When I was a kid growing up in Chickasha, Oklahoma, we had our share of predators. They were garden variety: older men preying on young girls for sex, a couple of seniors in raincoats, and one really fat old guy that would run around in women's underwear. My first memorable encounter with a bona fide child molester happened while I was walking to my school to play on the swings; a large white car pulled up to the curb.  I had been warned, and equipped with only a six year old brain, had forgotten, I was not to walk up to strange vehicles. Lucky for me, this pervert was only into some scare tactics. Down the street lived a man who really enjoyed showing off his body. Us kids would walk by his house sometimes just to see what he would do. More often than not, he would come outside in a pink bathrobe, and with a lot of fanfare, posing and teasing, he would open up to reveal his matching bra and panties. Sometimes the panties were obscured by his gut hanging down; we would laugh and scream all the way home.

Sexual predators have evolved somewhat since I was a child forty years ago. The monsters were real then, but now they are more numerous, and somewhat accepted into the population. They have more sophisticated weapons: internet, television, advertising, obscure laws, leniency, and a network. And this network is what troubles me the most. Recently a man was busted in my neighborhood, in a nice home, with tens of thousands of pornographic images of little kids. He is an elementary school teacher, certified by the State of Texas. Officials believe many of these images are from foreign countries, and at least one was created by this man himself. In this neighborhood we have a school, a park, several apartments full of children, and a sense of innocence---small town dignity. And now many parents are wondering how this pig could have lived, worked, and concealed the cruelest, and sickest of injustices from one of the nosiest, and most suspicious, communities on the planet.

I hope people will begin to realize how awful and cruel child pornography really is. This is not something that should be taken lightly, or swept under the rug of dignity. This is not something anyone should take part in, or help conceal. Little children with fragile minds suffer enough in our world. I am disappointed in the reaction of my fellow citizens, I would have expected more outrage.

Tonight at our group meeting a woman flounced off in anger because I suggested a damn compost bin for our community. She ranted and raved about smells she couldn't possibly smell, and argued that more meetings were "absolutely unnecessary!" Even though I am just a 47 year old proletariat, this kind of ignorance is rather foreign to me, so I was baffled, confused, and sort of insulted by the flouncing. The truth is, in a townhome community Marxism is just part of the program. We share a 'common area' we all pay for...a culture of workers in the same class. Flouncing is just unacceptable, and meetings are a responsibility. Yes, it's true, we have a collection of retirees; but I believe they would have fun with the composter, especially when they grow better and bigger flowers with less expense. Not only that, our garbage haul off bill was excessive--$4,249.96. If we could get that reduced, even by a few hundred, what the heck is the harm? I don't think we are going to have social problems because we have become more green.

Well, even though I am smart enough to read and understand Karl Marx, I am NOT a CoMMUNIST. In fact, I despise that system and hope it continues to die. But here in my little community we have a socialist system based on exclusion from process, an oligarchy of persons who resist change and new leadership. Their view is limited to only their noses, and I guess my hands are tied. It could be so much better here. I guess there is nothing I can do except wait. It ain't no big thing.

It makes me laugh, all of this talk about middle class. The truth is, we don't have a middle class of much distinction in our country. We do have a media and political class that in an effort to bone up ratings and votes have a tendency to over compliment and hash about words; they use the term "middle class" over abundantly. In fact with all of my superior traits, I jest of course, I am still only working class. Most people, if they cared to be honest, would say we have four very definite social classes in the US:

1. lower class
2. working class
3. middle class
4. upper class

In my opinion, the lower class people are those who have failed to gain any education or regular employment by choice. They choose, in most cases, not to work or educate themselves. Of course, there are some exceptions, and I believe some people are handed such a sorry hand in life that almost nothing could pull them out of destitution. But me, I am plain old working class. I may have a very good education, and middle class tendencies and beliefs, but nevermind, I am still a proletariat. I am very proud of my diligence and work ethic. It is nice to maneuver around the blue and white collar world. But I have never considered myself middle class; and when I hear it constantly mentioned in political debate, on news programs, and in polite conversation, I get a little angry that me "the working class" is left out of the dialogue. Angelina Jolie is middle class, Madonna, and Charlie Sheen...to my knowledge they have no OLD MONEY. The Rockefellers are old money and upper class. They are different than anything we down here in the working class would expect. But I really believe the upper class has more in common with the working class than the middle class...In other words, working at a skill, trade, or technical endeavor is nothing to scoff at. The person on the assembly line, behind the wheel, or at the computer desk all fill a working class position--a place of importance.

