[kj] OT Fw: A New Modest Proposal

[A. Madani]

A New Modest Proposal

Anyone following the nightly news reports about the problems of poor education, racial/ethnic discrimination and illegal immigration must surely be aware of the mounting obstacles we face in resolving these issues. Add to that the problems of fair wages, urban sprawl, safe neighborhoods and the decline of pristine natural reserves in our own country, and it becomes increasingly clear that we have but one solution:

No, no, it's not promoting imperialism -- err, sorry, democracy -- in the Middle East so we can all be assured of oil in abundance for decades to come.

The answer is much closer to home.

Annex Mexico. Make it the 51st state. Or if you like, the 51st-82nd states (there are currently 31 Mexican states -- it needs to be spelled out because everybody knows most Americans don't have a clue how many United States there are, never mind someone else's). Oh, sure, we tried this a little over 150 years ago and it didn't seem to work out very well, but hey, times change. In fact, I'm willing to bet the $25 I still have left in my 401(k) after financial hardship withdrawals and double-taxation that the average Mexican citizen would think it's a fine idea. Or even una idea muy fina. (See? Spanish isn't that hard.)

After all, it seems obvious even to this casual, Schiavo-dodging TV news viewer that Vincente Fox isn't really all that keen on being the President of an independent country anyway, what with his regularly encouraging his compatriots to "go north, young man." If Mexico were part of the United States, the need to travel north and work for sub-poverty wages fraught with dangerous working conditions and no benefits would be eliminated. They could enjoy the exact same working conditions the average US middle class wage-earner has laid claim to for lo, these past 20 years. 

Yes, dear amigos y amigas, you, too, can watch your wages stagnate, your health coverage become unaffordable or just plain unavailable, and your grocery dollar buy you less and less every week. You, too, can appreciate the stunning revelation that obesity doesn't just come from being lazy and useless: it also comes from being unable to afford fresh fruits and vegetables! You, too, can struggle along with us: just picture us all, one big happy diverse country, shoulder-to-shoulder as we scramble to find two or three part-time jobs to go along with our full-time one (for those of us still lucky enough to have that little luxury) so we won't have to choose among the mortgage payment, the credit-card bill and stupid stuff like food and car repairs. 

Just think: Mexican women and children will be spared travelling thousands of arduous miles without food or water, risking rape, exploitation and murder just for the chance to make $3 an hour. Come join the USA: with our growing penchant for kiddie porn, gang violence and school shootings, you'll be able to risk rape, exploitation and murder right in the comfort of your very own neighborhood. That's right, we'll bring it to you -- no travel required!

To all you current (legal) Americans fearing more job hemorrhages, lighten up already. Once Mexico's one of us (or 31 of us, depending on how the administrative aspects work out), we'll have one less cheap foreign labor market to outsource to. You don't really think that once they're bona-fide Norte Americanos, the average Mexican will settle for less than, say, the average West Virginian or Mississippian, do you? Get real! They'll want to struggle along on $5.15 just like the rest of us have since 1997. 

Oh, and did I mention that we'll have a huge influx of young people to help prop up Social Security? No need to worry about that population decline now, no sirree! Heads up, baby boomers: you wanted cheap real-estate for your retirement, and you wanted it along a nice, white sand coastline without all those high property taxes and urban sprawl, and especially a long way from "those" neighborhoods you wouldn't dream of driving your Beemer through. Mexico as part of the US will open up whole new vistas for us to pollute, exploit and ruin. Think of all that wildlife out there, just aching for extinction! All that cheap land just for us! What are we waiting for?

Shifting the border would benefit us, too. Think of all the money we'll save by not having to re-create the Berlin wall across the Southwest! (What do you want to bet that the contractor building it is using illegals anyway?) If we really still need a wall, well, the US/Guatemala/Belize wall would be much shorter and cheaper than the US/Mexico wall. We'd also be a lot closer to Cuba than we'd ever dreamed possible since 1959. Are you thinking Gitmo II? Bring it on!

What benefit for education? Do you ever hear about education problems in Mexican schools? Me neither. It just seems like they have trouble finding good jobs in their country once they get an education. So, we let the current Mexican Dept of Education become the US Dept of Education, have all the au pairs and nannies come up and show us how parenting and discipline are supposed to work, and have all the teachers come up and show us that teachers aren't meant to be substitute parents. Maybe they can even take some time to show the unqualified bodies in the classrooms how to teach (sneak preview: getting a degree in the subject you're supposed to be teaching helps a lot). Certainly the overgrown vegetables -- err, sorry again, students -- that currently inhabit our schools could use some leadership-by-example in how to behave in the classroom, how to learn and how to accept responsibility for improving their own lives. Hopefully their oh-so delicate self-esteem can handle it.

That leaves just one last group to win over. This might be tricky because we know who's really running our country now, and convincing them has to be handled more delicately than Boris Yeltsin's hangover cure. Well, religious right, here's the deal: we know you're salivating for that cheap real estate and all those belching industrial sites, just ripe for the pickin'. We know you'd love to plop your obese, pasty-white bottoms on those pristine white sand beaches. But eeww, you say, they're all brown, and poor, and a lot of them cain't talk English real good and -- ack! -- they're predominantly Roman Catholic?! What the bleep are you thinking? What does our great nation need with a bunch of potential John Kerry supporters? Well, if the Social Security solution and the fresh supply of recruits for Iraq and all points Middle East weren't enough to convince you, here is the clincher:

If they're predominantly Roman Catholic, then that has to mean there's a whole lotta anti-choice (some would call them "pro-life") folks down there. Wouldn't that be a great thing for encouraging the government to come around to the "right" way of thinking? Besides, once all those brown folks start moving north in search of the good life, we'll just rush in and buy up all the good parts for ourselves!

OK? Great! It's all settled. Now how can we squeeze the announcement into the nightly newscast along with whoever's next in line at the Hollywood divorce court and who wants to turn their child into a circus sideshow freak on the reality TV series we used to call network news? On second thought, maybe we can just run it on the ticker. It's not like most Americans would be able to find Mexico on a map anyway.

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://four.pairlist.net/pipermail/gathering/attachments/20050330/f87efc53/attachment.html