Who will blink first?
Brewer needs to talk from her heart and for the people of Arizona rather than blathering that tired old rhetoric that sounds straight off the page of the FAIR playbook.
16 Thoughts to “Brewer Talks a Tough Game”
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- Derecho, The
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- PW Conservation Alliance
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- PWCPolitics.com
- PWCPolitics.com
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- Shad Plank, The
- She the People
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- The Jeffersoniad
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- You, Me and the Lamp Post
Governor Brewer is a political opportunist who is drunk with power, shuffling and groveling for votes. She is nothing but a political pimp.
Ouch.
How is South Africa, Starry? Are you enjoying all the soccer games? Update please.
It has been awesome. Why not a World Cup thread?
Starry, your wish is my command.
“Brewer needs to talk from her heart and for the people of Arizona ”
That is EXACTLY what she is doing. And doing it well!
“tired old rhetoric” i.e. what 70% of America believes
“that sounds straight off the page of the FAIR playbook” i.e. what 70% of America believes
No, she isn’t. She is using FAIR words and sound-bytes.
I don’t buy this percent crap. We aren’t all that programmed. You might feel one way and I might feel another way….but I hope I can express my feelings without sounding like Dan Stein’s stooley. I hope I never sound like some of those –you know what word I am thinking…standing out on a street corner screaming’ illegal is illegal’ or ‘what part of illegal do you not understand.’
If Brewer wants to convince me that she has something important to say she needs to step it up past sounding like some toad with an 8th grade education.
Rick, there’s a real problem when I have heard so many sound bytes on this subject that I can talk for them if I had to.
You know, when you and Wolverine talk on this subject, I don’t hear slogans, sound bytes and rhetoric. I hear words and your frustration with undesirable behaviors. I know that you had problems with grown men leering at your kids. I know Wolverine had problems with parking places, and with people improperly disposing of items no longer needed and dumping things in the run off. (just to name a few things)
I am going to listen to people describing real problems. I am not going to listen to people saying ‘Illegal is illegal’ any more than I would listen to ‘Drill baby drill.’
I heard Brewer using direct straightforward language.
Sometimes you have to play a tough game, not just talk one. Maybe the time has come to lay out a problem solving scenario which I think is pertinent because of certain divided opinions on this blog and elsewhere concerning how to deal with negatives encountered because of the current wave of immigration. Some believe the answer is to force all illegal immigrants to leave. Others believe that the negative behavioral problems have to be addressed first by local government through local law working hand in hand with HOA’s, citizens, and immigrants themselves.
So, let me throw out a case history and let you have at it. About three years ago, our community had a real problem with violations of the county and HOA trash disposal laws and rules. County law requires that trash be stored outside only in covered trash cans. There are good reasons for this law. Failure to adequately protect trash leads to infestations of rats and other rodents. Moreover, this county is ranked at or near the top in Virginia for confirmed rabies cases; and unprotected trash draws the wild critters into developed areas, thereby increasing the rabies hazard and the possible need for very expensive, life-saving medical treatment. The critters attracted — racoons, skunks, foxes, possum, feral cats, stray dogs, coyotes — are almost all the primary carriers of rabies.
At some point after the major influx of immigrants began, our trash problem became endemic. On the nights before trash collection day, you could find unprotected trash bags curbside all over the community and, indeed, all over the town. In our own development of over 600 homes, we could count anywhere from 500 to 700 unprotected bags of trash at the curb on a given night. During the course of a night, many of these bags would be torn open by hungry critters and the foodstuffs strewn all over the nearby common areas and lawns. Then came the rodents up out of the sewers — to such an extent that the HOA had to put an exterminator on contract. As Neighborhood Watch (NW) on late night foot patrol, I spent no little amount of time chasing those critters away when I encountered them. When I did not get there in time, the HOA staff had to go out and police the lawns the next morning. There I was, a retired professional investigator with multiple college degrees, spending my retirement not only looking for criminals but also chasing off feral cats and racoons and rats at night!
The night I had an enounter with a hungry coyote was the last straw. That was not helped by the fact that visitors to our community on certain nights were screwing up their noses and remarking adversely about the piles of trash bags lining our streets. The HOA staff and NW decided to take action. The first thing we found out was that county government is all talk and very little action. It was up to us. We did a survey. The results of the survey showed us that about 8 out 10 offenders were recent immigrants, although citizens and legal immigrants did their fair share to “trash” the community.
