Lazy Americans

Yesterday, I blogged about the lazy Minutemen who sit on lawn chairs trying to deter people who actually want to work from coming into our country. I think there's more to this anti-immigration-folks-are-lazy story than I thought. Witness this quote from a Minuteman in an April Slate article.

"When I drive my pickup into Home Depot's parking lot, and there's 15 guys yelling, 'Pick me! Pick me!", I feel like we're under attack," Schwartz says.

"When I drive down Bethany Home Road [a main Phoenix thoroughfare that runs through both predominantly Anglo and Hispanic neighborhoods] and read billboards in Spanish, when I walk into Wal-Mart and the signs are in Spanish, I feel threatened."

Now, part of this is xenophobia, mixed with racism, topped off with insecurity, and snorted until hysteria is induced. But, I think a large part is also laziness. Americans don't want to be bothered. They don't want to spend an extra 2 seconds at a 7-11 explaining what they want. They don't want to be forced to turn their eyes away from billboards that are in languages they can't read. They're just plain lazy. This laziness also explains why people are too lazy to find out which bars don't allow smoking, and why they don't want to have go out of their way to avoid smoke.

There, I said it. Anti-smoking fascists and anti-immigration fascists are two lazy peas in a pod. And they should join forces. After all, dish washers wouldn't be going back to Latin America in body bags because of second hand smoke (as one pro-ban DC activist put it), if they weren't allowed to come to this country in the first place.