“Yo! White boys! What do you think you’re doing?”
“What you mean, man? Workin’. Layin’ block. What’s it look like we’re doin’?” responded one.
“Don’t you know you’re doing work Americans won’t? You’re going to give us all a bad rap working along side the main drag like this, in broad daylight too. Boss-man around?”
The Gang and I were on a road trip a while back. As we passed a small commercial construction site I had to pull over and rag on those boys a little. When the crew leader came around front we yucked it up about the bald-faced lie we’re all told that illegal aliens only do work Americans won’t and that hiring illegals allows businesses, particularly construction and agricultural businesses, to keep their costs reasonable.
As we shook hands to leave I handed him a buck to go next door and get a big orange drink for his crew, with five straws… and a fin to buy their lunch. That’s all I’ll admit.
As we pulled back on the highway toward our original destination I took a long, deep drag on the fag held gently between my nicotine-stained fingers. It’s a shame we allow a minority, a significantly small minority, to hijack, then bastardize, our language isn’t it. Exhaling CO2, CO, H2O, NOx, NH3, and other noxious gases that drive greenies nuts, it struck me we’re allowing our nation, this, the greatest nation ever to grace the face of Planet Terra, these United States of America, and our very society to be hijacked, then bastardized, by small minorities… sometimes not so small minorities, but minorities all the same. And they do it with nothing more than lies, lies intended to make the rest of us feel guilty for what and who we are.
Take, for example, this hoo-hah about Chattanooga’s Mayor Berke and his defenders who, interestingly, depend upon his graciousness with taxpayer dollars, dollars average schlubs work hard to earn so he can give them away to those who haven’t. But perhaps that’s a subject for another day. There’s plenty of time before the elections in March, 2017.
I’m not a big, highfalutin’ land developer living at the foot of That Mountain, Yonder who’s run for Chattanooga City Council, a Republican big-wig who told me several years ago it was too much trouble to verify the citizenship of people working for his rock harvesting company… even if they didn’t sprechen sie Inglés. I suspect he took offense at being told what scumbags I believe employers who hire illegals are but, you see, I remember being 31 years old, over half my life ago now, in a land far away, a gentleman sitting across my desk, at the time a 54-year-old veteran who’d marched off to war when our nation called during that little police action in Korea a few years before, with a tear leaking from his eye. He was looking for work that December day after being laid off from the job he’d held for over 20 years assembling and testing electric motors… replaced by an immigrant who would work for a lot less money, without any of his experience and training... training obtained at his own expense, to be a more valuable employee. Those people, his former employers, didn’t even have the courtesy to wait until after Christmas. They handed him walking papers, out of the blue, the day before Thanksgiving. Our company didn’t need anyone at the time but he wasn’t afraid to work and could swing a hammer pretty well, wield a mean set of pruning shears and paint brush, knew how to use a fish-tape to pull wire through conduit, etcetery, so a few phone calls later he had enough work lined up around our business park to get by until he could find a real job. I think one guy’s seven-year-old kid even hired him to assemble a swingset because Santa Claus did a dump-n-run that year… stale cookies.
Veteran is an interesting word isn’t it. Just like Marine, Sailor, Coast Guardsman, Soldier, and Airman, it can be a noun, proper noun, or adjective. We have veteran electricians, welders who are Veterans, and veterans of the construction trades. That’s the wonder of our language. Diverse, with a depth and breadth greater than any other it sort of goes along with the diversity of our society and nation, the greatest nation ever to grace the face of Planet Terra, doesn’t it.
A bud recently commented, “You’re such a flag-waver.” Actually I’m not, don’t have to be, but he’d just received The Finger. Not that one, digitus impudicus, he got the eye-poking finger for whining about the awful nation we live in.
Robert A. Heinlein once wrote "Do not handicap your children by making their lives too easy." (Time Enough for Love, The Notebooks of Lazarus Long) and I get a bit of a chuckle hearing people unknowingly quote that Bard of Avon Dude’s Hamlet, either directly or paraphrasically; “Woe is me. O, woe is me. T'have seen what I have seen, see what I see!”
T'have seen what I have seen…
There are 50 of these United States of America. I’ve traveled through all of them, lived in nine long enough to vote if I cared to and was old enough, not counting the years on Guam as a child… where Santa Claus came in a yellow rescue chopper because his reindeer, according to Mom, couldn’t tolerate equatorial temperatures, if too many people congregate on one side it might slip off into the Marianas Trench, and even after 60 years my sister globs ketchup on scrambled eggs because powdered eggs were all we had back in the day. I’ve worked in 23 states and 3 territories. Just over 12 years ago I took a stand against flying under the current conditions. Before that day I’d set foot in 26 sovereign nations and worked in 19 of those, including floating around the toilet bowl of Southern Europe, North Africa, and the Near East with the United States Navy as our chauffeurs… what cartographers call the Mediterranean Sea. On more than one occasion I’ve wanted to kneel down and kiss the ground upon returning home.
