The 1996 Immigration “Explained” in Gumballs video is making its way around the internet again. It’s an interesting theory, but it ignores the singular element of what is *humane* in terms of humanity’s caring for each other.
As a species, we face a few overwhelming problems; Over Population and Poverty/Starvation for most of the Earth’s inhabitants.
We can not turn away the most ambitious of the masses who seek asylum here (Gumball guy, Roy Beck’s words; not mine) AND simultaneously remove funding for birth control for a planet that is obviously too stupid to only have as many children as they can care for.
Simple solution: Mandatory MALE birth control. For example; if a male has fathered two children with his legal spouse, a mandatory vasectomy should happen the same day the second child is born. A global mandate of this kind means an instant reduction in the “pink gumball” numbers and, over time, a normalization of the number of humans to food ratio until the world is able to take care of everyone.
And here’s why men would make sure that won’t work: men think their sperm is theirproperty, but women’s bodies are somehow *co-owned* by others. Something has to change and it’s about damn time men started taking responsibility for birth control.
Those over crowded nations and horrific living conditions immigrants flee from might just improve over time with a normalization of population growth. With a population under control and all the pressures of overcrowding reduced to a dull roar, a return to home lands could realistically happen. Not through deportation, but through a welcome move back to a new beginning. Many immigrants move here with every intention of going home one day. And we are not the only nation where people long to go, but we like to pretend we are.
Over population is our singular, over arching issue globally. Access to affordable and effective birth control is the first line of defense for over crowding and growing poverty areas dependent on support from others.
In states like Colorado where birth control is readily available, teen pregnancy and unplanned pregnancies dropped by 40% in the past six years.
We should be following suit with a male birth control campaign in our own country as well to reduce the always growing numbers of those born in poverty that stay in poverty.
Beck’s plan at NumbersUSA.com is not to maintain legal immigration. It is to shut the borders. Period. So if your children or grandchildren are not already US citizens, brace for a battle when attempting to bring them here, no matter which country they currently hold citizenship in.
We are already a nation of immigrants, just like Trump’s wives. And frankly, I’ll take a migrant worker who might get desperate and commit a crime like any American person could over a President who commits treason and endangers millions by making back door deals for his own ego and monetary gain any day of the week.
So here’s the gumball video. It’s very interesting and I’ve gotta say, the visual aide is impressive. All that’s missing is him ending the presentation with the wrap up line he silently implies: “… and let’s get real people. Who really gives a shit about the other useless three billion people anyway?”
It’s just a scam to make private schools cheaper for rich people, erode public schools and allow for-profit corporations to gobble up education dollars.
With this blog and website, I will share with you my travels and moments I decided to capture. I am working on setting up purchase capability for my photos- so hang tight! They will be found here at SmugMug!
Please feel free to contact me about where some of these photos are taken. I would love to share my favorite hiking spots, trails, National Parks, favorite food joints, etc.!
Somewhere back in our cellular memory, we likely carry the echoes of the luxury of wealth and all it affords, or we carry the scars to the body, mind and soul received while serving the wealthy.
In our comfortable middle to upper class existences, we move through our daily lives like the courtesans and friends of royalty of long ago. We can afford to eat at a restaurant and stay in a hotel while we’re on our vacations. We can hire workers to do the things that we don’t have skills to do or we simply chose not to do. We order our meals and (some) make a show of complaining when the food doesn’t magically appear at the table within five minutes. We wave over our server as if we are French Aristocracy to announce that the wine is corked. We don’t want to see what’s happening back in the kitchen. We don’t want to think about the actual “farm to table” experience and who it was that picked this baby artichoke perched at an artistic angle in the small pool of lemon aioli.
Our new *leader* is talking about walls and sweeping immigration and deportation. Like his hair care knowledge, he has no clue what works and what doesn’t. His policies and those of the GOP will leave America not only looking as ridiculous as said hair, but will bring an economic hammer down on us that will cripple the nation.
Maybe it’s time to start thinking about those people and connecting the dots between everything we expect to be available in our supermarkets and restaurants and those same workers the GOP wants tossed over a wall.
Immigrant farm worker fixing irrigation in an artichoke field.
The Bracero Program. You may have studied it in U.S. History.
During World War II, under the Bracero Program, the United States brought Mexican laborers into the country to remedy wartime production shortages. Named for the Spanish word for manual laborer (bracero), the program began in 1942. I should say, it officially began in 1942, but the truth is that manual laborers had been working farms all along, reaching back to when strongholds of food producing lands were still Mexican territory.
Way back in 1928, when many white citizens were complaining that Mexicans were taking jobs away from “Americans”, a Chamber of Commerce representative from California testified to Congress on the need for allowing US businesses to hire migrant workers. “We, gentlemen, are just as anxious as you are not to build the civilization of California or any other western district upon a Mexican foundation. We take him because there is nothing else available. We have gone east, west, north, and south and he is the only man-power available to us.” The Farm Bureau asserted that “California’s specialized agriculture [requires] a kind of labor able to meet the requirements of hard, stoop, hand labor, and to work under the sometimes less advantageous conditions of heat, sun, dust, winds, and isolation.”
