by Lucy BrewerI work in our nation’s capital, where you can see the Jefferson Memorial up the hill. In the same block where Lincoln died across from Ford’s Theater, panhandlers work the tourists. An African-American man with mild cerebral palsy limps by pitifully, looking back over his shoulder at me when he thinks I don’t see. He passes by again, making certain I notice him. When I don’t look up from my book, he kicks the leg of my bench in protest. At the corner, another African-American man runs in place, until the light changes, when he dashes off the curb to run in place a few steps into the street. I know his routine well, but, like the Vietnam Veteran at the other end of my commute, he never asks me for money. Not like the one who lurks at the top of the Metro stop escalators. He stands in your path until the last moment, begging when he’s really demanding, and the cleverness in his eyes tells you that he knows that you know, and he knows there’s nothing you can do about it. It’s a free country, after all. Still. Technically.Down the block, past the Ghanian vendors selling their designer-knock-off handbags and other trinkets made in Taiwan curbside, I pass the American Immigration Law Foundation. You’d pass the place without ever seeing it if it wasn’t for the “Mexican Voices, American Dreams” sign propped prominently on the sidewalk. I remember visiting Ford’s Theatre growing up, and our world is changing. Just on the other side of the DC border, there are now two day labor centers in the suburban neighborhood where I went to elementary school. Down the road from my pediatrician’s office, illegal immigrants have a center that’s air-conditioned in the summer and heated in the winter, where they can wait for folks to pick them up to work in violation of Federal law, courtesy of local government and taxpayer dollars. Apparently the legal workers these places allegedly serve don’t feel comfortable waiting outside of unemployment offices like everyone else looking for work, the natural place where employers would look to find the legally documented unemployed. I go in and look through the brochures. After all, I might do something with them. So what do I do? Well, that changes, depending on the day and the moment. One night, it might be something as small as working on the family genealogy, and the history of from where we came. Another night, we might read the children Celtic fairy tales, or Hans Christian Andersen, or other children’s stories. My youngest’s favorite story is how Hans Brinker plugs the dike with his finger, holding back the water that saves the town. Another night, I write my Congressman and local politicians. We show up at critical town meetings, we sign up for alerts on key legislation. We chose a place where we dug deep, set down roots, and now we belong to it. This is the place we “own”, or it owns us, however you want to look at it, and we choose to stand here because this is where our children will grow and go to school. We show up at PTA meetings, we join groups, and we vote on every issue on how taxpayer money will be spent, because, if you do not build it, they won’t come. The indigent and the replacement votership our government is intent upon importing at taxpayer expense, those who pay no taxes in an underground shadow economy but receive millions in taxpayer-paid medical care and education social services annually, those conservatively estimated at 12 million right now. Those who, if amnestied, would pay only a fraction of the cost of taxpayer services they would receive, and who would vote to increase taxes to invest more in these services, vote for the North American Union, vote for open borders, ever increasing their numbers until there is, effectually, only one vote. We keep vigilance with the vehemence of a subsistence farmer keeping weeds from his family’s garden patch. We don’t want “don’t ask, don’t tell” laws to keep our local law enforcement from checking the citizenship status of an arrested criminal, we don’t want day labor centers in our communities, and we want our local law enforcement to be able to enforce Federal immigration laws and arrest and deport illegals in protection of our communities, and we vote, solicit, gather and protest accordingly. They say they “do the jobs Americans won’t do”, but it’s because your law-abiding, average American citizen can’t afford such low wages carrying the tax burden that they do and still make enough to feed a family. Or afford to send a kid to college without benefit of “citizenship not required” diversity-based funding programs, for which they pay but are excluded. For a bunch of economically destitute laborers who come to the U.S. for a piece of the American Dream, they have legal and legislative presence and political influence worthy of a small Arab emirate. Is it the organized crime, drug dealers and human traffickers who finance the attorneys proposing local and state legislation to keep them here and bring more, or is it the corporate interests who pay them slave wages and float their health care costs at the expense of our community? More and more, I think it’s all of them. Our politicians who sell us out to the interests of the highest econo-political bidder. And our unions haven’t sponsored a “save American jobs” advertisement campaign in decades. The last commercial I remember had to do with the “touch and feel of cotton”, back in the early ‘80s. The collusion of AFL-CIO and the Republican party scandal was hardly a surprise – they scavenge the same taxpayer carcass. Only it isn’t dead. Not yet, anyway.We fight to decrease welfare service programs and taxation, to make our community less appealing to the legal indigent as well. And, most importantly, we don’t buy into the great lie about our own insignificance and helplessness. We know, from talking to folks and all the news bytes we get from the Internet and all our group memberships, that there are millions of people out there just like us. We don’t buy into the myth our liberal media transmits daily to make us believe we are the only ones, so we have no hope of stemming the tide and we don’t even try. We look around us at every bit of encroachment, and we remind ourselves of what would happen if we didn’t do whatever bit of weeding we’re doing today – a garden swamped by weeds.Tonight, my focus will be to print out some flyers. Tomorrow, I will take them along with some “Save American Jobs” bumper stickers. Maybe I’ll tuck some into the shelves at the AILF office, or pass them out on the sidewalk nearby, in sight of the Jefferson Memorial. Edmund Burke is supposed to have said, “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.” So we do something, daily, whatever and whenever we can. We keep our finger in the dike.