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Tag: Whatcom County

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Reading The News

This morning while scanning the list of web sites in my browser bookmark tab labelled “News.” I may have been doom-scrolling, but I soon lost interest in today’s events and opinions and began to think about what “News” was like when I was growing up on Waschke Road in the region that the denizens occasionally call “The Fourth Corner,” referring, perhaps pretentiously, to the last corner of the U.S. to be dominated by Europeans.

First, we lived in the upstairs of my grandparents’ house. When I entered the first grade, my grandparents bought the house and five acres across the road and they moved there, leaving old farmhouse to my parents.

My grandparents subscribed to the local daily newspaper, The Bellingham Herald. The Herald arrived by mail the day after it was published. No home delivery on Waschke Road back then. When my grandparents finished reading the paper, they gave it to my parents, usually just before supper at five-thirty. Thus, we read the evening newspaper about twenty-four hours after it was published.

We got a TV when I was in the first grade, but we didn’t watch the evening news much because Dad switched off the television when the news started. That was the signal to go to the barn and milk the cows, taking all our attention until eight or eight-thirty. That schedule was fixed by the sun and the cows. Bovines must be milked every twelve hours or they stop lactating. Milking had to be at six in the evening and six in the morning, or the dairy interfered with raising summer field crops.

Sometimes, we turned on the radio at noon dinner break, but more pressing farm issues often dominated the midday.

Knowledge from off our road also came from magazines: The Saturday Evening Post, Washington Farmer, Farm Journal, McCall’s, Sunset Magazine, Time, U.S. News and World Report, and Saturday Review all graced our rural mailbox  at one time or another.

No dearth of content threatened the old farmhouse, but the cadence of our news sources was far different from my sources today. Our most constant news source, the daily newspaper, had a twenty-four hour delay built in. Everything else was either weekly or monthly.

Compare that to today. I have close to twenty websites listed in my news bookmark tab. I could easily add more. These are all updated continuously and I open them several times a day. I have almost instant news from all over the globe.

Am I better informed than I was in the 1950s and 1960s? Depends on what you mean by “better.” I certainly wallow in half-baked and ill-considered data, but am I more aware of what is important in my surroundings?

I don’t know.

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We Forget So Easily

We forget so easily where we came from, what we are. Here I am, a solid citizen of Whatcom County who has served on a county board, has voted in every election for the past fifty years, and pays plenty of local, state, and federal taxes.

I wish that the anti-immigrants of today would realize that a hundred years ago, they would likely themselves be the target of their own anti-immigrant mindset.

Last week, the sheriff of Whatcom County announced that the department’s role would be “a collaborative partnership in participating in [federal] Task Forces related to criminal activity that affects our community—not immigration enforcement.”

Our attorney daughter pointed out to me that the announcement was unnecessary because it is a foregone conclusion. Local officials who enforce federal law violate the 10th amendment (the states’ rights amendment). Subsequent supreme court decisions have made the separation clear. She cited Prinz v. U.S. 1997 SCOTUS.

The sheriff’s announcement was publicized in Whatcom News, a popular– at least with me– local news source. I was disappointed that the reader comments on the announcement were mostly unfavorable.

For the most part, the commenters confused the roles of local and federal law enforcement, saying that the sheriff was shirking his constitutional duty, when, in fact, he was correctly stating his constitutional role.

I am repeatedly amazed how personal sentiment changes people’s minds. Not long ago, the same folks who favored immigrant deportation and suppression of minority rights were asserting states’ rights against federal protection manifestos. Now, as the federal pendulum swings, states rights are sent to the back of their agenda.

I am also amazed at the changes in my home, Whatcom County. I can remember (just barely, I admit) when church services in both halves of my German and Dutch immigrant family were regularly held in German and Dutch respectively.

I overheard conversations about deportation and internment camps for Germans that my grandparents feared during World Wars I and II.

My grandfather was born in Minnesota, but his parents were both born in East Prussia, Germany. I vaguely recollect hearing that my great grandfather formally became a U. S. citizen in order to get a U. S. passport that would ensure a safe return home after a visit to Germany, probably in the 1920s. However, until then, my grandfather’s citizenship was from his birth in Wells, Minnesota, not his parents’ citizenship.

My grandmother was born in Germany and was never a documented U.S. citizen. Her citizenship derived from her marriage to my grandfather. In today’s parlance, an undocumented immigrant.

It’s likely that if you were to scratch into the family history of anyone whose Whatcom County roots go deeper than the mid-twentieth century you will find undocumented immigrants among their forebears.

As our daughter points out, the difference is that those Whatcom County immigrants were white, not brown. When I counter that a white at the bottom of the social ladder is still at the bottom of the ladder, she frowns and says its easier to climb to the next step if you don’t have to change your skin color; I have to agree.

I wish that the anti-immigrants of today would realize that a hundred years ago, they would themselves likely be the target of their own anti-immigrant mindset.