Illegal immigrants are criminals, by definition.
People have tried to make this issue a lot more complicated than it really is.
The fact that an illegal immigrant started a family here does not negate the fact that he broke United States immigration law. I’m not advocating breaking up families, but if that indeed is the consequence of one or both parents having broken the law, then so be it. Don’t focus on me as being cruel– focus on the father or mother that didn’t weigh the consequences of entering this country illegally.
As for the criminal enablers in this country– If you hired an illegal immigrant to do work around your house and INS hauls him/her away, neither of you are in a position to ask for sympathy. If your business relies on illegal immigrant labor and deporting/jailing them collapses your company, that’s nobody’s fault but your own.
For a time, when immigrants were entering this country illegally and filling American jobs, our country looked the other way. People like me really didn’t care. If all you wanted was the best for your family– if you wanted to make money, survive, and eventually thrive– we weren’t going to stop you. But now we see demonstrations calling for rights for illegal immigrants, and we’re incensed.
I have one key point to emphasize for these insidious protestors– If you want rights as Americans, then you must submit to the rule of American law. Compliance with the law is what guarantees our freedoms and promotes fair play in all walks of life. And if you break the law, you will be punished.
Many feminist and black civil rights leaders are now obsolete.
The people I’m referring to are those that think the struggle for gender equality is still as difficult as it was before women were allowed to vote, and those that think the struggle for African American civil rights is still as difficult as it was before slavery was abolished. Well here’s a news-flash– it’s not. The world has changed.
There are those who maintain that women are still oppressed– that the “wage gap” is a product of the subordination of women. There are those who insist that the differences between men and women are merely products of the traditional patriarchal system under which they’ve been raised. People like Gloria Steinem. She started off with decent ideas about women’s liberation, but now she’s better off fading into history. “A woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle.” Uh, no. Many women look towards marriage as their goal in life and their overall source of happiness– there’s nothing wrong with that. “Sexist parenting is what makes boys different… We need to raise our boys more like our girls.” Also, no. Men’s and women’s brains are hardwired differently; they produce different hormones; their body structures are vastly different. It doesn’t take a genius to acknowledge these things. And the idea that boys don’t inherently act, react, and think differently than girls do is just counter to common sense.
As for black civil rights leaders– take a look at Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton. The only time these jokers come out of the woodwork is when they smell the run-up to some kind of race riot in the air. The last time I saw Jesse Jackson in the news, he was offering a scholarship to the Duke lacrosse rape accuser. The last time I saw Al Sharpton on TV, he was blasting Don Imus for calling the Rutger’s women’s basketball team a bunch of ”nappy-headed hos”. In between these kinds of incidents — which should focus more on justice & decency rather than on race, mind you — the two of them are ghosts. I’m not convinced that these guys still serve a purpose. In fact, I’m not even convinced that racism is still such a huge problem in America. I just don’t see it. I see employers hiring plenty of minorities; I see young whites mingling with all sorts of minorities; I see people like Condoleeza Rice, Colin Powell, and Clarence Thomas holding high offices in our government. To me, our society looks pretty colorblind– as it should be.
A lot of rap music is disgusting.
In fact, some of it doesn’t even qualify as music. Music requires melody, harmony… Well, I digress.
What really bothers me are songs which condone fighting, disrespecting women, cursing, stealing, vanity, drinking, using drugs, not cooperating with police, and claiming that everything wrong with your life is somebody else’s fault. What a pile of garbage.
If you want particular examples, I’ll give them to you: Snoop Dogg, Ludacris, 50 Cent, Kanye West, and there are plenty more. You heard me before– their music is garbage.
Teaching young African Americans that being born black means you’re “oppressed” is a pretty good way to promote hostility of blacks towards whites. It promotes class warfare and goes against everything Martin Luther King stood for.
The idea that any person is prevented from succeeding merely because he/she is black is patently false. Any person of any race has the ability to succeed in this country. And any type of race-baiting that tells you otherwise is just plain wrong.
Today’s movies and TV shows are usually pretty horrible.
