“A Guatemalan town remakes itself in Indiana” – TTG

All the participants in a September basketball tournament in Seymour, Indiana, are members of the local Chuj community, Indigenous migrants from Guatemala. Jamie Vicente, Filipe Miguel, and Diego Martin play for Los Bulls from Rantoul, Illinois.

SEYMOUR, INDIANA  On a balmy day last September, hundreds of people gathered for a raucous, all-day basketball tournament in Gaiser Park, one of the sprawling, well-kept green spaces in this small midwestern town. All the players and participants were members of the local Chuj community, Indigenous Maya immigrants from a remote region of Guatemala in the country’s mountainous north, nearly 4,000 miles away.

Chuj people began migrating to Seymour some 20 years ago from the town of San Sebastián Coatán, in the province of Huehuetenango. Word about employment and the quality of life in Seymour soon spread to small villages nearby, and now Seymour has more than 2,000 Chuj residents, comprising over 10 percent of the town’s population. Thousands have moved to other small towns in the Midwest, such as Columbus and Logansport in Indiana, Cookeville and Shelbyville in Tennessee, and Rantoul, Illinois. On this day, the basketball teams from each of those towns—Los Primos (Cousins) from Seymour, Los Alcones (Hawks) from Columbus, Los Bulls from Rantoul, and others—battled each other on the court for local fame, glory, and a chance at a two-foot-tall plastic trophy.

Scenes like this are becoming increasingly common across small-town America, according to Pedro Pablo Solares, an attorney and immigration analyst based in Guatemala City. “Small-town America has been the destination for a majority of the present migration that comes from rural Guatemala,” says Solares. “I do not see any reason that would not continue to be the same in the future.”

Every year, more Guatemalans arrive at the U.S. southern border than from any other country other than Mexico. Increasingly, Solares says, these migrants are headed not to the major urban centers that have long-established immigrant communities like Los Angeles, Houston, and New York City, but to small towns in the rural Midwest and South where they have an influence on local economies, school systems, and cultures. They are also changing the face of small-town America.

https://www.nationalgeographic.com/culture/article/a-guatemalan-town-remakes-itself-in-indiana

Comment: This is a typically enlightening National Geographic article on the nature of Guatemalan immigration to the US. These Chuj Mayans are not escaping government repression or drug cartel violence. They are escaping poverty and death by starvation. I am perplexed that death by starvation is not a valid reason for seeking asylum under US law or even UN protocols. Death is death, whether it be by corrupt politician, drug lord or empty belly.

What we see between the people of Seymour, Indiana and San Sebastián Coatán, Guatemala is a real symbiotic relationship. It seems to be a good fit. Employers get the work force they need and the migrants’ presence doesn’t seem to tax local resources or piss off the citizens of Seymour. The town is being revitalized, albeit with a Guatemalan flavor. Even a die-hard Trumper was quoted as saying he had no problem with the Mexicans and others who now live in Seymour. The migrants are making good lives for themselves and their families and the remittances sent back to San Sebastián Coatán are allowing the families left behind to also live well. All this without federal, state or local expenditures by the US or Guatemala. It’s an immigration answer from the ground up rather than imposed from above… community-based migration.

TTG

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42 Responses to “A Guatemalan town remakes itself in Indiana” – TTG

  1. Al says:

    In 2008 and 2010 I made two trips into Guatemala The 1st with my 26 yr old son who had been a band leader at various Caribbean island resorts to Flores in northern Guatemala with a couple days spent at Tikal, THE Mayan ruins. My college undergrad major in Cultural Anthropology finally realized!!! The second trip was with my daughter who had just graduated form college and had a couple weeks of leisure time before starting her career. We headed to Panajachel, on the shores of Lake Attilan for 3 eves, with the 2 active towering volanoes smoking off the far shore (The flight into the Jurassic Park film was done here!) The lead singer in my son’s band was from Panajachel and set up our land travel, hotels, and daily “tut tut” motorcycle cab for us.

