Asshats Among Us

A friend from high school recently regurgitated on Facebook some xenophobic conservative drivel about illegal immigrants and I thought that rather than respond to it via mini-blog (This just in: Illegal immigrants are being vilified- Sadness consumes me. That is all) I would talk about it here, where the air isn’t so stuffy. Here’s the post in total, you may have already seen its like elsewhere:

“You pass the North Korean border illegally you get 12 yrs. hard labor, you pass the Afghan border illegally you get shot, you pass the American border illegally you get a job, driver’s license, allowance for a place to live, health care, education, billions of dollars spent so you can read a document. We carry passports in other countries or face jail time.- Repost this if you agree...”

Ug. Its difficult to know where to start. We’ll begin with a hypothetical situation:

You are busy. You know you need to mow your lawn but you just can’t find time in the week to do it. Your neighbor offers to mow it for you for a pittance. He does a pretty good job and you are paying him WAY less than you would for a landscaping service. Good deal, right? He cuts his hand while trimming your hedge so you offer him a band aid. You are being good neighbors, ja?

One day, as you wave to him from your porch you notice that he’s a little green around the gills.

“Got that bug that’s been goin’ around, neighbor?”

He nods.

“Yeah, the whole neighborhood’s gettin’ it at some point, its nasty.”

You and your family make up a nice batch of your world-famous homemade chicken noodle soup and bring it over with a half a bottle of Dimetap. You know, for his kids.

The next day you find your neighbor bright-eyed and a-mowing your lawn with verve.

Over the course of your friendship it is revealed that your friend cannot read or write in your language. He isn’t illiterate although when it comes to food packaging labels and stereo instructions he may as well be. This isn’t really surprising, heck; you spent three years in Germany and only had the most basic understanding of the language. In exchange for learning about his culture, you offer to help him learn how to read.

As a result, your neighbor is able to advise you on how to better set your sprinkler system to get healthier grass and to use less water. Nice.

He’s got some crappy cousins, but everyone has got some family members they don’t like, right? Come to think of it, you can’t swing a pool noodle at your family reunions without hitting a racist or an alcoholic or a glutton or a hypocrite or that pervy uncle that everyone hopes can’t make it this year. You accept them for who they are but you still have to remind them not to park on the lawn, its just too nice. It’s the same with your neighbor’s family: there are some you get along with and some you don’t.

If this all seems a bit simplistic, its because it really, really is. Charity doesn’t necessarily mean a free ride and not all charity comes from a place of compassion. Sometimes its born from pragmatism but often it’s a happy by-product of self interest.

I also take exception to the concept of economic protectionism. Now, don’t get me wrong, higher level economics makes my head spin but the basics seem easy enough to grasp. When you make money here selling goods and services and then spend that money here, it helps our economy by enabling others to make money and then spend it. Not all of it is going into a sock under the mattress nor is the great majority of it being sent to foreign economies. The part that is going into a foreign economy is being used for the same things it gets used for here: goods and services and living essentials. Those things are still needed no matter where the money comes from. Here are a few examples:

We cut foreign aid to the Middle East and instead of building schools and universities, they started building madrassas.

We cut aid to South America and farmers started planting poppy fields instead of the soy, corn and cotton.

After the fall of the Soviet Union, the resulting economic crisis created a breeding ground for drug cartels, slave traders and gangsters.

Contrast this with the Marshall Plan, enacted to help with European post-war recovery after WWII. It called for $13 billion in 1948 (roughly the equivalent of $119 billion in today’s money) on top of the roughly $12 billion we had already spent since the end of the war. It helped to kick-start the western European economy, but, more importantly, it gave us stable trading partners, ushered in an unprecedented era of U.S. prosperity and allowed us focus on the emerging Warsaw Pact.

People complained about Japan’s electronics and automobile industries in the 80’s and, more recently, India’s tech and biomedical industries. I swear I never understood why. Industrial competition is good for the consumer because it forces the industries to provide the same level of product for less than their competitors. It forces its competitors to innovate and improve its products in order to remain viable.

Better products at cheaper prices.

Contrast that with how industrial protectionism affected the U.S. auto industry: Virtually stagnant for 30 years, protected under the umbrella of protectionism while the rest of the world continued to innovate creating safer, more affordable, longer lasting cars. What did we get from Germany and Japan? The Passat and the Camry, two of the highest rated mid-level cars in the world. What did we get from Detroit? The Hummer H3 and the Pontiac Aztek, one vehicle aimed at the very well-off and another that rivals the AMC Gremlin in overall crappiness and both of them now discontinued.

