Quite the morning, wouldn’t you agree? The Big One is that the Administration was wrong about the Big Bad Border Wall. Apparently, we are going to build it after all. We had been selling it off for scrap, the small part that had actually been purchased by some other Administration and left to sit on the desert floor of what used to be the Southwest border of the United States.

We have added more than seven million people from all over the world to our population. You can add the “undocumented” to the total if you want, but there is something about the crowd that seems to surrender sovereignty to someone- or something else.

That was the newest breaking news this morning. There was more, of course. The individual who briefly was third in line to the American Presidency was removed from his position as Speaker of the House after one of the briefest tenures in that office’s (relatively) brief history. There will be more to come on that one today with Rep’s. Jim Jordan and Steve Scalise apparently throwing their fedoras in the ring.

With only a brief moment in the spotlight, Acting Speaker Patrick McHenry took the opportunity to oust former Speaker Nancy Pelosi from her temporary plush office held for her convenience on the Hill. A similar act of abolition affected former majority leader Steny Hoyer, but the controversy over power in the House may be distant enough now that the office shuffling will be relegated to “yesterday’s news,” which of course it is.

There is another that has “disparate impact” on the community of Old Salts. That would be the 75,000 health care workers who have joined the United Autoworkers on the picket line. That is the same one the Chief Executive joined with a placard the other day even as national policy is pushing electric vehicles that do not go far enough and cost too much.

We have a member of the Writer’s Section who was a member of that Union and “they” still smile at the idea they no longer have to report to a big old brick building to screw parts and panels together on the Swing Shift.

We have exported all that manual labor to manufacturing facilities overseas. Why exactly we did that with the certain knowledge that it was American workers who would pay the immediate price. You would have to ask Henry Kissinger about that, since he is still alive enough to answer.

That is not the same as the other former policy-makers who gave it away. But with the surprising variation in the topics of the morning news, we can expect some additional surprises. That would be the logical result of the improbable policy implementation we have been deliberately following.

A pal out in one of the western Square States has often opined that if you reward some sorts of behavior, good or bad, you are liable to get more of it. So we expect more of whatever is going on now, and the consequences are not even fully understood on this bright morning.

We may as well line up and get used to it, because we are busing our troubles all over. The Mayor of Chicago, for example, used to be against it all until it came to “their” neighborhood. In fact, the number of new migrants to America who have arrived without documentation is larger than thirty US existing US states.

So, the decision to resume building the wall is just a symptom of something else that we did without talking about it. That, with periodic states of emergency, is how we are going to live the 21st Century. Stand by. It could be fun.

Copyright 2023 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com