Picture this: You live on a rural Texas ranch.
In the middle of the night, there is a knock on the door.
You open it.
Standing before you is a young woman in tears, an unconscious baby in her arms.
"Help me.
My baby is Dying.
" "Are you legal?" You ask.
I for one could not imagine a human being so callous that they would ask such a question in that situation.
And if a person was that unfeeling, I could justifiably say that they will have untold sorrow, possibly in this lifetime, and surely in countless lifetimes to follow where they will have to experience, for themselves, the young woman's suffering and anxiety in order to wake up.
But then again during the Health Care debate, I was frankly surprised by the attitude of many Americans who do not believe in helping those less fortunate and only worry about keeping their own wealth.
Yet most are Christian and Jesus was reportedly poor, devoting his life to helping the sick and unfortunate.
I guess I just don't get it.
As a Buddhist, I follow the Eight Precepts, the first of which is non-harming of living creatures.
So what do I do, for example, when ants invade my kitchen? Let them stay and cause a nuisance? As a Buddhist, I have learned that in order to be non-harming, action has to taken before you are put in a situation where you have to choose between breaking a precept and allowing nature, or some other tyrannical power, to control you.
This involves insight and foresight, so I make sure that the kitchen walls, floor, ceilings and windows are well sealed so that I don't have to make the decision to either kill ants and break a precept, or live with them.
Somewhere between concept and reality lies that margin of ignorance which separates human beings.
Illegal aliens are not ants, they are people, and the vast majority are no different from you and I, trying to do better for themselves and their families.
The arguments for and against illegals are all conceptual.
The woman standing at your door is reality.
Our borders cannot be sealed as easily as I seal my kitchen - as a matter of fact, it's doubtful if they can ever be sealed.
Plus, Mexico's corrupt government cannot take care of it's people.
So here we sit, an incredible opportunity for poor Mexicans right across the river with open borders.
What would you do if your kids were hungry, if there was little justice in your country and much violence, and if there was no future there? And right across the desert, a short walk away, was justice, food, health care and a good future? Can you really blame people from wanting to come here? What would you do - follow some laws and let your kids starve? I think not.
We can't even put up with minor difficulties in this country without loud protests! We have only ourselves to blame for initially encouraging illegals to come here and work for cheap labor with no benefits, just so we could make more money off of them and increase our profit margins.
Again, big business, big money caused a huge problems that no one could see coming, similar to the economic situation we are in now.
You can close the barn door after the horses are gone, but the horses are still gone.
You might try and seal the borders, but they will remain porous, and illegals will flood in as long as there is opportunity for them.
Our success may very well bring about our downfall where porous borders and diverse interests crash our democracy.
Regardless, you just can't treat these people as criminals, just as you can't treat people who smoke grass as criminals.
These actions, sneaking into the U.
S.
or privately smoking Marijuana do not come from an evil place.
Paying low wages and mistreating workers do.
I recently lived in Florida where it was common practice for contractors and landscape companies to hire all illegal aliens, and the cops looked the other way.
Low pay, long hours without overtime, no respect, no safety equipment, no job security, no benefits, all the evils of management before labor unions.
If I were going to make sure that I don't have a problem with illegals, I would look no further than big and small businesses that takes advantage of the illegals every day in every state.
But how do you solve the overall problem? I believe that there are two radical ways that we can attempt to solve it, and which will be the two polarizations in the upcoming debate.
And one humane, sensible way.
The first radical, right-wing solution would be to close all emergency rooms to those who don't have either insurance or up-front money.
Let them die in the streets! Who cares? And stop, at random, anyone the police chooses to in order to check id's; at work, in your car, on the street.
If you're Hispanic, you get stopped, and if you have a bogus id, you are imprisoned until you can get deportation money together.
If you can't, you do five years in a federal penitentiary, and then the government deports you.
Machine guns would be stationed at the borders, a million man army, too, and dogs, mean ones, would chase down illegals coming across the desert.
Drug dealers would be shot on the spot without trials.
If you give birth to kids in this country and you are illegal, your kids will be illegal as well and will be deported as soon as they are caught, with or without the parents.
No illegals will have access to legal help, schools, or any government program.
Basically, illegal aliens would become sub-humans.
The radical, left-wing solution would be to have completely open borders, letting everyone come in from anywhere in the world.
Welcome! We would be the health care and opportunity panacea of the world! All would be eligible, as soon as they arrived, for all benefits as if they were citizens, including health care, schools, driver's licenses and all social programs such a unemployment insurance, social security, medicaid and medicare.
No enforcement of visas, no checking papers.
All would have every legal right that American born citizens have, and there would be peace and harmony throughout the land! And now the third solution.
Remember when I said that in order to uphold my precepts and not harm living beings, I make sure that my kitchen is sealed so ants don't come in, in the first place? Well, what if I didn't have a kitchen to worry about? That would certainly solve the problem! The third solution is to do nothing.
In truth, nothing can be done.
Porous borders and division and dissension is building not only in the U.
S.
, but worldwide.
Division in government, hatred amongst divergent political views and parties, it is all spinning out of control to the point that legislation is all but paralyzed.
We can see this in our own congress now, and when immigration reform comes up, watch out! If we do nothing, eventually there will be an erosion of good jobs due to the influx of cheap labor.
Void of any kind of regulation that can be politically enacted to prevent this (whatever can be regulated can be circumvented the next day) the tax base will fail due to loss of tax revenues, and since we have run up such a debt with other countries, the dollar will eventually fail, meaning that we cannot borrow any longer, meaning that our standard of living will eventually be watered down and approach that in third world countries.
Then no longer will we have to worry about illegals coming in here, but all the rich folks going to Costa Rica with all their money! Also, at this point, it would not be surprising, due to a paralyzed congress (too many diverse interests pulling against each other) that our democracy fails.
After all, our democracy is a very young experiment, only a couple of hundred years compared to thousands of years in China and India and put together rather hurriedly by a bunch a radicals (at the time) after a revolutionary war.
Then, however, there were very excellent principles to go by, and it was the people that made it work and continues to make it work, not the paperwork that resulted.
At that time the values included freedom, equality, privacy, due process, equity, consent and dissent, toleration, and the common good.
But if you look at each one of these values individually, you can see that they no longer have much relevance due to the diversity and cross currents that are fighting each other now.
So, things will go along pretty much as they are with a headwind almost impossible to fight.
Attempts will be made, laws will be passed but ignored, and inaction will rule the day just as inaction in the health care debate rules the day now where no significant changes can be made.
The status quo will try to be maintained as everyone attempts to protect his or her money interests until one day there will be no money, and the present resistance to change will continue down a road that is predictable.
Without a big CLEAR button, like the revolutionary war, divisiveness will paralyze us from now into the foreseeable future.
As a meditation teacher, I encourage people to sit quietly and watch their minds; to watch the greed, hatred and delusion that is always there, and to do something about these three before they speak, or act.
Freedom, equality, privacy, due process, equity, consent and dissent, toleration, and the common good are all wrapped up in what we deem as desirable, and these are good values which promote co-operation and compassion amongst human beings.
But nowhere in this world can we ever find perfection.
What we can do, however, is something that is very difficult to do, and that is to work on ourselves to perfect, as much as possible, our minds, because mind is the forerunner of all things.
Just a few minutes of meditation a day for each person would make a huge difference in the world, and could be the very thing that saves us.
Some might find this amusing, but nothing else seems to be working!