A Border Has 4 Sides

Let's look at this whole AZ thing from the perspective of the legal, the illegal, the politically expedient, and the corrupt.

The federal government says that the US has a legal process for anyone from another country who wants to live in the USA and benefit from the lifestyle America has to offer. It does not matter the country of origin: the process is the same for all immigrants. The US shares a physical border with both Canada and Mexico, but, it seems, the Canadians are the immigrants who follow the citizenship process, while the Mexicans choose not to do so. If an American leaves his/her country, s/he must have passport in hand to both exit the US and enter the bordering country. On the return trip, same rules apply: no passport, no re-entry into the US and, perhaps, jail in the country into which the American enters illegally. Canada favors deportation for the offense, while the stories of Americans held in Mexican jails without legal counsel or options are legendary.

Complicating the situation is the law enforcement angle between bordering nations: our federal government requires that the border be kept secure, most particularly since 9-11. While the Mexican border agents seem able to keep illegal Americans out of Mexico, the US agents are unable to keep illegal Mexicans out of the US because the border is too porous. Corrupt officials, as well as drug runners, leap over the border fences, dig huge tunnels under the borders, transport vans filled with desperate Mexicans, and defy all attempts by the US to secure the borders. However, the failure to secure the border between Mexico and the US is necessary for Mexico because the Mexican economy depends on Mexican workers earning money in the US to support their families in Mexico. Based on its own inadequate financial viability, if the US border is secured (and illegal drug trafficing is stopped), Mexico faces financial collapse, providing a very real reason for the Mexican officials to turn a blind eye to the "highways" that transport illegal Mexicans (and drugs) across the border and into the US.

Another layer to the problem is that federal law requires that the borders are secure and that any illegal immigrant is arrested, detained, and deported, not just illegal Mexicans. The law is pretty darned clear on this process, but enforcement is impossible because arrests, as well as immigration sweeps, hit the front page of the media outlets and set up a hue and cry of racial profiling by illegal Mexicans and US politicians who benefit from the publicity. The issue about illegal immgration is swept to the side so the accusations of racism can abound. Why would any law enforcement agency want to deal with the negative publicity and public exposure of its personnel, who are just doing the job they are hired to do? The federal government refuses to support its own laws, which puts the agencies tasked with the duties of the law into jeopardy both from within its own bureaucracy and from the media standing outside its front doors.

This circle of ineffectiveness has come to a head in Arizona, a state that has taken a stand in the sand of their borders and challenged the federal government to put its money where its mouth is: if the federal law requires that illegal immigrants are arrested, detained, and deported, then provide the personnel and the financial resources to do the job and stand behind the legal process in the courts, but especially in the media. Stop telling the states to do the job and then accuse enforcement officers of racial profiling in a border state whose target population is Mexican. The efforts of any agency to deal effectively with illegal immigration is hamstrung by accusations of racism and racial profiling as anyone who has white skin is accused of being racially motivated and found guilty by the media and the politicians who refuse to risk their political futures by taking a stand against illegal immigration.

The discussion should not be about racism, but about upholding the law of the land -- whatever it takes. Accusing AZ of racial profiling and dragging Sheriff Arpaio into the confrontation for his strong stand against coddling criminals is simply using a straw man to take the fall for the federal government's own unwillingness to enforce its own laws. Of course, that stance is severely jeopardized by a president who chastizes the enforcement of those laws with his own accusations of racial profiling being the motivation for the laws. When the president challenges both the laws he has sworn to uphold and the agencies created to enforce the laws, he challenges the very foundations of the will of the people to make the laws, enforce the laws, and change them when that becomes necessary.

The message is what the media is reporting: if you personally do not agree with a US law, flaut it. Do whatever you want, rather than what is legally required. If you are arrested, carry placards that accuse the enforcement agents of racism and shout into the reporter's mic about racial profiling. Take the focus off the illegality of your actions and protest the legal actions of the enforcement agencies in the media. If you are loud enough long enough, you'll earn a get-out-of-jail free card.

Our laws are not wrong; lack of adequate enforcement, however, extends the welcoming hand of even greater floods of illegal immigrants into border states that are already on the verge of financial collapse from having to provide mandated services not just to their own residents, but to literally millions of residents of other countries who are in the US illegally. President Reagan extended amnesty to approximately 6 million illegal immigrants during his presidency, which opened the borders to anyone else who figured out that if you come here, you stay here, and you refuse to leave, you, too, will win. There is no process as powerful as public protest, and if you have the louder voice and the ear of the media, you, too, will be granted amnesty.

As for the lyrics Cher sings, we cannot "turn back time" and deal effectively with the purported 12 million illegal immigrants currently residing in the US, but we can secure the borders from this point forward. We can arrest, detain and deport those illegal immigrants who commit crimes and who do not have legally-required papers that allow them to be in the US. We can plug the tunnels and set guards in the desert to stop the coyotes from bringing in more illegal immigrants whose families work in the US and send millions of dollars to their family members in Mexico, jeoparding the economy in the southern border states that are mandated to provide services to even those individuals who are in the country illegally, including medical care, unemployment benefits, educational opportunities, and social services.


