Play On!

Borders, culture and language are requisites of a nation, we are told.

When I was 10, we kids were very proud to be Americans. We celebrated the Fourth of July with a great deal of noise and an inner feeling of reverence.

Long dead, President Teddy Roosevelt was still a well-remembered idol and hero. The following are some of his inspiring words in 1907:

“In the first place we should insist that if the immigrant who comes here in good faith becomes an American and assimilates himself to us, he shall be treated on an exact equality with everyone else, for it is an outrage to discriminate against any such man because of creed, or birthplace, or origin. But this is predicated upon the man’s becoming in very fact an American, and nothing but an American. …There can be no divided allegiance here. Any man who says he is an American, but something else also, isn’t American at all. We have room for but one flag, the American flag, and this excludes the red flag, which symbolizes all wars against liberty and civilization, just as much as it excludes any foreign flag of a nation to which we are hostile. …We have room for but one language here, and that is the English language … and we have room for but one sole loyalty and that is a loyalty to the American people.”

Dropping all fatuous claims to “conservatism”, President Barack Obama now asks us to regard sanguinely many millions of people who have crossed our borders illegally.

Many of the illegal border-jumpers have been non-Mexicans — even Somalians — but carried documents written in Spanish.

No recent U.S. president has paid much attention to the dangers of our open borders with Mexico and Canada.

Both Republicans and Democrats seem willing to court the illegal aliens as future voters in their own political parties by making them welcome where they ought not to be.

There is, of course, also pressure to provide cheap labor for the many farms and orchards in the West.

The fox is already in our bosom, gnawing away at the vital sinews of our safety, our economy and our identity.

We should use our Armed Forces, enhanced by the latest technologies, to keep illegal aliens out.

The erection of the wall between us and Mexico is a worthy and necessary project for us to complete. (The cost will not be a fraction of the cost of providing entitlements for millions of illegal aliens and their burgeoning progeny.)

The horse is long gone, but closing the barn door may still be a wise move.

Only Solomon would have the answer as to what to do with the 12 million to 15 million illegal aliens now living with us and in many ways, off us.

Accepting the status quo is morally indefensible and surely tests the fiber of our long-held American creed that “we are a land of laws, not of men.”

There are, alas, no Teddy Roosevelts among us today.

Compromise for the wrong reasons is known in the vernacular as “selling out.”

Change? What change?