Through the Eyes of a Daydreamer's Daughter

In the past, if you were undocumented, it cost $150 to pay a coyote to bring you from Mexico into the United States at any point along our mutual border.  Now it costs $2,500 or more and the easiest place to cross with a coyote is along the dangerous border with Arizona. California, which is being so holier than thou over the new Arizona law, built itself a fence to keep the worst of the illegals out of its cities. Today it is cheaper, easier and far safer to get the paperwork required to enter the United States as a tourist rather than risk dying while walking into Arizona. The United States government does nothing to track the exit of people who enter this country as tourists. There is no reason not to prefer entry as a tourist to walking across the border if you can qualify.  So who enters the United States by walking into Arizona? Criminals walk into Arizona. People who have been convicted of crimes such as murder ...

One thing that starts happening as we age is going deaf. It'll be worse for aging Baby Boomers than earlier generations because we've listened to so much loud music and other noise. Television is an early problem because the actors mumble. Most televisions will allow you to display closed captioning but I'm convinced that the person who types in the words for closed captioning can't hear much better than I can. Next we start having trouble hearing women because their voices are higher in pitch. Actually we hear everyone--men and women--just not clearly enough to know what that person said. More and more the people around me produce sound without meaning. Yesterday I went for a jaunt with a soft-voiced friend. She had to repeat at least one sentence out of every five. I heard her voice--just could not break all the sentences down into meaningful words. I begged the doctor to clean out the wax plugs from my ears, but he insisted my ears were clean all the wa...

I’m a news-junky tuned into cable news all day long. So I’m very aware of the brouhaha resulting from Arizona passing a law that attempts to put state control over the problem of illegal aliens. A state law is by definition a second-rate solution to a national problem, but what is Arizona to do? The federal government demonstrates daily that it is totally impotent to deal with the problem and totally unwilling to try to deal with the problem. The citizens of Arizona are suffering. Citizens live in fear. Citizens die at the hands of illegal aliens. People are kidnapped as part of drug wars. Perhaps most importantly, hospitals are closing, bankrupted by illegal alien patients who walk away from their bills without paying. I live next door to illegal aliens. I’ve witnessed the local hospital being defrauded. One of the boys living next door went to the emergency room for an itch on his scrotum and gave my address as his own. I received his bill. I’m sure he thought he was very clever ...

American business now offshores a wide variety of office jobs: Customer Service, Information Technology, Accounting, Financial Analysis, Engineering, Architecture and maybe more fields that I am not aware of. Someone decided that these were jobs that could be done from a distance and never gave any thought to the fact that people working in other countries never get feedback for the work they do. When I created a computer program in America for an American company, the co-workers who used that program were quick to let me know if it failed in any way. I was the one who had to fix my own errors, but I had the privilege to learn from my mistakes. If someone in India writes code for America and the code bombs, someone in America has to try to fix the error. The person in India never learns from experience. Of course, if I were sitting in America writing programs for Indian companies in the same way, I wouldn’t learn from my mistakes either. Distance does impact results. When I produ...

I live in a small suburb. My village of about 17,000 souls is surrounded by larger suburbs, each with about three times our population. We have a better than adequate library, but our village library board lusts to keep up with the Joneses of the larger suburbs whether we can afford it or not. Tonight the library held a survey about future upgrades and I got one of the phone calls. It left me with a tension headache. The first issue in the survey was an attempt to get hold of the youngest male in the house. I didn't qualify. Then she asked for the oldest female so I could take the survey. At no time did the young woman attempt to determine if she was talking to the person who paid the real estate taxes so that annoyed me from the get-go. The very next question on their list was an attempt to determine my race. Now this town has a population of about 17,000 people and about 16,900 of those people are middl...

By the way--manufactured goods from China and other cheap labor countries have played a big role in recent Middle Eastern events. The absence of peace between the Palestinians and the Israelis has become--as Americans know only too well--the most convenient excuse for terrorism by any group anywhere in the world. But the truth is that Palestinians have a bigger problem than just the fact that Israelis live next door and continue breathing. The Palestinians used to have an economy that included many small factories making excellent products for sale to Palestinians, Israelis, and tourists to the Holy Land sites, as well as for export to bring in dollars to buy goods from abroad. Cheaper manufacturing in China and other Asian countries destroyed the Palestinian factories and eliminated the jobs those factories provided. Cheap imported goods replaced locally made goods of better quality, eliminated hope in the hearts of multitudes, and perhaps eliminated any hope for ...

The people who provide the cheap labor for offshored manufacturing are far away. We don’t see them or hear much about them on television. Sometimes we find out that they are children or prisoners. More often they are people who have fled poor farm villages looking for a better standard of living. I have seen television programs about the living conditions of people in Chinese factories. They worked very long hours without good food or breaks. Their dorms were cramped and dirty and uncomfortable. The workers who were interviewed had the same opinion of those living conditions that an American would have, but they were willing to put up with the discomfort they suffered because jobs were hard to come by and they wanted the money. It is a big planet we live on but it is overpopulated and there are not enough jobs to go around. Unemployment is extremely high in all those places where people are doing jobs for less and less money. Wherever wages start to go up, factories leave and mo...

It may not be possible to bring offshored manufacturing jobs home even if we were to bring manufacturing home. Years ago, as an undergraduate, I hung out at a campus coffeehouse where the professors and graduate students in sociology and community development gathered. I never actually read the books they discussed; I simply listened in on the conversations of the local intelligentsia. I was not expected to contribute anything intelligent to the conversation. That was not my role. I was a sweet young thing—curvy and curly—and I was there to be seen but not heard. The group in the coffeehouse talked about something called The Triple Revolution. The Triple Revolution predicted a future (around now) when robots would do all work. Comes the (Triple) revolution, only a few people would earn the honor of real jobs that would allow them to earn real wealth. The rest of the population would live on a generous government dole. The government would pay unemployed people to be consumers to k...

America's current use of foreign labor--here or abroad--is only the latest in an assortment of arrangements to obtain cheap labor and make some Americans filthy rich. The original colonists came from England and Europe around the time that peasants were shaking off the yoke of a feudal society organized to hold those peasants in various degrees of serfdom. The earliest colonists brought indentured servants along when they sailed to the new world. Soon after their arrival, colonists began to import slaves from Africa and over time tightened the yoke of slavery as farming with slave labor became increasingly profitable. When we had an agricultural economy, those who suffered worst from slavery were clearly the slaves. Racism rationalized popular indifference to the slaves' plight in a system of bondage that grew increasingly inhumane over time. Free citizens who did not share in the profits of...

I've just read a very good book by Bruce Frankel called What Should I Do With the Rest of My Life. Frankel located a handful of people whose life's had second acts that fit his criteria of success. He tells us about these people, covering their earlier lives as well as how they found the path to their second acts, giving a picture of the frustrations and tribulations they dealt with before they turned their lives around. His subjects' lives took new directions at any time from age fifty to ninety--so their stories say that it is never too late for new adventures. One very interesting aspect of Frankel's book is that he recognizes that making a great deal of money is not the prime criteria for judging a life to be a success. Several of his subjects found acclaim in the arts. One man developed an interest in modern dance in his fifties and is dancing with a professional troupe in his seventies. Another woman went to college and became a grade school teacher whose work w...