He went on to refer to these temporary workers as “Homing Pigeons”; laboring long, hard hours spending months away from their families but always with their eye on finally returning home.
It’s a fairly simple scenario to understand. Farmers grow food. They harvest and process the food. They sell it to a domestic market or it goes out of the country as an export. The things they grow must be able to compete in those market places by remaining in an affordable, yet profitable price range or they are driven out of business by competition who will sell the market a cheaper product. Selling affordable products means having low over head and that means cheap labor.
According to nfwm.org, this year-2017, the average annual wage of a migrant farm worker is between $10,000 and $12,499.
Let’s be kind and call it $12,000 per year. That’s $1,000 per month. And that means $6.25 per hour.
And now, let’s be honest, companies will always be looking to pay as little as possible for laborers. And most young, healthy Americans feel that work of this kind is “beneath them”. Not all young, healthy Americans. I personally know a few who work regular jobs and on their “time-off” they can be found picking cherries and harvesting other crops for the extra money. They also do it so that their family or their neighbor’s farms will have product harvested on-time and at the market while it is still sell-able.
And that, my friends, is perhaps the most ignored portion of the “illegal worker” situation when considering migrant workers. Produce Spoils. There is a window of time in the world of farming when the product is ready to harvest and when it’s over, if that is your only crop, you are done for the year. It’s a mad rush of seasonal frenzy and then it is the dead silence of a fallow field or an orchard empty of fruit.
Some have expanded their options and now use hoop houses and crops that can be gathered year round, but some solutions to the short grow season only work in temperate climates like Texas, California and Florida. Not so for the corn, wheat, barley and other staple crops of the “Bread Basket” states who must wait out the winter and spring until the ground is soft enough to plant again.
Imagine, if you will, an overwhelming number of Americans suddenly willing to relocate for a few months to work those California fields, or those Michigan Cherry orchards; spending long, hard hours away from their friends and families; living in affordable temporary housing that they or their employer provides. And after the back breaking harvest season, they earn $3.25 an hour less than their friend that is a life guard at the public pool. Maybe you can imagine a rush of newly graduated high school students and twenty and thirty-somethings uprooting their American lives to fill those jobs. Personally, I cannot.
Closing borders and deporting Mexican and South American workers will effectively cripple American food production. And even outside the hotly debated farm worker situation, there are many other industries that will be affected by deportation and it will trigger a series of economic catastrophes as they shutter their businesses, one by one, for lack of minimum wage workers.
Now, imagine if the USA deported every undocumented immigrant tomorrow.
A large portion of the restaurant industry is employing workers just like these. Restaurants in all our major cities would come to a screeching halt and within months they would be forced to close for lack of employees who do all the back of the house work that “our” kids and friends refuse to do because we are “over-qualified.”
Industry data says over 355,000 dishwashers alone work in our restaurants. Most restaurants employ one or two dishwashers.
When a restaurant’s doors close, it’s not just the dishwasher out of work. It’s the bartender, the server, the cooks, the hostess, the sommelier, the managers and the owner. For every one dishwasher there are six to eight other back and front of the house employees. Now multiply that by 355,000. THAT is the impact of deporting these workers en masse.
The same domino effect will happen in farming, landscaping and maintenance services, child-care, house-keeping for private homes, hotels and hospitals. When the manual and hourly workers are pulled from all the jobs they currently do, then businesses close and all other employees lose their jobs as well.
Staff of Helena’s American Ranch House in Shelby County, Alabama. Opened in 2016
Within one year we would feel the nationwide economic impact with the loss of the same laborers that the GOP is so eager to toss over the border. We need to slow the roll here and have a logical discourse about the impact on America that a sweeping edict like deportation will have on the nation.
I have a sinking feeling that the same breed of MBA wielding wizards who crashed the stock market in 2008 are now “advising” the GOP and our current administration. It’s like watching someone standing on a railroad track and the train is a mile away and they aren’t anticipating its arrival. Everyone hears the whistle and these are the only train tracks in town.
Which brings me to the “Wall”. I just have one question for Donald.
Who the hell do you think is going to be hired to actually build this “wall’?
And while we are busy building figurative and (hopefully not) literal walls, don’t imagine countries like Mexico are going to continue buying our exported products. THAT will be another massive hit to the United States economy. Take a look… and that’s in billions…with a “B”.
Send this to your representative in Washington D.C. and ask them if they are taking these issues into consideration while they wave their flags and cheer on their new quarterback.
I’ve been writing for fun and profit since I wrote a Choose-Your-Own-Adventure computer program on the Commodore 64 at age 11. I began selling $5 love poems in junior high, and have made my living as a writer and branding guru for the past twenty years. I spent the early part of my life in Montana, but grew up in Ohio, and really learned what I was made of in Paris, France. I now live and write in Ohio. MAID OF SECRETS is my first published novel, coming from Simon & Schuster Young Readers in late 2012.
After THE CALL… the first 90 days
If you’re like most writers, you don’t sell your very first draft of your first book. In fact, you may not sell your second or third, either, but you keep working at the process of writing and honing your craft. Even authors I know who became…
I stretch my heart across the land to see if I can hold you all as you drift homeward to your corners~ far away.
