This is My Home Country

Posted on 25/06/2014 by Grumpa Joe

I do not know Rosemary La Bonte nor her husband. All I know is that Rosemary wrote a beautiful letter to the editor of the Orange County Register, a California newspaper. It never got published. Her husband David took it upon himself to publish it for her. He sent it to friends via e-mail and asked them to keep it moving, and that is how I got it. Rosemary eloquently writes about immigration and the Statue of Liberty and what it means to her.. statue-of-liberty

Here is her husbands introduction to her letter:

For some reason, people have difficulty structuring their arguments when arguing against supporting the currently proposed immigration revisions. This lady made the argument pretty simple. NOT printed in the Orange County Paper … Newspapers simply won’t publish letters to the editor which they either deem politically incorrect (read below) or which does not agree with the philosophy they’re pushing on the public. This woman wrote a great letter to the editor that should have been published; but, with your help, it will get published via cyberspace! From: “David LaBonte

My wife, Rosemary, wrote a wonderful letter to the editor of the OC Register which, of course, was not printed. So, I decided to “print” it myself by sending it out on the Internet. Pass it along if you feel so inclined. Written in response to a series of letters to the editor in the Orange County Register:

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The Statue of Liberty

Dear Editor:

So many letter writers have based their arguments on how this land is made up of immigrants. Ernie Lujan for one, suggests we should tear down the Statue of Liberty because the people now in question aren’t being treated the same as those who passed through Ellis Island and other ports of entry. Maybe we should turn to our history books and point out to people like Mr. Lujan why today’s American is not willing to accept this new kind of immigrant any longer. Back in 1900 when there was a rush from all areas of Europe to come to the United States, people had to get off a ship and stand in a long line in New York and be documented. Some would even get down on their hands and knees and kiss the ground. They made a pledge to uphold the laws and support their new country in good and bad times. They made learning English a primary rule in their new American households and some even changed their names to blend in with their new home. They had waved good-bye to their birth place to give their children a new life and did everything in their power to help their children assimilate into one culture. Nothing was handed to them. No free lunches, no welfare, no labor laws to protect them. All they had were the skills and craftsmanship they had brought with them to trade for a future of prosperity.

Most of their children came of age when World War II broke out. My father fought alongside men whose parents had come straight over from Germany, Italy, France and Japan. None of these 1st generation Americans ever gave any thought about what country their parents had come from. They were Americans fighting Hitler, Mussolini and the Emperor of Japan. They were defending the United States of America as one people. When we liberated France, no one in those villages were looking for the French-American or the German-American or the Irish-American. The people of France saw only Americans. And we carried one flag that represented one country. Not one of those immigrant sons would have thought about picking up another country’s flag and waving it to represent who they were. It would have been a disgrace to their parents who had sacrificed so much to be here. These immigrants truly knew what it meant to be an American. They stirred the melting pot into one red, white and blue bowl. And here we are with a new kind of immigrant who wants the same rights and privileges. Only they want to achieve it by playing with a different set of rules, one that includes the entitlement card and a guarantee of being faithful to their mother country. I’m sorry, that’s not what being an American is all about. I believe that the immigrants who landed on Ellis Island in the early 1900’s deserve better than that for all the toil, hard work and sacrifice in raising future generations to create a land that has become a beacon for those legally searching for a better life. I think they would be appalled that they are being used as an example by those waving foreign country flags. And for that suggestion about taking down the Statue of Liberty, it happens to mean a lot to the citizens who are voting on the immigration bill. I wouldn’t start talking about dismantling the United States just yet.

(signed) Rosemary LaBonte

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In support of Rosemary’s suggestion that we not take down the Statue of Liberty I have often thought that we should build carbon copies of Lady Liberty and place them at the official entry points into the United States.  Along with the statue, I suggest we construct a replica of Ellis Island staffed to take care of all who want to become residents.  We must celebrate a system that worked as well as that which our parents endured with emulation. Instead, we have fellow citizens who want to tear down the successful system and open the door to anyone at anytime to partake of the benefits and to then  return “home” with the booty.

Many times, I asked my Dad if he missed his home country, each time he answered “this is my home country.”  Mom had a slightly different perspective. She pined for her home town and her mother and brother. The pining never stoped, and when she was seventy-eight years old we gifted her with a trip home. She spent six weeks living with her niece in her “home” town. When she returned, I asked her if she wanted to move back home? She responded, “this is my home.” Dad became an American with his first step onto North American soil.  Mom took a few years longer, but she finally admitted she too was an American.

