America In Retreat

America is losing ground, literally and figuratively. For decades, I’ve taught young people how the United States was born - and how it expanded to the configuration on the maps I use to teach - the lower forty-eight with Alaska and Hawaii scrunched in alongside. The maps don’t indicate how tenuous our hold on the territory within that familiar shape is becoming, but it’s getting weaker. That’s ominous - not only for us, but for the whole world.In spite of several warnings not to, I drove to the Mexican border in Nogales, Arizona last June, right after school got out. (See previous articles here and here.) Ordinary people I met in Tucson told me it was dangerous down there, but I went anyway and stopped when I got to the pathetic border fence where I pulled over and parked on a Monday afternoon. Half the signs were in Spanish. Hispanic men were sitting in groups of three or four on the sidewalks watching me get out of my car and walk around. The first several people I tried to talk to didn’t speak English - and I was still in the United States.I walked into the Nogales Historical Society next to a pawn shop. The man behind the desk in the office didn’t speak English. Another man came in and he didn’t speak English either. Exhibits favorable to Mexican bandits and revolutionaries proliferated.Seeing a McDonalds on a hill nearby and knowing they had wifi service, I drove up. Nobody spoke English there either and it was surrounded by a chain link fence topped with razor wire. Remember, I was still on the US side of the border, which I could see from the parking lot.Private homes in the area had bars on their windows.Those, and the security fence reminded me of traveling in the West Bank three years ago.

I left my car and walked across into Mexico. There were no clerks to challenge me, just a one-way turnstyle because nobody tries to sneak into that godforsaken country, and no wonder: A week later 21 people were massacred just 12 miles away. I didn’t feel safe in a country where the government is as corrupt as the drug lords. Two blocks in was a hotel outside of which were heavily-armed soldiers guarding government officials meeting inside. After an hour of being accosted by men selling viagra and prostitutes, I turned around.

I stood in line for another hour looking at pictures of Barack Obama and Janet Napolitano, waiting to get back into my country. I showed my passport, walked back across, then drove up International Street alongside the pathetic border fence where overworked US Border Patrol Agents in white-and-green pick up trucks drove around frantically trying to catch the thousands of illegals who jump over it every month.One told me to get out of there because it was “too dangerous.” I asked if he needed more help from our government to control the border, but he got nervous and referred me to his superiors at headquarters.

Last week, CNS.com interviewed Cochise County Arizona Sheriff Larry Dever, who said: “And you frankly have Border Patrolmen--and I know this from talking to Border Patrol agents—who will not allow their agents to work on the border because it is too dangerous. Now what kind of message is that for crying out loud?”

Indeed.

Also last week, Jim Couri reported at familysecuritymatters.com that: “On the heels of Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents' 258-0 ‘vote of no confidence’ against their superiors, U.S. Border Patrol agents [in Tucson] are slamming President Barack Obama's administration - especially Attorney General Eric Holder.”

US National Park officials are warning Americans about the danger of Mexican drug smugglers inside the US. Arizona Governor Jan Brewer said most illegal aliens are smuggling drugs.

Just the other day, An 18-year-old American woman was kidnapped in Texas, taken across the Mexican border and held for ransom. “U.S. authorities did not contact their Mexican counterparts because they did not know whether they were corrupted or connected to the girl’s captors,” San Juan, Texas Police Chief Juan Gonzalez said.

Drug cartels see America full of addicts and their own country in anarchy. Peasants see America as paradise with free medical care and education, and their own country as non-functioning. Our government and Mexico’s “government” pretend all this isn’t so. Working together, they pretend Arizona is the problem for trying to protect itself from invasion by millions of violent foreign drug dealers and illiterate campesinos.

The violent anarchy that is Mexico is spreading north, enabled by our federal government. We’re losing ground. Most of our fifty states are effectively bankrupt or chafing at escalating power in Washington. Some are talking nullification - even secession. We’re in danger of boiling over.

America saved the world from fascist and communist dictatorship in the 20th century and it’s the only obstacle to the chaos of radical Islamic terrorism in the 21st. Our enemies, however, no long fear us.They see us as a paper tiger governed by a president who apologizes for our past greatness while running us into bankruptcy.

We’re losing ground on many fronts.

That’s ominous for us - and for the rest of the world as well. Who else but America has the courage and the might to keep chaos at bay? The UN? After us, the deluge.

The Tissue Issue

It’s fashionable to be “green” these days, among liberals at least. Advertisers pick up on it to make products and services seem as green as possible. Given that man-made global warming is being exposed as a hoax with fudged data in British and American universities, NASA, and the UN, I’m wondering how long the fad will last.

