Thursday, April 24, 2008

The Wall




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I beg to disagree with Robert Frost. Good walls don't in fact make good neighbors. If you are a good neighbor you don't need much of a wall marking your property line.
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I have a piece of the Berlin Wall here in my house on the east side of El Paso, Texas. I personally self-collected it in Berlin. The USSR learned that this wall didn't work. And the wall being built between The United States of America and The United States of Mexico won't either.
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In the name of protecting the country from another 911 type attack, the very worst form of jingoism, xenophobia, and racism is surfacing.
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I have lived in Europe twice. The first time was for a few years in the 1970's. The Vietnam War was raging and I was lucky to be sitting in an office with the U.S. Army in Frankfurt, Germany. To go to The Netherlands or France you had to stop and show your passport. It took maybe 5 minutes. Unlike here in America, where it can easily take you an hour waiting in line to get past U.S. Customs when returning from Mexico.
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Many years laters I lived in The Netherlands for 15 years working as the European General Manager for a multinational food company. When I got there you still had to stop at the border and have your passport stamped, and each little European country had its own currency. Within a few years you could cross the national borders without stopping, and most of the European countries had traded in their national currencies for the Euro common currency.
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The prophets of doom said it would not work. But it did. Almost with zero problems.
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We don't need to be spending outrageous amounts of money building a wall between the U.S. and Mexico. Not when such a large percentage of our own people do not have health insurance.
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No, Bush is as lost in this matter as he is in foreign policy. He is such a loser.
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But Hillary just keeps bashing away. She is so dishonest and rude. If there ever was a year when the Republican bums would be voted out for sure, this was it. And now due to her insistence that the country owes the presidency to her, we just might have another Republican president.
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