Res Ipsa Loquitur

There was one Hispanic family here when I graduated from high school in 1970, but oil industry related companies and other local employers kept needing cheaper and cheaper labor, and kept encouraging the influx of illegals until that one family has become 60 percent of the population. And you are probably asking, "Did they assimilate?". Not hardly. Life here has just become more violent and there are many more pigs, goats, fighting-cocks, and a lot more garbage and junk. To this second they struggle to Mexicanize the place and succeed more often than not. We now have drive-bys, gang-banger graffiti, and groups who loudly talk about getting rid of the White people in this area. What was once a nice, clean, comfortable, orderly, safe, and productive community, is now a chollo infested dump. And the law enforcement agencies and judiciary, the very same ones who were brutal to my friends and I when we were little hippies, forgive them, overlook them, feel sorry for them, and otherwise just stand aside and let them vandalize, murder, assault, rob, etc.. It's kind of depressing sometimes, but at other times it's a problem to solve.

We're seeing most of the same problems here, though I don't get the sense that law enforcement cuts them much slack. Initially we got decent, hard-working family types. Now it seems to be all bangers, criminals and drug runners.

Like I've said before, the biggest problem with illegals is the predators who follow them, just like a pack of wolves follow a sheep herd. The next biggest is the cultural differences, i.e., drunken driving is ok and so is sex with a 12 yr. old.

Sometimes I seem sort of intense about the subject, but ultimately, it's that or lose everything. You are right about the predators and sheep and I do know the difference. I have never resented anyone for the Hispanic blood. Having lived here most of my life, I have many friends who happen to have Hispanic surnames and all different amounts of Hispanic blood, but they are Americans. Also, for the same reason, at least half of my family members have Hispanic surnames and most of them speak Spanish fluently. But once again, they are Americans. What I detest is being inundated by a bunch of savages. And you are right again, most of their brutality is inflicted on themselves, but their garbage is inflicted on us.

As for the other, years ago I was a graduate assistant for an ethnologist who was writing a book about several different primitive groups in Northern Mexico. I read his notes, then helped him edit and assemble them, and remember reading several papers he had written (then - late 1960's) regarding a practice among sheep herding peon families in which the father or oldest son would take the oldest daughter with them to the summer camps as a way of preventing the men from having sex with the sheep. At that age I couldn't even believe that there were actually people who would have sex with an animal, much less a relative, and I asked him if that was true. His answer - "these people live in mud huts and eat weeds and rodents. Of course it's true." When I asked him why it was allowed he said that the Toltec, Mayan, and Aztec empires weren't able to civilize them, so they kept them as slaves, and maybe food. The Spainards couldn't civilize them, so they used them as slaves and for pleasure, and controlled them with brute force. The Mexicans can't civilize them, so, althought they still utilize brute force, they mainly ignore them and hope they will go away. Kind of makes sex with a 12 year old seem fairly mild.

And by mild I mean, horrible, but just the tip of that particular iceberg of depravity.

I'd imagine bestiality and child sex are pretty common in many primitive cultures....partly due to their attitude towards sex (necessity of life just like eating or breathing) and the practical matter of having sex with whomever or whatever is handy. Sex with domestic animals seems to be fairly common in this area, cows, sheep, goats, even chickens. And then there's the infamous 'stump-broke mule'.

And young females being fair game makes sense in cultures when most women don't live past 40. Not that I'm making excuses, but I can understand the practicality behind it. The problem arises when it's not necessary anymore, like today, but the cultural practice continues anyway. It's not just the Hispanics here, but also the Marshall Islanders who are having/causing problems by continuing outmoded cultural practices....like communal living for example. They don't understand why there's a problem with 20 people living in a 2 bedroom apartment for example.

And you're right, many of them seem to have a definite indifference to dirt and litter. There's parts of Springdale now that aren't much different from any Mexican border town. And I don't think it's racist to point out cultural-based problems. I could say the same things about some of my neighbors from where I grew up. And like you say, I don't care what color or religion my neighbors are as long as they're decent, civilized people.

If you don't mind me asking Kenneth, why did you leave ethnology? Seems like a really fascinating field to me.

