As I sit in my recliner and gaze upon the political arena of 2024 through my 65” window to the world, I am reminded of a job I had in the mid-60s. I worked summers for the Florida State Road Department on a survey crew. On one of those jobs, we were called to do some preliminary work on what would become Alligator Alley, aka I-75 to the west coast of Florida.
In a time before GPS, we followed paper road maps in our yellow survey truck to the edge of the Everglades. We had to “chop line” to lay out the location of what would become an interstate. Then, it was only swamp, sawgrass, brush, snakes, and assorted crawly things.
I would put on my rubber boots, lace up my snake leggings, and strap on the “brush king.” This tool was essentially a weed whacker on steroids. It had a gas engine attached to a long pole and a free-spinning metal blade that could cut through the sawgrass, brush, and small trees. In my harness I was safe and everyone else was in danger as I cut a rough path in a general westbound direction, which we thought would be the centerline of the new road. I was literally up to my ass in alligators but safe if I had gas left in my tank.
While I was buried in the heavy brush and weeds, I had only a vague idea of where I was going. I just knew I had to clear a path to better tell the contractor where to build the road. Watching today's political machinations, I feel we are still staring into the weeds and can’t see the bigger picture.
Joe Biden in his 2024 SOTU address referred to an “undocumented” person as an “illegal.” The PC Police quickly sounded the alarm, called out their media SWAT teams, and excoriated the president for his gaff. WTF! To become an “undocumented” person who is now hiding in this country, you have to have broken at least one of our laws. I would guess their point here is that while the act is illegal, the person isn’t. We are so concerned with semantics that we have lost sight of the real problem. We are once again caught with our heads down in the weeds.
The problem is the broken immigration system, not semantics. The immigration problem is a multi-headed hydra which, like the monster of Greek mythology, is immortal as long as it still has at least one head. Just as Hercules needed the help of his nephew Iolaus and a golden sword from Athena to slay the Hydra, any president needs the help of a Congress willing to put political theatre aside long enough to address the problem. President Biden’s main problem is that one of this Hydra's many heads with poisonous breath is none other than, “The Predecessor.”
Helping to fertilize the weeds is our "Us-vs-Them" mentality. Last night flipping channels I ran across an interview with a Latina politician discussing the immigration problem in Del Rio, Texas. The interviewer asked this person how, as a second-generation immigrant herself, she justified her support for Donald Trump who calls immigrants and the undocumented among us, “vermin” and states that they are “poisoning the blood of our country.”
This politician (sorry I didn’t get her name) lived in Del Rio and the interviewer mentioned that she probably knew of undocumented individuals living in her community. The response was typical in that she proclaimed that only Republicans had conservative values, loved God, loved their country, and wanted to protect families. The interviewer repeated the question three times before moving on after she got the same rambling response.
How any person of Hispanic descent can adore a man espousing white supremacist rhetoric and echoing language last heard at this political level in Nazi Germany, is puzzling. I understand the Republican bent of many Cubans in Miami who never got over President Kennedy’s handling of the Bay of Pigs. I know the attraction of strong-man authoritarian politics among Latino voters. I understand the religious conservative values of this population.
What I will never understand is the thought that Republicans have an exclusive patent on many of the better ideas of conservativism. If friends and relatives of mine were being called vermin poisoning the blood of America, that person would be my enemy and not my leader.
Perhaps it is time to break out the metaphorical “brush king” to clear the weeds obscuring our view. We can’t have vision while petty bickering and name-calling are drowning out the voices of reason. These voices of reason exist on both sides of the aisle but the Hydra of hatred and animosity must first be slain.
Alligator Alley was initially a failure. The entire project was rushed to completion in just four years and opened in 1968 as a simple two-lane highway. It was an illustrious example of poor construction and poor environmental planning that managed to kill people and wildlife with numerous accidents. The roadway was rebuilt between 1982 and 1992 as a four-lane highway with fencing and bridges to allow water and wildlife to go underneath.
I want to first claim my innocence here as I only told them where to build the damn thing, not how. The new road is still exactly where I told them to put it. I may have had my head down in the sawgrass but somehow I managed to go in the right general direction.
The 70mph Alligator Alley is the quick way from Miami to Naples, but the Tamiami Trail to the south is the slower, more scenic route. Both roads will get you there. As a country, we know where we want to go, we even know the way, we just need to get there the right way
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