We can be proactive, rather than reactive, and work toward building a strong immigrant base of US citizens who live here openly and honestly, who get an education, who have job skills, who support the system from which they benefit, and who are proud to say that they are Americans, not hyphenated Americans whose first allegiance is to another country's laws.

Social Networking in Real Time with Real People

It was a good idea, but it didn't work for me, so I have opted out of Facebook.

Basically, I am a writer, so I blog. My mind likes to twist and turn with ideas and issues that interest me, and I write about them in whatever frame of mind I am currently enjoying. Because I share my blog with students, I am cautious about some topics, as well as my perspective on others. Freedom of speech extends only to those who have the funds to defend themselves in court against those who demand their freedom of speech at the expense of others whose point of view they do not share.

FB is akin to the current passion for on-line farming: if I have chunks of time to spend doing something, I'd rather not use it maintaining an imaginary farm. Instead, I need to pull weeds, but don't seem able to kneel yet, so I stand and spray weed killer from on high and hope that it does the job for me. I also don't on-line game, mostly because I don't like to play games, especially those that involve mythical creatures in imaginary settings and require killing as many "enemy" creatures as one can to advance to the next level ... of an imaginary game. I do, however, enjoy playing Scrabble for fun, as well as playing Spider Solitaire on my computer.

FB seemed as if I had walked into a "family" of friends who were all in on the back story about which I had no prior knowledge. Because I don't know the "family" members, I don't want to be their friends, even though part of the FB experience seems to be collecting friends in the hundreds. My observation is that these people share personal information that could make me uncomfortable, especially with my "real" family members. The question popped into my mind, "Why would I want to share my personal life with people I don't know," and when I could not answer that question to my own satisfaction, I realized that the FB venue is not the appropriate forum for my mental meanderings.

Few people read my blog, and that is fine as I mostly write it for myself as a means of emptying my mind today so tomorrow's thoughts can thrive. Part of my goal as a writer is to ask questions that other people may also ask, but explore them from my perspective. No one has to agree or disagree with my blog postings as it's not a contest to see who is right, but simply an opportunity to explore ideas and issues and open up thought paths that may not have been wandered before.

I read a few other blogs, including both my son's and my dotter-in-law's, as they are both interesting, intelligent people who write well and often stimulate me to think outside my own little box. Contrary to popular opinion, I don't correct the grammar, the spelling, or the sentence construction of my own blog, much less the writing of other bloggers!! If a student is blogging to earn class credit, I may ask questions and/or make suggestions, but those are aimed at the thought process, not the written expression.

Going forward, I will continue to delete the invitations to become a FB friend, electronically isolating myself from both real and imaginary friends. If I want to talk to my real family and friends, I will contact them in the real world in real time, and share a real conversation with them, my definition of a real social network.

Juliet's Letter

It's a formula movie, one of those that appeals to young females, mostly, and some indulgent males who figure to score from the left-over romantic glow of a chick flick. It's also not very good on almost all levels: the actors are ... weak? ineffective? not engaging? The storyline is ... weak? ineffective? not engaging? The setting is awesome and the scenery breath-taking, but the script is not E.A. Poe, so the location cannot excuse the rest of the weaknesses.

The young actors are, bluntly, too young, and the older actors are, bluntly, too old. Since there is nothing in the middle, the entire movie has nothing for someone, an unusual approach to filmmaking. The male actor, occupation chef, who is engaged to Sophie, who is a fact-checker, not a writer, is over-the-top self-focused, which is annoying when it's supposed to be charming. Sophie looks so young that it's a wonder anyone takes her seriously, including herself. Most startingly, her breasts seem to enlarge throughout the movie: seriously. She starts out somewhat deflated, becomes bouncy, but ends the film voluptuous. Only in the movies, right? Her English love interest, Charlie, needs to find a really good zit treatment regimine as his face is a bit too "real" for the big screen.

If you want to have some fun while watching an otherwise trite, predictable very young chick flick, look for these additional glimpses:

**Charlie, perched atop a picnic table, seems to be flashing the audience with his butt cheeks, perhaps clothed in underwear, but hard to tell -- and then, suddenly, he has pockets and/or button detailing to give the appearance of pants that are totally different when he leaps off the table and stands up.

**Ditto a scene wherein Charlie and Sophie are walking and talking and two women pass them, going the other direction. When their walk takes them down another street, the same two women pass them again. How do I know? I recognized the ill-fitting thong visible through the cotton pants of one of the extras!!

And if you're going to do a balcony scene, BE ON THE BALCONY for the scene.

Would I pay to see the film in the theater? Nope. However, I'd probably rent it when it goes to DVD, especially for a jammie day or a girls' night in. Other than that, you've already seen it done by other actors in other films and much, much better than A Letter to Juliet.