Two years ago, pop singer Sheryl Crow showed clips from Al Gore’s “An Inconvenient Truth” on her concert tour and insisted we could save the planet by using only one sheet of toilet paper per visit, “ . . . except, of course, on those pesky occasions when two or three could be required.” I can’t help but think that attempts to use just one sheet would be the main cause of “those pesky occasions,” but I’m one of those conservatives the Green People think don’t care about the environment and like to pollute it every chance I get because I like drinking dirty water, breathing dirty air, and using too much toilet paper, so what would I know?

Remember that Gore is the guy who, as a US Senator, restricted each American toilet flush to two-and-a-half gallons, so now toilet paper doesn’t go all the way down after you flush. It just swirls around and stays in the bowl - an inconvenient flush, you could say, because we have to wait while the tank slowly fills up and try again.

When Al Gore and Sheryl Crow insist that global warming is caused by human activity, they sound like Chicken Little and Henny Penny squawking “The sky is falling!” Nonetheless, I don’t want to get in the way of any students who wish to comply with Crow’s recommendation. The problem is that toilet paper at my school is on continuous rolls about twelve or fourteen inches in diameter and not perforated into individual sheets. Students and teachers must reach into the bottom of the dispenser, grab hold of the end of the roll, pull down a length of tissue, then pull up and to the side so the sawtooth edge of the dispenser severs the piece for use. If the one sheet Crow wants people to use is four inches long, it would be nearly impossible for students to pull out only that much and tear it off. It would just shred in their fingers and make for an inconvenient wipe.Luckily we have award-winning custodians in my school and I put the problem to them. Could we possibly perforate the big toilet paper rolls by drilling into them? They furrowed their brows and scratched their chins as they considered my tissue issue. They could drill a set of holes across the paper from the outside in so it would rip off in perforated sheets they said, but the ones toward the end of the roll would become ever smaller as its circumference steadily decreased with use. Those tearing off sheets at the end would find them so small that one sheet couldn’t possibly suffice for the task at hand no matter how fervently they wanted to save the planet. Steadily decreasing school budgets may, however, solve the perforation problem. Students in Ireland and Hawaii are now requested to bring their own toilet paper and we can ask our students too.

Meanwhile, Sheryl Crow is still, as our Hawaiian president might say, all “wee-weed up” over toilet paper. Last week, she wanted only recycled toilet paper dispensed at her concerts. I don’t know if she’ll allow people to use more than one square if it’s recycled, but she specifies that it has to be “post-consumer recycled toilet paper and paper towel” and that leaves me wondering: Does she mean some consumer must have used the toilet paper before her concert-goers use it? If so, how does it get recycled? Is it pulled up from a septic tank and reprocessed? I don’t like to visualize that so I’ll assume it’s from some other sort of “post-consumer” use, like an already-read newspaper or something.

Readers should keep this in mind should Crow ever decide to do a gig here in the Maine/New Hampshire area and you get what folk singer Tom Rush might call “the urge for going.” If it’s an outside venue, I suppose people could pick a leaf off a low branch and use that for a real greenie wee-wee.

Pressure Is Building

Is America is at risk of boiling over? Peggy Noonan, former speechwriter for the President Reagan, now columnist for The Wall Street Journal, believes it is. I don’t like to think about it but the danger is there. Noonan is not the alarmist type. She’s even-tempered and intuitive about Americans, and that’s why she was able to write speeches for President Reagan that tapped the American psyche. When she writes something like this, I pay attention.

She says “Americans no longer assume that their children will have it better than they did. This is a huge break with the past, with assumptions and traditions that shaped us.” Do Americans think we’ve peaked? That we’re going downhill now?

She identified a gap between what our elites think our country needs and what ordinary Americans believe it needs. She claims there’s a “growing gulf between the country's thought leaders, as they're called—the political and media class, the universities—and those living what for lack of a better word we'll call normal lives on the ground in America. The two groups were agitated by different things, concerned about different things, had different focuses, different world views.”

She’s absolutely right. Americans have voted over and over on referenda that they want the federal government to control illegal immigration, but elites call them “xenophobic.” When citizens in the states vote against supporting illegal aliens in schools, hospitals, welfare offices, in bilingual programs and so forth, they’re called “racists.” She cites the situation in Arizona: “The point of view of our thought leaders is, in general, that borders that are essentially open are good, or not so bad. The point of view of those on the ground who are anxious about our nation's future, however, is different, more like: ‘We live in a welfare state and we've just expanded health care. Unemployment's up. Could we sort of calm down, stop illegal immigration, and absorb what we've got?’ No is, in essence, the answer.”
Nogales, Arizona border

Rather than closing the border, the Obama Administration sued Arizona for usurping the authority of Washington even though Washington was refusing to exercise that authority. Then a federal judge ruled that the Arizona law - even though it mirrors federal law - violates the US Constitution. Unbelievable.