There was an enormous uproar after Dell moved the majority of its tech support to India after the fallout of the Y2K debacle. This helped Dell cut costs which allowed them to save jobs here in the U.S., remain competitive in the volatile world of home computing and helped them to buy the specialty computer company Alienware.

Better products at cheaper prices.

Xenophobic protectionism hurts consumers and industries alike.

Trading partners with stable economies increases wealth and lowers prices.

Food, clothing, healthcare, education, gas, cars, electronics and recreation are all cheaper when your trading partner has a thriving, stable economy.

And last but not least, prosperity stops wars. When your neighbor is content and healthy, he doesn’t try to steal from you that which he cannot afford to buy. When your neighbor is happy and educated, he doesn’t turn to the loud, persuasive lunatic to help him feed his family.

Better products at cheaper prices AND increased personal and national security.

While we talk about jobs, which jobs are supposedly being stolen by the illegal immigrants? I’m what you would call a ‘low-level professional’, like many of you I have some post-high school education and training.

With that in mind, here are some of the jobs I have worked in my life:

I’ve worked the fruit fields with my immigrant mother.

I’ve worked at McDonalds.

I’ve sold specialty electronics to American servicemen in Europe.

I’ve moved furniture and then I’ve repaired furniture.

I’ve repaired computers for a major computer company.

I’ve driven a municipal bus route.

I’ve been a soldier, an EMT and a PTA (all at once, lol) and now I’m advancing my medical education in preparation for PA school.

My question is this: Which of these jobs do you think an illegal immigrant would compete with me for?

So to all of you that are frustrated and find yourselves being persuaded by the current nationalist mania, please-please remember that very, very few of us are actually native to this great country. The quote doesn't read "Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free... so long as they look, sound and talk like us... unless, of course, they can hit a baseball really far." Our love of freedom and our cultural diversities are the two things that set us apart from the rest of the world. If that doesn’t give you a moments pause then consider this: The more healthy, intelligent, educated people we have working on our actual problems (i.e. disease, poverty, security, social inequity, etc.), the faster we will find solutions for them.

The Things We Choose To Care About

An incredible thing has happened recently – what my good chum Dave Bowman would describe as, "Something Wonderful". Every year about this time (The Ides of March) I am reminded of my long lost brother. This invariably leads to thoughts of his mother (who was in every way another mother to me) and his little sister. When the wifey and I last saw them, they were living in the old neighborhood in Olivehurst, CA and seemed to be as happy as could be expected. My wife and I saw them briefly in early 1998 during a layover between GE and TX. Half an hour later, we packed up our things, gave our hugs and our goodbyes and then made our way back across the country to see what awaited us at Ft. Hood. My wife gave birth mere weeks after our arrival and so began another chapter in our lives.

And that was it.

The entire span of my children's lives and they never saw or heard about some of the most important people in my background.

I have no excuse- I am terrible at keeping in touch. My affections stay fresh and genuine and yet it's far too easy for me to simply take for granted that they will always be there, constant and yet just out of eyeshot. I was reminded earlier this week that is not always the case.

I found that in 2001 my friend's mother died. My friend was 27 and his sister was only as old as my oldest son is today. There is literally nothing in my life's experience that can help me imagine what it was like for them.

This year as I went on my annual hunt to find my brother, I got a hit on a social networking site- not my brother but a young woman in her freshman year at a state university. I was terribly excited and yet wary of coming off as some sort of online weirdo- I think we can all agree that that full-grown men shouldn't chat up 19 year old strangers as a matter of course… Call me old-fashioned but it seems like one of those general rules that fall in the 'no-brainer' category, especially in this day and age.

So, after some deliberation, I wrote to this person. And she wrote back! She is indeed my friend's sister, my surrogate mother's daughter and she seems happy and outgoing and quirky and well-adjusted and she remembered me! Hell, she remembered my wife whom she met perhaps four times!

Now, the way I form bonds has been brought into question recently by the behavior of some of my friends who are going through their own ordeal at the moment. Just as an example, I don't think you can live in close quarters with someone without them becoming a part of you forever. I think this is especially true with children- I don't think you can learn and grow and share with someone without them taking up residence in your heart. It's never occurred to me before last week that I could be unusual in this respect.

As for this young woman, I was there when she took her first steps. I was there when she nearly bit her tongue in half after falling off a chair. I lived with her and watched over her while her mother ran errands.

I've said before that my affections do not require anything from the people I care for. It's nice, don't get me wrong but my feelings don't require validation or even reciprocation. I could be perfectly happy knowing that a person is doing well so long as they were happy.

Luckily for me, she seems genuinely excited about knowing someone who adored her mother and has expressed interest in meeting my wife and I to talk.

