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The Mexicans are coming and I’m sorry

povertyMy friend Kimmer turned me on to an article yesterday in the Washington Times about an Arizona rancher who’s ranch is on the Mexican border. In a nutshell, the rancher is being sued by 16 Mexicans who were trying to cross the border illegally, across his land. He held them at gun point with his dog by his side while he called the border patrol to come and arrest the illegals. In fact, he had done this so many times in the past eleven years that he has helped the border patrol arrest 12,000 illegals trying to gain access to this country by using his land as a gateway.

Now, the latest group of 16 Mexicans that he caught are suing him. You can read the whole story here.

I’ve thought deeply on this story since I read it. Just who do these people think they are? We stole this country fair and square. Our forefathers came over boat by boat and ship by ship to this land. They slaughtered scores of native Americans by introducing them to the business end of the firearms that they brought with them. They desecrated those heathen savages in every way possible, many times raping their women and killing their children until there was nothing left of them and leaving them nothing. Not even their pride. We stole this land fair and square right?

Our fore fathers brought slaves over from Africa. Ship by ship and boat by boat, cleared farm land, planted food and cotton with the aforementioned slave labor. They built this country on that stolen land and made it in to what it is today and that is something we can all be proud of right?

I am a proud American but sometimes, I really don’t feel so proud.

You can tell that I have mixed feelings about this. As a young man I thought I had seen poverty in America. I thought I knew what poverty was. I’d seen homeless people before. Not a lot, but I’d seen them. I didn’t know shit.

mexican-poverty1I went to Puerta Vallarta in about 1998 on a vacation. While I was there, I left the resort to go into town and check out some of the local shops and what not. I strayed a little farther past the outskirts of town than most Americans travel and that is where I saw true poverty. I saw true fear, hunger and despair in the eyes of innocent children. I saw an old woman in her 70s holding a baby in one hand and a tin cup begging for coins in the other while her daughter and grand daughter were trying to hawk up some business in the whorehouse a few doors down the street. These people’s best days don’t even come close to our worst. I sympathize and empathize with them. I’ve seen how they live and I can understand their desperation. I understand why they are willing to risk their lives to cross our border to make a few dollars an hour picking beans and chilies on our farms. I hold no animosity toward these people at all. They are just people, who are a lot worse off than we are, trying to survive.

Having said all that, do I feel that they deserve a free ticket to the US? I don’t know. I don’t know that I even deserve to be here. I don’t know that you deserve to be here either. If I steal your car like our great great grandparents stole this land, do I deserve to keep it just because I have a bigger gun? Is posession really nine tenths of the law?

These are tuff economic times, not only in this country, but world wide. Does anyone really think that a laid off GM worker is going to pick lima beans for three or four dollars an hour? Who’s jobs are they really taking or are they actually doing work that Americans are to fat and spoiled to do?

I have no answers on this. I feel sorry for the rancher whose land and belongings are being ravaged and vandalized by these people. I feel sorry for the Mexicans because I’ve seen the horror they are trying to escape. I feel sorry for the Americans who feel they deserve the luxury of $5 cups of Starbucks coffee just because their forefathers sodomized the native American culture. I feel sorry. I feel sorry that I’m somehow part of it and I don’t have the answers. I am sorry.