Then there’s California’s Proposition 8. The elites say homosexuals have a constitutional right to marry each other. California’s citizens passed Proposition 8 in 2008 - an amendment to their state constitution restricting marriage to one man and one woman. Then a homosexual federal judge ruled last week that the amended California Constitution violates the US Constitution. As if George Washington, John Adams, James Madison, and Thomas Jefferson believed men had a right “marry” each other? As if ordinary Americans who have voted in thirty-four state referenda to preserve a basic, 5000-year-old human concept are “homophobic”?

Last week, the State of Missouri voted 71% that Washington cannot force them to buy health insurance from anyone. Congressional Democrats knew most Americans felt that way, but they voted to ram it down our throats anyway. US Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid pooh-poohed the Missouri vote, insisting that the “trend is turning” and Americans will soon embrace Obamacare.


You’re in La-La Land Harry.

Back in March of 2009, Texas Governor Rick Perry talked about secession in the face of the encroaching power of Washington. Several other states are discussing nullification - ignoring dictates from Washington - because they believe the Constitution doesn’t grant Congress or the President power to do what they want. Democrat Congressman Pete Stark told people at a “townhall” meeting in his district last week that “The federal government, yes, can do most anything in this country.”
Pampered radical students from the 60s ad 70s are now running not only our universities and our mainstream media, but also our government. These dedicated followers of Saul Alinsky have taken over Washington. As Victor Davis Hanson puts it: “One walk across the Yale or Stanford campus circa 1975, and one could see pretty clearly what sort of culture that bunch would create when it came of age and was handed power.” They’re smugly imposing their bankrupt socialist policies on states and the states are rebelling.

There is indeed the “chasm” existing between the elites and the rest of us on the ground as Noonan describes. Ordinary Americans who know how things work in the real world because they actually keep the country running on the job sites every day have had enough. If citizens cannot use the democratic process to express their will without being thwarted and insulted by screwball federal judges at every turn, America will indeed boil over.

Government Knows Best

Not only is government "fixing" our economy, it wants to control everything it can down to the smallest details.

A property I manage was overrun with flying squirrels, for instance. The owners already had an exterminator but the contract didn’t include squirrels. I’d trapped more than a dozen flying squirrels and one red squirrel, but I couldn’t keep up with them. Then someone told me about a guy who specializes in the critters. I called him in and he went about plugging up the many places squirrels or bats could gain access. Then he installed one-way doors so they could get out at night (they’re nocturnal), but not back in. Finally, he trapped the stubborn ones that tried to chew their way back in. He told me that flying squirrels were protected by government. I couldn’t believe it at first, but it’s true. A great example of government trying to fix something that isn’t a problem. I’ve caught dozens with rat traps in my own house too and heard similar stories from friends.

Not wanting to violate the law while he conducted business, my guy contacted authorities about getting rid of nuisance squirrels. They told him to continue trapping them, but to save their cute little corpses for government to examine. He did so, but accumulated so many, so often, that officials told him to stop contacting them which he happily did. Flying squirrels are not scarce here in western Maine, but they only come out at night, so few people ever see them. One woman friend told me she caught thirty-six of them in her attic in her “have a heart” trap. She released them all some distance from her house. As for me, I don’t have a heart when it comes to squirrels of any sort.

One animal-lover group excoriated President Bush for taking northern flying squirrels off the endangered species list in 2008. How could Bush have been so heartless as to leave such a cute little rodent unprotected, they wondered, and they begged President Obama to put them back on. The Center for Biological Diversity claims: “The tiny squirrel, which appears to have a brown cape when in flight, is dearly loved throughout its Appalachian Mountain homeland.”

Well I beg to differ. I live in the Appalachians Mountains and I can’t stand them. I shoot squirrels of all kinds whenever I see them near my house or any of the buildings I take care of. If I don’t, they chew their way in and cause enormous damage. They’re a pain in the butt and there’s no end to them. I say hurray for President Bush.

These animal-lovers are nuts and government is enabling them. They think the human race is a problem and cutting back our population is vastly more preferable to trapping their cute little tree rats. In that spirit, they’ve initiated an “Endangered Species Condoms” distribution project. I’m not making this up. They want to protect squirrels and cut back humans because we’re the biggest threats to biological diversity. They believe human activity invades squirrel habitat when it’s pretty obvious that squirrel activity invades ours.

