Anger at Arizona Immigration Law

I am angry and disappointed with the passage of the new Arizona Immigration Law that makes it a state crime for illegal immigrants to not have an alien registration document. I am angry with fat cat congressmen and senators that were too busy taking legal graft from special interest lobbyists to protect the borders of our country from invaders.



I am angry and disappointed with my friends the hard working Mexican people.  They sneak into my country and take jobs that my fellow American citizen is competing for.  They take them at wages that my fellow American finds too low to support their families.






I am angry and disappointed with liberals who fought to make the proper term “illegal alien” politically incorrect in favor of the milk toast “undocumented worker” euphemism. What part of the word “illegal” do they not understand?



I am angry and disappointed with  conservatives who took every opportunity to mouth the words, “They just take jobs Americans don’t want.” What part of supply and demand economics do they not understand? That was a dishonest statement the first time it was uttered and became even more dishonest each time it was repeated.



Americans want  jobs that pay American wages. Why in the world would Americans want difficult, dirty jobs that pay Mexican wages? If they wanted those jobs they would go to Mexico.  Oh wait!  Mexico will not allow them to take jobs from Mexicans!  By turning a blind eye to the borders, conservatives undermined the supply and demand elements that say they are so proud of.  Market principles, left alone, can make everyone in a particular economy wealthy, but when the windows are flung open to less developed economic cultures, poverty consumes the worker class.

We were one of the only countries in the world that has never had to check travel papers as citizens freely travelled from community to community. Now, because of weak enforcement of immigration laws, Arizona has an estimated 460,000 illegal immigrants lurking in the shadows. Arizona was left with little choice but to do something to control what the federal government refuses to do.


I’m especially angry with Americans who use illegal drugs —200 billion dollars per year—yet they continue to prefer wealthy super criminals to handle that traffic over passing intelligent laws to regulate an industry that Americans clearly want. I don’t want those drugs. I have no use for them, but I recognize a huge number of Americans do want them. I’d prefer low cost legal drugs for them so they could curl up in a drugged stupor until they had all they could take or dreamed their way into eternity without stealing from their neighbors or killing their grandmothers for a fix.


By keeping unenforceable prohibition in force in America, we drive dollars into the hands of the criminal element. We drive prices up so junkies have to steal more and more to feed their habits. It also feeds the horrible forces of evil in our neighboring countries that rise to support the demand of our drugged up citizens.



If it wasn’t enough to open the gates to our borders, we feed evil forces on the other side of the border with our drug money so that law and order gives way to chaos and mayhem. The workforce that survives that horror brings some of it with them as they infiltrate our country.  No wonder there is so much new violence and crime. 


Now the states have to act to protect citizens from the invasion. In the process, we will all have to carry identification papers like in a Nazi or Fascist country.


For decades we’ve rounded up a few of these invaders and sent them home. They only came back as soon as they could pay another coyote the fee. If they needed work that badly, maybe we should have given them six months of labor building a stone wall to protect our borders. How long would it take for 480 thousand people to build a nice secure wall protecting Arizona?

Our working classes would have commanded a larger wage via the natural forces of free market. With that higher wage and a federal program to keep unnaturally low wage pressures from eroding the market, the prices of houses would have matched the price of wages and the huge numbers of foreclosures just wouldn’t have been necessary.


We can solve all these problems. It begins with protecting our borders. Imagine if we regulated rather than prohibited the drugs that Americans insist on buying. In a moment we would solve the cartel problems in Mexico, Columbia, and other South American countries. Wouldn’t it be nice if we encouraged our Mexican friends to develop their own economies so their people could stay home to earn money instead of having to come to the United States?


It all starts with protecting our borders! Is that too much to ask?

Now I've vented!  I don't like that I'll have to carry a passport and driver's license with me next time I drive from Texas to California, but I'll get used to it.  We've always had people in Texas that speak Spanish; they fought to free Texas from Mexico.  I've always supported their right to speak Spanish in Texas.  They earned that right when their relatives died in the Alamo.

Some silly Texas school book Nazis took the Spanish names out of Texas history books.  They can rewrite history, but they can't stop the Mexican influence in Texas, Arizona, or the United States of America.

I might be angry and disappointed, but I'm not crazy.  I've been learning to speak Spanish for a couple of years now.  If you can't beat 'em, join 'em.

Why not make a margarita out of sour limes?  Learn to speak Spanish and support our website in the process.

Click Here!

Cotton Ball Hanging on a Screen Door

by

Randy R Cox

Why was the cotton ball hanging from a screen on Grandma’s house? Longer than long ago, well maybe not that far back, but a lot of years ago, the baby boomer generation used to see cotton balls hanging from strings on the screen doors, usually on the houses of their family’s elders.

Often it was an aunt, or a grandmother, and sometimes on our own homes we would see the little cotton balls but seldom understood why.

I saw them, usually tied to a bobby pin with a short piece of cotton string. In those days “children were to be seen and not heard.” We heard that a lot. Maybe that’s why we never bothered to ask. At least I didn’t ask. I wondered, but I never asked, not until I was 40 years old anyway.