 

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He Gives Me The Reasons

Posted on 07/02/2013 by Grumpa Joe

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Back in the nineteen nineties a company I did business with invited me to visit their labs in New Jersey, I gladly accepted. I  landed at the Newark Airport a few miles outside of New York city. My host from Celanese met me at the airport. Jack was a native New Joisey guy. He loved the state and the area. Since I arrived in the mid-afternoon, he asked if I would like to tour New York City. I smilingly agreed. Jack drove me through the tunnel and around Manhattan Island. Being a Catholic, Jack asked us if I wanted to take a closer look at Saint Patrick’s Cathedral. I eagerly accepted the offer. He pulled into a parking garage a half a block away from the church. The car was half off the street into the garage when he screeched the car to a halt.

“What’s wrong,” I asked? “

“Look at the prices.”

High above the garage door was a sign with the price list, parking for one half of an hour cost $20.

“How about if I let you off in front of the Cathedral and I’ll drive around the block until you have seen enough,” he said. “Those prices are too high even for me.”

Later that evening we dined in a restaurant atop the World Trade Center. I sat next to the window and looked down upon the Statue of Liberty. She was barely discernible from the height. For me, this was a huge thrill because it was the very first and only time I saw the Statue of Liberty in real-life. She looks so tiny from so high, but I could make out all her features and because it was near dusk I saw her torch burning brightly.

Years later, I was getting ready to visit my wife in the ICU at Christ Hospital when the phone rang. I picked it up to hear my son say, “Dad turn on the TV to channel 7, now.”

“Why?’

“A plane crashed into the World Trade Center,” he said, “do it before they take it off.”

I did as he asked and went into shock. A WTC tower was a blaze, and spewing huge volumes of black smoke against a sunny blue sky.

We talked about it for a while wondering how an accident of this magnitude could happen on such a crystal clear day. Then, we watched in horror as a another passenger jet crash into the second tower. That is when we realized that these were not accidents but deliberate attacks on our country.

My rage toward Muslims peaked after that attack. What did we do to these guys to deserve such an attack? Why do they hate us so? Frankly, twelve years later, I still don’t understand their problem. All I know is that we could not deliver enough hurt to satisfy my needs.

Slowly the story came out, and President Bush began explaining the problems he had with identifying a true enemy. He was ready to fight, but we didn’t know who to fight against. The enemy was not a discrete entity like it has been for centuries, it is a man on the street. He could be our neighbor or the nice guy running the restaurant in town. Congress struggled with the problem. The Commander-in-Chief needed new authority to go after the invisible enemy. Congress came up with the Patriot Act. We heard what it allowed the president to do, but no one really liked it because many of its features are in direct violation of the Constitution. Yet, we all wanted to hunt down the attackers and put them out of business. Congress passed the bill in spite of the violations. The argument that convinced me to accept this flawed law was that it would not be used against US citizens. The country allowed the Patriot act to pass although under great duress.

Another reaction to the attack invented the Department of Homeland Security. It seems our many bureaucratic departments like the CIA, FBI, State Department, and the Immigration never shared information and as such there were big holes in our security. It was my understanding the HLS came into existence to be the clearing house where all the departments that could not or would not share would funnel information and HLS would connect all the bad guys.

Today, I sit here wondering how in the hell do we get out of this mess? The first thing we should do is repeal the Patriot Act and go back to using the Constitution as the bulwark of all new laws. The second thing we must do is dismantle the Department Of Homeland Security. Why?

1. The Patriot Act has evolved into giving the Commander-in-Chief powers to indiscriminately kill US citizens whom he suspects are involved in acts of terror. That could be me folks. All he has to do is declare that he doesn’t like one of my posts and I’ll be hunted down by a drone and blasted into eternity by a rocket.

2. HLS has to go because they are preparing for war against the citizens of the USA. Why else would they be stock piling ammunition? Right now they have enough bullets to conduct a 30 year-long war that uses the same amount of bullets as the military did in Iraq and Afghanistan. That is a lot of target practice by a bunch of bureaucrats. What the heck is that all about?

