CALIFORNIA ELECTIONS : In These Violent Times, Fear Finds a Scapegoat

Almost three hundred years ago the French author Voltaire wrote that fear follows crime and is its punishment. I think that’s why Proposition 187 won on Tuesday and why, if it is ever implemented, we’ll all suffer.

Crime has everyone living on the edge.

We exist in a society vaguely out of control. Children are slaughtered by their mothers and old ladies are murdered in their homes. Terror blankets us like a funeral shroud.

We can’t sit in a park or stroll down a dark street or do business at an ATM machine without the haunting awareness that these simple functions of ordinary life could invite disaster.

Carjackers kill for a car they’ll dump an hour later and gangbangers for no reason at all. Teen-agers, disoriented by drugs and booze, fight it out with AK-47s, kids pack Lugers in their lunch bags, and disgruntled employees express their rage with bullets sprayed through a workplace.

Schools aren’t safe, stores aren’t safe, public transportation isn’t safe, and God gets a little nervous in church on Sundays.

We’ve become a society of gunslingers, security gates, barred windows, car alarms, motion-activated spotlights, private cops, metal detectors, killer dogs and sirens that wail into the night like screams of despair.

What’s all that got to do with 187? It represents what Voltaire was talking about, the fear that follows crime and ultimately becomes its punishment. Proposition 187 is the very embodiment of our terror.

*

History teaches that nations caught up in fear seek scapegoats for their anxieties, whether they are precipitated by crime, national uncertainty or the supernatural. Jews, Asians, Indians and others have felt the sting of response to societal anguish. We tortured heretics and burned witches to combat the fear of things we couldn’t see, then turned blindly on each other in an effort to destroy the dangers we thought we could see.

In the brief life of this nation, we have singled out a whole array of racial and ethnic minorities to hate, abuse and ultimately blame for every evil that has befallen us. And now, through the disquieting alchemy of social decision, it’s the turn of illegal Latino immigrants to take their licks. They’re easy targets and, we thought, they can’t fight back.

We blamed them for the escalating crime rate, for deteriorating neighborhoods and, when the economy went to hell, for unemployment, rising taxes and the crushing burden of welfare programs. Another kind of fear was walking our cities, and it may have been the most insidious of all: the fear of finding ourselves jobless, hungry and in the streets.

The cry to “Save Our State” was the cry of decent people frightened by the cascading evils and uncertainties of our time. They’re the same people who voted for the “three strikes” measure and who, in frustration, threw congressional incumbents out the door in an effort to right what seemed so terribly wrong.

Among their supporters were Latinos in this country legally who, conditioned by the same fears, turned on their brothers and sisters in order to protect their own islands of security in a sea of uncertainty.

But 187 was an ill-conceived response to fear and despair, and, predictably, attracted pack dogs of hatred who sensed an acceptance of their malevolent ethnic phobias.

My mailbox was full of their invective-filled messages all during the campaign, and my telephone answering machine ran out of space to record their vicious, and frequently obscene, comments.

Their targets, contrary to Pete Wilson’s expedient logic, had gone beyond illegal immigrants and had settled on anyone whose surname suggested their heritage was rooted in countries beyond our southern borders.

What I hope was my last telephone call from any of them came sometime after the projection of 187’s sad triumph. It trumpeted the victory of white America over those of us who would pollute the cultural bloodstream.

*

I’m afraid of crime too. I’m afraid for the safety of those I love dearly and for the welfare of the community in which I live. I’m also afraid that 187 will open the door to an erosion of humanity not witnessed in this country since the ugly days of black repression. Barring children from school due to their immigration status isn’t a lot different than barring them from a restaurant because of their color.

I am also afraid that Latinos will respond with unbridled rage to a proposition steeped in the kinds of dehumanizing barriers that amount to a cultural insult. There is no guarantee that their rage will be confined to the courts, and not spread to the streets.

Proposition 187 has already succeeded in creating divisions that didn’t exist. One can only hope we are not carried to disaster by the shrill rhetoric of those who sought easy answers in a hateful referendum. We have been punished by our own fears, and the impact of that punishment may linger for generations to come.