I am hoping, not too far in the future, our media will once again use the term "working class" openly. They insult little ole me always harping middle class this and middle class that like nothing else exists.

I am kinda tired tonight, and tomorrow I have an important meeting. In fact, I hope tomorrow changes my life. It won't change my shape, or the terrible way I photograph. Tomorrow will not make me more beautiful, but I know what does---it's Kiehl's. The truth is, if you ain't lookin' after your face, then you gotta huge problem. When I first moved to Alberta, my skin dried up like a prune. I was just in my early 20's and I was starting to look fortyish. I went to the department store and I bought Shiseido. Believe me, that is some very fine skin care. Everyone blabbed about my extravagance, how silly I was, the way I wasted money. I started to look lovely...just really glowing. Years later I tried some different brands. But now, I am on Kiehl's.

The point is, I am not wasting my money; I am investing in my future. And soon, maybe tomorrow, I will take advantage of the offer Neiman Marcus extended to me, and I will buy another 24 dollar tube of Dior mascara. Dior could put eyelashes on a rat, and the rat would look like a starlet. So now you have it. From squabbling truckers, to lavish skin care, I am a woman after all.

Yesterday I spent a lot of time sending faxes to Washington. Over the years, I have had the opportunity to share the road and other transportation workplaces, (warehouses, offices, truckstops, inspection stations) with Mexican drivers, and, occasionally the bona fide real Mexican truck. One of my first experiences with a Latin American truck driver was down in Laredo back in the late 80's. He was from Guatemala, and his truck was covered in bullet holes. He told me he frequently faced gunfire on his journey around Mexico. At that time, just like now, Mexico was in political strife. Except now the problems are much worse, and our southern neighbor is in as much trouble as ever. Kidnappings are up for Central American immigrants who use Mexican smuggling routes to sneak into the United States. Migrants Going North Now Risk Kidnapping, New York Times, October 18

A close friend of mine, who owns his own trucking business, has brothers living near Juarez. He has begged his family members to sell out, and get out, of Mexico and return to the family home in Canada. The point is, I am not very worried about our small trucking companies competing with Mexican trucking companies. What really bothers me is that the government of Mexico will not admit that it cannot insist on free trade if it can't reciprocate its own side of the bargain. In other words, Mexico is not prepared in the same way Canada, and the US, is prepared for cross border trucking. This argument is about more than just the quality and compliance of Mexican trucks and drivers. The agreement is based on fairness and freedom of trade. It isn't fair if it isn't even safe to go to Mexico in an automobile.

Large trucking companies who have sullied the industry with poor hiring and training practices are licking their greedy lips at this opportunity to hire cheap Mexican drivers and begin hauling cheap freight across the borders. They do not really care, for all of the window dressing they do, one bit about the safety or security of the individual. All they really worry about is whether or not someone is going to steal the load. If they did care about the individuals who work for them, and the public they serve, then they too would get behind the independents in putting a stop to this cross border trucking program until all safety concerns, on both sides of the border, are properly addressed.

 Most of us understand some of the basic theme discussed in Plato's Allegory of the Cave. Remember, you learn what you live? If you are fettered, watching the shadow on the wall, once released you may lose your grace until you adopt to your new discoveries. If you are never released, then alas, your soul is wasted, because all men (and Socrates meant women also) have a capacity for learning. They simply must turn away from the shadows and look at the source. But the mind and human nature are so complicated. What do you do when someone you know has spent a lifetime looking at the wall? How do you turn, or educate, this person to the truth?

We all know someone, who in our opinion, is fixated and unyielding in some ignorant state of mind. Even if you really care about this person, turning them towards the light is a task you are unable to complete. So how do you change the mindset of children never unfettered from the squalor of their rundown neighborhood? Harder still, how do you soften the bigotry of an overpriviliged narcissistic snob? I was thinking of this today while reading a New York Times article, In Mexican Drug War, Fear Compounds Law Enforcers' Troubles.  Someone was so determined to keep the citizens of Mexico's noses against the wall, they even murdered a journalist in front of his 8-year old daughter.

While The Allegory of the Cave is just a sort of how-to guide in educating potential leaders, it also reminds us of the cost of ignorance. And if we need more proof we can remember the murdered honor student, Darrion Albert, the journalist for El Diario, and the thousands of other victims of senseless violence. And after you read the Allegory, you can start with Book VIII---The Decline of the State. After we stop honoring the wise and the good, we elect only men of war to office "spirited and simpler minded men." Once again, I refer back to the mess in Mexico. I think about Iraq, and Vietnam; I wonder why we can't reach all of our children. No Child Left Behind has a nice ring to it, but the concept was many years too late. We get a sense of incompetence at the top of not just our political institutions, but in business as well.