Our first step was to try education. We put out multiple notices and newsletters in English and Spanish explaining the law and the reasons for that law. We had a legal Hispanic immigrant member of the HOA board begin a liaison program with the Hispanic residents, including special “Hispanic” social and chat sessions. We even began to sponsor our own ESL program for Hispanic immigrants. To tell you the honest and unvarnished truth, none of it worked. The trash bags just continued to pile up, and NW continued to try to chase off the critters and the rats as best they could with limited manpower. Among the things we found were that many of the new immigrants (1) could not read even in Spanish; (2) did not bother to read warnings even if they were literate; (3) appeared not to understand the basic concepts of public hygiene; (4) (excuse my English here) didn’t give a rat’s ass about laws and rules; or (5) complied only for a short period before going back to the bad habits. Trash is bad enough. Recycling was and is a totally alien concept to many of these immigrants no matter how hard you try to explain it. Plain old littering I cannot even discuss without grinding my teeth.
Finally, we had to resort to force. Since the county either would not or could not (lack of manpower) enforce their own law, we used the power of the HOA. Between the HOA staff and NW, we began a program of identifying the violators either visually or through evidence. Violators began drawing fines to the limit permissable by an HOA. Failure to pay accumulated fines resulted in the loss of a very valued possession: reserved parking spaces. That seems to have worked. Remember the 500 to 700 trash bags on a single night? Last night we found exactly five violations in the entire community on our heaviest trash night. That represents over two years of relentless pressure and very little mercy.
Sad to say but persuasion simply was not successful. It did get us somewhere with most citizens and some immigrants. But it made scarcely a dent in the attitudes of the great majority of immigrants. The only thing which brought them up short and occasioned compliance with the law and the common sense of public hygiene was our own brand of “law enforcement.” The trump card has proven to be continuing dents in the wallet.
I will not mince words here. This was no interesting “social project” as part of an academic thesis. This was a pain in the ass from the get go. The last thing I wanted to do in my retirement was scotch my other plans and patrol the streets of my community in search of criminal activity AND trash violators. As I have stated elsewhere, I have spent many years living in foreign cultures in Third World countries, including periodic immersion in such cultures. But this time my personal patience was worn to a nubbin, and any tolerance on my part for these new immigrants was in serious danger of being lost. Even today, and despite the slim violation findings last night, I live with the strong suspicion that any slacking off will set us back. Sometimes the anger in me wells up to a point where I am also ready to call for the removal of many of these people so I can have some peace in my own neighborhood and on my own street.
Nevertheless, I am at base a pragmatic person. Pragmatism kept me alive in a sometimes dangerous career. I am looking always at possibilities for compromise, at places where something can be done even if not everything can be accomplished, at rational solutions to problems which we ourselves played a large role in creating because we have left our own back door open for over four decades. But, having said all that, I will tell you without hesitation that I can empathize with the pent up anger and frustration being felt and expressed by the people of Arizona. In my micro-world I had to take on the chores which the local government should have been doing. Their world in Arizona has been created largely by a federal government which has repeatedly and for decades let them down with regard to the security of their own border and a firm control of the immigration process. My county government deserves the scoldings I give it. The federal government deserves the scoldings Arizonians are currently giving it.
That’s a great post Wolverine, thank you.
Wolverine, you described a real problem. I saw no rhetoric, which validates your problem to me.
I am trying to figure out how you all did garbage patrol? How do you catch people taking their garbage out?
Did the residents have to buy their own covered cans? Why didn’t they do this?
Can you fill us in, please?
Also were you in single family or town houses? I have found that the townhouse situation intensified my feelings of frustration, simply because of denser population. My exposure to this happened in Prince William County many years ago and it didn’t involve Latinos.
Moon, sources and methods of intelligence will not be revealed here. Mostly townhomes. The craziest thing is that a resident has two easy choices: (1) you can put your trash out the night before if you use a trash can as mandated by the law; or (2) or you can actually put just bags out on the morning of trash pickup because the problem critters and rats are all nocturnal and the contracted trash service always comes at a reasonable morning hour. Trying to get such a simple answer across was hard enough to make you tear your hair out. Some people we surmised were simply oppositionally defiant until the fines began to hurt. Others….who knows?
Some day perhaps I will tell you about real rats — the African kind. We had one in our house who thought he owned the place. From the tip of his nose to the end of his tail, he as as long as our cocker spaniel and drove the poor dog nuts by traveling up and down through the walls and across the ceiling partitions. We called that rat “The King.” I once had him in the sights of a heavy pump shotgun but couldn’t fire because we were in an enclosed room and I might have become deaf for life. I think the bugger gave me the finger as he waltzed away.
Were you living in Africa when you and the Rat King went mano a mano?
Yup. It got really bad when Mrs. W would open the cupboard doors under the sink and hear “The King” gnawing through the wood, trying to gain entrance to the kitchen. Eventually, “The King” was victorious. We left, and he was still ruling the roost. The dog went looney with frustration. The cats stayed far away from the scene. The exterminators failed every time. “The King” was just too crafty for them.