Just how nutty are these people? To justify government intervention into the alleged squirrel shortage, they cite another non-problem for justification:

Despite dire projections from recent global warming models predicting the complete disappearance of the West Virginia northern flying squirrels’ habitat, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service removed all protections afforded to the species by the Endangered Species Act.

These are the kinds of people President Obama was talking to when he said he would lower the sea level and control climate. They actually believe he can do that. Their ilk elected Obama and a Congress that does what he says. Now they want to control virtually every aspect of our lives.

Canadian Geese are another nuisance species protected by government and making my life difficult. When they’re not causing plane crashes in New York City, large flocks of them invade lakefront properties and crap all over the place. The easiest thing would be to shoot them and eat them, but government says you need a federal license to do that.

So what’s going to come out of Washington next? In Virginia, where so many federal employees live, there exists an organization known as the “Center For Human-Wildlife Conflict Resolution.” It purports to “help Virginia residents and municipal leaders identify potential sources of assistance when confronted with problematic wild animal concerns.”

Isn’t that special? If present trends continue, we’re going to need a federal license to pull ticks off ourselves or swat mosquitoes - and then only according to whatever guidelines are laid out in a Center for Human-Wildlife Conflict Resolution action plan.

Racism and Wolves

The villagers don’t all come running anymore when the NAACP cries “Racism!” It’s getting so they don’t take that organization any more seriously than they took the boy who cried “Wolf!” There used to be lots of racism when the NAACP formed, but they still claim to see it everywhere, even when it doesn’t exist. The shepherd boy who cried “Wolf!” in Aesop’s fable was bored and wanted to generate excitement with his antics, but that’s not the case with the NAACP. They cry racism lately because they’re afraid government programs they’ve lobbied for may be curtailed due to pressured from groups like the Tea Party.

There was a time “colored people” were oppressed by Jim Crow laws and white racism, but it’s almost half a century since the Civil Rights Bill was passed, the KKK was neutered, and racism turned into the racial preferences known as “Affirmative Action” which the NAACP supports. For nearly two generations, the deck has been stacked in their favor, but too many still play victim because it’s all they know how to do. As long as some “villagers” in the form of politicians and media keep running up, wringing their hands and appeasing them when they cry racism, they’ll continue. Many like me, however, stopped responding long ago. We’re not racists, we never owned slaves or oppressed minorities, and neither did our ancestors that we know of. We realize that all people have suffered throughout history - and there comes a time when we have to stop whining and get on with it.

Americans are getting mighty tired of that growing segment of our citizenry who see themselves as victims and who habitually blame others for their situation. There are many others who carry around guilt for having been born white, or wealthy, and will come running whenever someone claims “I’m a victim!” Victimology has become a lucrative racket for people like the Reverends Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson and organizations like “La Raza” (translated: “The Race”) and AIM - the American Indian Movement. There many other victim groups whose grievances no longer exist, or have diminished to such an extent that they’re hardly recognizable, but they continue to sing the same old song.

As Walter Williams wrote this week: “Yesteryear, it was the Klan or White Citizens Council who showed up at polling places to intimidate black voters. During the 2008 elections, it was the New Black Panthers who showed up at a Philadelphia polling place to intimidate white voters and tell them, ‘You are about to be ruled by the black man, cracker.’ What's worse is the U.S. Department of Justice has decided to not to prosecute.”

Former Justice Department attorney J. Christian Adams resigned over this, claiming voter intimidation charges were dropped because of racial bias and corruption on the part of President Obama’s Attorney General - Eric Holder.

Racism isn’t the cause of astronomical crime rates or high unemployment rates for black men. Their self-made subculture is a much bigger factor, but few have the courage to point that out. Who wants to hire someone who drives up blaring obscene, angry rap music with his hat on backwards, his pants sliding off his rear end, and purposely speaking in fractured English? I sure wouldn’t. Black men are not arrested and imprisoned at higher rates because of racism. They’re arrested and imprisoned more because they commit more crimes.

Young black men today are not victims of racism as much as they’re victims of race-hustlers who profit from perpetuating the myth that racism is what’s keeping them down. They’re victims of their own thinking - that if they study hard, do their homework, get straight jobs, save money, and walk the straight-and-narrow, they’re “acting white.” They’re victims of government give-away programs that have subsidized their irresponsible behavior for half a century.

It’s those continually-expanding entitlement programs - which disproportionately high percentages of black people and other minorities have come to depend on - that are threatened by the Tea Party, because they’re bankrupting local, state, and federal government. Rather than examine the efficacy or affordability of those programs, the NAACP cries “Racism!” It worked for most of a century, but it’s wearing very thin now.

