You Can’t go Home Again

By Wayne Allensworth

Bill and Shirley Allensworth Houston, Texas 1953

I recall the time and circumstances in which I knew once and for all I couldn’t go home again. It was 1992. We were back in Houston for Christmas. My wife and I took walks in the morning and passed still remaining landmarks that had taken on the air of museum exhibits. Or ruins. The post office. The old grocery store, now a warehouse. Dairy Queen. My high school wasn’t far, and we walked around the big circular road that encompassed the building. I reminisced about days gone by. And felt a sadness that wouldn’t leave me.

The decay in the area was awful. Trash everywhere. Junker cars. Fences around businesses, sometimes topped with barbed wire. When we had left Texas for Virginia, we envisioned a time when we would return. When we would come home again. But the truth was sinking in, as it had been slowly, like an insidious cancer, during the last decade. I had entertained the idea of eventually coming back to my old neighborhood to live. It never occurred to me that forces beyond my control would sweep it away. Not that I hadn’t seen the Spanish and Vietnamese language billboards going up, or that a supermarket a few blocks away now looked like a border town in miniature. The store sported the flags of Mexico and every Central American nation. And the trash. Broken beer bottles on the curbs. Litter drifting in the wind. The strange sensation of being a stranger in a strange land took a while to set in, as I had somehow imagined that the newcomers were just visiting. But it was we who were visiting.

One day, as we strolled by the high school, I spotted police cars gathered near one of the athletic fields. It was a crime scene. A passerby had found a body, the apparent victim of a gang shooting. The erosion of law and order had also come on gradually. The crime wave that swept over our country beginning in the mid-1960s didn’t reach us until sometime in the 70s, when we were shocked to discover that our neighborhood was not immune to the chaos. Our old neighborhood grocery store — and we did think of it as ours — was robbed. The gunmen took a hostage, a young guy who had been a high school classmate of my older brother’s, when they left the scene. I never understood why they did that. Or why they killed him.

That was one warning sign, but it passed, and things went on as they had before. Then, when I was away at college, our house was robbed. It’s difficult for someone who has not experienced this to understand the sense of violation you feel when strangers have entered your home and carried off something valuable that was yours. My parents were angry and humiliated. After that, our home was encased in burglar bars. The police nonchalantly mentioned that our valuables were probably already sold off or in Mexico. A while later, thieves stole some of my father’s tools — he was a carpenter — from our garage. He was home and had left the garage door up. He saw the culprits running down the driveway to an awaiting car, armed himself, and took off after them, but it was too late. Again, the police didn’t do much. What could they do? The culprits were likely part of a school of criminals that moved in the sea of illegal immigrants that had inundated the area.

My father retired early; it was harder to find work. Contractors were using cheap Mexican labor. I have a memory of July 4th at home around that time. I had switched on the TV, looking for the Independence Day celebration broadcast from “our nation’s capital.” My mother walked by and asked me what there was to celebrate. My parents felt betrayed. Their government had abandoned them. It had shirked one of its most important duties—ensuring that we had a nation at all.

In 1986, Ronald Reagan signed the “Immigration Reform and Control Act” known as the Simpson-Mazzoli bill. That was the last nail in the coffin for us. The burial of my neighborhood was about done. Beside granting legal status to most illegal aliens, the bill supposedly penalized employers who knowingly hired “undocumented” workers. That proved to be a joke, window dressing to sell legalization to the rubes. The powers-that-be had no intention of enforcing that law, and the legalization only encouraged more “migration.” When Reagan signed the bill, his words reflected the naïve optimism of his administration and, to be truthful, of many Americans, especially those who had not suffered the consequences of porous borders: 

“The legalization provisions in this act will go far to improve the lives of a class of individuals who now must hide in the shadows, without access to many of the benefits of a free and open society. Very soon many of these men and women will be able to step into the sunlight and, ultimately, if they choose, they may become Americans.” 

I’ve read that Reagan later regretted signing the bill. That’s nice. Bully for him. I never noticed anyone hiding in the shadows. It was we who had to be cautious in the brave new world of borderless America.

The years passed by, and we made our way back to Texas. But not back to the old neighborhood. That was out of the question. I finally talked my parents into moving. The last straw was the day they were T-boned by a Hispanic man who fled the scene, leaving my parents stuck in a ditch in their wrecked car. The police did nothing. What could they do? The Spanish-speaking witnesses didn’t know the guy, or so they said. After nearly 60 years of building a life and many happy memories, my parents sold the house my father built with his own hands back in the 1950s. My mother nervously told me that the new buyer would tear it down. I was disturbed by that, as she knew I would be, but they had no choice. Momma told me it was better that way. She didn’t want foreigners living in our home. I could hardly describe my anger and sense of loss.   

Before they moved, my parents and my brothers and our families, gathered at the old house for a last meal. On the day my parents moved, I walked through the empty house one last time. Momma and Daddy waited in the driveway. I walked out and got in the car and pulled away. I stopped at the end of the driveway and Daddy said, “Goodbye old house, you served us well.”

I understand and sympathize with the people of Springfield, Ohio, and Aurora, Colorado. I know what they are going through. They have been called bigots and fascists and racists and all the usual labels the establishment’s pod people can throw at them. They cling to the perfectly reasonable notion that they have — or had — a home. And that a nation without borders, one without a coherent immigration policy aimed first and foremost at benefiting the nation and not displacing it, isn’t a nation at all. But that’s the whole point. The pod people lack normal human attachments and sympathies. They don’t have a home and don’t understand why anyone would want one. They want to prevent us from going home again. What’s more, the inundation of the people they despise in places like Aurora and Springfield is, in the collective view of virtuous pod persons everywhere, the punishment they deserve for atavistically clinging to their homes. All the more so if they are working class whites, who must bear the alleged sins of our country on their shoulders. Released from all normal attachments and loyalties, free-floating wraiths without substance or real empathy, the pod people can enjoy their smug sense of superiority.

The political realignment that began in 2016 is unfinished. As long as, say, Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina is still in the GOP, the transformation will be incomplete. But 200 neocons’ endorsing Kamala Harris, along with another 741 Deep Staters, signals a sea change. The GOP is becoming a more populist, America First party. The Democrats are the primary base for oligarchy, perpetual war, and corporate, woke globalism. If we are going to have a chance to salvage anything for our children and grandchildren, we must elect Donald Trump and Senator J.D. Vance in November.   

 Chronicles contributor Wayne Allensworth is the author of  The Russian Question: Nationalism, Modernization, and Post-Communist Russia, and a novel, Field of Blood. 

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