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What a depressing week it was. For one thing, Sen. Hillary Clinton persists in her campaign to put another Republican in the White House, and for another, there was state Rep. Doug Bruce of Colorado Springs. His remarks led Rep. Kathleen Curry of Parlin, then chairing the House debate in our legislature, to cut him off. And that led to so many threats against Curry, presumably from Bruce fans, that she has asked the State Patrol for extra protection that would include her family ranch.
At issue was a bill for the state to work with the federal government to bring in more temporary agricultural workers -- legal immigrants with visas.
When it was Bruce's turn to speak, he said I don't
think we need 5,000 more illiterate peasants in
Colorado.
Curry stopped him there.
Bruce later said that he was trying to make illegal
immigration an issue for the House.
If so, he was
clearly out of order, because the bill on the floor
concerned legal immigration. Thus it was proper for Curry
to cut him off to keep the discussion on topic.
Should she have, though? Isn't society best served by a
robust debate? Was the phrase illiterate peasants
accurate, even if some found it offensive?
My American Heritage Dictionary gives the primary
definition of peasant as someone included among small
farmers and tenants, sharecroppers, and laborers on the
land where these constitute the main labor force in
agriculture.
So agricultural workers are peasants.
As for their literacy, who knows whether they can read
and write? I'm unaware of such tests for agricultural field
work. Does Bruce mean literacy in English, or will Spanish
or Nahuatl work? Further, the term literacy
has been
so expanded that many of us suffer from some newly
discovered form of illiteracy. I earn my meager livelihood
with English literacy.
I manage tolerably on
computer literacy
and cultural literacy,
but
I scored zero on a magazine test for emotional
literacy.
The assumption behind Bruce's statement is that if one is literate, in the sense of being able to read and write English, then one will find better work than providing our food.
I grew up in farm country and I've done farm work. Not the brutal stuff like thinning sugar beets with a short-handled hoe, but still, there's nothing like bucking hay when it's 105 degrees in the shade, and there is no shade, to make one yearn for the classroom.
It is my considered opinion, as a history buff, that
slavery and agriculture were invented at the same time in
human history, and there's a reason for this connection.
Few people ever wake up in the morning and think Gee, I
can't wait to get out there and pull thousands of flax
plants out by the roots.
Historically, it took whips to
get people to do that work.
Last year, Colorado was so short of farm labor that
state prison inmates were allowed to work the fields at
harvest time. This indicates that Bruce is wrong about his
primary point, and that we need more peasants,
literate or not, during harvest season.
Along the way, we might give agricultural workers some
respect for their grueling toil for long days under the hot
sun. They put food on our tables. Peasant
should be
a term of honor in a society that professes to admire hard
work.
Why isn't it? There's an urban bias in our language, reflected in the unflattering connotations of terms for rural folk: hick, hayseed, rube, yokel, yahoo, clod, bumpkin and, of course, peasant.
The final definition in my dictionary says a peasant is
an uncouth, crude, or ill-bred person; boor.
And a
boor is a crude person with rude or clumsy
manners.
So whatever else you want to say about peasants,
it appears that we have one serving in our legislature.
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