Recently, a  friend called me a conspiratorialist (one who believes in government conspiracies) because of my extreme views on stuff about our can-do-no-wrong president. I am also considered a racist because I pick on a half black president. I do pick on him, and I do believe the government is conducting clandestine plots to transform America from a Constitutional Republic into a Dictatorship. If President “O” and his minions didn’t give me so many reasons of  concern I wouldn’t be thinking this way at all.

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Thanks Australia? This Is Awesome

Posted on 05/10/2012 by Grumpa Joe

I received this today from my brother. It is written by a dentist in Australia. He characterizes the people of America better than most natural born citizens of America. He hit the nail on the head and I appreciate his words. I wish everyone in America thought this way. The problem with this essay is that it was not written by a dentist in Australia. The piece was written by one Peter Ferrara and published by the National Review on 25 September 2001. Why do people do what they do? Wasn’t this essay good enough to steal and give credit to the real author? Or did the original thief think that he could change the author and spread the story without being discovered?

&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&

THANKS AUSTRALIA THIS IS AWESOME

 

Written by an Australian DentistTo Kill an American You probably missed this in the rush of news,but there was actually a report that someone in Pakistan had published ina newspaper, an offer of a reward to anyone who killed an American, anyAmerican.

So an Australian dentist wrote an editorial the following day to let everyone

know what an American is . So they would know when they found one.

(Good one, mate!!!!)

‘An American is English, or French, or Italian, Irish, German, Spanish , Polish,

Russia or Greek. An American may also be Canadian, Mexican, African, Indian,

Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Australian, Iranian, Asian, or Arab, or Pakistani or

Afghan. An American may also be a Comanche, Cherokee, Osage, Blackfoot,

Navaho, Apache, Seminole or one of the many other tribes known as native

Americans. An American is Christian , or he could be Jewish, or Buddhist,

or Muslim. In fact, there are more Muslims in America than in Afghanistan.

The only difference is that in America they are free to worship as each of them

chooses. An American is also free to believe in no religion.. For that he will

answer only to God, not to the government, or to armed thugs claiming to

speak for the government and for God. 

An American lives in the most prosperous land in the history of the world. 

The root of that prosperity can be found in the Declaration of Independence,

which recognizes the God given right of each person to the pursuit of happiness.

An American is generous. Americans have helped out just about every other

nation in the world in their time of need, never asking a thing in return.

When Afghanistan was over-run by the Soviet army 20 years ago,

Americans came with arms and supplies to enable the people to win back their

country!

As of the morning of September 11, Americans had given more than any other

nation to the poor in Afghanistan.

The national symbol of America, The Statue of Liberty, welcomes your tired

and your poor, the wretched refuse of your teeming shores, the homeless,

tempest tossed. These in fact are the people who built America. Some of them

were working in the Twin Towers the morning of September 11 , 2001 earning a

better life for their families. It’s been told that the World Trade Center victims

were from at least 30 different countries, cultures, and first languages, including

those that aided and abetted the terrorists.

So you can try to kill an American if you must. Hitler did. So did General Tojo,

and Stalin, and Mao Tse-Tung, and other blood-thirsty tyrants in the world.

But, in doing so you would just be killing yourself. Because Americans are not

a particular people from a particular place. They are the embodiment of the

human spirit of freedom. Everyone who holds to that spirit, everywhere,

is an American.

Please keep this going!

Pass this around the World .

Then pass it around again.  It says it all, for all of us. 

Please do not just delete. 

Pass it on first. 

Thanks!
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She Weeps for Many Reasons

Posted on 28/06/2012 by Grumpa Joe

She weeps for many reasons, but today marks a special event. The Supreme Court upheld Obama care as Constitutional because Congress has the right to impose a tax. The Supreme Court made the decision that Obama was not capable of making.

President Obama knew right from the start that the health care bill would never pass if he sold it as a tax. Especially after his campaign promise to not tax the middle class. Therefore, he and his cronies invented the ambiguous language which failed to define which it was (He speaks with a forked tongue). The Court saw through the subterfuge and decided for him. Now he has to live with the task of convincing the country that the single largest tax assault the US has ever seen is a good thing. This is another tax to pile onto the backs of the working class to make them tax-slaves to those who feed off of big government.

