So you’ve hit 30-something+ and you’ve made a nice little life for yourself.  You tell yourself you have worked hard for what you have.  That two-story vinyl-sided house with the perfectly shorn lawn and the two trees that are exactly equidistant from the front walk.  The two car garage with the two comfortable, leather-seated sedans inside.  The two slightly overweight children who inexplicably act like they hate you, but are destined for good colleges, and (you tell yourself) will understand your perspective once they’re older.  This probably wasn’t your dream when you were younger, but you’re not that idealistic kid anymore, so you’re pretty happy with what you’ve created for yourself.  Which is fine, I suppose.  If you want to retreat inside your plastic palace and congratulate yourself on your accomplishments, I may judge you, but most people won’t, and I reckon that suits everyone just fine.

However, I’m afraid you’ve crossed a line.  It’s one thing to sit smug and cozy in your superficial notions of success.  It’s quite another when you start using it as an excuse to deny other people their path to happiness.  Which you do, every day, using barely disguised bigotry, racism, and xenophobia to justify your Us or Them mentality.  That makes you an asshole, and you need to fucking quit.

Let me explain a simple fact about human psychology: we like there to be an “Us” and a “Them” so that we feel like we belong.  We build lots of little social tribes to feed this urge.  When you identify with a sports team to the extent that you become angry when someone implies that another team is better, that’s what you’re doing.  When you gang up on the one person in your neighborhood who doesn’t regularly mow their lawn, that’s what you’re doing.  When you dismiss either Republicans or Democrats as “crazies”, that’s what you’re doing.  Any time you identify yourself as part of a group, and feel that little, satisfying tie to others because you’ve identified an “Outsider” who doesn’t adhere to your system, that’s what you’re doing.

Which, I suppose, is terribly unevolved of you, but not really what pisses me off.  What pisses me off is when you start using your disparagement of Others as a reason to prevent them from having the same quality of life you enjoy.  When you hate them just for being Other.  Let’s start with the obvious, shall we?  You don’t want immigrants coming into this country and messing it all up with their grubby hands and strange languages and freeloading ways.  That’s bullshit.  They work harder than you, for less, and the only thing you have to be scared of is that they might one day — legitimately — be more qualified for your job than you are.  Your problem is that you’re scared.  You don’t want to learn anything new, and you’re terrified it might be asked of you.  Fucking deal with it.

When forced out of the familiar, you despise everything you see.  Those clothes the kids are wearing these days.  The music those brown people are listening to.  The strange foods at the sketchy stand outside of the main thoroughfare.  Other religions.  Other cultures.  Other ideas.  Has it ever occurred to you that you are the problem?  You and your regressive views on human culture?  Did you really get to wherever you are in life and decide that you’d reached the pinnacle, there was nothing more worth learning?  How the hell did you let that happen?

You might as well die now.  You’re never going to see, hear, taste, or smell anything more than what you already have, because you have already decided it is not worthwhile.  I suppose I should feel sorry for you, for your sad, shriveled psyche, for the fear you carry.  You must be very, very afraid.  Because somewhere, deep down, you know that there are far, far more of Us than there are of You.  You can’t stop Us.  Other ideas and languages will spread.  In twenty years, you might not even recognize this country.  And you know what?  With just a little luck, your kids are never, ever going to understand what the fuck was wrong with you.