Post by DefendarioPost by T Jr HardmanPost by Sanders KaufmanPost by Homeless Capital of the U.S.The Mexicans have been doing this work for generations. But this
season, they were afraid of
the border bigots.... so the fruit rots on the ground.
I don't know if I buy that as the reason. From what I've read, the
Mexicans and Central Americans already here want construction and other
kinds of work formerly held by Americans.
Yeah, I heard that too - from you.
But when I go to the day labor office for help picking pecans or to
tidy up my yard - 30 Mexicans crowd around for the opportunity.
The reason that you don't have that many Americans crowding around is
likely because illegal aliens from Mexico have driven them off with
violence, which for no good reason, the police refuse to prosecute.
You have seen this happen in real-life, ToeJam Fascistboi? I smell
bullshit.
Nope. I was homeless at one time, having misjudged the cost of living in
Austin TX when moving there in a hurry ahead of the fuery of winter
settling in on Denver. The InterNet not being in existence, I had no
idea that Austin was one of the most expensive places to live at that
time, and didn't have the money together to even get an efficiency. I
wound up living in a VW Beetle once I prepaid storage and offloaded most
of my life from the car into the lock-closet.
I wound up hanging around a place called H.O.B.O, or "helping our
brothers out", where the City of Austin and County of Travis had taken a
warehouse (or former bus-station, not sure) used at night as a fairly
large-venue show club, and added a waiting room, some small offices,
laundry facilities and showers. Between that and the Salvation Army and
the local charity hospital and public-assistance clinics, it was
possible to live with something approaching dignity, even though homeless.
If you got there early in the morning, 5AM or earlier, you might get a
place close enough to the front of the line that that Texas Employment
Commission man, a fine hardworking fellow named "Sol", might be able to
find some work for you for the day. If that didn't work, you could hang
out in the parking lot hoping someone would come by and hire you. This
being over the winter of 1993/1994, and Austin's winter weather
amounting mostly to rain and more rain, work was fairly scarce and I was
luckier than most, having a working vehicle to get to places outside of
the bus lines.
Hanging out in the parking lot waiting for work, all day every day from
before sunrise til mid-afternoon, for several months, I had ample
opportunity to observe human nature.
Most of the people were indeed pretty much scumdogs in many ways, or
just pretty lame losers, with problems ranging from severe mental
illness to severed alcohol addiction, but there were a lot of folks who
were just passing through, or for whom Austin was their winter-over when
their seasonal migrant labor was done. There were a lot of what I came
to understand as "harvest tramps", not too much different from the Joads
in "Grapes of Wrath".
I made friends with one of the security guards, a Tejano from somewhere
down in the Valley. He had problems of his own, but no criminal record,
and he could play the hell out of a guitar. I learned a couple of things
from him and not all had anything to do with six-strings. He spoke
fluent Spanish and I noticed that he never spoke to the Mexicans other
than to tell them to stop doing something. I asked about that and he
said "most of them are here because they're on the lam in Mexico, or
because they can't afford TB treatments there, and Mexico's cops aren't
telling much to our cops and in Texas TB treatments aren't just free,
they're mandatory after diagnosis. (In the homeless clinic at "the
Sally" there was a poster advising of the dangers of multiple
drug-resistant TB being developed rapidly due to non-completion of the
regime by seasonal border-crossers who were infected.) Tom the Guard
also told about how his family lived right along one of the migration
routes, and the illegals were nothing but trouble because they broke
into sheds, stole things, killed or wounded livestock, and generally
were assholes with no sense of order who mostly didn't give a shit about
anything. Those were pretty much his exact words.
H.O.B.O had a sort of mixed management, in many cases they were the sort
of Texans who are the backbone of Southern Baptism and they might not
think highly of people who are down and out, but they are committed to
doing their Xian duty to bring charity to those who need it. In many
other cases, there were practically-communist leftist latinas who
quickly let you know that as an "anglo" you were allowed into the
facility mostly because the local-government funding wasn't about to
support overt racism in their facilities, especially considering that
the bare majority of people served out of that day-labor center were
"white". Texas being Texas, there was significant self-segregation of
the various groups, with a lot of the white homeless being pretty openly
standoffish (when not actually haetful) to the blacks and the Mexicans.
Most of the "Mexicans" actually were Mexicans from Mexico, with almost
none of them being in the country legally. They were in the minority,
but not by much, and we had a few new faces every day. We also had a lot
of cops cruising through taking pictures, mostly looking for a few
extremely dangerous criminals and they took a few of those out off the
population and in fact off of that facility's property or environs.
When a car showed up to hire, generally the different groups had
different responses. The whites generally gathered around to see who was
offering what work. The blacks would usually stampede over to the car
and form a line behind whoever got there first. The Mexicans would
surround the vehicle and mob it, climbing in the windows, and we used to
scoff at the lack of dignity displayed, because while the other groups
tried to have some semblance of order, when the Mexicans mobbed a
vehicle it looked like a rugby scrum with an oversized ball made in
Detroit. On a few occasions, the biggest Mexican would arrive last, and
some smaller faster guy who had arrived first would be grabbed from
behind and hauled out to the rear, and into the space created, the rest
would crowd. Sometimes this would be repeated until there was a crowd of
smaller people outside a crowd of larger people who would block the
others' access while they carried on their own negotiations.