But I’m nothing special. A lot of us working schlubs have done more, seen more, been more places. However, I do take issue with anyone who would compare athletics, particularly high school athletics, to any of our military services, especially the United States Marine Corps, relating to turning boys into men. I earned seven varsity letters in high school for swimming, diving, water polo, and was 3rd in the region in my wrestling weight class. Had I not decided to run off for a little vacation at MCRD San Diego just a few weeks into my senior year there would have been 3 or 4 more, but that didn’t keep Sgt. Moser from dang near killing us on the PT field in Boot Camp. I figure there’re about 73 years, 127 days, 22 hours, 49 minutes and 32 seconds (mark), in round numbers, until the average person catches up to all the running we did, and I was a Wing Wiper. Grunts… now those boys really do some PT. Classroom work was no cake-walk either.
There’s no member of any athletic program subject to getting a phone call in the middle of the night, or merely walk into work to be told, “Pack your dittybags, boys and girls, you’re headed off to BuFu Nowhere so somebody can shoot at you, blow you up” or any number of other possible atrocities in the name of duty to those who demand a right of social justice, a right often earned with no more sacrifice than sucking in good air to exhale those noxious gases that drive greenies crazy.
What is social justice?
Is social justice being allowed to walk the streets after committing crime after crime after crime after crime? Is it aiming or firing a weapon, or a toy that looks like a real weapon, at a cop with no consequences? Are the police supposed to look the other way while criminals, even if they may only be 13 years old, commit dastardly acts upon other citizens in the name of social justice? Is it taking money earned by people who get up and go to work every day to give it to those who won’t? Is it being given a home mortgage without having enough income to pay back the loan, sometimes without even a job? Is it being relieved of all responsibility for poor personal decisions and behavior?
Does social justice mean a company purchasing from a minority business when there are other local businesses, often owned by Veterans, selling the same products at a lower, often significantly lower, price?
It would seem that a 42-43 year old man with a PhD, and little to no personal financial burden for his education, has no room to complain about social injustice. A millionaire football player, with no personal financial burden for his college education either, might take a lesson about social injustice traveling to another nation, perhaps one where soldiers wander around the airport, and streets, with M-16s locked, loaded, and at sling arms. PhD dud too. Perhaps those who complain about social injustice and abusive police would have a greater appreciation for our own after seeing, first hand in a foreign nation, how quickly a thief hands over the wallet he just stole from an American GI while on his knees, hands behind his head, with a member of the local gendarmerie holding an M1911A1, safety off, to his forehead.
Why is it those who scream the loudest about social injustice have personally benefited most from those very same social injustices and have the least personal experience with the situations they complain about?
Slavery ended, by law, in this nation in 1861, over 150 years ago. We, these United States of America, the greatest nation ever to grace the face of Planet Terra, were the first nation to outlaw slavery. Jim Crow laws were eliminated in 1964, over 50 years ago. But prejudice is prejudice isn’t it. Getting bumped to the bottom of the eligibility list for a job opening, or bumped out of a job, merely for the color of one’s skin or religion or nation of origin, for any reason other than qualifications, isn’t right no matter which way it goes. I don’t need to ask my great great grandfather’s 3rd wife’s second (by marriage) cousin’s niece’s husband what it’s like to be 15 years old, sitting in a secluded area at school to do homework, and get sucker-punched by some clown saying “let’s get it on” with 3 of his Chicano buds standing beside him. I don’t have to ask a guy who works with my neighbor’s wife’s brother about the adrenaline rush of having a car pull across the lane in front of him in a parking lot, turning to his accomplice to be sure her seat belt’s on while telling her to brace herself as another pulled across the lane behind. Those silly gangbangers. One would think they’d have enough sense to know not to stand between two vehicles, screaming threats and obscenities, while their intended victims are sitting there smiling, engine running, transmission dropped down into low gear, left foot on the brake, right foot gently pressing ever harder on the accelerator… in a rental car. Their eyes sure do open wide when they realize what’s about to happen if they don’t leave, too.
How much time is wasted over minutiae when there are real problems requiring solutions… like a congress that not only allows, but encourages a federal administration to spend money that hasn’t yet been earned by our great-grandchildren’s unborn children? How about savages who’ve declared war on our nation, our very society, and have no qualms at all about harming women, children and others for no better reason than we don’t hold the same beliefs, when our government refuses to even acknowledge them? And we, the most powerful, and charitable, nation the world has ever known, accept being bullied by people who still wipe their butts with bare hands? Or children who graduate from high school and can’t read or sign their name? Or adults who can’t fill out a job application?
But insanity, by any other name, is still insanity isn’t it.
Those who live in them look down from their towers at us peons because they’re above any requirement to follow the law, the rules of common decency, or telling the truth because lies and half-truths allow furthering their agendas, don’t they. It matters nothing to them that our children aren’t educated at a level commensurate with the system’s funding, does it. Thomas Jefferson, in his 6 January 1816 letter to Mr. Charles Yancy, a letter containing a wealth of wisdom throughout, commented “If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be.”
He was right you know…
Poor Nanners. Imitating The Bobby Fuller Four she was singing “I fought a wasp and the, wasp won” yesterday. A Boston terrier mix with a softball hanging from her chin is a pitiful sight.
Royce Burrage, Jr.
Royce@Officially Chapped.org