On 2019 Jul 21 08:20:56, you wrote to me:

 GD> Maybe *she* should "go home" to Puerto Rico,

  One of the most ignorant and hateful statements that a person can make to
another is "If you don't like it here, why don't you leave?"
  That attitude is the main reason America was founded, in all its hope and
energy and goodness. The people who came here, to make a better land than had
ever been seen before by the common people, had been rebuffed and rejected by
their neighbors in the Old World.
  They didn't like conditions where they lived, and wanted to improve them. If
they had been allowed and encouraged to, the Old World would have had a happier
 history, instead of the miserable tribulations that turned the eyes of the
people to America as their last, best hope.
  NOW WE FIND that many Americans--smug and fat and entrenched in their
affluent inertia--are saying the same ugly thing to their neighbors: "If you
don't like it here, why don't you leave?"
  But most people who want to change conditions /do/ like it here: they love it
 here. They love it so much they cannot stand to see it suffer from its
imperfections, and want it to live up to its ideals. It is the people who
placidly accept the corruptions and perversions and inequities in our society
who do not love America; they love their status, security and special
privilege.
  Nobody should be faced with the mean choice of accepting conditions as they
are or abandoning the place he has grown up in. We not only have a right, we
have a responsibility, to make our environment as just and as flourishing as
our Founding Fathers declared it must be if it were to live up to its
aspiration as "the standard of the world."
  THOSE WHO WANT to leave have a right to, but those who want to stay and work
for what they consider a better society must be protected in that right--for
without it, our nation would sink into stagnation, and the process of change
would harden into repression by those who benefit by keeping things just as
they are.
  If all the settlers who came here, with high hopes for a new and finer social
 order, had been compelled to "go back where they came from," we would have had
 no United States of America. This country was born out of dissatisfaction with
 the old scheme of things, and grew on the blood and dedication of men who were
 not afraid to speak and work for fundamental changes in the whole political
and social structure.
  Somebody who truly didn't like what America /stands/ for ought to be invited
to leave; but there is a vast difference between such a person and those who
dislike /what we have allowed ourselves to become/, through greed and prejudice
 and provincial indifference to the great problems we now face. No community
can afford to lose these good "agitators."

Sydney J Harris - July 21 1969 - Chicago Daily News

)\/(ark

Once men turned their thinking over to machines in the hope that this would set
 them free. But that only permitted other men with machines to enslave them.
... A G-Spot and a golf ball? A guy will actually search for a golf ball.
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 * Origin:  (1:3634/12.73)