Whenever I hear the incessant, deep-base cadence of rap music, I feel a visceral negative reaction. Not only does it glorify illegal drug use, exploitative and degrading attitudes toward women, nasty sexual behavior, and violence against law enforcement and rival gangs - it’s celebrated by the entertainment industry as “authentic.” That industry meets annually to bestow awards on the “artists” who produce it instead of condemning them for the malignant mindsets they spread.

When this subculture is mimicked by the rural white boys I teach, no good results that I’ve ever been able to see. We tolerate them walking around in schools and other public places with their pants down below their asses and this malignancy has infected young males from the sticks to suburbia. My least functional male students wear the outfit and imitate the behavior. They think “acting black” is cool. They revel in music and the anger it drills into them. They disdain learning. They’re rebels without a cause. They’re caught up in a contagion of anger and belligerence, and they think it must be normal because too many of the so-called adults around them seem to accept it as such.They accept it because if they criticize it, they might be accused of racism.

Put Government in Reverse

I’m conservative, not Republican. Millions of Americans out there are, like me, fed up with the Democrat/Republican tandem which has been bankrupting up our country. That’s going to become very apparent when votes are counted in November. People won’t vote for someone because of party affiliation. They’ll vote for candidates who want to rein in government spending and limit government itself only to what our Constitution designed.

The newly-emerging Tea Party is not an organized political party as Democrats and Republicans are, and may never become so. But that’s all right. We didn’t have political parties at all until the early 1800s and we did just fine. The original Tea Party in colonial Massachusetts wasn’t organized either, but they knew what they didn’t want - high taxes and big government controlling their lives from far away. They knew what they did want too - to be left alone to take care of themselves. Political parties didn’t emerge until long after the Revolution, and I can’t see they’ve helped much. Citizens who consider themselves members of the Tea Party back candidates based on how they see the role of government, not party affiliation or how much pork the candidate will bring home to the district. In early America, people took care of each other because they chose to, not because government forced them to. Here in New England, citizens went to town meetings and elected local leaders called “selectmen.” We still have them, but their power and authority are diluted by county, state, and national governments which are growing at an ever-accelerating rate and bankrupting our country with entitlements. The federal government now decides which people deserve assistance and which people will be forced to pay for it. Selectmen still exist in New England, but they can only do what state government lets them do.

The official title for them is: “Selectman, Assessor, and Overseer of the Poor.” They’re municipal executives, tax assessors and welfare officials rolled together. They take an oath to preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States which is supposed to strictly what state and federal governments can and cannot do. It doesn’t anymore, of course, and that’s our biggest problem. They operate in small-town America where everybody knows each other. They know who needs help, who works hard, who is a slacker, who drinks too much, and so forth. They know who is truly needy, who is a parasite, who is dependable, and who isn’t. They don’t want to be forced to give money to anyone who comes to town thinking everyone else there owes them a living. Neither do they want to be forced to pay for anyone who comes into their state or sneaks into their country from Mexico or anywhere else and expects to be supported.Hat tip: Anissa Cuthbert

Selectmen cannot do anything unless authorized to do so directly by citizens who would be paying for it. The road commissioner couldn’t build a road or fix one unless voters approved the expenditure. People can watch the progress as they drive by and if anyone were seen leaning on a shovel too long, selectmen would hear about it at the Post Office or in the store. That’s accountability.

Here in New England, towns built, maintained, and ran elementary schools and didn’t need state or federal government to regulate them. Secondary and post-secondary schools were private and autonomous, and they were much more effective and efficient compared to today’s pubic high schools and colleges.

Government is a necessary evil and almost always wasteful. Local government keeps inefficiency to a minimum with close accountability between citizens and their elected officials. People are expected to take care of themselves. When misfortune or poor decisions make that difficult, they can rely on family or church to help out until they get back on their feet. Beyond the local overseers of the poor and county homes for the elderly and infirm with no family, nothing else in the realm of taking care of people should be the responsibility of government. That was not the intent of the Constitution.Where Lovell holds town meetings

Beginning with the New Deal, the Great Society, and now the the Obama Administration, the federal government has pretended it can provide everything for everybody womb to tomb. It cannot, of course, and anyone with a basic knowledge of math knows it. Nonetheless, states and the federal government are going bankrupt trying. Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid alone have unfunded liabilities exceeding $100 trillion. Any one of these should have been seen as a last straw. The camel’s back is already broken, yet Congress and the President heaped Obamacare onto the prostrate animal. Unless it’s all cut back systematically and drastically, the whole system is going to collapse - and soon.

