Lately we keep hearing in the news about the Mexican immigration problem, and I am a little bit mixed on the subject. Quite honestly, I totally feel that it is anyone’s right to live here in the US. I think it is a great honor and a privilege to live in this incredible country and I think that anyone who wants to come here should be allowed to. After all, I am half Italian and half German and my ancestors came to this country and were accepted and I would hope that anyone of any race, religion, or nationality would be accepted into this country as my relatives were.
On the other hand, why is it that we will not allow these people to legally immigrate into this country? Instead of providing them with social security numbers and allowing them to obtain legal work on the books, we are allowing them to work for unaccountable income, giving them all the benefits of social services, health care, food stamps, etc, without any of the responsibilities of true citizenship like paying taxes. The whole system seems a little bit wacky to me. I am not really sure why we are afraid of allowing them to immigrate legally into this country. Are we really afraid that they are going to take over our country?
Well, guess what people…that is what we are doing right now. For instance, we are allowing all of our labeling and our phone machines to need to be switched over to being a completely bilingual country. My real question is why? When America became a melting pot, it welcomed people from all areas of the world, and they all entered the country legally and they all came here and learned our primary language, English. Now all of a sudden we feel the need to switch everything over to meet the needs of the Spanish speaking people. Why? Isn’t it true that whenever people in the past settled in new lands, they accepted the language of that land and learned to speak it. I personally would not expect that me wanting to live in a country would cause them to change all their labeling and phone systems and everything. Does it really make sense that you should not be asked to learn the language and culture of your new homeland? It makes sense to me. I just think that having them come live in this country should not cause us to revamp our whole system.
Now some people will use the argument that in countries like Canada they have 2 predominate languages, French and English, however, this has to do with the way Canada was settled. It was settled by the French on one end and the English on the other. By changing the US system to make Spanish a primary language in this country, it seems to me that we are slapping in the face of all the people who came here prior to this and saying that these people are more important than anyone else who needed to come to this country and actually learn our language. In my mind, this is absurd.
Please let’s stand up and have our country fight to make these people legal immigrants and let’s allow them to join the melting pot in this country and use our primary language of English.
Posted by Kate on Tuesday, June 10, 2008 @ 10:50 PM
How is it that people can claim that having sex with children is a freedom of religion? I mean I am all for people's rights to express themselves, but come on. Can we really justify acts such as rape and murder by disguising them as religion? Don't we as a society need to draw the line somewhere?
I just don't understand how in this country we can allow people who are obviously insane and doing insane and illegal activities and fear that we are impinging upon their rights of freedom. I mean that basically means that you can do anything and blame religion for it, it is not an excuse.
Take Andrea Yates, the woman in TX who drowned her five children in the bath tub one at a time while the other kids watched in horror and hid for their lives. Yates told her jail psychiatrist, "It was the seventh deadly sin. My children weren't righteous. They stumbled because I was evil. The way I was raising them, they could never be saved. They were doomed to perish in the fires of hell." I don't know whether this woman was truly insane, or whether she believed that what she was doing was saving their souls. That to me sounds like it would be religious justification at the very least. Thank goodness the courts did not see it that way.
Or what about David Koresh in Waco TX where his Branch Davidians had a compound? Here is a man who truly believed he was a prophet, but was he really? Koresh advocated polygamy for himself, and asserted that he was married to several female residents of the small community. Some former members of the cult also alleged that Koresh felt he could claim any of the females in the compound as his. Evidently he fathered at least a dozen children by the harem. Allegedly, his harem included girls as young as age 12. The other adults at the compound were told by Koresh not to tell anyone else about this "because they wouldn't understand." Would this not be an example of a person or group of people's religious freedom. Why were these people not protected by freedom of religion? Oh, that was probably because they were obviously insane.
If you look at these examples, you will clearly see that although we do have the right to religious freedom, we don't have the right to use them as an excuse to do whatever we want. If we stop thinking about what is logical and start believing that every insane act on the face of this earth is an act of God, we are not only condoning all the good on the earth but also all of the bad as well.
On that fact, maybe we should just do away with the criminal justice system all together. If we did that then we could just allow God to fix what he sees is wrong, without discrimination and without prejudice. This way, no one would ever be punished without just cause. It would be by far the perfect system of perfect justice.
Posted by Kate on Friday, June 06, 2008 @ 12:57 AM
I just saw that they are coming out with a new television show on human cloning. This is a subject I find a bit troubling. We all have been made aware that they can already clone sheep. Many scientists have been able to clone animals for a while and for all we know the meat we are eating has already been cloned. Genetically altering things seems to me to be a dangerous solution to the problems of today. It is a bit like playing God. In this day and age, where people are so readily giving up their DNA, who would know if the government is cloning them right now? The government may already have stored more people's DNA than we are actually even aware of. Think about it, most people are born in hospitals, and they immediately take some of your blood to perform a few tests with. What if they are storing everyone's DNA while they are doing this? The government has full control over the hospitals and could be doing this without our consent or knowledge.
I find it a difficult concept that they could be cloning each of us and putting another of us out into the universe, but would we even know? Probably not. People lately seem to me to already seem to be slightly genetically altered; some seem to function at a lesser capacity than others. With the decline of the human race as it is with a lack of morals and knowledge, do we really want to start putting 2 of these people out into the world? I would think that one less than normal person would be enough.
I know that we need advancements in science and medicine, but it seems to me that all scientists really want to do is explain the unexplainable and play God. In my life, I have accepted that I don't understand the bigger plans for the universe, and I don't always know God's plan, but I do not try to second guess it or figure it out. As a human being, I accept the fact that not every question has an obvious answer and I am okay with this. Maybe because I am not the type of person who needs to know how things work, just that they work or don't. It sounds like a really simple view, but I don't think that science has the answer for everything, and even in medicine, I don't think that they always make the right choice. I think that they feed off of our own personal fear of dying and use that as an excuse to find ways to save people. For instance, is it really in God's plan to have babies that were created in test tubes, or babies that are born 6 months prematurely to be saved in a box for a year, before they can even breathe on their own? What has happened to the natural selection and survival of the fittest? Not only is science keeping little babies alive, but what about the elderly? How long should we keep an older person alive and for what purpose? I am just not sure on these questions. I think medicine, science, and technology have a place, but I am not sure that they are not taking things too far.
Posted by Kate on Friday, June 06, 2008 @ 12:51 AM