idealists

Don’t you think that sometimes idealists are, well, full of crap. I mean we kind of admire them, they seem so pure and all, and at first glance their ideas are sparkly. But it seems they are more interested in the purity of their ideas, and so disdainful of the rough ways of man, that they are just not going to get anything done.

I know I’ve told you that in some of my advanced math classes, there would come a point when the prof would be explaining some abstruse chain of logic and some student would raise his hand and ask, So what? What good is all this stuff? What can we do with it? And the prof would set down his chalk, and stare at the guy, and with thinly concealed disgust ask, You’re an engineer aren’t you? And the student would be all like, Why yes I am. And the prof would raise his hands as if in despair of ever teaching this lout anything, and the half of the class that was math majors would all laugh, and the half of the class that was engineers would scratch their heads.

I was a math major, not a very good one, most of the time I didn’t know what was going on. I survived on the kindness of professors, more likely their disinterest in grading. Sometimes they would give the whole class A’s, because they couldn’t be bothered wasting their time by judging the rough lot of students. I sided with the profs, because those engineers, all they did was make gadgets, generally loud and annoying. I would have been happier on some Grecian Glen watching Pythagoras sketch his pure ideas in the sand. Unless it got too hot. Then I would have liked to have been in an air conditioned room.

And I guess I like the union idealists better than the pragmatic ones. The liberal union guys look at the world and the unfair distribution of wealth (remember that) and they think that something has to be done about it, and maybe the place to start is the paper mill. They will help those poor oppressed folk to make a buck more an hour and put an extra slice of bread on the table of their children. And from there they will go to other mills and help those oppressed folk, and on and on until everything is fair and dandy.

But those plant guys who may have nodded through the flowery speeches of the liberals at the union hall, once they get that extra buck, they have kind of lost any interest they may have had in making everything fair and dandy, and they don’t want to support those strangers at that other mill halfway across the state and those union dues seem to awfully high, and as for making everything fair and dandy, well that sort of sounds like commie talk.

Don’t those Red Chinese earn the money they get from us, by working harder and saving more, all fair and square? Or is your argument that they are them and we are us? I don’t think you can tax another country.

I think they take polls and extrapolate, maybe estimate how many come over and how many get caught. Wiki has an article on it of course: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illegal_immigrant_population_of_the_United_States 

12 million seems to be the generally accepted number. And two reasons why even the tea party doesn’t talk about shipping them back is that it would be really hard and expensive, and it would ruin or economy even more.