    Staying far away from Guatemala City on both trips, we felt very safe, saw no acts of aggression or even theft at all among the population. The Mayans were observed as intense laborers, Our Spanish was very limited, but my daughter’s 3 yrs of French, my 1 yr of Spanish was way back in 9th grade, and an English/Spanish translation book, got us communicating with the Mayans fairly well.

    Following Panajachel and before retturning to the states, we spent two eves in the former Spanish capitol Antigua. What Spanish buildings there still surviving the many earthquakes were beautiful on the eye.

    The added chapter:
    A yr later my daughter decided to study Spanish, as she wanted to visit Guatemala again. She enrolled in a course located near her apartment. The teacher was a Guatemalan from Panajachel, a recent graduate from Oklahoma State U where he had attended on scholarship and then began a teaching career in the US. One thing led to two, led to three, and….He is now my son-in-law and has become a US citizen.

    Well.. the Caribbean off the Central America coast must also make for marital bliss, as my son while making music on the islands met a wonderful young woman there from China. They’ve been married for 20 yrs and now live in the US with a highly achieveing teen son.

  2. JK/AR says:

    A simple anecdote.

    Fall 2007 or thereabouts a Geologist pal of mine – both of us at the time ‘doing our thing’ in a community college setting some 40 minutes from where I am now – Anyway needing lunch and what was on offer in the cafeteria unappetizing we set out to the town to find better. “Hey!” one of us said, “That’s a new Mexican restaurant, how’s about we give it a try?” So we parked and went inside.

    Conversation with the staff ensued. But while I was experiencing fairly appreciable difficulties with the dialects/idioms my pal Don was having himself a fine old time. Actually the old coot was getting a regular fete. Heck even the kitchen staff came out to exchange telephone numbers with Don. ‘Heck’ muttering to myself ‘Hows come this 80s year old is getting this while my [relative] young pup self ain’t?’

    On the way back to campus Don explains “JK, you remember my telling you I worked for Shell down in South America?”

    “So what” says myself?

    “You maligned ’em from the very get-go asking ’em where in Mexico they hailed from. They’re not Mexican they’re Guatemalan.”

    And they’ve been a welcome addition ever since. Though my learning how to “perfect” the requisite amends turned out to be an adventure.

    Don being in cahoots with them I’m reasonably certain, didn’t smooth the track.

    (Seeing the Seymour mention on the building reminded me we sent our girls to Marian Heights Academy in nearby Ferdinand.)

  3. Fred says:

    TTG,

    I’m happy for all these people; which also brings me think, golly how wonderful it is to be colonized.

    Did the NG author ask anyone what the wage rate on all those jobs was, and how much it would have had to rise to fill them with non-immigrants because you know, supply and demand of labor? Did the author ask if all the school classes taught in English only or is there ESL instruction (at no cost to the tax payers of course) or did they all learn English is Guatamala, where Spanish is the national language? Just rhetorical questions of course, because who could possibly be opposed to helping people who are starving.

    ” I am perplexed that death by starvation is not a valid reason for seeking asylum under US law or even UN protocols. ”

    Speaking of starving to death, I hear there’s soon to be lots of starvation in Sri Lanka. Too bad their government listened to the IMF/World Bank and organic true believers. Maybe if they hadn’t they could still feed themselves. I sure hope their neighbors in Asia take them in, or will it be “open borders” for the rest of the Biden administration? Needless to say I disagree with that policy position.

  4. TV says:

    EXCEPT how many are illegal?
    Gang bangers, molesters, etc?
    These people escaped a third world toilet.
    Are they bringing one here?

  5. jerseycityjoan says:

    TTG:

    It is too late for me to read the article. I will have to do it tomorrow.

    But whatever it says, I am afraid that nothing can make me agree with you on this. We see it from different perspectives. I do not want anyone to die of starvation but I cannot agree that the solution is for people to just come over our border, reconstitute their hometowns here as best they can and we just sit by and accept it.

    I do not want to be pay for these people and believe me, they will end up costing us plenty, just like our own poor do. I do not know if they are competing with Americans for jobs or if they are in agriculture, the one field in which Americans won’t work for fair and decent pay anymore — not that American companies are offering decent wages — but even if they were. Few Americans would take the job.

