An Inferior Present Judges a Superior Past. Victor Davis Hanson
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Illegal aliens largely live in the homes of the vanished agrarians. In turn, they rent out the barns and sheds, and create compounds of 20-30 people, with 10-15 cars parked about. No sheriff, no county inspector, no building inspector dares to set foot on these old homesteads of now dead farmers. They are no-go zones, despite law enforcement denials—sort of like Wild West hideouts that everyone knows, and no one enters.
There the pit bull dogs do bite—and bite. They are unvaccinated and unlicensed. No one knows who is armed, who not. I once stopped by a nearby compound to return a dog that had bolted from there to our place. I knew every inch of that farmhouse and yard, since I visited there at age 10, decades before the current occupants were born. I was greeted warmly as the dog jumped out of the truck, but on the unspoken premise that I was also to leave immediately given the various “operations” that seemed to be going on.
Who fled a felony in Mexico, who came up just to work? Which shed is a chop shop, which a drug den, which a meth lab, which a child care operation? Which lean-to is a cock-fight arena, which a prostitution center, which simply a trailer for a hard-working roofer, which an anything for anybody?
Joe Biden and Alejandro Mayorkas claim all this is reifying Lady Liberty saying, “Give me your tired, your poor. Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free.” But there are no Ellis Island lines here. There is no poor immigrant with papers, intent on queuing up to enter his chosen country legally. And there is certainly no Joe Biden or Alejandro Mayorkas or anyone like them anywhere near here.
If anyone wants to go to an illegal barber shop, an illegal day care center, an illegal nursery, in the sense of all unlicensed, unregulated, untaxed, and unaudited, then they can simply find the appropriate trailer behind these homes. Houses that I used to walk to and talk with the kids and parents, most now would not enter with a SWAT team. I doubt Nancy Pelosi or Gavin Newsom would visit without the National Guard.
As far as “privilege,” the new rural residents seem to buy lots of stuff. Indeed, our farm is often littered with their flotsam and jetsam—defunct big-screen televisions, worn Nike sneakers, cast-off electronics, and once high-priced kids’ car seats, all tossed by the “poor.”
But I remember different consumption from the prior “privileged” owners of their homes, who used to make string balls, saved ribbon and wrapping paper, and took turns splicing and fixing the vineyard wire that also served as the community phone line. In lines at the grocery store, they did not shuffle 6-7 EBT and SNAP cards of the underprivileged, half of them expired or someone else’s. But rather the so-called privileged fiddled with S&H green stamps booklets, and wads of cutout newspaper discount food ads, as they scoured out nickels, dimes, and quarters from their purses to finish off their sale.
My grandparents were both poorer than I, but in some ways far richer. They slept without worry of gunshots, with the screen door in their faces unlocked. They saw no stripped-down semi-trucks resting on block in their alleyways, no bags of wet trash and moldy mattresses dumped by their barn. They did not meet strange trespassers in their orchard with guns in their belts, high on meth, PCP, or fentanyl, speaking a dialect no one can understand. No.
I am saddened daily that my grandparents, parents, aunts and uncles, and our neighbors, are no longer with us. But a part of me is relieved that they did not see what their rural spaces have become, and that the civilization they built was unwound by those who never even knew or cared what they created, whether out of malice, insolence, or indifference.
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