..which is why we occasionally find magnificent human beings like Britt Minshall burdened with the label of "liberal." I am familiar with Minshall's work, his mission and his predecessors in the struggle to actually make a sane and sensible difference in conditions here in the richest, strongest and, sometimes, stupidest country on the planet. Long before Minshall's ministry caught fire I was radicalized by the Rev. William DuBois, who introduced a bunch of us then-Christian kids to life on a migrant worker's camp in southern Deleware. Although I am, thus far, a lifelong Republican (which answers at least one wise-ass's question about the subject of illegal immigration bringing out the neanderthals), I have never been the same since the beanfield epiphany. Then, in the late 1960's I met Cesar Chavez and was further impressed by the utter sanity of that movement's platform and goals. That was in Takoma Park, MD, when Chavez had been prevailed upon to assist the vast Mexican/Guatamalan/Salvadoran immigrant community in the DC area. Chavez was right then and Minshall is right now: illegals, and especially illegals with a liberal-inspired entitlement mentality, those who regard the United States as a giant waiting room, a polyglot boarding house and a gold mine which belongs to the world, are bleeding the decently motivated immigrant dry along with the rest of us who were already here making this into the gold mine that it is.

Now I live in Orange County, CA. (I can just hear the gasps, hear the lips curling, the muttering

and cursing out there in the ether) and we here are most acutely aware, as the first rest-stop on the journey to that "American Dream" (a nightmare not mentioned ANYwhere in our constitution, so quit TALKING about it awready!), of the flagrant and arrogant disregard for the kindness of we

strangers. Nowhere else will you find so many Republicans complaining about the abuses committed by the "wetbacks" while at the very same time hiring them, for peanuts, to mow their lawns, tend their gardens and wash their cars. It makes me wish flame-throwers were available at Wal-Mart.

Minshall is right, and that's not left. When we all finally wake up to the realization that by labelling each other all we are doing is dividing ourselves over arbitrary and usually petty, stupid lines that have no meaning while flames are leaping from the top of the Big Tent, maybe, just maybe then we will realize that once we have given away the store there will be no store, no dream, and very possibly no nation, at least not any sort that we would want to live in, which is precisely what is wrong with Mexico and its neighbors - those countries suck! When Americans start storming the borders of Mexico it ought to be due to a military invasion and not the result of a collapse of the cornucopia earnest, legal American citizens created.