People who have been collecting unemployment checks for 79 weeks, for example, are about to be cut off. Is the federal government obligated to write more checks? How many of those people would have accepted lower-paying jobs if their benefits were cut off after 26 weeks or 52 weeks? Is collecting unemployment a disincentive to work? It certainly has been for some of my relatives and acquaintances over the years.

If government really wants to create jobs and improve people’s lives, they have to get the hell out of the way, stop trying to “fix” things, and let people do it on their own. When I hear candidates make speeches like this, I’m going to vote for them whether they’re Democrat (not likely), Republican (maybe), or Independent (we’ll see).ADDENDUM: I Just went down to the Lovell Town Office to take pictures for this post. There, Lovell’s Road Commissioner, Larry Fox, told me an OSHA official drove up while he was working in my neighborhood a couple of weeks ago. Said he was inspecting progress on rebuilding my road - Christian Hill Road - because it was designated a federal stimulus project - that $300,000 had been earmarked for it and given to the state for disbursement. “Did they ever consult you about that?” I asked him.

“Never heard a word from them,” he said, “but after talking to him that day, I called the State of Maine guy in Scarborough who is in charge of roads for this area. He said the money had already been spent.”

“Hmm,” I said.

So, someone in Washington decided that my road ought to be rebuilt without consulting Lovell’s Road Commissioner and designated $300,000 to do it. Then an OSHA guy came out here to see how it was coming along, and $300,000 in federal funds disappeared into Maine’s budget.

I swear I’m not making this up.

Missing My Camera

Eagle Island from the house

“I forgot my camera!” I exclaimed at the Shaw’s parking lot in Ellsworth, Maine.

“Are you sure?” my wife asked, while I bent over the steering wheel with hands over my face in grief. I could hardly believe it but I knew it was true. We were rushing around to leave for a week’s vacation at a rented house on the ocean in Addison, Maine.View from the bedroom of rental house

I had carefully loaded my wife’s car for the four-hour trip and we were almost there before I realized that I’d left my camera in my truck back in Lovell. I don’t go anywhere without it and I’d taken it with me for a trip to the dump. Don’t laugh. I’ve taken great pictures at the dump. You just never know when you’re going to see something. I got home and put the empty barrels back in the garage, but forgot to take the camera bag out and transfer it to my wife’s car. The thought of a whole week’s leisure with countless opportunities to creatively capture beauty being squandered was breaking my heart.Old House around Jonesboro

I called my daughter, Jessica, and explained my dilemma. “So you want me to ship it to you overnight,” she said, anticipating my request.

“Oh, would you please?” I begged.

“Of course,” she said, “but it’s Saturday afternoon and the Post Office is closed. I could use UPS or Fed-Ex. Let me check online how to do this and I’ll call you back. I assume you want insurance.”

“Yes. There’s about $1500 worth of equipment in that bag.”

She called back to tell me she would have to ship it out Fed-Ex on Monday morning and I’d get it Tuesday, so I’d be without it half my vacation. I thought, “Okay. I’ll read books and cook gourmet meals to distract me from the urge to take pictures and try not to think about it until Tuesday.”

After food shopping, we went by a WALMART and I bought a little Nikon Coolpix S3000 to use in the interim. I’d still miss my DSLR and 18-270 mm lens, but the Coolpix is a neat little camera capable of 12 megapixel images, and it’s small and thin enough to fit easily in my pocket. If a whale came up on the shore in front of the house, I could capture it. I’m justifying the expenditure thinking that I’ll keep the Coolpix in my pocket at all times while my camera bag is in my house or in my vehicle. I can’t frame a shot as well or zoom in as before, but it’ll have to do.

The house was fogged in when we arrived and it still is. It’s raining as I write and I’m glad of it being camera-crippled. I’m going to read books and take my mind off the pictures I can’t take. I’ve just finished “The Girl Who Kicked The Hornet’s Nest.” It’s the third book in a series by Stieg Larsson and he’s dead, so there won’t be any more novels about Salander, the intriguing main character. Guess she’s dead now too.

I have another great book to last me into Tuesday. It’s Richard Grant’s “God’s Middle Finger: Into the Lawless Heart of the Sierra Madre.” In Tombstone, Arizona three weeks ago, I met a guy who recommended it and I’m glad he did. I’d told him what I was doing down there in border country and it reminded him of Grant’s escapades. I’m not nearly as fearless or crazy as Grant, however. I was warned numerous times to stay away, but I went into the border areas of Nogales and Douglas, Arizona to explore and ask questions. I could sense the danger, but nobody robbed me or tried to kill me. Grant, however, went across the border and into the belly of the beast, alone and unarmed. He explored where the violence and lawlessness that’s transforming the southwestern United States originates and published his account two years ago. If a book can distract me from the dramatic beauty of Maine’s coast, it’s this one.

