In the early 1970's I had a big problem. The Vietnam war was still raging, and I had the opportunity to enlist in the U.S. Army for three years with a guarantee of where I would be stationed and what my military occupational specialty would be. The other option was to be passive and do nothing, in which case I would soon be drafted but only for two years. I would almost certainly go to Vietnam, and I would very likely come back to El Paso as a young man in a flag covered box.
I chose to give up an extra year of my life and enlisted in the U.S. Army to be stationed in West Germany. So the first time I visited Berlin was in 1972. The Berlin Wall was very real at that time. I also got to attend the summer Olympic games in Munich in 1972. I was there the day that the Palestinians brutally killed the Jewish athletes.
Years later the company I worked for offered me a nice promotion to move to Europe and become the General Manager of the European division of our company. So I moved to Europe for a second time. It was a 14 hour per day job, and I did it for the next fifteen years. I bought a house in the south of The Netherlands, roughly one mile from Germany and about 10 miles from Belgium.
By this time the Berlin wall had already come tumbling down. I have visited Berlin many times since then, and I even have a small chunk that I personally collected of the old Berlin Wall.
When I moved to Europe if you wanted to go to Germany or Belgium you had to stop on the freeway, and present your passport to the bureaucratic and officious customs officials. They looked at you with disdain, like you were some kind of a second class citizen. It often seemed like they stamped your passport just so that you would leave. Then you stopped at the bank right there on the freeway to change your Dutch Guilders over to either German Marks or Belgian Franks.
The Dutch didn’t like or trust the Germans. Not at all. If one wanted to get a Dutchman upset, all you needed to do was bring up the subject of Germany, or even worse say something kind and positive about the German people.
By the time I moved back to America some fifteen years later the situation had changed greatly. Before the change over the locals told all sorts of horror stories and had all sorts of reasons why it would not work. The border fences were torn down anyway. The Customs and passport control facilities were bulldozed, as well as the banks whose sole purpose in life was changing money from one nation’s currency to another. The Netherlands no longer had their Dutch Guilder, the Germans gave up their stable and strong Deutsch Mark, and the Belgians did the same with their Franks. On the exact same day everyone changed over to the Europe-wide common currency called the Euro.
All the prophets of doom said everything would go to hell. But it didn’t. The light skinned people said that allowing all these dark skinned people from the South (like Spain and Italy) to live and work in their countries would destroy their culture. But it didn’t happen. In fact it made life a lot easier. There were no longer any long waits at the border. You didn’t even slow down. The only way you knew you had gone from one country to another was the road signs. People began going over to Germany and Belgium for lunch or to go shopping, since you no longer needed to worry about using a different currency or the wait at the border control station.
If a policeman was chasing a bad guy in Germany, he no longer had to stop and give up the chase at the Dutch or Belgian border. He just kept on going, doing his job. Citizens of one country no longer had to get permission from the host government to move to a different country, or to work there.
There were a great many people who were afraid of this change. Fortunately the more reasonable and sensible people won out. It was indeed a great experiment onto unchartered territory, but it worked out fine.So are the Europeans more open minded, forward thinking, and bolder than us Americans? Nope. Not at all. This may cause some anger among my European friends, but I think that many of the good ones emigrated to the New World to help build America. It mainly was the losers and the lazy ones who stayed home. And then many of those who stayed home ended up getting killed in the various wars which have tortured Europe.
America is a country of immigrants. Our country has been built from the very finest people choosing to leave their native countries and moving to the U.S.A. in order to better themselves and their families. Americans are for the most part hard-working people. Ask any single mother who is working two jobs, or the person in the ghetto or barrio who works all hours just to try and provide their family with a decent living. There are not many jobs that Americans will refuse to do, and that Mexicans will do. The problem is the very low wages and the virtually non-existent benefits.
Bringing in Mexican nationals to do these jobs is just a continuation of the culture of slavery.
By legislation we need to bring up the wages of these dirty and difficult low skill jobs to decent levels where one can support a family, and also to require that all employees (temporary, part time, and full time) be provided with health insurance and decent pensions. Stop treating these people like slavery in America is still alive and well, and suddenly one will find that there are plenty of Americans who are ready and willing to do these difficult jobs.
A big change like what I am proposing isn’t going to happen as long as most of our elected officials are controlled by money and big campaign contributions, are afraid of change, and only look backwards.
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