A staff member from Gene Wu’s office, I believe, took a poke at me and insulted me, insinuating that I didn’t like this country. His reason was that I told the group that I did not celebrate Thanksgiving as I don’t celebrate the genocide of millions of American Natives. I believe the staff member from Gene Wu’s office assumes that people like me will never be Americans.
Even though I was born in this country, as were my parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents, I was born an American. But, I am still not called an American; I may be a Mexican-American, Latino, Hispanic, or worse, Latinx, but yet they fail to recognize me as an American.
Throughout this lifetime, I have voted for Democrats, Republicans, the Green Party, and the Libertarian Party; I recall at least once voting for Lyndon LaRouche and Ross Perot, who ran as an Independent. I was not born into a political party, nor was anyone else.
I am an American until the day I choose not to, and that would be when I decide to move to another country and renounce my citizenship.
The amusing part is that State Representative Gene Wu was having a Thanksgiving celebration with the Asian community, primarily the Vietnamese community. The same staff person indicated that the Asians appreciated being in this country. Well, maybe they should, as I recall that they got quite a bit of assistance when they arrived. Citizens of this country were also in need, but they did not receive the same type of assistance.
[6] While many refugees were receiving financial assistance, economic success did not come easily and this use of federal funding became an issue that not only lawmakers were paying attention too, but also the American public. Another group of opponents focused on the growing need of poor Americans. Representative John Conyers asked, “Should we be spending (federal dollars) on Vietnamese refugees or should we spend them on Detroit ‘refugees?'”[7] A last group of opponents believed that presidents Ford and Carter were taking advantage of the parole system to allow mass numbers of people into the nation. In their view, the parole system should have been only used for people with specific cases, and certainly not for the processing of huge groups. Source
Maybe State Representative Wu should consider reading the history of the United States, not the one taught in Texas Schools, but the one that tells us how millions of Native American men, women, and children were killed and their land was stolen from them. About two percent of the population of the United States is Native American. Compare that to Mexico, whose population is almost 20% Native American. But if Wu is already knowledgeable about our history, he should at least ensure his staff knows it.
I have always identified more with the Native Americans than the white people. I watched the TV shows, and the Indians looked like they could be my brothers or cousins. So I easily identified as Tonto; that would be the Lone Ranger’s sidekick.
There are a lot of things that our history books don’t tell us about how the White Protestant settlers slaughtered the Native Americans. They used chemical warfare.
In Indian Country, it is an accepted fact that white settlers distributed items, such as blankets contaminated with smallpox and other infectious diseases, aiming to reduce the population of Native people resisting their Manifest Destiny. These accounts have left a legacy of trauma and distrust in Native communities that persist to this day. Source
You won’t find in our history books that Native Americans were enslaved and shipped to the islands as slaves.
Although sources are scant, scholars estimate that Europeans enslaved about two to five million indigenous people between 1492 and the late 19th century. The Spanish enslaved about 250,000 to 650,000 Native peoples in the circum-Caribbean from 1492 until the end of the 16th century. Source
I don’t celebrate the rise of Adolph Hitler, either.
I am not in Gene Wu’s district, but I will not push that button if I can vote for him. He can win, but it will be without my vote. Below is an image of Gene Wu (Front left corner), the person who claimed he worked for him in the photo, in the back, wearing a hat.
