Failures of Assimilation

my interaction with a recent immigrant

Photo by Stéphane Legrand on Unsplash

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This post is currently getting a lot of traffic from Woke idiots who are enjoying pretending that it raises no serious issue. I don’t doubt that they see it that way in good faith — that many of them would be perfectly fine with a male Muslim doctor refusing to treat a woman in the ER, for example.

Letting women suffer medical mishaps, or even die, is only evil when a right-winger does it around abortion. Or when a conservative pharmacist doesn’t want to dispense an abortion pill. Women have the right to medical treatment unless a Muslim man isn’t in the mood, in which case, screw those bitches and their racist white woman tears, right?

I am enjoying, and cataloguing, their responses because they are so indicative of the extent to which these stupid kids are entirely willing to live in the caliphate as long as nobody calls them racist.

Pathetic, thy name is “Lefties in 2025.”

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I’ve debated with myself at length about whether I should write about this. I finally decided to do so because I’m an American woman, freer than women have ever been in history, and it’s the start of a three-day weekend from a job I love at a great company, where I do meaningful work that makes an impact.

If I’m not willing to speak about this, then there’s really no hope.

And I both believe in and need to embody hope. So here’s the story.

Last week, a recent immigrant crossed my path.

The encounter gave me a lot to think about — specifically, how badly we fail at assimilating immigrants in this country, and whether it’s even possible in the case of Muslim men.

Maybe it is. I hope it is. The part of me that still believes in rainbow coalitions and colorblind choruses of kumbaya is not a small part — she’s just quieter now. A little tired. A little hoarse.

But she’s still in there, and she still wants to believe.

Lately, though, I’ve been having doubts.

To explain why, I need to give you a little context — and a little overshare. But don’t worry: nothing scandalous. Just the sort of thing every woman has been through, and every man married to one has heard about at least once while driving to Walgreens at 9:45 PM.

It started a couple of weeks ago when I got bitten by a tick.

Not just any tick, but an overachieving little bastard that gave me both Lyme disease and anaplasmosis — because why do anything halfway.

Apparently New England is crawling with infected ticks right now (ha), and my doctor said I was her fourth patient in a month to test positive for both. She looked like she wanted to scream into a pillow. Instead, she gave me doxycycline and told me not to go outside.

If you’ve never been on high-dose doxy, here’s the rundown: it’s like antibiotics crossed with Satan. I couldn’t eat, couldn’t sleep, couldn’t think. The sun became my mortal enemy. The pharmacist said, “People either react to Doxy or they don’t — but Irish girls usually do, and when they ignore my warning they end up looking like extras from the set of a horror movie.”

Which, thanks, I guess? Cool how my genetic propensity to blister in direct sunlight has now expanded into my pharmaceutical chart.

Both of those tickborne bugs are potential kidney wreckers, and as a childless woman with a psych history, I know where I rank on the organ transplant list. (Spoiler: very damn low.) So I’m not complaining. Vampire quarantine probably saved my life.

Plus, my apartment is cozy, I had the supremely wonderful

Josh Slocum

running errands, and overall, I handled it pretty well — at least until Day Four, when the most cliché side effect of antibiotics showed up right on schedule:

A yeast infection.

Because of course. Of course.

Instacart, Immigrantcart

I use Instacart constantly. Around here, it’s not just for groceries — it’ll grab stuff from Best Buy, Michael’s, CVS. The modern hunter-gatherer, now available on demand.

So when a cord dies — and it's always the one with USB-C on one end and mini-USB on the other, naturally — or when I’ve just finished a drawing and realize I’m out of fixative and also the roads are iced over (or I’m in vampire quarantine), I can still get what I need.

And in my area, it’s nearly always recent immigrant men doing the shopping. I assume they’re legal — they go through background checks, and Instacart is a tech company, which means it’s extremely afraid of liability. If anyone’s doing more paperwork than ICE right now, it’s probably them.

Up until the day in question, the only real issue I’d had with male shoppers — immigrant or not — was the Great Overpacking Problem.

For some reason, they treat grocery bagging like a competitive sport. As if masculinity itself is being tested by how few bags they can cram fifty pounds of produce and canned goods into.

I always ask nicely mid-shop: “Please don’t overload the bags.”

They always do it anyway.

At this point, the phrase “Help, good grief, I’m about to drop it, take it back!” has been shouted on my front porch more times than I care to admit. The ones who apologize and help me lug it up the stairs stay on my good list.

The ones who don’t get banished with the push of a button.

But aside from that, it was a pretty smooth system.

Until Vagisil made the list. One-dose. A shopper’s note reading, “If they don’t have this exact item, please take pictures of the other options and send them to me.”

