My shirts come from the cleaners starched and pressed, nicely folded and buttoned, every button, and I look at them and think, “Technical wizardry has not yet developed a machine that will properly button shirts, not breaking the buttons, so who does this labor? Children? There are child labor laws. No, someone does it who was accustomed to something much worse such as persecution, semi-starvation, life in a shanty with primitive sanitation, that’s who.”

So where do we come up with this rage against undocumented immigrants? For someone from parts of Africa or Asia, this work would be a godsend. Where do we get off sending armed masked men to round them up like cattle? They’re people who do difficult necessary work. Until we switch to tunics, so long as there are bankers and other stuffed shirts, this is a decent job.

My darlings, not so many teenage boys are looking to work in construction as back when I was that age. They used to and now it’s rare. Men from South America and Asia will do those jobs. Artificial intelligence is not going to fix toilets or carry out trash.

After high school, I got a job as a dishwasher in a big hotel. It was sort of a game, working fast during mealtime, hustling to run racks of dishes on a conveyor through a washer, stacking, delivering, and it was sociable, four boys on a crew, and we did good work to keep on the good side of the cooks. The next year I was a part-time parking lot attendant on a crew working a 600-car college lot, managing the morning rush, keeping them in straight tight formation to achieve maximum capacity, yelling at haughty academics to bend them to my will, a perfect job for an 18-year-old.

The other day I saw a large woman in a yellow reflective vest striding through a traffic jam at the airport and yelling, “Keep moving up! Three lines! Tighten it up!” in the loudest voice a human being is capable of. I used to do that, now she does. She appeared to be Mexican.

The ICE spectacle is naked racist cruelty and my country is not a culture of cruelty, that is for Russia. Look in Putin’s eyes and you see ingenious cruelty. America has a long religious tradition that teaches kindness and respect. No Trump children are going to work at the cleaners buttoning shirts; they’re going to collect investment funds from Arab princelings.

But why belabor the obvious? It’s summer, time to take long walks and then sit on the porch and watch the river go by and think about the goodness of this land God drew our ancestors to. My mother’s family escaped from a cruel stepmother in Glasgow, a woman who abused her stepson for getting his girlfriend pregnant. He married the girlfriend and begat more children but she still mistreated him. My mother was his tenth child. She met my father, who descended from Yorkshiremen who escaped grim lives as farmworkers to become skilled carpenters and handymen. I’ve no idea what they’d make of me, an 83-year-old on tour as a storyteller and stand-up to paying audiences — probably think America is a generous country to pay for amateur entertainment when you can watch an auction or a revival service for nothing.

I did a show at an 1864 opera house in Gardiner, Maine, in August and that was my chance to work a lecture about the Civil War into the act, the abolitionist movement that conquered states’ rights to define our culture as one of individual opportunity — the idea that race or gender or religion or country of origin does not define a person, that each person contains great possibilities. And the audience believed me, so I hummed a note and the crowd sang about trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored and the verse about the circling camps, dews and damps, and flaring lamps. It was magnificent. A mature crowd, some of them almost as old as I, who hadn’t sung that song since the ninth grade, knew all the words and also “In the beauty of the lilies Christ was born across the sea with a glory in His bosom that transfigures you and me,” and they tried to believe that too.

The Bible says God looks on us as individuals. But of course when Donald J. Trump sells Bibles he has endorsed and put his name on and sells autographed copies for $1,000, it does cast a shadow. I hope God will show mercy.

The post A few thoughts in time for Labor Day appeared first on Garrison Keillor.