I've also said before that I believe the Cosmos is about balance. Well, mostly about balance- there's also a large part of my belief system that involves Alanis Morissette "irony" and Monty Python-esque humor which tends to favor synchronicity over coincidence. Here's an example:

I share my birthday with two other people in my life- a previous girlfriend and my Evil Twin, There4. One of the places we would frequent (my twin and I) was a shake joint called Rick's Cabaret in San Antonio while we were stationed at Ft. Sam. My only souvenirs from this time are a lasting friendship with one of the performers and her husband, a lingering respect for the voraciousness of some of the dancers and a small matchbox with the establishment's logo on it.

Days before my birthday I was contacted by my unit and instructed to be prepared to deploy on a possible mission to Chile. While going through my gear on my birthday, I happened to come across the matchbox (strangely bereft of burnable matches… why would anyone keep that?) and it was such a day-brightener that I felt I had to share it with my twin to our mutual pleasure on our special day.

Honestly, what were the chances that I would have reason to go through my kit at all, much less have a tiny, unlikely keepsake pop out that reminds me of a place I used to share with someone whose birthday it also was?

Alright, I'll concede that it isn't Hurley-winning-the-lotto-with-the-mysterious-numbers-on-"Lost" unusual but it was interesting and significant to me nonetheless.

Here's another:

The day before I found this young lady on the internets, I watched the trailer for the Tron sequel coming this December. This led to fan-boy nostalgia which led to watching the original Tron the next day. Suddenly I was 11 years old and sitting on my friend Alan's living room floor, watching a VHS copy. I could smell his mother cooking in the kitchen and I could hear his father sitting in an armchair behind us, reading the paper. That afternoon I found, wrote and heard back from his sister- after years of trying.

I cannot express how much this pleases me=) I don't know how this is a-gonna turn out but I'm hopeful. Family is the most important thing in my world and the people I love are all my family by default.

Words’ Worth

Last night was the Academy Awards and if you paid any attention at all, you found that Kathryn Bigelow's "The Hurt Locker" was the winner for best picture. I enjoyed THL and I appreciate any attempt to raise awareness of our ongoing war(s) on a mainstream/personal level but Best Picture?

Now, I'm a movie buff so movies with big, glaring holes stand out to me and I'm a soldier so military inaccuracies also stand out to me and this one had its share of both. I'm not talking about little nit-picky things like patches and awards or whether unit X was in theater between such and such dates: I'm interested in these things but they don't color my enjoyment of a story. I'm talking about cliché plot devices and dramatic elements writers and film makers use to move along a story, seemingly without thought to the simultaneous eye-rolling going on in the movie-plex. Just as an example, my wife and I went to see the remake of "The Crazies" recently and were pleasantly surprised by its clever writing, austere visual style and its heavy emphasis on paranoia (rather than gore), especially in the critical third act. Only once did sloppy writing stand out enough to jar my wife and I out of our immersion and it was a time-honored horror movie doozy, the whole "Wait here, I'll be right back" bit.

/sigh. And they were doing so well up till that point. It was as if the creators/storytellers wanted to throw an extra helping of tension into the last reel and simply couldn't come up with a plausible way to separate the two surviving characters and so they dug into the big book of clichés and drew up that one, a gimmick that's so tired and hackneyed that its been lampooned famously by other genre movies.

Needless to say, that one little problem didn't at all ruin the movie for me but it was glaring enough to be picked up on by nearly the entire audience (especially the VFH kids behind us, lol).

The same was true for THL. Military-centric errors/lapses abound along with more than a few conventional ones. Did they further the story? Sure, each and every one. Did they ruin my enjoyment? Nah, overall I gave it a B. Was it a no-holds-barred, adrenalin-fueled thrill ride? Nope. Was it the most innovative, entertaining piece of storytelling released in '09 (which is what I assume the criteria are for Best Pic)? No.

What it did (and it does this admirably) was to assuage America's guilt over largely ignoring the ongoing conflict by raising awareness in a non-threatening way. Horrors on CNN are gauche and voyeuristic; horrors on celluloid (even ones portrayed in mediocre fashion) are interesting and laudable.

The thing is, you don't need to resort to poor storytelling and predictable plot devices to accomplish either of these two goals. Pick up a copy of "They Fought for Each Other" by Kelly Kennedy if you require proof. Or wait for it to filmed, I'd bet a dollar it's already been optioned- hopefully it'll be treated with the same respect "Band of Brothers" got.

That was really my only beef with the Oscars. I find the whole process interminably boring but I like it when people are honored for their hard work.

Here's one that was tragically overlooked:

Award for Best Golden Globes: Christina Hendricks.

Holy cow, that woman can fill out a gown.