Part of the good thing about holidays like Memorial Day is I meet up with relatives who think completely differently than I do about political issues. I’m amazed about what concerns them, and they do not share my worries at all. One was telling me how much she hates DeSantis because of the abortion issue. Florida’s bill only bans abortions after 15 weeks. My God, if you don’t know if you want to keep the child after 15 weeks, perhaps, motherhood is not right for you. I’m sure you can find another state to go to, and how easy is it to smuggle day after (or months after) abortion pills across state lines? Abortion is definitely not an issue I will be voting on.
When I got over to my uncle’s house, he had a crew doing some yard work. I went to work helping them out. One of them was a recently arrived illegal alien from Colombia. I made some small talk with him. He had come up through Monterrey, Mexico, which means he likely crossed in the Rio Grande Valley Sector; for some reason, Laredo Sector is not getting hit as hard. Later on, my uncle gave me a compliment of sorts for working with an illegal alien. “I wanted you to see they’re not bad people.”
I had to scoff. I’ve arrested hundreds of people. Some of them I liked very much. That didn’t mean that I wanted them in the United States. I remember reading a story by a cop who said that he’d arrested people he liked all the time. He arrested one guy twice for the same offense, first degree homicide, and said the guy couldn’t have been nicer. He was a small guy who got fed up with being bullied and once he got a gun, he decided he wasn’t putting up with it anymore. I’ve arrested some mean SOBs, and I’ve arrested some genuinely nice people. Just because you are nice, does not mean that you should be allowed into the United States.
It was reminiscent of why journalists are liberal while editors tend to be a bit more conservative. Reporters go out and talk to people and get good human interest stories (they sell well with the public), while editors are more likely to sit in an office and worry about making payroll and the bottom line. Reporters get the individual hard luck story, editors have to be a bit more hardnosed in figuring out what advertisers want and what stories the public will buy.
As Stalin supposedly said, “The death of one man is a tragedy, the death of millions is a statistic.” I’m sure there are plenty of individual sad sack stories coming across our southern border. Each one of them taken individually has a hard luck story. However, there are projected to almost 3 million illegal aliens will cross the border this year. How many of these “nice” people do you want to take in?
My uncle’s buddy was there working too. He told me he had no problem with the open border because “We need the workers.” His only problem, he claimed, was all the girls being raped along the way.
I’m trying to find the who authored the quote, possibly Alexandre De Tocqueville, “When America becomes solely about money, it will cease to be a country.” To people like my uncle’s buddy, we are a corporate economic zone, not a true nation.
