Something I'm really on the fence over...

I live in the furthest furthest furthest southwest corner of the continental United States. The way the crow flies, I'd be in Tijuana, Mexico (TJ) in ten aeronautical miles.

This proximity, being the case, there is an awful lot of debate over illegal immigration round here. It gets hot and heated and a lot of attention.

People are concerned. A lot of people are. And then there's me.

I'm so on the fence here.

I mean irrespective of the religious implications, I really do want to help the less fortunate and it is also in my natural nature to want to love my neighbor.

When I imagine it, I see what US economic engines could do to rally people together around the resources all over that land. The standard of living would rise across the board for a lot of people down there and all it basically would take is some direction and organization of some sort. I wonder what a group of western philanthropists could do if given a region for a test spot. I wonder.

I am for restrictions on the border absolutely, and the laws in place are effective when they can be enforced. It's just that if it were my job to tell a little Mexican girl she had to leave her classroom because she is on the wrong side of the border, it would wear on my heart something terrible.

(Oh what's a mother to do? I worry worry worry over you kids)...

Spiritual Emergencies...

"I'm very spacious about this kind of thing, because I've seen people spend time in catatonic stupors in mental hospitals as a result of drugs, and later they turn out to be more effective as human beings, more alive to the moment, than people that went through Harvard and came out summa cum laude. Even with my relatives, whose kids got doped and started to fall apart, and the parents put them in a treatment program, because they freaked because the kid wasn't going anywhere. And I understood the parents' fear, but when I looked at the parents' own lives, I thought, what is it they're trying to do? They're trying to justify their own lives., which has a completely dysfunctional mythology connected with it. And if the kid says, "I don't want to play the game", is that health or is it sickness? Are you asking them to be initiated into a pathological system?

Ram Dass