I get confused. Other times I just get angry. I listen to the people that talk about a divided America. Sometimes, I have heard some of those same people say “They will not replace us”. That statement is meant to divide us and the people who are yelling it are trying their damnedest to keep us divided. In my opinion, they want to keep us divided by race but at the same time have a unified White front, not a unified country. Good old white power, and what upsets them the most is not the minorities that disagree with them but it is the White people that disagree with them. Sometimes I think that they want us to feel like we are betraying our race. The people that have pushed the “Great Replacement Theory” do so to strike fear into White people’s hearts, especially old people like me. The problem with that strategy is that it is more successful than it should be.  It is one that uses hate and fear to control how we vote and in the long run, will hurt the growth of our country. 

One huge part of the “Replacement Theory” is our so-called immigration problem. The Republicans have claimed that is why the Democrats have the so-called “open border”. They like to paint a picture of hordes of Illegal immigrants pouring across the border and being given voter registration cards to vote Democratic. Of course that isn’t true. That lie is just meant to scare you old White people and to prey on people's prejudices. There was a Missouri Senate candidate that said the Democrats wanted to replace us with Hispanics from Mexico and Central America. Having been around as long as I have I know that the Democrats have no such plan. Democratic administrations deport people just as Republican administrations have and at times in greater numbers. If you look at the actual numbers which are out there for everyone to see you will notice that more people were deported by the Obama Administration than by the Trump Administration. Trump ran on securing our southern border but his only solution was to build a wall that could be climbed over or gone under. They say that talk is cheap but in the case of Trump his talk was expensive and it wouldn’t have made much of a difference. When the majority of the illegal aliens come in through legal ports of entry no wall is going to fix that. 

I have always thought that the reason why there has been no solution to our immigration problem is because we have such a thirst for cheap labor. The people with money, the people that are the power behind our Politicians, don’t really want a solution. Undocumented workers and uneducated workers keep our wages low. Lower wages means more profit and that is what contributes to the huge income disparity in our Country. Lyndon Johnson had his war on poverty but I really don’t think that it accomplished what he intended it to. In many ways, I feel it may have made it worse. Many people think programs from the 60s made too many people dependent on the government. That in turn led to the resentments in the 70s of government handouts that eventually led to Reagan declaring the government as bad, something that was holding the system back. That was one of Reagan’s main themes -  welfare. That may have started our war on the poor. The poor became something to demonize. People were poor because they were lazy. People depending on the government for handouts made people not want to work. See the vicious cycle we have in this country. Our system creates poverty through low wages and then calls the people that make those low wages lazy and blame them for being poor. In reality, many have never wanted people to escape from poverty. 

The problem all along has been low wages. There should not be a job out there that does not pay a livable wage. If people are getting rich by paying people a non-livable wage they have no business being rich and their businesses have no right to exist.  Working people should not be made to live in poverty but they do in America. Why is that? Everywhere I look there are help wanted signs. There actually seems to be a labor shortage. I have heard that is because people no longer want to work for low wages. What confuses me is people don’t want to work why are the unemployment numbers so low and the job creation numbers so high? If people don’t want to work then where are they getting their money? Welfare? Welfare is not what it was pre-Reagan; in fact, the majority of people that are getting help from our government are working. We go back to those low wages as being the problem. In fact that some states are now proposing to weaken Child Labor laws. This is happening for maybe many reasons. One is that we would rather employ children than allow people to immigrate. Another is that in an effort to keep wages low they will employ children. I find both of those reasons disgusting. I had heard that in one state they wanted to have children down to the age of 16 to be able to tend bar and serve alcohol. I had thought that society had moved past such things and the laws that they are trying to change were actually created to protect our children.

Let’s not forget their attack on Social Security and want to raise the retirement age. There are many ways on how to shore up Social Security but the one that is talked about by people like Ron Johnson and other Republicans is raising the age to 70. Could it be that they want to keep people in the workforce longer so they don’t have a labor shortage? Maybe they want to keep Grandma and Grandpa working longer so they don’t have to allow more workers into this country. Are hatred, racism, and bigotry leading the call to keep Grandma and Grandpa from retiring? I could be wrong but it is something to think about. 

That is why it is so confusing to me. I hear one thing then a see another. People talk about a united America yet work to keep us divided. People talk about immigration reform but really do not want to really tackle the real reason for immigration which is not the illegal workers but the people that benefit from those illegal workers. They talk about wanting people to be less dependent on Government without real pathways for them to succeed. Low wages and income inequity just create people dependent on the Government. We talk about how important an education is for a child and then we will allow them to work at jobs that will take away from that education. If their parents made a livable wage the children would not feel the pressure to work. They will deny this but in some cases, it looks like we are turning our backs on laws that date back to 1938 protecting children. We have a labor shortage we need to address as it has been done in the past through immigration and not putting our children to work and robbing many of their childhood. As baby boomers get older, retire and die our labor problems will not go away they are only going to get worse.