. . . and immigration policy, please do keep in mind that people like Alla Axelrod are also among the people in whose face you spit when you argue that any attempt to keep out swarms of illegals is somehow deeply unfair, nay, racist.

This is the view from someone who lived and grew up in the socialist, re-distributionist utopia that Dear Leader really thinks the U.S. ought to be more like.  These are vignettes from the “single-payer” healthcare system that he and his allies tout.  This is what the ways of the U.S. looked like to someone so fresh off the boat that she spoke almost no English (and having tried to function — even a little — in a society of whose language I spoke almost zero, her coming here, to live and work in NYC, fills me with immeasurable awe).

And these are the thoughts and discussions that are current among those who played the game, honestly, correctly.  Who paid their dues, digging fans for an un-airconditioned NYC apartment from the garbage, digging up a mattress from the same source.  Who walked 16 blocks to the subway through early 1980s NYC dirt and crime.

To pretend that there can be no two good-faith sides to the discussion about immigration policy, about government hand-out policy, about tax policy, about socialized medicine, is neither more nor less than dishonest.  This woman’s intellectual legacy isn’t of patriarchal, dominant-culture, slave-holding exploitation over sundry oppressed minorities on whose necks she and her ancestors stood to enjoy the Good Life.  Her legacy is just about the diametric opposite of that.  Her resentment of shucking out her taxes to fund drug habits and sturdy beggars is not that of someone who’s finally being asked to “pay her fair share” to those whose misery is the foundation of her prosperity.

Disagree with her if you want.  But you cannot dismiss her out of hand.