Once again politicians are responding to polls instead of acting like leaders as they give their support to issues like California’s proposition 187 otherwise known as the Save Our State proposition and the prison pork bill known as 3 Strikes You’re out.
As we in the U.S. look at the Nov. 8 midterm elections, we are confronted by politicians who cannot articulate any programs of progress, rather they respond to polls and chose to govern by committee. All of us are aware of the fable that Says a camel is a horse, designed by committee.
California, Texas and Florida undoubtedly pay an unfair share of the costs of Illegal Immigration, Their respective governors have threatened to sue the U.S. government for the costs that the state’s feel that the center demands that we provide. Yet statistics indicate that, overall, immigrants contribute far more in benefits than they exact in costs.
But the heated rhetoric of ant immigrant “Blame the Brown Skins” holds sway here in California and across the country. Proposition 187 wants to turn teachers into INS agents making the demand that educators report children whom they suspect are not here legally expel them from school and deport their parents.
Most teachers I know have quite enough to deal with, including overcrowded classes, unfed and ill prepared students, gun-toting, drug dealing, neighborhood punks and students who are legally here but do not speak English well or well enough to actually understand everything that’s going on.
Now, as well as reporting suspected child abuse they are to report suspect parents. What will tip them off? That the child speaks with an accent? So do many longtime residents of the U.S. including some teachers that I know one from Austria, another from Laos and another from the Punjab. What else might indicate “foreigners”? The child’s name? No Billys, Bobbys or Sues need worry but how about Jose or Jaswinder? Already I’m aware of a born here Sikh boy whose application to college was returned with the notation to take Toefl the test for students for whom English is a second language what caused the college to suppose such a thing? The fact that his given name was Randeep Singh instead of Randy Smith?
Maybe we can excuse this as an “Honest” mistake, personally I think it rather presumptuous of anyone to suppose, without proof, that someone doesn’t “belong here,” just because their name or accent isn’t appropriately ‘Western.’ Another hot issue of course is crime like poverty, crime has always been with us but with the increasing emphasis on materialism and instant gratification the ‘better nature’ of humans seems to have been buried by “I want it now and I want it my way.”
So to address the criminal element our politicians vow to “build more prisons” and “put violent felons away for life” but the facts belie this as an answer to our increasingly violent society if incarceration were the panecea, the U.S. and South Africa, with the highest rates of prisoners to general population in the world, would be the most peaceful and crime free countries on earth this is not the case.
Currently our prisons are filled with nonviolent drug offenders who had the misfortune to get caught during the never to be won, war on drugs.’ The Reagan years instituted mandatory long sentences for even first time offenders, meanwhile murderers and rapists get “time off for good behavior.”
A pot smoker gets 1020 years without parole and a murderer is out in seven years or less and this is justice. Now with the idea of “3 Strikes” a petty thief can join the druggies at the expense of the taxpayers and a killer who was never convicted of anything else will get a few years maybe the governor feels comfortable with “three strikes’ but let’s hope the voters cry “foul” because the only people to benefit from this misbegotten legislation will be the few contractors hired to build these massive warehouses and the guards 1 staff them the rest of us will be no safer, but lots poorer.
Article extracted from this publication >> September 30, 1994
