As a retired public school teacher who devoted 23 years of my time, resources, and many prayer-filled, sleepless nights to kids from all walks of life, just indulge me for a moment.
I have a math equation for you in the form of a word problem. Now, I realize that I was NOT a math teacher, but all my years of teaching English coupled with my 16 plus years of personal education will probably suffice for this simple elementary equation. And to be honest, I already know the answer, but let’s see if you can solve it as well.
If 7,000 people (supposedly, mostly women and children) travel on foot 476 miles from San Pedro Sula, Honduras, to near Huixtla, Mexico, in 11 days:
#1-- How many miles did they travel per day?
#2--And at how many miles per hour did they walk, if they walked, let’s say, 10 hours per day?
#3--And how is this task possible for hundreds, even thousands of children?
I have done the math for you, but do not take my word for it. Use your calculator. Or better yet, get out a pencil and paper and do it Beverly Hillbilly style, like Jethro, and “commence to cyphering it” for yourself.
I think your answers will mirror mine, and perhaps that mirror image will shock you a bit. It sure made me pause for thought. My answers were:
#1-- 43.27 miles per day.
#2-- 4.32 miles per hour---for 10 hours per day for 11 days.
#3-- Impossible. It took the Lost Boys of Sudan six months or more to travel that far on foot.
Now, use some common sense, folks. 43 miles per day! Even if it were only the 20 miles-per-day ratio that one well-known liberal news source erroneously claimed it to be, this is still a mathematically impossible scenario for mothers with children. (Surely, 18-wheelers or flatbed trucks must be involved in this political stunt.)
This is proof positive that we must always dig deeper than what is being projected via media. We must do the math, and we must think for ourselves. And even though the majority of Americans are indeed visually based learners, we have to take a second glance at the microwaved sound bites that we are fed continuously by news sources and social media sites.
There is a not-so-cleverly hidden agenda to this caravan of immigrants, and it does not involve a simple group of individuals who are all desperate to reach the land of the free and the home of the brave. There is much more to it than that, much more than we are being spoon fed by liberal media – or even by conservative media, for that matter. And I, for one, am tired of news sources acting like we the common people have no common sense at all. I resent being treated like I cannot think for myself.
For example, I watched video footage of the caravan of immigrants traveling from Guatemala and Honduras to the United States the other day, and the beautiful, young liberal female pundit spoke of how we just do not understand that this entire caravan is mostly made up of poor women and their children, women who only want a safe home for their families. Her words were filled with both passion and compassion, while footage showed hundreds upon hundreds of caravan members walking by the cameras.
But as this woman spoke, in fact, the entire time she spoke, I saw only one or two women walk by. And as the cameras pulled up and away to pan backward, far down the line of walkers, I diligently searched for those “mostly women and children.” They just did not exist. Man after man after man walked by, the majority of whom were young, able-bodied Millennials.
The reality of the film footage did not line up with her impassioned speech. So, I began to wonder. Was she blind? Did she think we were blind? Or did she think that if she spoke passionately enough that she could force reality to resemble the imaginary picture she had painted with her words? Maybe, just maybe, she hoped to rearrange reality to fit her fictionalized agenda.
And who knows, maybe if she says it loud enough and long enough on enough publicized venues, her fiction will become the truth. I do know the overwhelming majority of Americans were immigrants at one time. We can all trace our ancestry via DNA testing or genealogical research and discover our own immigration journey to America.
One side of my family left Scotland devastatingly impoverished and came to America like so many other families in the first half of the 19th century. My ancestors left their homes with little to nothing, and generations later, they were still working sharecroppers’ lands to eke out a living. But they were proud to be free American citizens who immigrated here legally through America’s lawfully designated naturalization process.
Generations later, just like yours, my family has produced teachers, lawyers, engineers, farmers, ranchers, factory workers, and every profession in between. Some of us became musicians, writers, potters, carpenters, seamstresses, blacksmiths, and athletes.
Each of our families represents the beautiful, multi-faceted, diverse socio-economic melting pot America is known to be. And we are spread out across more than half the states in the Union because an individual somewhere in the world long ago had dreams and aspirations to come to America with hopes of a better life. But they first had to get here legally and lawfully.
Though I have heard some of my ancestors’ stories, I cannot fathom their struggles, just as I cannot truly realize the depth of poverty and despair right now in places like Guatemala or Honduras. And even though I have made multiple mission trips to villages in Mexico and Nicaragua, I have enough sense to understand that I was able to leave those poverty-ridden places and return home to America. So, I cannot truly comprehend how badly some of those immigrants in this caravan simply want a chance to come to America. I get that.
I also get that no matter how much liberals and socialists decry our land, the truth is that no other nation on the earth offers the everyday, common working man and woman the same degree of freedom and prosperity as America. This is still the place dreams are made of, the world’s best hope. And despite what the media might want us to believe, America is still the land of opportunity for people around the world.
So, understand me when I say this caravan of people is not wrong to dream of a better life, but they are wrong in their American immigration approach. Yes, of course, we welcome hard working people who want to legally come and contribute to our nation. In fact, we need them to come and add to who we are as Americans.
We want their story to become our story, but we want their immigration story to begin legally. And if they come to America the right way, then their descendants, like me, can recount that immigration story to their children with true American pride and freedom. If not, if they come here illegally, their descendants will have to tell some mathematically imaginary tale of how they walked thousands of miles in less than a month to storm the gates of America illegally.
If that’s the case, then maybe years into the future, they can resurrect that video footage I watched of the thousands of imaginary “women and children” who caravanned here to America in order to back up their imaginary tale. Or someday, maybe those future illegal aliens might even be able to watch a lovely propaganda video of their illegal arrival at our borders—just in time for America’s 2018 midterm elections.
But only if they walk a little faster – since they need to cover the 1,100 miles from Huixtl, Mexico, to Brownsville, Texas, in 13 days. So, do some cyphering, Jethro. That’s almost 87 miles per day, 8.7 miles per hour – about double the astronomical pace they are supposedly traveling now.
But who knows! Stranger things have happened in the magical, liberal, socialist dream world. But don’t count on it. After all, wasn’t it the Democrats who said, “Trump will never become President of the United States?”
