Off to Farmer's Market after I catch everybody up on Arizona news

I am finally getting used to Arizona being in the national news. I read in the Arizona Republic today that Governor Brewer released a video suggesting that President Obama help us secure our borders if he wants to calm all this controversy down. People in families are lining up on opposite sides. My daughter is against the SB1070 and has taken to making remarks that upset me some on Facebook. She was raised in a ghetto on the west side so naturally she is thinking about how her Hispanic friends must be hurting. She has gone to all the trouble to learn Spanish for which I highly commended her, but what I would try to tell her and her Mexican friends is that this law does not mean that Arizona does not like brown people. An article was in the news today about a woman who owns the Barrio cafe serving authentic Mexican food involved in the protest at the capitol against a governing body in our state 'that does not like brown people' because of this law.
I would say that hundreds of people crossing the border every day for years amounts to an invasion from another country. Nobody likes the idea of doing what it would take to stop them at the border, but doesn't that seem like a better idea? Today Doc and I threw around ideas that would not seem too inhumane about how to prevent them from entering the country illegally in the first place. Senator McCain is now advocating the National Guard. That might do it. Or in addition to sending troops to Iraq and Afghanistan we could send them to the boarder to stop that invasion. Their sole purpose would be to stop people from entering so we would not have this big problem of stopping people after they get here, and determining they are illegal and must go back, after they have settled down and are busy pursuing the American dream.
Surely the armed forces could come up with a way to patrol this border that would be a whole lot more effective than what we have got going down there now. The touted expensive fence we put up once to detect human crossing also detected deer, and I suppose rabbits, coyotes, and possibly even mice! Of course if we get serious about stopping people at the border, Mexico might not like it and would protest we did not like brown people, as well as Guatemala or any other country who has illegals crossing the border. Apparently there are a lot of people in this country who cannot stand being accused of not liking brown people, including my daughter. I understand. She grew up with brown people. She loves them. Most of them were citizens. But my daughter has always had great sympathy for the poor, the hurt, the starving, which of course many are who want to come to the United States.
Things are bad in their country. They don't have enough to eat. So why can't we share? Well, we have shared, for many years we have not really gone all out to secure our borders. That's because I think we are people with big hearts who would like to take in the whole world.
But now border states like California and Arizona are broke, our governor says the costs of taking care of all these people has gotten too great. And then there are the bad people who have taken advantage of the 'porous' border (to quote Governor Brewer and me) to ferry illegal drugs across. I just read about the 'drug trains' some have taken to doing now, two armed people walking in front, the people carrying the illegal drugs in between, and two people armed walking behind, with the ones with guns ready to shoot anyone who tries to stop them or take their contraband. This can lead to an awful lot of unpleasantness for any Arizona residents owning property in the corridors where the illegals cross. To say nothing of the terror factor which I experienced on the west side in HUD housing with illegals coming into that area to assimilate.
I started keeping track of all the illegals involved in car accidents that killed or injured people who were not insured, may not have driver's licenses, most likely were intoxicated. I kept track of illegals who were responsible for murders in the neighborhood and my complex and who shot and either wounded or killed police officers in Phoenix. When the numbers started to add up, I started getting angry. I am sure every time an illegal got caught committing a major crime, a policeman got angrier, too.
My daughter was not keeping track of crime as I was. She had her mind on other things and soon left to go to the University where she studied Spanish, joined a church that had outreaches in Mexico. She even flew to Mexico City twice during the time she belonged to that church, and she once spent two months in Mexico when she was learning Spanish. Her sympathy grew for the Mexican people on seeing them in their own habitat, while my sympathy dealing with crime in my complex long after she went to college got less and less with the numbers of illegals and the problems they created with drug trafficking, guns, and shooting up the neighborhood.
So our experience often determines how we are going to feel about an issue. I saw that illegals did not hesitate to use guns, more so than citizens because they were illegal. All we had were the police to protect us in an increasingly violent area.
When my daughter got pregnant by a University student from Sudan, whose wealthy father sent all his children to foreign countries to be educated, I was upset, but I was not going to make an issue over it since I had her without benefit of marriage as I did her brother, my youngest son Dan. I was a virgin when I married my first husband and had my two oldest boys. This husband would get drunk and threaten to kill me on a regular basis. By the time I got through 10 years of marriage with him I did not think that marriage made much difference when it came to violent husbands. I had terrible difficulty leaving this guy partly because of all that legal marriage entails in our society. I felt I had had to put up with ten years of misery because of how severing this tie was going to be regarded by my society, my family and his, and by him! He had too much power as a legal husband I thought.
I vowed I would never marry legally again and I never have. I was not legally married to the father of Ronda or Dan although he insisted we go through a sham of a marriage that I knew was not legal because he had not yet gotten a divorce from his first wife. This changed my name to Hitt to match my kids' last name which he changed. I left my name Hitt so we would all be Hitts in the same household. He married a third wife, so he has never made any fuss about my having the name Hitt because he was the one who insisted on going through the ceremony.