My little diatribe really has no point tonight. I guess I am just worried. I see the Allegory in my ten year old, the wall is a television. Around me I am seeing limited economic potential and opportunity, fetters holding bodies with faces pointed straight ahead, people unable to find the source of the light. We read about men and women climbing over walls and swimming across the river, overstaying their visa, planning atrocities, stealing social security numbers, and hating our institutions. We know where many of them have spent their time...in the cave. If we can't educate them, then what do we do? And in our own cities, around our own schools, roaming gangs of thugs beat little honor students to death for absolutely no reason whatsoever.

Recently, I overheard a friend talking about his wife. He complained that when his father came to visit, he had to pick up the house. This same father once told me he never wanted to go inside his son's house, the smell was so bad. The wife owns a beautiful yellow car. Her husband bought it for her. Most days she sleeps until noon, and her weight is, well let's just say, more than hefty. Another friend of mine told me about his wife's drinking habits. Three thirty packs of beer, a week, were drank in his home without his assistance. The beer swilling dame's best friend is, of all things, a local, and very male, city cop. These facts would bother me, especially if I traveled for my work like my friend. One of my coworkers has a wife who has no job, never has had one, and she smokes three cartons of cigarettes each and every week. They have a young son together, and when he comes home she often has male company sitting in the living room. Now I know what all of you are going to say, "NO WAY WOULD I PUT UP WITH THAT STUFF!" But I am willing to bet money, that each and every male who reads this story has done exactly that.

I am not going to condemn these women and call them stupid. They are much smarter than I. With all of my education, travels, living in foreign lands, the books I have read, the math I have slogged through, the elders I have listened to, and the wisdom forcibly beat into my skull, I yet have any level of leisurely success. Financial stability evades me, and instead, credit card hell awaits me. My soul is gone for cheap, and no man is creating a safety net for little old me. I think "like a man" I am told. So to me the dice is thrown, and I have my own destiny resting in my misguided little palm.

However, my rear is comfortably covered...and for this, I am grateful. Maybe I am not draped in silken undergarments, upon a smoky beer can covered bed, but I am clinging to my cotton panties. Like me, they are rather cheap. The cotton boll is sold to hell. And when my life is over, I hope I can look back in pride at the trouble I have caused, and the issues I resolved. For this, in my view, is the true measure of success. As for my cunning, and resourceful female sisters, I do love and respect their game. They are masters of deception, gleaming goddesses of stolen wealth, and the owners of male souls. I look at them with a kind of envy and pride, this is my dirty secret. To these vixens of male adoration, I have only one warning---stock your dollars and resources away---bury the can, but not in HIS yard. As for me, I can keep my money in my wallet. It isn't much anyway.

She pushes a tub across the threshold to keep the baby in the bedroom. The tub is loaded with books: classics, dictionaries, and an anthology of Shakespeare add weight, impossible for the screaming child to push it away. The house is old, the ceilings are cracked. The furniture is out of style, worthless to anyone except the old lady who lives alone. This home is in sharp contrast to the airy and clean little apartment home the baby was used to living in. The familiar faces that visited him everyday are suddenly absent. He feels frightened and nervous. "How long have we been here?" his mother mused, "Maybe two weeks, maybe longer." But somehow time seemed unimportant as the old air conditioner droned on and the child continued to cry. Exhausted, leaning her back against the wall, she flinched at the jingle. Is it her mother's bell, or the phone? The bell was a plain old souvenir from a dairy, with a cow painted on its handle. "How cheap and miserable death is."  Suddenly it rang again, and she realized it was the phone. Grabbing it with anger, she listened in silence. Her sister and nephew were driving over tonight. Wonderful...after their work, spouses, and leisure activities, they were going to squeeze in a night to help. She left the crying baby holding himself up on the tub full of books, and she ran down the hall to the sunroom to share this news with her mother.

White hair framed an innocent and a helpless face bent over a television tray. Cracked dry lips asked gently, "Well, was it them?" Thoughtfully, she answered her mother, "Yes, I guess they are coming over tonight." "Well it is about time they decided to show up."  With panic in her heart, the daughter felt a change in her mother. A sense of letting go floated in the air like a feather. It floated softly back and forth, until it drifted to the floor at her own feet. Horrified, she stood in front of her mother and sensed a parting of paths, a final goodbye. She reached out and touched her mother's arm, and irrational anger seized her, " Mom, I feel like you are just throwing me to the wolves, you really can't be leaving me here!"