    Of course we will end up legalizing them, paying for retirement and other benefits and educating their kids. None of their descendants will take the jobs their parents did. They will compete for jobs with our descendants if they get good educations. If not, they will be added to the already large number of poorly educated and jobless people of color we don’t know what to do with.

    I do not want other people deciding our future for us and further transforming the US because they decided they are going to become Americans

    • Bill Roche says:

      Me too JCJ. Come through the front door if you want to be an American.

    • Fred says:

      JCJ,

      “They will compete for jobs with our descendants …”

      They’ll get affirmative action benefits too. The explosion of outrage out of the mayor of D.C. over all 4,000 or so illegals sent to them by Texas shows you what the actual cost to the community is.

  6. Glenn Fisher says:

    I’m glad those people escaped poverty and can make a better life for themselves. As a general idea it’s a glorious concept.
    Now if only those wonderful Guatemalans had not violated multiple federal laws to be here this would certainly be a feel good story. The normalization of illegal immigration as a rule includes ignoring the felonious aspect of such things.
    There’s a reason countries have borders. I shake my head at why anyone thinks ours should be the only one that’s not considered inviolate…

    • Pat Lang says:

      JF
      we had a thing like this in neighboring Arlington in which a Central American village r-created itself on
      us soil and then resisted in court the owner of their “town” when he wanted to re-develop the property. They lost.

  7. DEVENS SHARECROPPER says:

    A micro example does not make the macro case.

    Over the last decades CORPORATE BOARDS have voted relentlessly to LOWER WAGE EXPENSE. To do that entire manufacturing industries have closed USA operations and move the facilities to China, Bangladesh and beyond.

    My first experience with ‘immigration’ had to do with Tyson in Arkansas. Tyson was a BIG sponsor of “open borders” to bring CHEAP hands to the chicken farms. The typical American worker who had worked at Youngstown Tube and Steel was ill-prepared to move into agriculture.

    There is a HUGE need to do two things: 1) reestablish manufacturing and 2) engage in the “mental” work to acclimate the USA workforce to the REAL present state of affairs.

  8. JK/AR says:

    The parents, man and wife I exampled above were legal. Their six children were not however they were working toward that goal. Last time I was there everything was conducted- except for the door greetings – in English. I understand there to be four additional restaurants in relatively nearby [small] towns with the older four of the original six owning and hiring hillbillies as there ain’t enough Guatemalans to go around.

    Don’s “girlfriend” being formerly a university languages professor (Ohio State as I recall) and that to explain why telephone numbers were exchanged on that long ago first, chance meeting.

    Tyson’s however is a horse of a different color – me personally wouldn’t disagree its a horse’s ass of a different color. And there’s another multinational headquartered nearby Tyson’s Corporate which one might say the one saddle is sized to fit either horse without adjustments. And too, that area of Arkansas compared to about a 70 mile radius around “my area” might be aptly said to be on another planet.

  9. powderfinger1 says:

    Such a rosy picture. “All the players and participants were members of the local Chuj community”, sounds like assimilation to me. Any quotes from the local residents about their new neighbors? I wonder how many are here legally? I wonder how much tax payer funded resources are being used on illegals that shouldn’t be here? I’m sure small town schools have money for dual language programs in their budgets. I wonder how many are actually paying taxes or making and sending money out of the country?

    Immigration laws are for the other guy I guess. Hell, why stop there?

    • TTG says:

      powderfinger1,

      Although the article only alludes to one being illegal, I’m sure a good percentage of those Chuj Mayans in Seymour are there illegally. Read the article. It quotes a few non-Chuj as not minding their presence at all, including an ardent Trump supporter. If they’re working in the factories or farms, they’re paying taxes even if they never file. Those local schools have more money with the Chuj presence than if Seymour remained a dying ghost town with no employers willing to stay there.

      • Fred says:

        TTG,

        “If they’re working in the factories or farms,….”

        Then the factory managers and farm managers are committing felonies, just like the illegals.