He also proved to be so violent when he got drunk, too, that I was very relieved I did not have any legal tie to him. In fact he threatened to hit me in the stomach thus providing an abortion when I was pregnant with Dan. I told him to just leave, that this would be my baby and he took me at my word and never came near Dan. He had no legal tie to Dan and I thought from how he talked he would say he did not think he was his because we were not living together when he was conceived, even though Dan looks like him. He was an accident who happened when we met only one night when he went through town in an 18wheeler. But I wanted more kids and loved and enjoyed my kids very much.
I was happy when I got pregnant with Dan. I thought I was destined to have 3 boys and a girl. So Dan completed a family I had foreseen I would have years before. His father was the only guy I ever met who was remotely interested in having kids with a woman my age.
I had money I inherited from my dad on which I raised the kids for 12 years. I paid for their births and for my caesarian and to get my tubes tied. I hoped to have published a book since I wrote a number by the time my money ran out. That was not to be the case, in fact I became disabled in my early fifties after going back to work for some years, which is what I was doing in a HUD complex for women and children. I got in desperate straits. I felt I did not get published because people were not interested in the issues I wrote about!
Ronda's former boyfriend, father of her son, did not want to be involved in fatherhood, but he had to pay welfare costs or lose his University student status, which he did until her husband formerly adopted Jamal and took over supporting him completely. So that was that.
The romance had ended as far as he was concerned before Jamal was born. My daughter was very sad, but she became a conscientious mother who loved her son with all her heart and soul, and she and I took care of him after she needed to go back to the University to get her degree to teach after her graduation had been delayed by the pregnancy. I had to tend Jamal quite long hours when she had to go back and forth by bus to the U..
As soon as she graduated and got a job, she had to move out or be put on my lease. She knew the neighborhood was violent and wanted to move to another area. We had a few words over all this years before, but then we settled down and became a team to raise Jamal, the sweetest most well behaved little guy in the world. She eventually met a wonderful guy who has been a great father to Jamal in every way. I was freed up to move out of the complex for women and children on the west side and downtown where I have been for the last 12 years.
All the nights of terror I endured on the west side because of all the terrible unrest in the neighborhood I would say was caused by the big influx of illegals. Many citizens got involved in helping illegals because they were of their race, because their ancestors had originally come from Mexico, and other reasons. Single women in the complex very often acquired illegal boyfriends.
I knew two of these women who got shot by them, and others who were threatened or shot at. I started feeling overwhelmed by all the violence. It was not any better place to live than on the border properties as far as I am concerned. It was not peaceful! I lived in terror, especially on the weekends when things really got rough. It was a community in a war zone!
Mexican citizens who were neighbors would sometimes express their upset with the influx of illegals. I thought the only way those neighborhoods were going to get less violent was if the border was secured. The constant influx of illegals had to have somewhere to go and this was one of the neighborhoods where they went. They went to all Mexican neighborhoods in the city.
I did not think Beirut would have anything on the west side when the bullets were flying, ricocheted off the apartment walls. There is nothing more terrifying than a bullet from a drive by hitting your wall. I can still hear the whine of those bullets. I would look out and see people running. Once I saw a guy go down right in front of my apartment, and saw a woman screaming over him. Pretty soon helicopters would be flying overhead, police cars would drive up.
I saw guys with AK rifles climbing the stairs next to my apartment. I called up the complex manager who lived elsewhere. She said there was nothing they could do. Not until this same gang shot up a party down the street, and hit five people, two of whom died did the police get involved chasing that bunch. I talked to the buddy of one of those killed. He shed tears, saying this was a guy he had gone to school with, known all his life, grown up in that neighborhood. He was doing nothing to deserve it and this violent gang of illegals invaded the party and shot and killed him!
At that time it looked to me like Arizona governors were doing their best to ignore the Phoenix neighborhoods that resembled Beirut on weekends. You didn't have anybody to tell who would do anything but the cops who were running here and there doing the best they could to stem the violence. I told my family never to come there at night. I remember Raymond driving up one day before noon just as a gang war was ending right next door. The smoke from the guns still seemed to be blue in the air. Raymond looked so innocent and unaware. I thanked God he did not drive into that gun battle a few minutes before. I told him he had just escaped driving into a gang war. He said, "Mom, we have to get you out of here." I told him I couldn't go yet as I had to have a place to tend Jamal. As soon as Ronda got earning a living, I could move away, which I hoped would be soon, but not until. As it was I was there 13 years.
Is it any wonder I am for the borders being secured? The neighborhoods where illegals must go to assimilate are all in a war zone just like the people are who own property close to the border. At long last we have got a Governor who has recognized the problems and was not afraid to sign this bill as a desperate measure to help a border state under siege.