I wasn't one, specifically, although I have the education. I went through the graduate and undergraduate programs because they were interesting. Not because I had a plan, and I never used the degrees afterward. Why? I Didn't know I could. Even here, but especially in Arkansas, we were so totally isolated and so totally ignorant that it should probably have been terminal. I had a very happy childhood but it was because we never associated with anyone else. I hated high school and barely graduated, but somehow went from being shunned white trash in this school system (we were the only people on welfare in a very affluent small community and there were too few Mexicans or Blacks for them to be effectively mean to), to the anonymity of the early 1970's colleges, where I became a full-blown drug saturated, commune living, estranged from "the establishment", bon-vivant appreciating hippie. I just happened to complete many years of college classes during, and afterward. My family was so poor, so socially ignorant, and so agoraphobic, that although I went through high school, then on to college for several degrees, I never understood that formal education had a point beyond pursuit of knowledge. I only went to school because it was interesting and I worked at whatever I could find to do so. My first degree was a bachelors in Geology, which was a complete accident, and I never used it again except to get into a graduate geology program later on. A month after I got that degree, during an oil boom, I got a job as a garbage collector, and was sincerely grateful. Even though at the same time all of my Geology friends went on to work for oil companies, and I sort of wondered how that happened, I never really understood it. I continued going to college for the next 25 years, and although I was an excellent student (brilliant with the abstract), it turns out I was not very smart. I continued to work at menial labor (ranches and farms, oil field, restaurants, yard work, etc) and continued school as my favorite hobby. None of the people who I now know really believe I was that ignorant for so long, but it's true. I lived that way (one commune after another, one menial vocation after another, one college after another, and one new drug after another) until the early 1990's when I was finishing a graduate education program, and as part of a requirement, started tutoring prisoners in a detention facility. After I completed the degree in education, I almost quit going to school (except for that brief stint in a graduate psychology program) and at the request of prison administrators, went on to create, and then run, a school for that entire facility (juvenile prisoners, adult prisoners, and prison employees). It was the first time I ever used, or understood that I could use, a college degree to get a job. Sounds impossible? I still remember the first week I opened the school. I had never before been paid to do something that didn't require hard manual labor, and I didn't believe it was real. Even though I graduated number one in my class, I still didn't understand what the paper meant, and ended up sitting there all day, waiting for someone to come and tell me what to do. The second day I was so jittery that I started cleaning the floors and washing all of the walls in the classrooms, until the prison administrator looked in the door and said, "we have custodians for that. Get on with your real work." Finally in desperation I bought paper, colors, paints, etc., and opened the school for art classes. I figured I would just do that until someone showed up with the real plan. As the months went by, I accidentally created a school while I was waiting for someone to tell me how. And during that time I also somehow woke up. I quit wearing rags and living with junkies (although one good thing about junkies, they always treated me with high regard), stopped eating LSD, mushrooms and peyote, stopped being angry over ancient, real or imagined affronts, that didn't even bother me when they happened (we were treated badly when we were children, but so what. It's over. In the first place, we actually thought we deserved it because they were obviously better than us, and in the second place, they let us live),and really, as I stopped those things, I replaced them with activities such as mowing my lawn and keeping my house clean and repaired, being dependable (I maintained the school for a long time), behaving responsibly (when I left it was for something else that I wanted to do more, and I transferred the programs over to others so they would continue), and so on up to and including voting Republican. This is probably more answer than you wanted so to summarize, At one time I probably was an ethnologist through formal training, but was never actually was hired by anyone to be one, and that was so long ago that it's just a flashback anyway.

Funny you should mention it, but I've never felt comfortable in a completely mental labor job either. Even after I started my law practice, you could more often than not find me cleaning the toilet or dusting or something when I didn't have anything pressing to do. I'd never realized it was because I've never had a job that didn't require physical labor. But it makes sense.

I made a similar progression too, from being a man-hating feminist liberal (I actively campaigned for Carter can you believe it?) to a happily married conservative. Mostly I think because once I got out in the world, I discovered the real effects of liberal policies. Or, as I jokingly say, I used to be a liberal, then I grew up.

My biggest problems with illegals, besides the ones we've talked about, are that they're breaking the law and I've sworn to uphold the law. I don't give my word lightly. And then there's the fact that they're being exploited because they're uneducated and poor. I know what that's like.

And it ain't right.