  10. Tidewaterit says:

    TTG,

    I am a bit puzzled by the statement that they are escaping death by starvation in Guatemala. What is going on there in the climate? Recently I took a glance at the water situation in Mexico. There are three great lakes in Mexico that supply water to millions. These are Patzcuaro, Chapala and Cuitzeo. There is absolutely no doubt: they are losing them, albeit in different ways. Mexico City is not only sinking. It is drying up. And I don’t think the rains are coming back, not there and not in the American Southwest, not anytime soon.

    What I think could happen in a very few years is that immigration could become a kind of triage. Millions are coming. I don’t see how this country can endure this invasion under the present form of government. White nationalism is coming.

    • cobo says:

      Since NAWAPA (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_American_Water_and_Power_Alliance) is out of the potentials, then I think there should be desal plants every fifty miles up the Pacific coast and the Gulf of California coast. First, of course, would be the elimination of the CA Coastal Commission and other idiot farms. Then, let’s flush out the salts from one of the most productive agricultural areas on Earth, CA & Baja, and recharge the aquifers. And then it’s pool parties, baby

      • Tidewater says:

        Cobo,

        What about a channel one hundred feet deep, a half mile wide, running up from the Gulf of California through the Salton Sea and making the town of Mecca into a port? There would be desalination plants at intervals along this channel, and there could be pumps to keep seawater moving and filtration systems etc. The waste byproduct from the reverse osmosis desalination process would be taken by train out to a point in the desert where it could be processed for minerals at factories. The advantage of this channel would be the protection of the coastal desalination plants from storms, tsunamis, sabotage, or even a potential earthquake that might damage them. The distilled water would have to go as far by pipeline to places like New Mexico, I suppose. The ships that plied these waters would be carefully and specifically designed to protect the cleanliness of the channel water, and might even have to take on cargo at a port in Mexico delivered by ocean-going freighters. Some of these might be Egyptian -style feluccas with enormous vertical sails, a must-do voyage for the windjammer tourist trade? There could be Henley-style races for rowing competitions and even yacht clubs in competition with one another for the Salton Channel Cup? I could see a yacht club burgee with even a cactus on it. And I suppose fishing might have something to do with all this as well?

    • Al says:

      TW.. Check out the destructive hurricanes that went across Central America the past 5 yrs. That added greatly to the “misery index”.
      .

      • Tidewater says:

        Al,

        Thanks. I do remember now Hurricane Mitch. I had no idea of the verticality of that coast off of Honduras, or that villages that had existed there for a long time in those mountains could suddenly vanish in a mudslide. Seven thousand people!

        • Al says:

          TW, my son was touring in Guatemala around 2006 (?), was in Antigua, Guatemala, when a hurricane off the Pacific brought torrential rain into the country’s highlands. He volunteered with a relief group for several days pulling dead bodies out of villages covered in landslides.

          • Tidewater says:

            Al,
            What a bond he must have with these people! I have seen some poignant photos. My hat’s off to your son.

            Looking on the brighter side, I am trying to learn a little Honduran slang. There is a catracho who has done me a signal service recently. The city was after me for the way I am treating my property. True, they have been patient. But finally, the letter plus the legal basis etc. Scary shit. Place was problematic for sure, I knew, because a nice man on a bicycle sent me twenty dollars and a Bible. He had stopped when I was out in my driveway and said I must have had a very hard time of it in recent months . I nodded politely, thanked him warmly for his concern, thinking that it was sad that the real reason the place looked so bad was because I have been reading a lot, have a subscription to the WSJ wine club with an emphasis on reds, have grown a beard, stopped bathing for weeks at a time (it doesn’t matter, by the way, you do not even notice) since Felix peed in the shower and it ate through the pipes, and somehow or the other I really do not give a shit. (It’s my house, paid for.) Anyway, this new immigrant with an Apostolic kind of a name saved my ass.

