I should warn you in advance that this is largely a personal tale, but I believe it speaks to what too many American citizens are dealing with today. I recently ordered a shipment of specialty bitters that are slightly alcoholic and they were delivered to me yesterday. (I’m finicky about my martinis. Judge me as you wish.) Because of the contents of the package, identification was required upon delivery. I have no problem with this and actually support it. I provided my ID and the delivery person scanned it. It was rejected. We tried several more times before finally finding a resolution and the delivery was completed. I’m sure this sounds very modest to most readers in terms of day-to-day troubles, but allow me to explain what the problems here are.
First of all, I’ve been fairly meticulous in taking care of my ID. I live in New York and the requirements can be complex. My ID card has not a star in the upper right corner (signifying that appropriate identification documents have been supplied) but an American Flag, along with the word “VETERAN” in bold letters in the upper left-hand corner. (You can see examples of these ID cards here.) These “Real ID” cards will soon be required for all international travel and are just about the best, most unquestionable forms of ID available. And yet, despite the fact that anyone could tell with a brief glance at me that I’m a senior citizen, I was being held up to receive delivery of a shipment from a national delivery service.
The fact that we have systems in place that raise questions over such situations is beyond concerning, and it should be for all of us. I am far from a perfect human being as none of us are, but I was born and raised in New York State. I am a citizen. I have no criminal record, though I had a few scrapes with military law enforcement as a young man. ( I was pulled out by the Shore Patrol a couple of times for bar fights as a young sailor. I tended to drink a bit.) But I have never been convicted of a crime or spent time in jail.
In my thirties, I was blessed to meet a young woman nearly ten years my junior who I fell in love with and quickly proposed to. After some understandable hesitation, she accepted. She is the daughter of veterans who attended and graduated from a small but prestigious university. In those days, she participated in some “Take Back the Night” protests against the sexual assault of young women, but never became violent and was similarly never arrested. We later protested together in the early 2000s against the invasion of Iraq, but we only carried signs and did not break the law.
We went on to not only marry but to start a life together that continues to this day as I’ve reached retirement age. We saved our money and purchased a home, eventually paying it off early at low interest rates. (Thankfully) Nobody paid off my wife’s college debts. We did that. Nobody paid off our mortgage or the payments for various cars. We did that. We didn’t resent it. That’s just how the world works, or at least how it used to work.
We are honestly bewildered as we are looking at what’s happening today. Society is no longer anywhere near as safe as it used to be. People are flooding into the country and they are being given everything while contributing nothing in many cases. More than a few of them are committing serious crimes. They do not pay their bills, they don’t even qualify to have jobs in many instances, but all of their needs are cared for. And the rest of us are the ones who are paying for all of this as the quality of our lives continues to deteriorate.
This is not a screed against immigration in general as so many liberals would have you believe. One of our best and oldest friends is a man who legally immigrated to the United States from Germany in the 1990s. He has multiple degrees in engineering from a university in Berlin and works for a NASA subcontracting company. He married a wonderful woman from Pennsylvania that we know and they are raising a great family. They all speak English. (He actually speaks five languages.) Those are exactly the types of people we need to be attracting and accepting. But that’s not what’s happening today. And it’s not right.