Standing Room Only

      

What frightens us most today?  Most of us are not always certain what we are frightened most about, just that we feel fear about something, whether it be a fatal disease like Alzheimer’s, a nuclear attack, another 9/11, having a Republican win the next national election – or perhaps something a little less frightening, like a stroke.  Any of these can be more than a little terrifying.  But what is perhaps worse and more pressing than any of these or even all of them combined is something we give little or no thought to: over population.

     Was that a misprint?  No, that was not a misprint.  We need give the matter only a little thought, like never before, and we may come to a speedy agreement that over population will eat us up sooner than AIDS will engulf us.  Let’s consider a simple law of nature: barring a sudden epidemic Black Death to sweep across the world overnight or rigorous intelligent birth control, human growth is exponential.  If we look at a few numbers [statistics], we can see how this has worked since ancient times, no farther back than Greek and Roman times.  World human population was still only considerably less than 100 million people.  In spite of man-made wars and plagues, we are now in the billions.  [We tend to pooh-pooh such numbers when we refer to people but bellow bloody murder if it refers to the national deficit.]

     Today [April 2011] the world population is, specifically, at 6.91 billion.  We were barely over a billion in 1800.  By the year 2050 [within the lifetime of those born in the last 25 years and their children], scientific predictions have us at over 7.5 billion and more likely flirting with 10.5 billion.  [That is still only pocket change for what Bernard Madoff ran off with to rent for himself a nice place in federal prison.]  Well, no doubt, as far as most people are concerned, these are still only numbers, nothing to worry about.  It might do well, though, to look at the matter from another angle.

     Not very long ago, there was a fellow by name Adolph Hitler, and he complained that Germany needed more lebensraum.  Very patriotically, he led his country and went out to obtain that extra “room” or space.  We call that noble effort World War II.  Not enough space, he said.  A few years before Hitler, there was another war.  We have proudly called it The War of Independence, the making of the American nation.  At that time there were only “thirteen colonies” settled in the far Northeast, Yankee land.  To the west was a nearly “boundless” land, totally unexplored by the white man but inhabited by a few million [handful of] “savages” [whom we kindly set aside to make room for the white folk.]  It was long said that from that Northeast corner, there were such thick forests that a monkey [not the Yankee, of course] could swing from tree to tree across the entire land right up to the Pacific Ocean.  How many of us, or at least a good, athletic African monkey, would be able to swing on trees today from coast to coast without our feet touching ground?

     The fact is that we have cut down millions of acres of trees in scarcely over two hundred years.  Why?  To house millions of people who have covered our erstwhile virgin lands.  How about the asphalt and concrete we have poured on them to build our streets, highways, and parking spaces for our cars and trucks?  At the beginning of the 20^th century we had less than 100 million population.  Today we are climbing at 311,191,000 and counting, what with our practically open immigration policies. Where will we be in 2050, especially if we continue to let all the Asian peoples, who are dying to come to the “land of opportunity,” come rushing through our well-oiled revolving door?  China is bulging at 1,343,520,000; India 1,210,193,422; Indonesia 238,400,000; Pakistan 175,791,000, Bangladesh 164,425,000; as well as Africa with Nigeria enjoying 158,259,000 [only one of the countries in Africa] and Ethiopia [the poorest country in the world] with some 60,500,000.  Already the face of America has darkened considerably since the Civil Rights bills of the ‘60s, which allowed for our nearly open-door immigration policies.  Who or what is going to put the brakes on the free flow of poor countries from flooding what remains of our diminishing spaces?  Logic tells us that with our current fiscal deficits and rampant immigration of the world’s poor, it will not take many more generations to qualify as one of the “third world” nations.  And we, too, like Hitler, will be screaming our lungs out for more lebensraum.  Unthinkable?  What odds are you laying on your bet?

     For those who have not kept up with foreign news might want to know that Brazil [population 194,529,000] has been cutting down millions of acres of its Amazon jungles for years for building roads, infrastructure, industries, and homes.  Sound familiar?  The Amazon jungle once provided vital oxygen to our atmosphere, but it is now being transformed into carbon dioxide and other pollutants.  Let us not forget that they and we are only getting warmed up in our mad determination to destroy our world, which includes not only our air but also our waters [oil spills contribute marvelously to the madness; after all, we do need more oil for more people, do we not?], marine life, animals, vegetation, etc.