            We were standing talking by his truck parked on the edge of the road out at Ivy the other day, He was doing something for the Cossack, who is hopefully still in my life. A fantastically good- looking girl came by, walking up the road with a big yellow lab on a leash. She was all dressed up, probably going out with her beau after she got the dog home. She stopped and chatted with us gaily for a moment. Sharing some kind of inner joy? I have never seen her out there. It was completely unexpected and I would never have expected this to happen under any circumstances. (Even when I was her age.) At best a little wave in return as she walked by. I was gobsmacked. I think we both were. We were both standing there looking at each other silently as she walked away. I realized that something a little bit er macho must be said in Spanish, along the lines of ‘ What just happened?’ I racked my mind and then said in a low voice “Guapa.” He hesitated, politely demurring, I think, for a moment and said something under his breath decisively. Then dropped it. What I think he must have said was something like “Belico.” ‘Guapa’ would only be ‘good looking.’ but ‘Belico’ would be ‘Amazing!.’ If so, he was right. He doesn’t seem to mind too much my fractured Spanglish since it is in the course of business, anyway. And we have settled on ‘Usted,” since I don’t actually know the informal, which he has figured out.

    • TTG says:

      Tidewater,

      Guatemala and the rest of the region is suffering from the effects of well over a decade of climate change. Between the extremes of long term drought punctuated by torrential flooding, crops have been failing for years.

      • Al says:

        TTG, Between 2003-2010 I made frequent trips (at least 2x per yr) to the Belize islands. During that time span, also the 2 trips noted above into Guatemala.

        While on the Belize mainland venturing around I usually perceived a high need to be “on guard”. That was not my experience while in Guatemala where interactions with the Mayan population was seemingly much more genuine .

      • Tidewater says:

        TTG.

        Thanks. You know, I was thinking about it; hasn’t emigration into the United States always been community-based? Certainly it was very well organized as a kind of community/ business project in the Chesapeake society of Virginia during the seventeenth century. ‘Indentured servitude’ has a bad ring to it, but to start with, it took at least three hard years to learn how to grow, sell, and ship tobacco, a very lucrative product, then and now. I know a story which is kind of a family story, though I am uncertain about some things, about a man who as a young teenager may have lost his parents in the plague year of 1688 in London. He may have had connections with family in Bristol, and they were all likely Quakers. The Quakers had settlements in Virginia in the Isle of Wight area. The Bristol people were watermen who actually took a good-sized ship to the Mediterranean to places like Tangier and even Istanbul! They seem to have gotten into the trade of carrying indentured servants to Virginia. Now, long story short. By his early twenties this young man was a free man, released from his indenture, and he had gotten a little education somehow, and he owned three hundred acres of the best land along a Virginia river, I can’t recall which at the moment, but one below the James. Three hundred acres before he’s twenty-five! He had a real, working farm. And that was just the beginning. He eventually ended up a rich man who represented his community in the House of Burgesses.

        There had been community sherpas for him all along the way, to allow him to eventually tack ‘Gent’ to his name probably before he was thirty. His name was the middle name of my mother’s mother, but I never heard anything at all about him in the family, nor have I ever met anyone of that name. The indentured servitude bit may have bothered them, this being Virginia, you could say, with a grin, but actually, I don’t think that. The connection seemed tenuous and distant. Actually, I don’t know. The way I know about him was that a soft-bound genealogy of him and his family was sent to my parents years ago and sat around for a long time. I saved it and finally a few years back I read it. That family had gone west before 1830 probably, and whoever commissioned the genealogy, with its unexpected very charming comments by the genealogist, had sent it to my mother as a courtesy. And then I found on the internet from the genealogist’s citations even more of a remarkable story. One strange thing was that after the revolution the Quakers of that maybe Nansemond/ Isle of Wight area felt guilty about not freeing their slaves, which had been agreed upon during the war. There were letters about this. When finally they did so, they found that the slaves had been so poorly prepared for independent living that it seemed to me–it is sketchy– that some of these Quakers went through some very bad years, even nearly ruining their own lives, trying to make things work out for the freedmen. It is an intriguing story about the trap that slavery was. As Colgate Darden remarked to Guy Fridell, more white men were set free by the abolition of slavery than black. Historically, the Quakers gave up on Virginia and went west to settle in free territory. They also became Hicksite Quakers who could bear arms. Some, with the Union army, just after the war, visited relatives in Southampton County, or so I was told.

