Recovery
My shrink is the smartest person I know.
My twenty-some years as his patient does not indicate that he couldn't "cure" me; rather he has managed to keep straw in a scarecrow to prevent his going up in flames.
I digress. He and I talk about the horror of high school for me and the end of Western civilization. There is nothing we miss. At least this week.
Speaking of...while I have stumbled around with the tussle of Mexican immigration, he led me to a single solution that seems to be the beginning and the end. (I told you.)
Who are the most culpable in the morass and who could end the flow of these troubled immigrants tomorrow? I'll ask one more questioin before hitting the answer dead center. Why are Mexicans willing to chance their lives to get across that damn border? Jobs. The little money they earn here and send back home is the only solution to their plight available to them. If they could not get jobs, the fracas would be all over.
The people who should be arrested and punished in such a way as to lose their way of life are the people who grab illegals in order to pay slave wages. If there were no jobs, everything is solved in a minute.
These employers, however, belong to a club that allows them to act and move without consequence. Unless you consider a Bentley a consequence.
For a moment I stupidly thought the INS should work its way through the rallies, putting on buses everyone without a passport or any of the other proofs that say we belong to or in (who knows?) America.
Wrong.
The INS needs to go up and down Rodeo Drive and Camden and Beverly, the flats are a good place you know, and pull onto buses the women who have already been pulled, who have in their kitchens undocumented aliens. And, too, the factory owners. And the restauranteurs. Well, you know who you are!!! And throw away the key. And the fines. Oh, the fines would be outlandish. Ruin them. The INS can become the biggest and most frightening agency in government. Suddenly, it would not be Mexicans jumping out of windows. It would be powdered and fragranced matrons. Can you see Betsy Bloomingdale diving from the second floor? Oh, my Goodness, this is effective and worth a reality show.
In a few weeks I will check into Santa Monica Hospital to have a ligament in my leg, a ligament that is torn in four places, repaired. Soft tissue takes an inordinate amount of time to heal and I will be confined, as they say, for three to six months. Crutches. Probably won't be able to use them. I'm somewhat scared, I'll tell you. But perhaps, little by little, I'll make it back, never to go running again, however. Well, that was one of the factors that got me into this mess.
So there's a lot to consider. A lot of possible problems. My friend Jeannine will think I should heal faster, because her hip did. It's hard to separate apples and oranges for people sometimes.
Of course, a Mexican could to that for me, huh? But I promise you this: he will be documented.
My ligament and the immigration nightmare still have a chance for a happy ending. But that will take the best doctors (legislators), patience, adherence to rules, and, as I say, three to six months.
Plus a shrink who knows everything.
I'm Comin', I Hope and Pray I'm Not too Late...
If you're planning to come to the United States illegally, I certainly hope you're way to late, terrorism and Southern California's maid service withstanding.
Our cities are bursting with citizens living below the poverty line whom we can't or won't help. The thought of adding more people to the rolls of those receiving medical care, food stamps, disability benefits, schooling for children whose parents pay no income or property taxes is terrifying.
If I hear one more person say what hard workers Mexicans and Central American Latins are, I'm joining the border patrol and hope that the government arms me.
If you live in Southern Cal and have had the tree in your front yard trimmed, your roof repaired, or your living room painted, you know this: the illegal immigrants in question may be less hard working than other groups, simply because they have not been trained to do their jobs properly and so slack off out of frustration. Employers who use illegal immigrants in the hope of paying immoral wages to build a business on the backs of people whom no one else will hire should be told to leave the country, too. They certainly are not displaying any of the values a naturalized alien learns on his way to becoming an American citizen. "Do it cheap, do it on the fly, do it under the radar, and don't do it well" are hardly part of any American ethic I've come across.
Of all the ridiculous reasons I've heard for allowing illegal immigrants to stay in the United States, the following is the most absurd, galling me that anyone would be stupid enough to make it. When confronted with the question of Mexico's economy, which can't support its people, the answer comes flying back that it would take twenty years to create a robust economy in Mexico. Putting aside that Mexico has not created a working economy in the past two hundred years, would not the most junior of economists suggest that Mexico begin that twenty year climb to self-sufficiency this very day? Otherwise, in twenty years, it will take twenty years to build the Mexican economy. Could that debate be more specious? Or maddening?
In a second I will be labeled a bigot for two crude suppositions too broad to be taken entirely seriously. To that I can only say, "Bite me!"
Under autocracy, monarchy, communism and, now to some extent free enterprise Russians have been able to create only peasant and landed (full of money) classes. It appears, so it will always be. So Russians, hearty and hardened by their past, come to America and see that we are a bunch of fools ripe for the picking. And so, the Russian Mafia. More violent and souless than anything Don Corleone would have imagined. A hit here or there. Prostitution. Drugs. But, generally speaking, the Italian Mafia doesn't blow up district attorneys or little children who may have witnessed one of their bloody crimes. These Russians don't even attempt an honest life. The other is just too simple.
And for the Mexicans it is just too simple to cross the border illegally, strip this country as they may, ruin the lemon tree in your front yard, and send money home - hardly a boon to our economy.
More than any argument, though, is this honest one: there are Mexicans who enter this country legally and take every step to citizenship, including mastering the English language. (In Southern California someone raises the question of a bilingual education system daily. Why for God's sake? Ah, to school [notice I did not use the word educate] the children of illegal aliens.) We cannot slap the faces of those people who have worked to become Americans and done so legally. That would be, in a word, immoral. Returning people who have done everything possible to undermine the processes of naturalization and citizenship is not. Is not. Period. Exclamation point!
The next time you see a photograph of a Mexican child with big brown eyes that warm your heart, hope that his parents or grandparents came to this country legally to make him part of the American fabric.