     Communist China, whatever else we may think or say about it, adopted a policy to control excessive population growth a few years ago: reward those who participate in birth control and ignore the others.  Couples having no children reap the greatest tax and financial benefits; those with one child a little less; those with two even less; and so on.  Preaching never produces positive results.  Money always does.  As soon as possible, we should seriously invest in such a practical program here as well as in poor countries, and close the door to free immigration into this country.  [We can already anticipate interested parties reacting vehemently against such a policy, but it is not a matter of permitting any and all relatives and friends to come live with us, but a matter of survival for legal tax-paying Americans.]  As our worthy politicians say in their political charades “let’s take back our country,” we should take back our land, the natural world around us, and our future before we reach the point of no return.  The handwriting on the wall is writ large enough for a blind man to see.  When are WE going to see it, read it, and act on it sensibly?

   

Celestina

Celestina

Taken from the Tragedia de Calisto y Melibea [published in 1499], which is believed to be the model for Shakespeare’s Rome and Juliet, this play plucks out the minor but one of the most memorable characters in literature, Celestina.  In the earlier work this character appears as an old crone once a successful prostitute, who now serves as a tutor to young girls seeking [“in the life” – prostitution] a means of feeding themselves and perhaps their young families, and is also a mender of hymens for young wayward ladies who are willing and able to pay to have their pure virginity restored.  This play, however, presents a beautiful, intelligent, well-educated girl “in the life,” whose clientele includes successful businessmen, a renowned Archbishop, and politicians.

Opening the play is a scene of Celestina and her mother discussing the merits and demerits of prostitution, the mother wishing that her daughter could have a more respectable career but accepting Celestina’s position: except for our prudery about sex, why is prostitution any less respectable than any other commercial business that sells a valuable product in great demand, especially if the clientele is doubtless respectable?

Celestina has won a respectable place in the community because she does not flaunt her beauty or success, but is obviously appreciated, especially by the men, and also because as a brilliant fundraiser for the Church she has been accepted as a respected member of the Board.  In a meeting with the Board, despite Celestina’s admirable efforts at diplomacy, when the Archbishop feels “attacked” by the subject of the clergy abuse of its young and female parishioners, he explodes in anger a storms out of the meeting.  To divert attention from the growing discontent of the community in the negative publicity about the abuse of young boys, girls, and women in the confessional, the Archbishop publicly announces a campaign to clean the city of all prostitution by closing all brothels and arresting any and all streetwalkers.

Immense pressure is placed on Celestina when she discovers that word has gone out of her abominable “business” and that the Archbishop has broken his appointments with her, however much he craved his masochistic flagellation “therapy.”  Forced to decide whether to allow herself to be run out of town, Celestina elected to go public and name names of her clientele, arguing that if she is guilty, so must her clients who pay for her services.

Not one to take such public disgrace lying down, the Archbishop calls on a couple of his more able henchmen to go teach her a less she will never forget and put her out of business permanently.  They mutilate her so that she will never again be able to sell her wares in the open market.

To get "Celestina" by Dr. David Hernandez, click here!

Seeing Illegal Immigration Right Side Up

How many more wetbacks do we need invading our shores?  Is “illegal” really legal?

     The answer to these questions may not come by so easily because it seems much depends on our various interests and different views.  For example, if we asked the first thousand people we came across in the street what they meant by justice, we would be sure to get a thousand thumbnail definitions as assured as the slick first-rate, highly paid shyster.  Yet it took arguably the greatest philosopher of all time, Plato, a whole book, The Republic, to answer that very question.  Just shows how little we can trust less knowledgeable “experts” trying to answer difficult questions with simple answers.

     While we all have the right of opinion, it hardly means that we all have the right opinion.  Many are bound to clash with others.  And when we are so adamant about clinging to our pet interests, they, too, will clash with those held by others.  In the instant case, we see todAay how our state laws differ and our Congress does little to soften the obduracy of the differing sides in trying to reach a reasonable solution to the benefit of the entire nation, while each side wants and expects to prevail.

     To complicate matters, the exploding numbers of illegals and the numbers of their interested legal advisers, who see gold in defending them and find places in the political system now have more power in determining legislation that favors the illegals and the definition of what is “legal” itself, rendering the question we asked at the start all but moot.

