Letters to the Editor
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Do you need a better
example?
Poco
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Immigrants and multiculturalism
I find it interesting that anyone would blame desperate Mexicans who come to America to work at pathetic, barely subsistence wages rather than blame the true source of the problem--those corporations that advertise jobs in Mexico, expedite illegal entry, and pay wages too low for American workers to even consider. When will the government and those upset with the resulting situation take notice of what these companies are doing?
I'm also amused by people who decry illegal or legal immigrants. Native Americans are, in my mind, the only Americans with a right to bitch about what multiculturalism has done to their country.
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Poco's "Church"
Poco writes of his church and fellow congregants:
No one tells us how to live or what to think. We make our own choices.
Then... why do you go to church at all?
Also, aren't there rules and commandments and stuff in that bible thing you people read? Isn't that kinda telling you how to live or what to think? Or are those commandment thingies actually just suggestions? I wonder why god didn't call them "The Ten Suggestions" if he intended for them to be simply suggestions.
And also, an you go to your church and be an atheist, or would someone possibly try to tell you what to think, upon finding out you don't believe in god?
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Sorry about that...
Last night I posted that "If you want health care, move to Canada," crap because I was tired and grumpy and just wanted to hear how it sounded. Sorry. I do think despair is unwarranted if it's based on the complaint that some guy down the street, across town or in the nearest big city is stinkin' rich while poor me has only two cars, a hot tub and a well-fed family. In fact, I wonder if a lot of the despair that leads people to embrace evangelical fairy tales grows out of an excess of plenty, rather than a shortage of it. The caravans of mini-buses I see all too often on the highway, bumper-stickering their membership in some holy-rolling group on a giant prayer-orgy outing, are always well-heeled, smugly groomed middle-class types. Turn on Kristianist TV; who's in the audience? They're not poor, gap-toothed people left behind by the economic juggernaut. They're people who don't have everything, perhaps, but they have more than enough.
Problem is, when you've got everything you need -- which isn't necessarily everything you want -- when there's a DVD player in every room; a couple of nice cars in the garage; if not great health care at least the knowledge that you're not going to die like most humans have, arbitrarily and in great pain, for a reason you don't begin to understand; the kids in school; good food on the table; a trip to Disney World in the planning stages -- what have you got? You're the center of your own little consumer heaven, richer by far than kings and queens of old. But it doesn't feel as good as you've been promised it would. And since every moment isn't a struggle to survive you've got plenty of time to think about the fact that it's all going to end. How unfair. How frightening. Driven to consume, to measure success and happiness by one's ability to consume, you've done what you were told but it's all for nothing because you're going to die and all your stuff will end up in a garage sale. That's a pretty heavy burden for most people. The angst settles most heavily on the affluent (again, not compared to the Joneses but to humanity at large) but modestly educated people who make up so much of the evangelical right. They don't have the comfort of reading great literature or the mental tools to contemplate their place in an existential universe wherein their death is as meet and natural as their life. So, they look for someone to tell them it isn't really going to end. They hug that fairy tale tight and hate anyone who, even with a doubting glance, dares to suggest that the fairy tale isn't true.
Talk about a ripe seedbed for demagoguery.
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Kirby's immigrant woes
Kirby wrote:
"I have seen the working class of entire areas become devasted by illegal aliens. Answer me liberals, you can't be bothered with people of your own race who aren't as rich or educated as you are, you have nothing but contempt and you have to hold your nose when you do talk to them. So why do you break out sobing over the plight over the poor illegal Mexican with 9 kids back home who's just here to help his family. Call me a racist, but can't those people help their own and maybe if they didn't have sky high birth rates maybe they could take care of their own instead of coming here illegally and taking what we have and worked for. You can't add endless people to the population and not have it affect the communities and fabric of the country."
Kirby, I grew up in a working class family in a mainly working class or lower-middle-class town in the midwest. Plants closed and moved elsewhere, leaving people out of work. I wonder why they moved to international locations in some cases? Because of the liberals? No. Perhaps now, too, the new influx of mexican immigrants in my town has created a new labor force willing to work farm jobs for cheaper than those previously. But this is not the immigrants' fault--this is how unfettered capitalism works. This is what our country prides itself on -- a small group of people get even more wealthy if they can another group of people (they don't care who, or where) to work for less. Capitalism doesn't care about race, gender, religion, or even age--just the cheapest possible labor that can do the job acceptably well. The liberals are not responsible for this.
If an American takes advantage of an opportunity to get ahead, we call that good old American progress. If some capitalist here takes advantage of the opportunity to hire cheaper (legal or illegal) immigrants instead of 'Mericans and the company posts profits, we invest in the company and envy the managers when they get big raises. But the immigrants working these jobs are the ones to be blamed when it turns out Americans are being put out of work? Now that's interesting logic. You'd think they were giving themselves paychecks. Gee, I wonder why those profiting from this cheap labor aren't trying to stop illegal immigration into their factories and factory-farms, etc. Anyway, your final sentence is a real slippery slope fallacy: allowing some immigration does not mean allowing "endless" immigration. In any case, when the John Mellencamp stops playing in the background, you might wonder why a decent number of legal immigrants are not the poor and fertile you seem to loathe so much, but the well-educated technical and intellectual class that our country seems incapable of producing enough of or high enough caliber of to do all the work needed. Is this putting working class Americans out of work? No.
And it's odd that you seem to blame high population in immigrants' home countries on the people themselves. Yes, if only those people would practice better birth control -- birth control that is often too expensive for them, against their religious beliefs, or not an option down at the local non-profit clinic that is funded by US charities that believe in abstinence-only education until marriage and then no birth control (or rhythm method if you're lucky). Since this article is about fascism and Christianity, I'll just point out that fundamental christianity (of both protestant and catholic varieties) generally forbids all birth control.