      • Fred says:

        TTG,

        “…well over a decade of climate change. ”

        You mean it wasn’t a corrupt government and latafundia doing that to the people of Guatamala? LOL

        • TTG says:

          Fred,

          Corruption didn’t make the crops fail repeatedly.

          • Fred says:

            TTG,

            tell me about fertilizer and modern seeds, and how corruption doesn’t impact price or availability – see Sri Lanka as reference. Then tell me how hurricanes and flooding never happened before “global warming” got rebranded as climate change.

          • TTG says:

            The indigenous farmers of the Guatemalan western highlands have access to chemical fertilizers and have been using them for years. Unfortunately, those modern chemical fertilizers have imbalanced the soils and have contributed to lower crop yields. Climate change has brought frosts to the higher elevations damaging the potatoes grown there. Fungal diseases are also a recent problem. The now alternating periods of drought and torrential storms are more than any combination of fertilizer and modern seeds can overcome. Perhaps a less corrupt government would implement a robust cooperative extension program to assist these indigenous subsistence farmers, but I don’t see that happening.

          • Tidewater says:

            TTG and Fred,

            I have a little theory of the case. It’s worse in both cases! At least in Honduras, for sure. The capital there, Tegucigalpa, is actually the capital of a narco-state. It goes beyond corruption. It is an organized, murderous criminal power thriving on the manufacture and shipment of cocaine and other drugs. The ruling crime families are destroying their own people and their own country. Whatever else they may be, Mara Salvatrucha 13 and Barrio 18 exist at least in part to protect (for a price) their neighborhoods. The money of the ruling criminal class flows up into the United States, and this synergy with New York and Miami is what makes its power, and even its very existence, possible. It is as bad as it gets.

            YouTube has some explanation of what is happening to the corn crop in Honduras in the west. It is as simple as opening up an ear of corn and revealing that kernelization has only partially developed. Why? Drought, in some large measure. The farmer can tell you exactly what he gets and what he used to get in the weight of his corn crop. He will tell you that he sees that it is all coming to a dead end. Then come the torrential rains and floods and the mining leach ponds overflow and are destroyed and tons of deadly chemicals and heavy metals go into the main river that flows down to the Pacific, the (Rio Grande) Choluteca. That river must be deadly. I wonder about the Honduran shrimp farms.

            But given that they do have rain, even if too much, at times, the question is, in the next ten to fifteen years is Honduras survivable? In the region of the west that I was looking at, they use expensive water trucks and the farmers cannot afford the service. What the U.S. needs to do is to find a way to get around the criminal ruling class, while working to destroy it using treasury sanctions, for example, and even harsher, covert methods. But also, the way forward is to simply build dams and reservoirs all over the place in those little valleys and by keeping Corps of Engineers control of the projects. I mean a lot of them and a lot of American aid. It has to be done! Then, agriculture would change to perhaps some other crops, and agricultural survivability, as with genetically altered beans, or plantains, for example, could be made possible simply by this new and widespread water storage which would sustain even through the new long droughts. This in the short run, the next ten to twenty years. And mining has to be curtailed. The situation with the ruling class, the army, the police, well, either it is reformed juridically and openly and/ or covertly, or thousands will keep trying to get up through Mexico via Chiapas, as they are doing now. And there is a lot of sympathy for them in the United States which is hard to control. The United States Army simply has to guard the border, as it always did.

            I, for one, think that climate change is real, and records, as, for example, of the increasing heat of the Arctic or the strength of the flow of the Gulf Stream, make it obvious that there is alarming climate change now underway. I’ve been reading about this off and on for more than ten years, and I am sick of it. I think the Gulf Stream and the North Atlantic Drift, not that I know much about them, are truly under threat of slowing, or being diverted by fresh meltwater from Greenland which causes the overturning of the saline laden current far too soon.

            I run on. But one thing for sure, you cannot allow a narco- state to exist and thrive, either in Honduras, or across the Atlantic in Guinea Bisseau or in West Africa. It’s too dangerous. Vast climate migration is only a part of the threat.