     On the side of the illegals, we hear and can empathize with them in part, when they say, “this nation was founded by and is a nation of immigrants,” “this nation has been made strong and great by its diversity of immigrants,” “we seek a better life, like anyone else – and willing to work for it,” “we pay taxes, like any other American and are not a burden on the State,” “we love this country and will be good American citizens,” “we are human beings who don’t deserve to be discriminated against or to be profiled anymore than any other person,” etc.

     There are many who defend the employer and our country as beneficiary of the work the illegals contribute to our economy.  Among the employers there are the landowners, farmers, restaurants, salons, hotels, resorts, parks, zoos, garbage collection, and construction industries: homes, commercial, streets, expressways, sweat shops that fill our department stores, etc.  Their chief argument is that “it is work that no one else will do,” which means invariably legal [especially “white”] Americans, and it is indispensable work to our economy.

     The first white man who set foot upon the western hemisphere [as unwelcome as he may have been] was surely an immigrant, as were the millions of Europeans who continued flowing upon these shores.  And there was a time when immigrants were in fact greatly needed to work the land and build our infrastructure.  But then came a time when the flow of immigrants had to be stopped, because it was no longer desirable to have endless immigrants bulking our population, for we had reached the point of diminishing returns.  In short, the unneeded, unwanted immigrant was no longer welcome.  The fact that this land was founded by and is made of up immigrants is totally irrelevant to today’s issue of illegal immigration.

     Lawyers who defend illegals do our country a disservice, since they should know better, however much they argue for the “inhuman” hardships the illegals suffer because they are not given the benefits of legal Americans.  They may be human beings, but they are illegal ones.  A murderer is a human being, but that doesn’t make him innocent of crime and eligible for rewards and special privileges.  That they should make good American citizens is more than slightly dubious, since they were ready to abandon their country for “a better life.”  It seems rather that their eagerness to abandon their country makes them opportunists, hardly material for loyal American citizens.

     To say that we need 12-13 million illegals to do the work that “no one else wants to do” is pretty much putting the cart before the horse, is it not?  According to latest figures, there are millions of American citizens out of work and some hundreds of thousands, if not millions, considered “homeless.”  Now, supposing we eliminated those 12-13 million illegals AND closed all the havens for the homeless, would we still have jobs that “no one else wants to do?”  [There would always be some kind of haven for the proven infirm.]  Forgive me if I can’t hear for the deafening silence.

     It’s more than high time that we stopped fooling ourselves and made some sense of the kinds of messes we are quite geniuses at consistently creating for ourselves.  Let’s go back to the “indispensable concept” we proposed for making a start at trying to solve our immigration crisis.  We mentioned the next thousand people we met would give us a thumbnail definition of “justice.”  Yet, arguably the greatest philosopher of all time, Plato, needed a whole book, The Republic, to define the term.  That’s how much we can depend upon slightly less enlightened people to present us with easy answers to such complex problems.  Without going into Plato’s book, as a working concept, we can at least say, what few would disagree with, that justice cannot make sense if we do not have at the same time reward and punishment: we reward those who obey the law and punish those who disobey [break] the law.  How very simple even if not so easy.  All we need now is to determine, as our Constitution enjoins us: a reward or punishment that fits the deed [the patriotic duty or the crime].  We also need honest [patriotic] judges, prosecutors, and legislators.  [Where might we find such creatures, or as we remember how Diogenes went around in daylight with his lamp looking for the honest man?]

