I have an issue in that whenever any English or Welsh person asks me my partners name, they eye me after the reply as if I had replied in complete gibberish. I am English, though I prefer to classify myself as Welsh (having spent more time there growing up than I did in England). My partner is Polish. I don't consider this to be a strange thing; we met over the internet when we both played MUD's together, (The Lands of Evermore and at one point ToD and Shadow Siege too.) and I have never really considered him being Polish as an issue - other than the obvious heavy accent and the slightly bemused way he views some English traditions..... and lets face it, who isn't bemused by those.
But some people do consider it an issue, and it angers me greatly. When they find out he is Polish as opposed to a middle-class, white, English businessman with a small grange or good family name - as I am 'supposed' to have... what with me being white, English, educated and 'well to do', they immediately categorise him as one of two things: Fruit Picker or Gold Digger. The 'Fruit Picker' one angers me the most. In England, we have the same problem with the Poles that American's have with, say, Mexicans. When idiot Tony Blair decided that EU freedom of movement laws were good for England, all hell broke loose. 600,000 Poles under 25 within the first 2 years of Poland joining the EU, and those are just the legal, fully registered people. The Polish authorities would probably give figures hundreds of thousands higher than that.
Now, personally, I don't have -that- much of an issue with this. As a generalisation, the Polish are hard working people. They come here, work like slaves for a pathetic, in-human, illegal wage, pay tax on it both here and in Poland, are treated by some people like degenerates just because they do the jobs that certain classes of English people consider to be 'beneath them'. They fail to take into account that if they sent all these people back home,the English Ecconomy would go into freefall. English people will not do these jobs; otherwise the Poles wouldn't have them in the first place. Sending these people back wouldn't be a cure for unemployment, because no English person would work for the wage these jobs offer. In my opinion, if the Poles carry on working and boosting the economy in the positive way they have so far, why -should- they go?
Anyway. I am getting, in the heat of the moment, off track.
The 'Fruit Picker' label. Many people assume that this means my partner will 'change his mind' soon and go back to Poland, having made himself a nice stack of money to take home to a 'real' partner - not an English whore. It is not the suggested attitude of the Poles that gets to me here, it is the fanatical English assumption that every country, every person, must be like them. In the past two years, I have met more Poles that I would call 'gentlemen' than I have met English ones in a lifetime.
The 'Gold Digger' label is just as infuriating. People always ask if he works, if I provide for him. Or if he's just another Pole come over here to work his way in to an English family, so he wont have to worry about finances again. That never looks at English people, just English peoples wallets. I am at a loss for words on this one. It is possibly one of the rudest and most incorrect assumptions people could make.
My partner is nothing like either of these labels. He is smart, hard-working, funny and cares for me very well. I don't care if he's Polish, or English, or any other nationality you can think of. If he was a martian, and still made me this happy, I wouldn't care. It's being loved that matters, not the 'label' of the person who gives it. I pray that now, having much bigger internal issues to think about, the English will begin to appreciate the Poles for the hard work they do.