Lady Liberty cries because of the loss of Liberty we face with this regime. Justice Antonin Scalia gave us a Constitutional lesson regarding our loss of liberty and what we have to do if we don’t like the law. If we don’t like losing liberty, or this law, we should vote for new leadership, or in other words, throw the bums out. Let us show him that we are quick to learn and send the Constitution-Side-Stepper-in-Chief along with his head bobbing Senate packing

On the immigration issue, I  believe we should erect a Statue of Liberty along with a copy of Ellis Island at every legitimate entry point into the USA.  Perhaps the same symbol of liberty that greeted our immigrant parents will help solidify why a person wants to leave his home country to live in America.

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The Big Hoax

Posted on 24/03/2010 by Grumpa Joe

 

     Every day our lawmakers and pundits bombard us with BS.  They say, “we are a nation of laws,” but are we?  Sure, we employ sixty Senators and  four hundred and thirty-five representatives to write and pass laws, and they do write laws by the hundreds every year. When some poor slob has a problem, he writes to his Congressman to fix his problem so it never happens again. The Congressman, eager to keep his job for a lifetime drafts a law. He lobbies his friends in congress to vote for it. Together, they vote the law in. The rest of us who do not have the same problem  don’t really give a rats hoot about it. The law stays on the books, and congress forgets about it. Someone finds a loophole in the old law, and applies it inappropriately. Time passes, and some genius Congressman decides to be creative by working around the silly house rules requiring that congress debate it first, then vote on it.  A recent example of this is the reconciliation bill. The Senate adopted the reconciliation bill to fix differences between the house, and the senate versions of the health care bill. Originally, the bill reconciled differences in the budget. 

     How many laws do we have that lurk in the books with hidden time bombs like the reconciliation bill? Today, I tried researching what it takes for a person coming into this country to come in legally.  Try to Google that one. I got thousands of hits on what an American needs to get into Mexico, but very little on what a Mexican needs to get into the USA. There are stories of overcrowded border crossings and border patrol people at the gates who do a poor job at checking the credentials of those coming across.

     I was able to glean that several presidents were involved in opening the gates to the USA. Remember when, Jimmy Carter tried to make the country bi-lingual? He wanted to post all the signs in the country in Spanish as well as English. I bet that is where “dial one for English,” crept into the vocabulary. Bill Clinton made the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) part of his agenda. He also began looking the other way when the Mexicans began flooding across the border to jobs in border towns.  George Bush was no better. He wanted the country to have low-cost labor to pick lettuce, wash dishes, and mow lawns. He is highly regarded by the Latino population in Texas.

     I spent considerable time looking for the requirements for a Mexican to enter legally. I found one reference to a form that day workers use. Another actually mentioned a passport. A visa is not required. I’m sure the State Department knows what the rules are for entry, but I sure as hell don’t.

     So, what is the hoax? The hoax is we are a nation of laws. We have books filled with laws on immigration to the USA. Most of them worked very well until the 1980’s. (Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986 (IRCA)). Ever since then, we have forgotten what the laws are, and disregard them. We fail to enforce immigration laws. Presidents encourage the border patrols to look the other way. Federal Immigration laws are in such poor regard that big cities pass “sanctuary” laws. A sanctuary law prohibits the police from determining if arrestees are in the country legally.  We do have many immigration laws, but hypocritically, we pass laws to say we don’t have to follow the laws. What is that all about?

The next big push by our president is to reform immigration. I have some recommendations:

  1.  Start by enforcing the laws we already have on the books.
  2. Several presidents have chosen to clean house by deporting all illegal aliens.    
    1. During the Great Depression, President Herbert H. Hoover,  (R) ordered the
      deportation of all illegal aliens in order to make jobs available  to  American
      citizens that desperately needed  work.
    2. Harry S. Truman, (D) deported over one million Illegal aliens after WWII to create jobs for veterans.
    3. In 1954, President Dwight D. Eisenhower,  (R) deported 1.3 million Mexican Nationals during ‘Operation Wetback’. He did it to give returning WWII, and Korean Veteran’s  a better chance at jobs. It took two years, but the illegal aliens went home by deportation!

These three Presidents deported illegal aliens to help the country.  Obama can do it too. He has both justifications, i.e. a poor economy and returning veterans.

  1. After we clean house, I recommend we use the laws we already have to allow these people to return legally. This is a tough action. We must take it if we are to live up to the claim that “we are a nation of laws.” If we don’t, we are perpetrating the HOAX and spreading hypocrisy across the world.

Obama will not do it because he is part of the HOAX.

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