     We can well empathize with anyone who is seeking the better life, like the rapist, holdup man, mugger, or white collar crooks who bilk people [associates, clients, friends, the company, and our nation] out of billions of dollars when they create a world financial crisis for their pleasure, that is, “seeking the better life.”  A wetback is not normally seen as either a rapist or white collar crook, fleecing the country of billions of dollars, chiefly because we picture him wading across the Rio Grande mostly in the evening or night alone or sometimes with a couple of family members. We even feel a tender sympathy for them when we hear of their hardships if they get caught, get raped or robbed by the coyote, or die from thirst and hunger trying to drag themselves across the burning deserts of Arizona.  And then we give them cyclical relief with legal amnesties, free medical attention, financial aid, food stamps, and educational benefits.  American humanitarianism and generosity.  No doubt most admirable.  But what does that do for our country when we ignore the basic principles of justice or rule by law?  We reward rather than punish them for a crime tantamount to rape.  That may sound outlandish and perhaps cruel.  That is because we equate rape with sex instead of force.  We take someone or something by force is rape for our benefit/pleasure [seeking the better life] – with or without sex.  It may still seem an exaggeration [for one thing we are hung up on sex, i.e., its avoidance], but let’s go back to the 1930-40s, long before we opened the doors to indiscriminate legal and illegal immigration.  [Americans were doing all the jobs that “no one else wants to do.”]  Now, what if the national alarm went off that 12-13 million Latinos were going to rush over the Rio Grand and invade us?  What would we do?  What would YOU do about it?  Sit back and enjoy being “raped” – as one fine candidate for Texas governor recently said that women should do when confronted by a rapist?  Would you then deign call it rape, or would you start handing out food stamps and lashing out for taxes to pay for the free medical care, education, etc. of 12-13 million illegals who have just swamped over your erstwhile rule-of-law country?

     If we are not entirely brain dead and decide that punishment should fit the crime – breaking our federal laws [if that means anything anymore] – we should consider the crime of illegal immigration as we do rape, or carrying a female across state lines for sex or prostitution.  What do we do in such cases, offer the rapist free education, medical care, food stamps, etc.?  Don’t we slam him in the hoosegow and hand him a hefty prison term?  Why haven’t we done that with the wetbacks?  One of our quickie solutions is to deport them.  Another is to offer them amnesty, as some lame-brained politicians have suggested more than once.  How much would it cost the tax-paying American to ship back 12-13 million illegals?  That’s unadulterated insanity.  Amnesty is tantamount to announcing to the world that it is perfectly correct to break our federal laws – at their pleasure.

     Sanity and reason would demand that all illegals, past, present, and future, be slammed into prison for the same amount of time a rapist would get.  Since he had no legal right to be here, he has no legal status.  Therefore he must pay as he goes in the same way as if he were living in Mexico, China, or Tierra de Fuego: he pays for his personal needs, heat, food, air conditioning, bedding, laundry, medical attention, etc.  To be able to do this, he must work FOR FREE, except for a voucher [no cash or currency of any kind] to credit his work at minimum wage at the moment he was arrested at the rate in that state, never to change until his release.  His work will be the kind of public service work needed in the local community “that no one else will do” until he has finished his term.  He will not be sitting idly in his cell.  AFTER his “debt to society” is paid in terms of time, he must now work to accumulate enough voucher credit to pay for his deportation.  No more free rides back home.

     There has been a misplaced sympathy for the separation of families.  These are not our concern but that of the family involved.  They are the ones willing to take the risks; like any gambler, they must pay the consequences when they lose.  If he is dragged into jail and leaves his family behind because they are “not guilty,” they will not stay here only because they are not guilty.  They, too, have no legal status in this country, because they were not supposed to be here legally in the first place; hence, they will be taken back most economically in a bus to the border and left on the other side.  It is the concern of the affected parties to make preparations before they come to violate our laws as to the care of family if left at the border.

     With such inflexible procedure and expectations on the part of those anticipating an illegal venture across the border, there should be more contemplation by future adventurers before any attempt, because there will be no free ride back home, which they almost invariably take advantage of by making repeated attempts until they succeed – at the American taxpayer’s expense.  Rigorously sweeping them out of sweat shops, restaurants, salons, hotels, etc. will leave prospective lawbreakers scant opportunity for employment and be more than a little discouraging for future illegals, less burden on the American taxpayer, and more employment for Americans in need of work, even those who think today that they would not do that kind of work, because to fill that loop hole, we can save even more tax money by closing all havens and feed bags for the homeless, and then produce plenty of jobs available with 12-13 million less illegals on our premises, and reducing the unemployment rates within our borders.  (There would be havens for invalid homeless.)  [See a fuller discussion on this subject in my Missing in America: Freedom, Justice, and Honor and Boy, What I Could Do With Gates’ Billions!]

     Of course, if we can’t be bothered with doing things right because it’s too much trouble, too cruel, too much to think about, we can always leave things as they are.  Why not?  We love letting things “just happen.”  It’s easier that way, isn’t it?  But, then, would we have a right to complain?

David Hernandez, Ph. D.                                                    Labels: Illegal Immigration