Mohammed Wanted The Tip

I’m a good tipper. Partly because I’m picky — I want the low-carb version of this, the generic-but-tastes-the-same version of that — and partly because I understand how Instacart works. It’s not a necessity; it’s a luxury racket. You’re bidding for a shopper’s time and attention in a system that underpays them, then bundles your generously-tipped order with three others from cheapskates who think $2 and a prayer is appropriate for someone schlepping through a snowstorm.

This gives me leverage, if I ever need it.

If a shopper tries obvious nonsense — like claiming the store is completely out of onions — they don’t want to lose the order that’s 80% of their payout. They also know you know that. It’s a delicate dance.

I thought my shopper on this day was doing well, especially when he found me the Atkins chocolate pretzel bar (not the chocolate chip, nor the chocolate peanut butter, nor any of the other varieties) I had requested.

I relaxed a little, but I still kept an eye on the message window during the shop — because he hadn’t shopped for me before, and the “okay I’ll cancel” gambit is both semi-regularly required and highly effective.

Sure enough.

When Mohammed (and yes, really, that was his name) messaged me to say, about the Vagisil, that the store was “out of this item and all varieties,” along with a cheerful little refund request, I gave the usual response.

I rolled my eyes and typed: “This is the only item I actually need, so I’ll just cancel.”

If I’d hit “cancel” right then, that would’ve been the end of it.

But I got distracted texting Josh, warning him that I might have to send him on yet another errand. Sorry in advance.

(Side note: ladies, get you a gay best friend who will buy you one-dose Vagisil without flinching, asking questions, or losing eye contact with the cashier. Preferably one with a nicer purse than yours, a reusable grocery bag, and a solid sense of theater.)

Anyway, that delay gave Mohammed just under two minutes.

And wouldn’t you know it — during that window, he miraculously located the item that had apparently vanished from the store, the shelf, and the known universe.

How lucky for us both.

Kumbaya Has Left the Chat

I don’t know for sure that it was because he was Muslim.

I can’t prove that Mohammed pretended not to find the yeast infection meds because he saw what they were for and decided he didn’t want to help a woman with that.

But it fits. It tracks. I’ve had American men fumble awkwardly or blush over tampons, sure — but they still picked them up.

They didn’t tell me a blatant lie in an effort to ghost the product off the face of the Earth.

And while I can’t know what was in his head, I do know what’s written into law and custom across much of the Muslim world. In places like Afghanistan, where I could be beaten — or worse — just for walking outside without a male escort. Where girls are barred from school, women are denied faces, and rape victims are imprisoned for adultery.

That’s not just “a different culture.”

That’s codified, state-sponsored misogyny.

Real misogyny. Misogyny that deserves the name — not the watered-down use of that word that gets invoked when obvious imbalances in our now-too-feminized culture are pointed out.

And if that’s the worldview you were steeped in — if that’s what shaped your understanding of women, especially women without husbands, women who live alone, women who make requests — then yeah, a one-dose box of Vagisil might not register as deserving of dignity.

Or respect.

Or even basic customer service.

I don’t think beliefs that deep dissolve at the border.

And I don’t think we, as a country, are doing a great job of saying clearly: That’s not how we live here.

We’re afraid to name the problem. Afraid to offend. Afraid to seem intolerant — even when the thing we’re tolerating is itself intolerant by any definition we claim to hold dear.

Even when it erodes the freedoms we’re supposedly so proud of.

I don’t know how to fix that. But I don’t think it’s going to fix itself.

Maybe I’m wrong about Mohammed. Maybe it had nothing to do with his religion, and he was just lazy, distracted, or bad at his job.

Or maybe he did object — and ultimately just decided he loved money more than he hated women.

Either way, he’s blocked. He won’t be shown my future Instacart orders. And other women will handle him however they see fit.

But in the broader sense, yeah — it matters.

Because this is a free country. And Mohammed is free to live here, to work, to raise children — daughters, potentially — in a society where women have the legal right to speak, to drive, to divorce, to walk alone. To apply for jobs. To get hired. To be treated, at least in theory, as equals.

And if we keep importing people who see those freedoms as wrong — or un-Islamic, or shameful, or simply optional — then we are going to have a problem. A growing one.

Because in my opinion — and yes, I’m saying it plainly — Islam, especially but not exclusively in its fundamentalist forms, is structurally and unapologetically misogynistic.

And that is completely incompatible with the values this country claims to stand for.

I don’t know what the solution is.

But I do know that silence won’t solve it.

I refuse to refrain from naming the problem.

Islam is the problem.

I said what I said.

Meanwhile, I got my yeast infection meds. Eventually.

Thanks, Mohammed. Hope the tip was worth the trauma.

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