Monday the sun came out and we could see how beautiful it is facing west over Pleasant Bay from our rental house.
Tuesday we hired Maine Guide Rob Scribner to take us out into Machias Bay via sea kayak and see some petroglyphs - ancient carvings on bedrock visible between the tides.I used the little Nikon Coolpix. It’s just as well I didn’t have my DSLR for the trip. If it got wet in the kayak, I’d have been really sick. The little camera worked okay.After that we explored Jasper Beach in Machiasport. It’s not a sand beach. It’s terraced with stones piled up by wave action and there are beautiful pieces of jasper from an outcropping in the ledge nearby. Retreating waves tumble them down the terraces against each other with a unique clicking sound. It’s picked over regularly, but there are still some beautiful pieces of polished jasper to be found if you look hard enough. A woman there told us there was only one other beach like it in the world - in Ireland. By sheer coincidence, we were there two years ago. It’s on the Isle of Doagh, Donegal from where my Great Grandfather, James McLaughlin, disembarked back in 1900.

On the way back to the rental house I got a cell phone message from the Fedex carrier that something went wrong with the overnight shipment. My DSLR wouldn’t arrive until Wednesday (today) and would require an adult signature. Guess I’ll have to leave a note on the door for the Fedex guy because it’s raining again and we’re heading into Bar Harbor to check out the Abbe Museum. Our internet connection is via satellite dish and doesn’t work in the rain. I have to file this column - and to do that I’ll need to suck in a signal from somewhere on the road between here and Bar Harbor.

Hopefully the Fedex guy will find this place while we’re gone.

Peace Through Strength

It’s beautiful where I live and peaceful too, most of the time. I like to sit on my back porch, smell the woods, hear the birds and animals, feel the wind, and watch the sun light everything from different angles as it moves across the sky each day and sets over the mountains. But then I’ll hear coyotes yipping and howling as they chase down some other animal to eat. I’ll see an owl and listen to the other birds cry in distress at its presence. I’m reminded that it’s a struggle to survive out there and if you’re not careful, you might be eaten up. Keeping strong, wary, and ready to fight enhances survival. Most predators are smart, preying on the weak and avoiding the strong. Strong is good.

Late one night I was woken by screams outside my bedroom window and it took several seconds to realize they weren’t human. Animals were struggling violently, but I didn’t know what kind and I still don’t. I got up and peered through the screen into the darkness, but I couldn’t see anything except movement. They were screams fear, panic, and pain as the fight moved into the woods on the other side of the road. After a minute or so, it ended and I went back to bed wondering what had happened. The next morning, I saw smears of blood on the road and leading into the woods where ferns were trampled. There were no tracks I could discern, and no remains. Either the victim got away, or it was killed and eaten somewhere deeper into the woods.

Months later, a couple of young thugs tried to invade the house across the street about fifty yards from where the animals had been fighting. One said later under interrogation that they intended to kill the elderly couple living there and take their vehicle for a joy ride. They had knocked on the door, demanded keys at gunpoint, cut the telephone wires, and then fled after the man slammed the door on them and they heard him yell: “Get the gun!” to his wife. They were arrested later for attempted home invasion and conspiracy to commit murder, and sentenced to prison.

Most people are harmless and many are kind, but we mustn’t forget there are predators everywhere - always have been - and the human variety is the most dangerous. Thank God these two young men happened to be stupid predators or my elderly neighbors would have died. Ever since, I’ve kept a loaded pistol within reach and encouraged my wife to learn to shoot with it. I’ve always had rifles and a shotgun around, but they’re bulky and not well suited to handle something like a home invasion. People have to be ready to defend themselves because police can’t be everywhere.

“The price of freedom is eternal vigilance,” as Thomas Jefferson said, and that applies to us as individuals as well as nations. Our freedom and our very existence depend on readiness to fight whenever necessary. What troubles me lately is that most Americans seem to have forgotten this, if they ever knew it. Our country has changed. We’ve elected a President and a Congress who believe it’s possible to discuss our way out of any potential conflict. They believe criminal predators among us are victims of poverty, poor childhoods, severe toilet training, or whatever, and that police and the courts should be the only ones to deal with them and citizens should be disarmed. They apply similar skewed logic to international relations, believing the United States has oppressed other countries and that’s why they hate us and attack us. They think that if we just make nice, conflict can be avoided.

