Tag Archives: general welfare

Alien

Words from Dic(tionary)

dictionary with letter A

Alien: (adj.) belonging to a foreign country or nation

People are funny. (But it is a good idea not to laugh at them to their face.)

What I mean is, the boundaries we establish for personal contact and acceptability within the human race are not only bizarre, but always prove to be irrelevant.

Even though people from Africa didn’t decide to emigrate to the United States, but instead were brought over on a “Kidnap Carnival Cruise,” complete with chains and beatings, we still decided to insult them while they picked our cotton by continuing the mistreatment and relegating them to less-than-human status.

We did the same thing with the Chinese when we were building the railroad. We welcomed them to the country so they could lay our tracks, work cheap and receive a good old-fashioned American dose of abuse.

Matter of fact, every nationality which has come to this land has gone through a season of being rejected as tourists, beaten up as neighbors and eventually absorbed due to the passage of time and proving their usefulness to our general welfare.

I think what some Americans would like is to have the Mexicans come in, clean the houses, work the menial jobs, pick the fruit and lettuce–and then somehow or another, be transported back to their homes in Mexico nightly, so as not to interfere with our present “preferred mix.”

Yes, if the Southern plantation owners could have had the black folks pick cotton by day, and then jam them into a space ship to go back to the Dark Continent to sleep at night–only to return at dawn to work, we would have called that the Great American Ideal.

But doggone it, those foreigners who come here and work for us for pennies on the dollar start desiring things like citizenship, consideration and worst of all, equality.

I learned a long time ago in that what betrays me more than anything else are my needs that vary from my wants.

  • America needs cheap labor and souls who have been raised in a culture with a great work ethic.
  • The fact that we don’t want them to live next door to us creates the conflict.

So I guess the only choice is to either lessen our need or change our wants.

Yes … that will truly be an alien concept to us all.

 

Adjourn

Words from Dic(tionary)

dictionary with letter A

Adjourn: (v.) to break off a meeting, legal case or game with the intention of resuming it later. e.g. the meeting was adjourned until December 4th.

The key to organization, which by the way, is the breath of successful life, is to get your ducks in a row without making everybody around you go “quackers.”

In other words, be efficient without being a jerk.

This is my problem with Parliamentary procedure. For when I think of the word “adjourn,” I recall all the meetings I have attended, which have basically consisted of children trying to act grown-up by following some archaic procedure of rules and regulations which end up being the conversation of the room instead of working on the topics themselves.

Quite bluntly, in that atmosphere, the person who seconds the motion and whether they have seconded a motion before instead of waiting in line, or whether the vote was taken before discussion, becomes much more important to the committee than whether they pass resolutions.

Thus, Congress.

The thing that upsets me about our form of government is that we’re much more concerned about maintaining the traditions of our system, tipping our hats to old-fashioned methods, than we are about whether progress is being made and we’re actually addressing situations before they slap us in the face.

I usually don’t pontificate on this issue because I don’t have an alternative.

I do understand if we don’t have SOME sort of order while considering options in a meeting place, that chaos can quickly become the ruler of the day. But I am not convinced that following the rules of Parliament (which by the way, isn’t even American) has anything to do with the general welfare or the common good.

What should come out of a meeting?

  1. All ideas expressed within a time limit.
  2. Those who are uncertain of facts should be able to question them.
  3. A vote–up or down.

That’s it. The quickest, easiest, friendliest and most human way to achieve that should be pursued with great passion.

I’m just not sure that all of the rules and regulations that we follow like a herd of sheep is doing anything but fleecing us of possibility.

So for me, I’d like to adjourn Parliamentary procedure.

Can I get a second on that?