I’ve made room for you now inside my ribs
where I can carry your voices
until the trees bloom again
and you return to this northern town
where we move like circus folk –
readying our spaces before the show begins again.
Short, sweet season
filled with a thousand birds gathered on a wire outside our night windows.
I have walked them before in various places including the stone labyrinth 7000 feet up Mount Shasta.
Labyrinth on Mount Shasta
The one I walked today was a classical labyrinth design. Examples of these designs and others like the Celtic Labyrinth with its culture specific symbology have been found around the globe and in ancient ceremonial sites. The one I walked today is at Pure Prana Yoga Studio in Lake Leelanau, Michigan. Go there. Marie Elena Gaspari led our walk. Find her and Mariann and let them guide you to the entrance.
Classic Labyrinth with left, counter clockwise entrance pattern
Labyrinths have long been used as a moving meditation by cultures around the globe and even by organized religions; perhaps the most famous example being Chartres in France where a beautiful labyrinth is inlaid into the cathedral floor.
The point of a labyrinth is that the walker must continue moving along a specific path in a specific direction for however many repetitions are needed until they are able to understand why they are walking it in the first place.
Praying is too vague and random for someone like me. I’m of the ilk that feels that a higher intelligence did some pretty fine planning to drop me in the place I am right now, and *it* trusts my intelligence to find my way out of the paper bag I live in-all by my little self.
Perhaps you’re like me; forgetful of the experiential insights that I have after I return to the hectic regular world. I wish I could retain them every waking moment but there’s a long list of chores, appointments and important things that take up storage space in my head and so my brain files away insights in a synaptic *Insights Pringles Can* for future reference.
While I walked, I spent the first circuit of the labyrinth paying attention to my bare feet in the grass, stone, wild flower and dirt along the way. Trying hard to be spiritual about it all and failing as my monkey mind focus was looking for sharp and pokey things that would seriously damage my zen vibe.
The Labyrinth, like a maze, has a pattern that causes you to go wide to the outside and then weave in towards the center and just when you think you are on the final lap to the middle…Nope! You find yourself five more paths away. While I walked, I had that nagging feeling that I’d figured this out before and I started trying to navigate my thoughts to find a thread to pull on about this particular ritual.
Several circles in, I remembered what I stored in the Insight Pringles Can about labyrinths. It was this: The pattern represents every challenge we have ever had in every life time we have ever lived,The turns that bring us near the middle represent those moments when we think we are done growing; understanding the lessons of life; the end in sight. The reward of completion feels close enough to touch.
But it’s not. There are more lessons and more work to do before we really reach the end; our end insight. The point is, until we actually do reach completion, we need to keep going. Along the way, we will learn the same lessons over and over again until we no longer need the practice.
In the labyrinth, we traverse the same arch and curves again and again and though we can see where we’re headed with the smallest of eye adjustments, we will not get there until we do all the work. There is no cheating. There is no cutting the line in life. There is no paying someone else to learn our lessons for us. It’s our effort, our perseverance and our understanding the lessons that will be the only way we reach our goals.
At grocery stores, I’ve often found myself doubling back through aisles in search of something I was supposed to bring home but whose identity has momentarily slipped from my mind. “Was it a food item? A cleaning product? A bottle of wine? Oh, look! Dish sponges. I’ll get this but it’s not the thing I’m looking for. What the hell is the thing I’m looking for?”
So as I walked this hand built stone circuit today, I remembered how much I love these crazy puzzle walks. I remembered that it’s OK that I’m still walking in my life; still headed towards a goal.
Because on the way to *there* I will find wildflowers on the path, and soft patches of cool grass. There will be holes to negotiate and thistles to avoid or pain will be my companion. There are sharp stones that can bruise a tender instep and the echo of the injury can stay with me long after I have left the offending item far behind. And there are smooth, warm stone obstacles that come into contact with that same vulnerable place on me and instead of pain, they will give me a momentary massage that brings reprieve to the long journey I am on; soothing comfort to the sole/soul of my being. Still a rock. Still a foot. But the way that smooth rock has shaped itself over eons of its own transformation has made it a welcome friend to all who encounter it.
There’s another labyrinth not far from me at Cross Farms. Now that I remember why I love this time spent with mind and body and spirit moving with purpose for a piece of time that I re-assigned from *must be busy at work* to *must realign my internal spiritual gyroscope*, I’ll be doing this more. On a regular basis.
It’s a wonderful way use the small moves of our feet touching the Earth to put everything back in order and help us access our full potential with a focused clarity and a new commitment to keep on walking.
KarenCross– I’ll see you soon at your lovely labyrinth just up the road from Willowbrook Mill in Northport.
See the little Pringles can just above my eyebrow?
So summer came again-
With willow skirts sweeping the water
Drunk on warm moonlight-
Wild vines climbing to the sky
Startled by memories rising with the hollyhocks-
August carries me on a slow walk
Past every summer I have ever known.
Peach sweet sadness catches in my throat at the thought of all I’ve left behind-
And how far I have to go.
Word Ninja Girl 
