AS I read about Trump ranting and raving about immigrants, I remember my father telling me about travel in his days. Those were days, he told me, when one hardly reserved seats when travelling but took one’s chances in crowded, congested, claustrophobic third class compartments.
First you arrived, along with seemingly a million others on the platform, waited for yon smoke spouting train and as you looked with dismay at the doorway of each compartment, it seemed warriors, bristling with rage, guarded each entrance, preventing entry. You pleaded, pushed, even pinched your first leg in, then the other. Shoved back, you thrust more determined and finally as the train left the station you were perched precariously maybe, but victoriously on step number one.
Then came the next foray into the jungle inside, where again, every move was thwarted. Again, you used cajolery and coercion, with knee and elbow, sometimes stamping a toe, then swiftly moving in when with a painful curse that injured limb made place for you to inch in.
And finally, you stood near your promised heaven; seats that guaranteed you, your back, and buttocks, a blissful journey. You watched for telltale shift, which revealed some passenger’s readiness to get up, and then with a deftness that could have beaten a surgical strike you slipped in, sat down, maybe on just an inch or two of hard wooden berth, but utopia!
But here, instead of enjoying the rest of your journey, my dad said, you looked angrily out through little chinks of revealing window and stared with hostility at others trying to enter in, forgetting that a few stations back, you were one of them. Trump fits my father’s description of such a selfish traveller.
His grandfather came in, an immigrant from Germany. Pushed and shoved, jostled around the competitive land America is, and now Trump, his grandson after embracing everything the USA offered, both gold and dollars, looks out of the same train window, sees helpless immigrants, and pushes the same poor people away! His whole policy is that America belongs to those already inside the compartment!
His rants, his raves, his angry tweets at all and sundry speak only of a comfortable seat he now sits on and maybe if you and I listen carefully, the chugging of an ancient engine, and rattling of old wooden berths may be heard, as this once German immigrant pushing others out, sits on his two inches of space. But I know, if those same passengers of that grandfather of his, ever knew what his grandson would become, those inside would never have given him a toehold to step on!
And as a takeaway thought; it’s not just Trump, it’s many of us who have been helped into getting a place somewhere, who become the biggest hindrance to helping others. Are you a Trump?
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