Letter from Slim Wolfe
Immigration – January 2006 – Colorado Central Magazine
Ed,
The solution to your migration dilemma might just be the policies of the present administration. If we destroy the middle class and break the cycle of upward social mobility, or better, if we land in a great depression, there will be no more jobs in service industries or agriculture, nor will there be any motivation for the world’s disadvantaged to come here in search of an economic bonanza. Those of us with retreat cabins (as in your cover story) will retreat, and the rest will become trash-recyclers. It’s happening today in Buenos Aires, they even run special trains for the dumpster entrepreneurs and their booty. As our Patriot Acts continue to lessen our civil liberties those furriners won’t even have the lure of freedom to bring them here. Couple that with the great mass of dead protoplasm created in Iraq which may, in 300 million years replenish our petroleum reserves, and you’ll have to admit we’re sitting pretty.
The other solution would have been the One Great Proletariat notion, in which pushing a wheelbarrow is as noble and well-rewarded as pushing a hot-mouse, thus there is no bottom-of-the-heap where a vacuum is created to suck in aliens. This might still come to pass if sufficient numbers of Americans rapture themselves up into a state of cyberbliss beyond this dreary mortal coil of humble hungers and wheelbarrow necessities leaving the rest of us to tend our flocks in peace.
Maybe it’s all by design after all, but I’m not so sure about the intelligent part. Why would I humble myself to please the designer who made Homo sapiens the keystone of all this? Intelligent design would have omitted heavy metal — as a weapon and as music — not to mention other sorts of torture and abuse. We need benevolent design, and we need to strike until we get it. We’ve seen it in the work of the great composers and artisans, so we know it can be done.
I won’t reveal the location of that Earth Mountain Commune, but I had a glimpse of that wonderful cabin back in 1982 and I’m glad the builder has come back to roost. Much as I cuss my proximity to the paved highway, it does have advantages over living at the end of a long and bumpy ride — for one who needs to work out, as I still do.
So, good luck up there, send up a flare and let us know how yer doing.
Slim Wolfe
Villa Grove
