I just love how complex issues that will take years to resolve now pop up just before major elections to create a firestorm, then die away once the elections are over.

Any-one remember gay marriage? Holy cow, all the gays were on the verge of storming the church doors, forcing preachers to marry them right there in God's inner sanctum.

For Pete's sake.

Now it is illegal immigration. Or as I like to call it: why-you-pay-$1.30/lb-for-tomatoes-instead-of-$10.00.

Yes, I understand all the issues faced by communities along border states. How these immigrants are bankrupting the school and hospital systems there. Really, I do and I have very little solutions for that. Except how it's funny that hardly anyone has said a thing about the $150 million a MONTH we spend in Iraq. Dang. Wonder how much that would help out Texas and California? Congress voted the money right on over to Georgie-porgie without so much as a second thought.

But I digress.

Come on America, take off your middle-class black and white glasses. We created this issue. From this country's earliest beginnings, we depended upon a slave/indentured servant class to provide us with cheap labor. In the not so distant past, "illegal" immigration of migrant workers hadn't been a problem because before the 1960's, we had exploited black Americans to do the jobs we didn't want to do but certainly didn't want to pay any decent amount of money for some-one else to do. Then came the Civil Rights Movement and our consciounesses got raised. We had to find a new group to exploit.

America is in favor of keeping all these "illegals" when it comes to their wallets. Oh, just have to pay twenty or thirty dollars for some avacados or tomatoes or apples. Then they'll be screaming.

We are just such blind hypocrites that we don't want to see "them" and we certainly don't want to have to take care of "them". We just want "them" to stay quietly exploited so we don't have to feel any uncomfortable conflict.

Oh, and how about this. Most hispanic immigrants, illegal or not, follow the exact same course as your immigrant ancestors: poor, hard-working, non-English speaking first generation begets a working class, high school graduate generation which then begets a college educated professional generation.

So stop being a snob.

I heard a story of an immigrant here in the Charleston area, from a church volunteer who works with immigrants. This man was so poor, so desparate and so afraid of ruining his one chance at a decent life that he was catching frogs in the field to eat for dinner. He was starving. But afraid. Maybe he saw that bumper sticker that a friend saw in the Wal-Mart (I'm not suprised) parking lot: This is America, we speak English, learn it or leave it.

Eating frogs. In America. The land of compassion. The land of immigrants. The land of freedom. The land of Christians living the word of Jesus.