One time I was over on that side of the building and a truck pulled up
and a white guy inside asked if I wanted a gig tiling a roof. I stuck my
head in the window and said sure, what was he paying and how long was
the job, I had a car and could get there myself, and then one of the
Mexicans crowding behind me pulled out a toothpick and broke it off in
the back of my neck, right as the guy in the truck handed me the
address. I was speedily ejected from the crowd by many hands but managed
to keep the address.
When I sought treatment at the local clinic, they put me on antibiotics
as a precautionary measure because they had no idea what might have been
in the saliva on that toothpick, and I was on those antibiotics for the
better part of my stay in Austin. They were strong antibiotics and
didn't exactly make it any easier for me to work.
In the meantime I spent the hours of the day, after the time it was
clear that nobody would be hiring that day, at the library, and
discovered that the fragments of the comet Shoemaker-Levy would be
slamming into Jupiter at extreme speeds later in the year. I also read
Livy's history of the Roman republic and did some other catch-up on
journals and trades. I wrote a little bit, and managed to get a freebie
membership in the Austin Writer's Guild, which since the days of "O
Henry" had always been rather supportive of the indigent community
whenever they showed the least merit. I installed a copy of the Citadel
BBS (from my PC which was in storage) onto their office PC and showed
them how to network and do primitive e-mail.
Meantime, when not at the library, I was up at the main campus of the
Texas Employment Commission and also UTA, where they had developed
publicly-searchable databases of job-listings. Discussing the matter
with one of the staffers, a UT student, I wondered about whether or not
those database listings could be dumped to text and left available for
dial-up, and then went off to try to sell Sol at the TEC annex at
H.O.B.O on the idea of getting those listings via his computer in his
office. I don't think he ever quite understood me; and in fact right
about then was when the disability folks were interviewing all of the
references I gave them.
So, there I was, some homeless guy who was half-delerious from
antibiotics and a subclinical bone infection at the base of my skull
where some Mexican illegal alien had broken off a toothpick in my neck,
and when the folks from Social Security started nosing around, they were
told that I was running around babbling about something to do with
computers and "modems" (whatever fantasy that might have meant) dialing
other computers to get job listings delivered to the bum corner. Clearly
delusional. I delivered about 20 lines of QBASIC code to the student
staffer at the TEC/UTA office along with a copy of "GremCIT" Citadel BBS
software set-up to dial into the Austin Writer's Guild PC as an example,
and I also installed a copy at the County of Travis outreach office.
Right about then was when the SSA kindly awarded me my disability, and I
bought some new jeans and t-shirts, put the rest of the back-paying
award into car repairs (I needed brakes, a muffler, and a new clutch)
and headed off to the Puget Sound area where I had heard they knew about
computers and modems and "stuff like that". Within 3 months, I was
living in a semi-decent flophouse on the edge of the Puyallup
reservation, eating salmonberries off of the bushes and regaining lost
weight. It turned out that my outrageously long travel to get to the
latitudes where the Van Allen Belt was thickest hadn't been necessary
after all; Shoemaker-Levy did stream into the predicted impact with
Jupiter, and Jupiter didn't ignite into a temporary mini-nova. I
resolved to read less science fiction.
Making some friends, I heard from them that in Whatcom County they were
amazed at the huge number of illegals that were appearing, though in
that part of the country the problem was busloads of people from Hong
Kong who entered from Canada and simply never returned, but the illegals
from Mexico were starting to show up in large numbers; I certainly saw
lots of spanish-speaking people flooding the day-labor corners at the
Seattle waterfront.
Eventually, back in the DC area, I got an incredible earache and tried
to go to a public clinic. I was told that the appointment list was 3
months long, and looking around, I could see why. The waiting room was
full of nothing but pregnant latinas.
Trying to get day-labor work around here, I discovered that nobody was
hiring whites, because "poor whites around here are always crackheads"
and "{blacks} are all junkies". But everyone was full of praise for the
hardworking illegals who were only ever wonderful in all ways.
Through years of personal experience, I have seen how the citizens --
especially the ones most in need of work -- are pushed aside by illegal
aliens, and I have seen how once the illegals get entrenched, they take
over the systems established to help needy citizens. The needy citizens
are still out there, and I'm just trying to "pay it forward". Back when
those systems were still capable of helping citizens as well as illegal
aliens, those systems probably saved my life, especially after some
illegal alien used a toothpick in my neck to infect me with a likely
load of spinal TB. I want those systems to be able to help the citizens,
and they can do that only by excluding the illegal aliens.
Indeed, the citizens -- rich or poor -- of the USA can only be saved by
excluding illegal aliens at the border, and by increasing interior
enforcement under a policy of Verification and Attrition.
And once again, my thanks to the City of Austin and the County of
Travis, and even to the people who were running H.O.B.O, where I guess I
almost invented monster.com and spent a fascinating winter losing 35
pounds while learning more about people than I had ever wanted to know.
--
Be kind to your neighbors
even though they be
transgenic chimerae