October 30, 2006

Catching the 7:55 AM plane for Chicago—A Symbol of Our Coming Chaos

By Donald A. Collins

Last Friday, October 27th, my wife, Sally, and I awoke at 5 AM in our NW Washington, DC home to start on a business trip to Chicago. We decided to get breakfast at Dulles.

We were at Dulles International Airport at 6:20 AM. The line at the United Economy fare line was staggeringly long, but by 7 AM we actually had our tickets in times to press on the next huge line to get through security. This took another 40 minutes, punctuated by a TSA employee confiscating my wife’s prescription tooth paste, her eyebrow liner dispenser, her anti bacterial hand lotion, and her nail polish. Actually, the TSA lady was very nice and deftly only took a couple of minutes to extract what Sally admittedly should have not taken in a carry on.

One of those famous Dulles personnel carrier buses lumbered from the A Terminal–the one in the front to the C Terminal. We arrived at the C Terminal, got the proper gate at 7:52 AM, just in time to learn that the Chicago flight had been delayed until 9 AM.

Consequently, we had plenty of time for a Southwest Burrito, the only food service in sight, which was actually not bad, and read in a Washington Post article about how no protective wall to keep out invaders works. [The Walls Tumbled By Time From China to Berlin, Fences Have Failed to Exclude or Contain By Joel Garreau, October 27, 2006]

The Great Wall of China would have worked better, but the Ming dynasty came down anyway. There may be a lesson for all of us here: No wall works if the will of the government who builds it fails! That Chinese government—Ming Dynasty (1388-1644 CE)—showed stupidity and venality, something our own seems anxious to emulate.

So why tell you of this common snafu of modern travel, one which we all experience frequently?

Because if our leaders for the past 35 years had been thinking about the national interest instead of their personal interests, we wouldn’t have 300 million people crowded into systems which are becoming increasingly dysfunctional for the average citizen. If our Captains of Industry hadn’t decided to import cheap slave labor while paying our Congress to look the other way, building any wall would not be necessary. And our population would be about 225 million, not on the way to 500 million by 2050 and one billion by 2100.

Here they are backdating their stock options and paying themselves salaries 369 times the average wage of the hourly wage workers in their companies, while paying lobbyists, who outnumber the elected officials in Congress 5 to 1, to keep the borders open.

These worthies can well afford to take their corporate jets above the maddening delays at the nation’s airports and send their kids to well-run private schools, while watching their minions on the Hill avoid enforcing the laws on the books, let alone enacting urgently needed controls on immigration.

Of course with all this imported cheap labor around, our kids get to hang out in malls instead of cutting the grass or helping with other chores at home or get a summer job like my generation did, where we learned punctuality and the value of manual work like digging ditches on construction jobs, as a powerful inducement to not do it later in life if possible.

So send our young men and women off to foreign wars and then don’t offer them the G.I. education bill, if they don’t get killed. Or if kids do get to college, be sure the tuition is exorbitantly high, so they can graduate with an indebtedness so big it would have bought a very nice house in my era.

So what will this election prove? Incoming and likely to control of the House are the Open Border Democrats headed by the most Open Border Democrat of all, Nancy Pelosi. The majority of Senate is already Open Border as is our President.

Oh, yes, I know you can’t wait to know. We finally got the Chicago, coming out of our jetway just in time to hear the announcer saying that Homeland Security had raised the terror alert level to Orange for reasons of course no one knew. Fortunately, our hotel was right across the street and we got to our room exhausted at 11 AM local time, 12 noon DC time, a simple transit door to door of 7 hours.

This sort of uncomfortable daily life circumstance is happening all over America in our large cities. And it is not going to get better until we understand the price of being slaves to these Captains of Industry is very high indeed.

As long as they can buy Congress and the White House, we poor Middle Class and blue collar citizens are in for a worse drubbing. Watch what happens to our schools. You think they are bad now? And our public services of all kinds. We are moving into a soup of people, no one will know what to do, the Rule of Law will be breached again and again, and most of us won’t even know it. The dissolution of our great country will continue if we don’t get control of our elected officials and bring this corporate oligarchy to heel.

Endless growth, open borders, loss of public services we pay for to the growing hordes of legal and illegal aliens, elections paid by the special interests instead of a system of government-funded campaigns paid for from the tax stream, out-of-control spending by both parties, national debt beyond our ability to pay for it EVER are but a few of the impending disasters.

The solutions are numerous. Here are some that are obvious (in my opinion!):

1. The wall approved by Bush (as an 11th hour political promise) is a start (if it ever gets built).
2. Stick with paper ballots until we are assured that electronic ones work.
3. Force public financing for all national elections and gradually work toward such funding at the state and local levels.
4. Cut illegal immigration with proper ID, making employers personally liable for hiring illegals.
5. Bring immigration levels back to replacement; be conscious that more population is not necessary.
6. Make our foreign policy one of conciliation and cooperation, not arrogance and lack of openness.
7. Stop using the threat of terror to steal our civil rights and undermine our democracy.

Quite a laundry list, although one that could realistically be accomplished over several election cycles. But we must begin with immigration reform as number one right now.

500 million people by 2050 will make urban America uninhabitable.