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David Mitchell
Mike,
The video from your earlier post is quite compelling. Hearing that young lady physician who is on the front line of battle in NYC is gut wrenching! They are truly heroes in my mind. All the medical and health personel are deserving a huge dose of our collective gratitude.
I am also mindful of another group who desrves our gratitude - all those folks in the supply line of goods, groceries, medicines, etc. The truckers, dock loaders, and warehouse people who are keeping all that neccessary "stuff" moving. And not to forget the postal delivery people.
We all have much to be grateful for, sometimes it takes a crisis like this to remind us of the fact.
Speaking of being grateful, it just dawned on me last night that this is NOT happening during our hurricane season. Now there's a frightening thought. In fact, we are having gorgeous weather down here. We will approach 90 in the next few days but the humidity has not showed up yet.
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John,
Your (long) article about immigration was fascinating. Not sure how we drifted back to that issue at this time but it was really full of so much information that it was hard to take it all in.
I must mention a few things;
First; Ironic that they mention ETS in the educationpart of the article. Don't I recall someone we both know that used to work there? (Like your wife - didn't Carol run the company for years?)
Second; A stunning reminder about our "Border Warden-in-Chief" who relies so heavily on illegal and undocumented workers for his golf resorts (and his hotels I might add)
Third; This is my own take - - Isn't anybody lisening to the experts (several in our own pentagon) who have offered studies that show it would cost far less than the wall, if instead we helped countries like Honduras and Guatamala (two of the major sources of immigrants), rejuvenate their own economies?
The questions may be asked - why? - Or how we could do such a thing?
My two responses -
A) Why? Because, to a certain extent we owe it to them. During the early 20th century we allowed American Companies (mainly the "United Frut Co." - today's Chiquita Brands) to exploit these countries for economic gain, with virtually no behavioral controls. They used all sorts of illegal presure, intimidation, threats, kidnapping, bribery, and even assasinations to operate at maximum profits. We sat back and allowed them to wreck the government, the police and legal systems, and their societies in general. They have never really recovered. This blood is on our hands.
B) How could we do this? I suggest taht if we could feed and rebuild Europe (twice in one century), Japan, and Korea, we could surely go a long way towards helping these countries out of the nighmare we helped create. And yes, we would proably have to include sanctions on their own corporate giants, who are rich with corruption and discriminatory practices toward their own people.
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