How can you tell when the national immigration debate has reached saturation point and seeped too deeply into the public's consciousness? When your wife starts having dreams about it.
Lisa told me this morning she dreamed she'd walked with the girls to the school bus stop (which, oddly enough, was beside railroad tracks). Suddenly, everyone started screaming and pointing to the sky, where thousands of heavily armed paratroopers were pouring out of giant transport planes high above. It was like a scene from Red Dawn. Lisa grabbed our children and rushed back to our house (which, in dreamland, had morphed into an apartment complex). Once there, she realized that the invaders were wearing U.S. uniforms. Puzzling, no? Why were they attacking? Then she learned they were immigration troops.
There was a national, no-tolerance crackdown on immigration under way. And by no tolerance, I mean no tolerance. Every single human being living in the U.S. was required to prove their citizenship or legal immigrant status. Lisa, at gunpoint, was forced to produce her birth certificate and those of our kids in order to avoid being herded into cages--yes, cages--and trucked away.
But it didn't end there. Apparently, birth certificates were pretty flimsy proof for the new, get-tough INS. So an agent began interviewing her. Where was she born? Where were her children born? Where were her parents born? At this point, Lisa begins panicking, hoping that they wouldn't ask where her grandparents were born, because she'd have to answer, "Czechoslovakia," as sure a one-way ticket to deportation central as anything.
There's some pretty poignant insight and social commentary there, if you ask me.
Now Playing: The Smithereens 11
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