Dick Trail

Opinion

Liberty or Security?

Tuesday, March 23, 2021

The news of the day mostly involves the horde of illegal immigrants swarming across our southern border. At the moment our facilities provide temporary shelter for all those people to allow time to process them, check their identification, fingerprint, check DNA, or even check to see if they have the Covid 19 disease are full to overflowing. It must be overwhelming for those charged with the job of attending to our Southern Border. A thank you to President Biden.

We can speculate that living conditions in their native countries must be so bad that they, the illegal immigrants heading this way, are willing to risk all to come to the United States. They have to know that the journey north must be hazardous. Then too, the Mexican Cartels collect large sums of money from the travelers probably with the promise of being smuggled into the U.S. and avoiding our Border Patrol. What then is the attraction?

Possibly those people that send their young children ahead and those who come as families are given the dream of free education for their children, free health care and government handouts to sustain a minimum but poor lifestyle. Then there is the assurance that, at the moment, once they get north of the border they will not be sent back to their prior homes. Currently, their new “freedom” also includes free transportation from the border to a place to live until they can get a bit established in their new home.

Then too there is the idea of chain migration to get their relatives, yes parents too, into the USA eventually. Actually, all those incentives seem pretty valid under the interpretation of the law according to the Biden administration. There is little mention though of who is going to have to pay for all of it.

Recently I have heard a commentator on TV, a learned man, posit that maybe there is a principle in life, all our lives, that is now taking priority and that may be the concept of security. This country, the United States of America, was founded on the concept that this nation should be self-governing. The concept of liberty free from the dictates of the King of England was inherent in our Declaration of Independence. We see it in the pledge that we all render to the flag of the United States: I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America and to the republic for which it stands, one nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all. Our Constitution mentions liberty many times and does not embrace the concept of a personal security. The security understood by the framers of our country meant that it was our government’s responsibility to keep our territory free from the invasion of other countries but that, thank you, we as a people were responsible for the security of our own lives.

When I first came aware of such things it was family that cared for their elderly. My own great-grandmother lived with her youngest son. No assisted living, no nursing homes then. For those in dire circumstance, the county maintained a “Poor Farm” where people lived and worked for their keep. Somehow there was a stigma attached to that and getting sent to the poor farm was universally thought not a good thing. Then too churches took care of their own by helping with food, shelter, and other needs. Still, those that gave to the church tended to provide oversight to such largess and were reluctant to encourage laziness in those who received the help.

During the Depression of the 1930s the government, under FDR, Democrat, created projects like the WPA where men could work and be taken care of all at government expense. Our own McCook Auditorium was one of those WPA projects. Then WWII came and it became necessary that most men of age enter the military with a few essential industries such as farming were excepted. Then ever so many women then went to work in the defense industries for the first time.

Eventually after that war the government, local, state and federal, began to accept the responsibility of caring for the poor and indigent. Thirty years ago when I was a county commissioner the county was charged to care for the indigent but only for the bare necessities. Boy how that has changed. A giant step forward in that direction was LBJ’s 1964 Community Action Act to Stamp out Poverty. It was paid for by grants from the Federal Government filtered down through the states. That program is still in effect today and the present percentage of people in poverty is still about what it was in 1964.

Evidently it is the dream of many in big government today that tend to crave more and more power and have found that they can buy more and more votes by handing out money for all who seek security (i.e. don’t have to work) over the liberty of taking care of their own affairs. Unfortunately, it isn’t their money, it is the money that you and I pay in taxes that is handed out, no strings attached, to those who are reluctant to earn their way in life. The dream is socialism with them in charge, of course, and never has socialism been a success.

I do fear for our country’s future but then Grannie Annie and I will probably not live long enough to be much affected. It is our children and their children who will have to suffer the consequences of the poor decisions made today. There is not much we can do to prevent the turn to the left but to listen up and vote responsibly.

That is how I saw it

Dick Trail