          • Fred says:

            TTG,

            That is laughable though tragic. How did the Olmec civilazation collapse? Crop failure, the same with a few others in the region before and after. “The now alternating periods of drought and torrential storms ”

            La Niña , El Niño. Alternating cycles, plus slash and burn agriculture. It wasn’t caused by “climate change”.

    • cobo says:

      corporate farming, like when the Irish were starving

  11. cobo says:

    America and western civilization have been under attack for decades. I got the term, “global communist” from Yuri Bezmenov, the Soviet defector. However, we are here. Latinos are here and Mayan Indians are here, and this is our future. We don’t have to accept the future the globalist/communist is trying to force on us, but we are all in this together. And we are better off with our brothers from the south here to fight this thing. But, not even knowing we have been at war has given the communist a big head start. Live strong, ride hard, surfs up.

    • Jimmy_w says:

      Yugoslavians did not think that they were all in there. And here we are.
      Geographic proximity does not always engender camaraderie.

  12. Eliot says:

    TTG,

    Americans should have more children.

    National policy should encourage it, and make it more affordable. Motherhood should also be destigmatized among the middle and upper middle class.

    Importing foreigners ignores the problem, our culture, and creates new problems for us to solve.

    – Eliot

    • TTG says:

      Eliot,

      Perhaps we should. We should also take care of our elderly. Unfortunately, implementing national policy to do that smacks of Communist China’s family planning measures. We see what that done. I don’t know if motherhood has ever been stigmatized in the first place. It just been supplanted by raising material wealth to a god-like status in our culture.

  13. Eliot says:

    TTG,

    “Unfortunately, implementing national policy to do that smacks of Communist China’s family planning measures. We see what that done.“

    There’s a powerful and innate desire in humans to have children. Our demographic problems are truly a historical abnormality, this hasn’t happened before. Looking at it from that perspective, appreciating just how weird it is, I don’t think it’s a hard problem to solve. We just need to rely on basic human nature.

    If men and women got married in their twenties again, as were naturally inclined to do, if society encouraged them to do that, instead of spending that decade at university or focusing on a career, the population figures would normalize. I think it’s the emphasis on earning credentials, at the expense of a family life, and the focus on having a career, at the expense of family life, that is the issue.

    “I don’t know if motherhood has ever been stigmatized in the first place.”

    It has in my eyes, at least among that subset of America, where status is derived from your school and your occupation. To climb the ranks requires casting aside other obligations. You can’t afford to to split your focus.

    “ It just been supplanted by raising material wealth to a god-like status in our culture.”

    It’s a tragedy. Material wealth might be nice, I suppose. But what a soulless and meaningless existence that entails.

    – Eliot

  14. Lars says:

    I am sure it was not easy to obtain that search warrant, but since it was, there has to be some reason for it. According to reports, documents were removed from the location, which would indicate that the FBI got what they were looking for.

    I am not sure that using the Alex Jones playbook to deal with this is the best way, but that seems to be what Donald Trump is doing. It is interesting that he avoided to mention the conditions found in the warrant.

    Of course, the cult members will continue to fantasize about things in general, which will not change reality. This episode will just add to the numerous legal problems Donald Trump has accumulated and it may not even be the worst one.

  15. Al says:

    Trump”s attorney has stated FBI left with a doz or so boxes of docs. Again, if these were govt docs, Trump violated the National Archives law he himself boosted from a misdeamor to a felony with a max 5 yr prison term.

    • Fred says:

      Al,

      You mean documents like in all those presidential libraries that didn’t get anyone else raided?

  16. Richard Ong says:

    It’s wonderful that they are such jolly souls. I wonder if any of them are illegals.

    A million here, a million there. Pretty soon we’re talking about a cultural and political dispossession of white America. That no white person voted for. Feeble acquiescence appears to be the order of the day. In the immortal words of that Swedish politician– we’re nice to immigrants when we are in the majority so they’ll be nice to us when they are in the majority.

    • TTG says:

      Richard Ong,

      The immigrants in this town are getting into high school baseball, working in US factories, and their kids are learning English. Looks like they’re getting assimilated into white America. If anybody is getting dispossessed of their culture, it’s the Chuj.

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