   In despair, she thought about the routine they had established together. Even though no one was sleeping well at night, still they got up each morning to a pleasant breakfast of coffee and eggs. While the child played, they visited back and forth like nothing was happening. Later, the hospice nurse would visit, and the home health aide would show up to give a blessed sponge bath. The women's jokes and lovely manners were filled with compassion, professional but sweet. Occasionally blood flowed from her mother's coughing, and trips to the potty were made in great haste, or sometimes not at all. The bell rang to signal a new misery, or simple need. Food remained on the plate, and pills became almost impossible to swallow. Sometimes her mother suffered what the hospice team called a "pain crisis." But the routine continued, and the daughter was beginning to believe it was all something she could endure forever, as long as her mother wouldn't leave this way. A life would soon be over; a child would lose its grandparent, a daughter would be left to wrangle with relatives who had never bothered to treat her with decency. "Well Mom, I guess we can prepare for the arrival of royalty." The old woman's face was forlorn, and her expression regretful. "Yes, honey, I guess we can."

Cologna and Hayseed arrived that evening. He carried a sack full of junk food: snack cakes, crackers and cheese wrapped in plastic, microwavable spaghetti, and inexplicably, a can of dried nuts. "How pitiful," the daughter said to her baby, "A can of peanuts for a woman who can no longer even swallow her pills." The hospice nurse came to teach the "family" how to treat the pain with a suppository, and suddenly, Cologna decided it was no longer feasible for the old lady to die at home. Hayseed kept himself busy shifting from foot to foot, trying to appear sympathetic. He couldn't have been more removed from what was going on since he had never experienced an independent thought in his life. Controlling and bossy, Cologna decided they should spend the night in the house, the daughter went to bed with her baby.

Mother died the next morning with Hayseed and Cologna looking on. The daughter gripped her knees in the sun room, not believing the morning routine of coffee and breakfast was gone. The room was gloomy and summer drizzle cooled the warm atmosphere. The funeral director came to take the body away, and he herded the 'family' into the sunroom so no one could see the body being wheeled away in a rubber bag. As soon as the hearse, the hospice chaplain, and the nurse departed, Cologna grabbed the tub. She dumped the books out with disdain. Then briefly she inspected them for possible dollar worth. Together, she and Hayseed roamed the house taking whatever they wanted. The old costume jewelry, ornaments, glass, and flatware filled the large plastic tub. When it was full, they found an empty box. Several pieces of old furniture piled into the pickup. Eventually the door slammed and the pair departed with a warning that they would be back.

The little baby stretched his arms up to his mother and tears ran down his sweet little face. He had been through an ordeal, and he knew it. She hugged him close and realized that even though the day was getting on, it still was her birthday. She stepped out into the cool rain conscious of a new beginning not supported by her 'family's' miserable history. The sense of lightly letting go stretched her heart and the feather floated in the misty rain, back and forth, landing gently at her feet. Lovely, tiny, little hands reached out to feel the rain. Together they would attend a funeral with Hayseed and Cologna in tow. But the daughter knew many other family members and friends would want to visit the house after the ceremony. She whirled the baby around and faced the house. "We have a lot of work to do to get ourselves and this house ready."  When she closed the door behind them, the house felt like home. Maybe it still does.

The End

L Eckert

According to an article posted by AOL news, and written by "God Knows Who" James Carville, the democratic, left wing, bald headed guy, is claiming Glenn Beck is totally nuts. http://news.aol.com/article/james-carville-calls-glenn-beck-nuts/702767

Because my son has had swine flu for several days, and because I am too tired for a lot of revision, I only want to say, "I wish Glenn Beck was nuts." When he did his series on CNN about the possibility of school house terrrorism, I was too frightened to listen. And, at times, I find his little blackboard and some of his raving quite radical...but the sad truth is, he has theories that actually stand up to logical scrutiny. This is a problem, and we as citizens have a duty to listen to Glenn, Lou Dobbs, and other old wise white men like them.

Illegal immigrants have worn out their welcome. They are starting to offer our country less than what they expect...and violence on the streets of Chicago is disgusting...this is America, not Rio. We have free public schools, and other social programs. Our children should not be out flogging one another with boards; we have no excuse for allowing this behavior.

I don't agree with all Glenn Beck says. I think everyone's life is worthy of decent medicine. We should all be allowed to visit a doctor, receive help, and not suffer indigence because we are sick. He does need to shut his mouth now and then. But is he crazy? Sadly, he is not.