They place more confidence in United Nations resolutions than the United States military, and the human predators out there in the wide world know this very well. They don’t understand that we must be strong and ready to fight at all times, and if we are, it’s less likely that we’ll have to do so. However, our president goes around the world apologizing for our past use of force and promising to set limits on how we’ll use it in the future. Our military wants to pass out medals for not shooting the enemy instead of killing them. We still have by far the strongest military the world has ever known but we seem to lack the will to use it, and our enemies sense that. Violent conflict therefore becomes more likely, rather than less.

Should these trends continue, we’ll have to again learn the hard way that weakness, real or perceived, is a bigger threat to peace and freedom than strength.

The Mexican Border in Arizona - Part II

Arizona is divided. Illegal immigration is the hottest issue on people’s minds in that state, but discussion seems to vary depending on who is there. In the southwest I’m an “Anglo,” as opposed to a “Latino.” Though I was in Arizona only a few days, I got the sense that it’s discussed openly when Anglos are present, but if there’s mixed company with Latinos present, the topic doesn’t come up. Arizona is about 30% Latino and the percentage is higher the closer you get to the border where I was.On the plane from La Guardia to Tuscon I was seated with two women flying home. One was an Anglo about my age and the other a young woman of Mexican descent. They were friendly and chatty at first, and eventually asked me why I was going to Tucson. I explained that I wanted to see, smell, feel and hear the desert southwest because I’d never been there before, and that I wanted go down around the border area and see how much of what I’d been hearing about circumstances there was true. Both tensed up. We discussed illegal immigration, but only in guarded terms.

In last week’s column, I wrote about what I saw in the Nogales area and my dealings with the US Border Patrol. Agents in the field talked openly until I told them I was a writer. Then they referred me to up to their office in Tucson, but nobody there would sit down with me and discuss things on record. Spokesman Mario Escalante said he’d answer questions on the phone or via email, but not face-to-face over a recording device. I wasted half a day between phone calls while they brushed me off as a small-time columnist.The next day, I drove to Douglas, Arizona about sixty miles east of Nogales. There I saw a new border fence under construction, but the construction bosses I spoke to on site told me they were pulling out after building only a mile for $5 million. What they’d built was a formidable double fence with a ditch in between, but as one supervisor said, “They’ll just go a mile further east and jump there as we saw two of them do this morning right over there.” He pointed to the end of the new fence he built to an older section just like the one in Nogales.At nearly sixty, I believe I could climb over it easily. I looked east to see a straight line of such fencing clear to a distant horizon.It was the same when I turned around to look west.There are two thousand miles of border between the US and Mexico, and a mile of new fence here and there are so many drops in the bucket. When President Bush got $800 million from Congress to build 800 miles of “virtual” border fence, it ended up costing $15 million per mile rather than the $1 million per mile projected.

Meanwhile, the smuggling of illegal aliens and drugs from Mexico continues. Open battles in Mexico between the Mexican military and well-armed drug lord armies are so bad that Mexican citizens aren’t sure who will win. Some foreign policy experts are concerned that Mexico may become a failed state if it isn’t already. That lawlessness has spread into the border states like Arizona to such an extent that the Bureau of Land Management is warning US tourists in five national parks near the border of dangers posed by armed drug smugglers. Arizona Governor Jan Brewer said the other day that the majority of illegals coming into Arizona are smuggling drugs. Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano said this week: “You’re never going to totally seal that border.” She seems to be making the case here that it’s impossible to prevent millions of people from invading our country, so why try.

Napolitano is following the Obama Administration policy on illegal immigration, which he articulated in a private meeting with Arizona Senator Jon Kyl a few weeks ago. Kyl told contituents in Phoenix that Obama said: “The problem is, . . . if we secure the border, then you all won’t have any reason to support ‘comprehensive immigration reform.’”“In other words,” said Kyl, “they’re holding it hostage. They don’t want to secure the border unless and until it is combined with ‘comprehensive immigration reform.’”

Comprehensive Immigration Reform is nothing but a euphemism for amnesty. President Obama and the Democrats would solve our illegal immigrant problem with a stroke of the pen: They would grant amnesty to the 20 million or so illegals already residing here because they would become 20 million new Democrat voters.Hat tip: One-simple-idea.com

Democrats don’t want to secure the border and shut off the constant flow of a million new Democrats every year.Many Republicans are reluctant to address illegal immigration because they represent businesses which profit from cheap Mexican labor.

The majority of Americans, meanwhile, are doing a slow burn over the issue and expressing themselves through their state governments. Arizona’s new law allowing police to arrest anybody in the US illegally is just the beginning. Expect other states to follow as our federal government abdicates its responsibility to stop the invasion of America from the south.