Unfortunately, it is our morbid curiosity which keeps Reality TV and disgusting slasher flicks from going out of style. If the American people want to know who’s responsible for the presence of crappy media, they can shine a big mirror right back on themselves.
Personally, I don’t want to see people treating each other like dirt and talking about each other behind their backs on TV. That we’ve resorted to plastering people’s raw emotions on television for all of America to watch, as something to entertain us– That’s just sick. I thought soap operas were bad; reality shows are just awful.
And I think the more that we watch movies that show completely gratuitous blood & gore, the more we become desensitized to destroying ourselves. The more we watch movies that show some psycho carving people up, the more we become desensitized to real depraved behavior.
Seeing too much pain, suffering, and death isn’t healthy. Being repulsed by cruelty and/or an excess of blood is a natural part of your humanity– you don’t want to lose that.
You can respect the office of the President without liking the person holding the office.
If you’re an American citizen, the person that holds the office of the President of the United States is your president whether you like it or not. I wasn’t a fan of Bill Clinton’s, but at the time, he was still my president. You may not agree with George W. Bush, but he’s still your president. The President represents you and your country whether you voted for him or not.
There may be two sides to the issue, but that doesn’t mean ideas on both sides are respectable.
Many ideas are completely ridiculous. And I mean that in the truest sense– some ideas are deserving of ridicule. The terrorist attacks of 9/11 provide two excellent examples:
First– Some people have rationalized the plight of the terrorists as that of a group of ”freedom fighters” battling American oppression… as if one could justify murder by citing the miserable lives the murderers (or their families) lived. Sure, it’s another side of the issue, but I don’t respect that justification in the least. In their own minds the terrorists may have been fighting American oppression, but they are still evil people for choosing to kill innocent civilians, and they deserve no sympathy for their cause. Freedom fighters attack military targets; cowards attack the innocent.
(By the way– Evil doesn’t make itself obvious that it’s evil– it dresses itself up in motives that appear to be valid and tries to trick you into believing that it’s not evil at all. Don’t be fooled.)
Secondly– Some people believe that the fall of the World Trade Center was actually a conspiracy hatched by our own government. Alright, that’s definitely a theory, but it is completely bogus. The holes in that story are so wide that you could drive a caravan of trucks through them, and as such, that theory is not respectable– it’s just plain stupid. In order to believe such a ludicrous claim, you’d have to discount or slant the stories of (a) the families of those who actually saw who the hijackers were, (b) the people who saw with their own eyes the two planes fly into the Towers, (c) everybody at the Pentagon, (d) the families of those who brought United 93 down, (e) the rest of America who watched the whole thing unfold on TV, (f) the investigations done on the simultaneous attack at all three sites, (g) the documentaries done which chronicle the lead-up to the attack, (h) the court testimony of Zacarias Moussaoui, the “20th hijacker”, (i) the countless other documentaries which show how a huge amount of jet fuel is perfectly capable of melting the insides of a high-rise building… and on and on and on. To think that our government, in its bloated bureaucratic state, could orchestrate some sort of massive conspiracy underneath the 9/11 attack– you have to be off your rocker.
Morality is not based on emotion.
Concepts of good and evil are based on philosophy, tradition, religion, family, country, and the like. Feelings are not a valid basis for morality, because moral conduct is not a part of human nature.
There are plenty of actions that feel good to us but, in fact, are very wrong. There are plenty of people who make evil decisions but feel justified in what they do. Take again, for example, those who claimed to be fighting Western imperalism when they flew airplanes into buildings and incinerated innocent Americans. Their hearts betrayed them; their blind hatred consumed them. Above any arguable justification, they perverted the aims of their religion and they made a decision that was undeniably wrong.
When you’re faced with a genuine crisis of morality, your heart is simply not a good enough indicator of what to do and what not to do. When you’re in a bind, you’re far more likely to make a decision that is reckless, comfortable, better for you in the short-term, and/or selfish by using your emotions, whereas you’re more likely to make a decision that is wiser, temporarily uncomfortable, better for you in the long-term, and/or beneficial to those around you by using the philosophy that you live by.