In north Texas where I grew up, we were very cautious about poking anything though a screen. Most of us didn’t have air conditioners, and those who did would still open a window when the weather would permit. Seems like it didn’t get as hot in those days as it does now, but I understand that is a highly debatable position these days.

Anyway, we all knew then that a mosquito could somehow climb through a metal screen without someone enlarging the hole with a bobby pin. So why would someone do that? Did they want to let a mosquito in to feed off us poor kids who ran around barefooted with our shirts off?

I remember sleeping on the screened in porch of my great Granny Eades’ old homestead in Dixon, Oklahoma. Granny Eades was a midwife to the Choctaw Indians around there. It was said that she was Black Dutch, herself, but it was many years before traditional Choctaws laughed and told me that Black Dutch was what light skinned Choctaws called themselves to avoid the problems that came with being an Indian.

Anyway, I’d watch that cotton ball dance lazy like with the wind on that screen door while I swatted at those pesky mosquitos that played “New Moon” on my skinny little body.

Sometime during the hot summer night I’d always fall asleep and by morning I’d always have enough blood left in me to make another day…but I never had enough gumption to ask Granny why those cotton balls were there.

The years passed and the cotton balls grew fewer and fewer, and to tell the truth I found girls and sports a lot more interesting than cotton balls so they just didn’t cross my mind.

My great grandparents began to die off, and my grandparents began to get old themselves. Suddenly I started to ask questions about things I should know but didn’t about our family, the depression, and lots of little things that had changed since they were kids. Still, the cotton balls didn’t seem all that important.

My wife, artist D. Bell found an old abandoned house in central Texas that caught her interest, I saw one of those cotton balls hanging from a rusty screen door. It was tied to a bobby pin, just like I remembered, but the old ball of cotton was now a droopy lump of dirty fiber. Debbi painted an oil painting called, “Tattered,” I loved the painting, but it sold. We have photographs of almost all of Debbi’s paintings but somehow the photo of that one has disappeared. Discovering that old homestead with the lump of cotton on a string brought back memories and set me upon a quest to finally solve the mystery of the cotton ball on a string.

I began to ask around. Some didn’t know what I was talking about. Others would smile and remember but they never knew exactly what had been the inspiration for the wispy little mobiles. I had exhausted all my own family resources and was forced to put my quest on hold for a while.

A few years went by and I was talking to my wife’s grandmother Mamie Lyn Bell. I believe she was about 95 at the time and I asked her every silly question that came to my mind. She was wonderful woman full of life and memories of old. Among her many adventures, she had met Orville and Wilbur Wright at the State Fair of Texas when she was about 13 years old. They invited Mamie Lyn and her sister to cross the rope and come inside where they could get a better look at the “Kitty Hawk” or whatever plane they had on display at the time, Aeroplanes were new fangled gadgets back then.

Anyway, one of the questions that I asked Mrs. Bell was the illusive mystery of the dancing cotton ball. “Ohhh!” she laughed getting excited at the memory of those things. She was capable of giggling like a schoolgirl at that age but with much more dignity than Orville and Wilbur must have witnessed.

Finally she told me. “It was to keep the flies away,” she said. “We’d hang them on the screen door to keep the flies from coming in when the door was opened. It was said the flies would see that cotton ball and think it was a spider egg.”

Well, once you hear that, it sorta makes sense, doesn’t it? A sneaky old fly wouldn’t want to come through the door of a house where a giant spider waited to catch ‘em.

Recently, I ran across some other curious people from my generation speculating about the cotton balls. Tennessee’s columnist Patricia Paris of http://www.chattanoogan.com/articles/article_67008.asp or Texas author, Delbert Trew http://www.texasescapes.com/DelbertTrew/Screen-Door.htm They all figured out it was to scare off the flies but I don’t think any of them mentioned the spider egg concept.

I thought it might be a good thing to write about this for all those people on the same quest to find out why the cotton balls once hung on thousands of screen doors around this land, but most of all for those who have never seen a screen door much less a cotton ball on a string. There may come a time in the future when knowledge like this might be useful again. Anyway, for those not blessed to have someone like Mamie Lyn Bell to teach them about the old ways, this may at least answer one of life’s many mysteries.

Want Something Great--Get it!

by 

Randy R Cox

If you want something, want something great!  If it's great, you should have it.  The greater your dream the more important for the world that you reach it.  Reach for the stars!  Build a colossal dream and go for it.  A world full of dreams is a better world than one full of despair!

Don't let the failures in life trip you up.  Whether they are events in your life or people in your way, failures can pull your eye away from you goals.  Don't let that happen.  The world can not afford for you to get diverted from your dream.

Most of the world has given up on the desires of their heart, but a few have found the way to fulfill one dream after another.  These people stand out because they are headed straight to another victory.  Find those people and follow them.  They know what they are doing; they have done it before.

Listen to people who know what they are talking about.  Follow them.  Your dream is at the end of the walk they are taking.

One of those people that know the secret is Will Smith.  Follow him!  Listen to him!  He knows what he is talking about.  He knows where he is walking.

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