Along the SoCal Coast

Yesterday, I drove to LaJolla to see my friend for lunch and do a few quick errands. Although it seems like a somewhat long drive just for lunch, she lives across the street from the beach ... across the street!! The ocean is one of my favorite places to visit, a place where I have always found peace, and she is one of my dearest friends. It's a win-win.

This is a snippet showing the small breakwater that provides a sheltered swimming area, now overly-populated by seals (the black forms on the sand).



An on-going controversy about allowing the people back into the sheltered swimming area seems to be coming to a head as the courts have ruled that the closed-off beach can be reopened to humans. Opponents fought the good fight, but the open beach advocates won the battle, just as the off-shore oil drilling advocates won their battle -- and we all know how well that's turned out.

The seals have fouled the little cove formed by the breakwater, so I'm not sure who would want to swim there, but perhaps there is a point I'm missing made by people whose joy in life is making meaningless points. Will the re-integration of humans into this tiny spot of ocean force the seals to relocate? Perhaps that is the goal of the humans' actions, but the seals are a huge tourist attraction, evidenced by the several buses that dropped off passengers during the short time I was there.

Sometimes, we do cut off our noses to spite our faces.

Mixed Message

Remember all the protests that beauty pageants aren't about beauty, but about so much more than that? Guess we've all learned that it is more than that: it's about sexually exploiting young women who are in it to win it by taking borderline porno photos that fix the pageant squarely into the realm of best body takes all. Trump's justification for the lingerie spread hyping the Miss USA pageant is that his show is on TV this weekend, while the other pageants aren't, breaking down the morality of the photo shoot to one word: money.

The price we are paying, however, for our overt emphasis on physical appearance and sexual attraction is too high. Just ask any woman who has ever been inappropriately touched or sexually violated how it feels to know that it's not about who I am, but about how someone thinks I look. Just ask anyone who has had sexually explicit photos released to the media. Just ask anyone who made a sex tape that came out from behind closed doors. Just ask anyone who was illegally taped behind the closed and locked door of a hotel room.

Today's youth knows that nothing matters as much as appearance. If a child's body is not aligned with what the media determines is desirable, young women can become obsessed to the point of doing physical harm to themselves. It's one thing to starve or exercise one's self into unnatural thinness and physical harm, but to pay to have a surgeon completely redesign one's body indicates how deeply imbedded a person's self-image is and how easily damaged it can be by the media. Heidi Montag is symptomatic of what's gone horribly wrong: she paid hundreds of thousands of dollars to alter her appearance to conform to what she thinks is the way she should look, including distorting her body with huge breast implants that take the focus off the person inside the cosmetic surgery. Don't see me: focus on my huge breast implants and then pick me to star in your next movie.

I do not totally disagree with what Elizabeth Hasselbeck said about the Dancing With the Stars contestants: it is not about the dancing, but about the "sexiness" of the performance. Listen to the judges' comments, especially the male judges, who slather over the scantily clad female dancers and then pontificate that it's a "dance" contest. When Carrie Anne makes a comment that a dance was hot, hot, hot -- the male judges look askance at her, as if her comment is offensive, but Carrie Anne's comments are always about the dancing. We cannot pretend that anyone watches the show for the dancing, but for the potential costume malfunction, the spur-of-the-moment sexual relationships that allegedly develop as a result of working together, the overt sexiness of the performances. If it were truly about the dancing, the costumes would blend into the background, rather than take center stage as the reason for the judge's scores.

And if we're watching for the costumes, for the sexual tension between the performers, for the emphasis on anyone's "jiggly parts," the next logical step is that there are those who will step over the line between a TV show and the implied entitlement that what is on the show is available to anyone who wants it.

A long, long time ago, I shared my perspective that the scanty costumes and the sexually explicit and provocative moves of the high school dance team were ... inappropriate. After all, a high school is not an adult Las Vegas showroom, and, in my opinion, there is a different level of appropriateness depending on the age of the performer and the performance venue. At another school, I was totally offended by a performance from the dance team that appeared on stage wearing scanty sexy lingerie and bumped and grinded their way through "He had it coming," a song that did not just display over-the-top sexuality, but glorified justified homocide.

In both cases, I was accused of being too prudish, but I stand by my observations today. Teenagers are 24/7 hormonal surges, so feeding the urges with costumes and performances designed to display the female form sexually is not appropriate. Teenagers need to be guided through age-appropriate awareness, not thrust into sexual competition with Playmate role models and home-grown sex tapes! Even the youngest children participating on cheer squads and school dance teams are slapping their boooties, thrusting their pelvises, and shaking their jiggly bits, moves that are questionable at best and age inappropriate in many cases.

Women in this country have more public rights than in most other countries, but instead of keeping the standard for women at the highest levels, we have become no better than the women who cannot see beyond the public display of their sexuality to define themselves. No, we don't need to wear burkas and cover our bodies, but we do need to regain a perspective on public displays of far too much skin in questionable venues. If a beauty pageant is going to be about global issues, about scholarship, about the well-rounded woman, then why does the focus of the publicity need to be on scantily-clad bedroom photos of young women in barely there lingerie?