Shutting Up
Living an hour from Los Angeles in Laguna Beach, California, I saw the march of (supposedly) hundreds of thousands of Mexican Americans and illegal immigrants from Mexico today as local news. It strikes me that, being a child of the seventies, I've rarely witnessed a march for a cause that is totally without merit. The marchers are basically asking for open borders between the United States and Mexico, citing the fact that Mexicans are cleaning our houses and washing our cars in Beverly Hills.
I'm almost afraid to see what shifty California politicians will do with this one. Basically, the argument is, "We're here and more of us should be able to come illegally to live, work, and take from any government program we can get our hands on."
You're reading this from a bleeding heart liberal, not from an icy Republican. We cannot talk of saving America from terrorists while maintaining open borders. It is as insane as Bush's destruction of the world to chase down ten terrorists (whose numbers have increased exponentially in response to each of Bush's terrorist acts upon the world). Come on. You know it's true. You'd have to be an idiot not to. Ah ha. I have a problem, don't I?
Well, for you idiots out there, look at it this way. You see a fly in your living room. You go to the tool shed (Oh, yes, I know you have one.) and get a sledgehammer, dragging it inside your home. You begin to strike at the fly with your sledgehammer. Missing, of course, time after time. As you continue, you smash your furniture to rubble and slam holes in your inside and outside walls. Multitudes of flies seize their opportunity and swarm into what was your living room. Have you noticed yet that careful use of your fly swatter may have solved your original problem without creating others? Now you need money to repair your room and replace your furniture. You need to rebuild and secure your home. Of course, now you have thousands of flies in your house, so after all that - with your neighbors watching your lunacy the whole time, hoping you will just get out of the neighborhood for good - you have an enormous problem and the once invasive fly begins to seem as though he were the nuisance he actually was by comparison.
This little allegory in no way means or does diminish the horror of what I find - this is just me - was poorly tagged 9/11. (Doesn't say enough. Doesn't speak of the horror in those towers, the aftermath of tears, nor the direct hit on our Pentagon. We should think of better nomenclature. Who strays from the point more than I? It's just that one wrong touches another, then another, and so on, until I believe there is no beginning and no end. Well, the beginning was our failure to build good will and treat the rest of the world with respect and honesty. We were never capable of that it seems. The next wrong was George Bush. And then everything was lost.)
So...there is no question that even before, or as, we protect ourselves from "terrorists," we must secure our borders tightly and in every possible way to prevent any undocumented person, any person we cannot follow, to enter our country.
Sorry, Mexican Angelenos, you're not protesting a wrong, you are hoping to maintain one. The price of your easy back-and-forth between Mexico and America is way too big for us to pay. "Us" being the people whose houses you clean and the rest of the 300,000,000 people who have a right by birth or naturalization to live in America. Mexicans have no greater or lesser right to the American Dream (boy, is that a laugh!) as other people. There are many nations of people yearning to breathe free.
Our borders must be tighter than any in the world now. And forever probably. Anyone who desires to live here knows that is true. We're all dealing with hard truths now. I know it's rough. It certainly is for me. Pain is relative, I promise you.
I'm almost afraid to see what shifty California politicians will do with this one. Basically, the argument is, "We're here and more of us should be able to come illegally to live, work, and take from any government program we can get our hands on."
You're reading this from a bleeding heart liberal, not from an icy Republican. We cannot talk of saving America from terrorists while maintaining open borders. It is as insane as Bush's destruction of the world to chase down ten terrorists (whose numbers have increased exponentially in response to each of Bush's terrorist acts upon the world). Come on. You know it's true. You'd have to be an idiot not to. Ah ha. I have a problem, don't I?
Well, for you idiots out there, look at it this way. You see a fly in your living room. You go to the tool shed (Oh, yes, I know you have one.) and get a sledgehammer, dragging it inside your home. You begin to strike at the fly with your sledgehammer. Missing, of course, time after time. As you continue, you smash your furniture to rubble and slam holes in your inside and outside walls. Multitudes of flies seize their opportunity and swarm into what was your living room. Have you noticed yet that careful use of your fly swatter may have solved your original problem without creating others? Now you need money to repair your room and replace your furniture. You need to rebuild and secure your home. Of course, now you have thousands of flies in your house, so after all that - with your neighbors watching your lunacy the whole time, hoping you will just get out of the neighborhood for good - you have an enormous problem and the once invasive fly begins to seem as though he were the nuisance he actually was by comparison.
This little allegory in no way means or does diminish the horror of what I find - this is just me - was poorly tagged 9/11. (Doesn't say enough. Doesn't speak of the horror in those towers, the aftermath of tears, nor the direct hit on our Pentagon. We should think of better nomenclature. Who strays from the point more than I? It's just that one wrong touches another, then another, and so on, until I believe there is no beginning and no end. Well, the beginning was our failure to build good will and treat the rest of the world with respect and honesty. We were never capable of that it seems. The next wrong was George Bush. And then everything was lost.)
So...there is no question that even before, or as, we protect ourselves from "terrorists," we must secure our borders tightly and in every possible way to prevent any undocumented person, any person we cannot follow, to enter our country.
Sorry, Mexican Angelenos, you're not protesting a wrong, you are hoping to maintain one. The price of your easy back-and-forth between Mexico and America is way too big for us to pay. "Us" being the people whose houses you clean and the rest of the 300,000,000 people who have a right by birth or naturalization to live in America. Mexicans have no greater or lesser right to the American Dream (boy, is that a laugh!) as other people. There are many nations of people yearning to breathe free.
Our borders must be tighter than any in the world now. And forever probably. Anyone who desires to live here knows that is true. We're all dealing with hard truths now. I know it's rough. It certainly is for me. Pain is relative, I promise you.
By the way, before you slip away, if you haven't already, I think British Intelligence, the best in the world, would have made a life-saving fly swatter after we were attacked. Precise, effective, it would have given us a fighting chance - assuming our borders had been secured.
posted by lvuback1 @ 11:21 PM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home