Immigrant Reflections

So this machine is my nightmare.  It nearly defeated me in Berlin.  It is the dispenser for the U-Bahn ticket in Berlin. I went to visit it to buy 5 one-way  tickets to get us the underground.  2 hours later, I managed to secure tickets, buy fruit and a diet coke for Laura,  and I was exhausted from the intellectual challenge of negotiating a simple transaction and a grocery checkout.  Part of the "fun" was walking past the machine to conduct an hysterical conversation in my pidgin-Germany with s purple-haired German girl that went something like, "Where is the ticket for underground?" "In the automatic underground." "Yes? Underground? (Point)" "Yes."  This required every word I know, practically.  I was sustained in my struggle remembering that millions of immigrants have and are still coming to America with far less resources--monetary, educational, cultural and social--than I have.  Yet they manage to negotiate these transactions daily--and still  maintain families and work schedules at grueling jobs and house and feed thesmselves. We criticize immigrants,  but I think we fail to a appreciate them for the extraordinary feats they perform by simply living.  They are testaments to human spirit, and I wonder I would be up to the task. I admire my ancestors who uprooted their lives to better the future for their posterity.  (I had to put a credit card in a machine and negotiate a touch screen; they survived perilous crossings, cleared forests, planted and reapedwith crude tools and fought hostile people's and animals.)  I wonder if I have the spirit they did?  Yet they survived, and here I am as proof. I salute them and immigrants in general, even today Their story is more than a summary -minute dismissal by a Fox news jabbering head.