I Made My Choice - Have You?: One Man's Thoughts on Issues in Our National News and Possible Solutions

by Blair Stevens

Overview

The twenty-four-hour news cycle brings the issues facing America to the forefront every single day. Author Blair Stevens sees parallels between many of these issues and his own life experiences. He offers his unique take on them in I Made My Choice—Have You?

A husband, father, and businessman, Stevens discusses several of the most pressing concerns facing Americans today. He explains how working in Mexico City as part of his job shapes his observations on illegal immigration and reveals some possible solutions that America can take to stem the tide.

When Stevens’ unwed daughter became pregnant, another hot-button issue—abortion—landed right on Stevens’ front doorstep. With warmth and honesty, he shares how the family navigated his daughter’s decision to keep the baby and opens up about his views on the right to life. In addition, Stevens discusses other important topics including drug abuse, teen suicide, education, and racism, all within the prism of his experiences.

Down-to-earth and engaging, I Made My Choice—Have You? seeks to help you look at today’s current events in a different light.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781475958935
Publisher:	iUniverse, Incorporated
Publication date:	11/12/2012
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	116
File size:	215 KB

Read an Excerpt

I Made My Choice—Have You?

One Man's Thoughts on Issues in Our National News and Possible Solutions

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By Blair Stevens

iUniverse, Inc.

Copyright © 2012 Blair Stevens
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4759-5892-8

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Chapter One

Who am I?

I was born on August 30th 1950 in Glendale California and went home from the hospital three days later with my parents to a small suburb in southeast Los Angeles County that is today known as Pico Rivera. This area was previously a farming community and after World War II, it was subdivided into a medium sized community of inexpensive two bedroom homes that were very affordable for many veterans and young families just starting out in life. Life here was good as the area was pretty much like a television show of the day. There were young families in just about every home with a working dad and stay at home mom and all seemed fairly happy. There was an endless supply of things for young people to do as well. Scouting, little league, new schools, and farming that was still actively going on in the area as well as a few spots that made us young folks think we were living in a wilderness with lots of wild critters to catch and places to explore.

Growing up here for me was great. I wasn't inclined to be athletic like most of my friends as I was then pretty much a 98 pound weakling but scouting suited me fine and I liked catching many of the local wildlife and trying to make pets out of them. Nothing too exotic, just the usual kid stuff like frogs, toads, lizards, birds and jackrabbits among some others were there for the taking. I even had a cousin that wouldn't come to my house because he was convinced I had snakes hidden under my bed. Of course I'm not talking.

Education was available to all up to a two year college for free as well as lots of jobs of all sorts. This was such a good place to grow up, I didn't even leave until my wedding day twenty two years later and I still live just five miles from where I grew up. No complaints, life was good and I still see many of the kids I grew up with on a fairly regular basis. Along with my parents and friends, I also have an older brother, a younger brother that died at two years of age and two younger sisters. And of course the requisite dogs and a cat to make the perfect childhood seem apparent. In fact, there is really not too much to write about here because aside from the usual bumps, bruises, stitches and broken bones there just wasn't much going on. Of course my parents had all of the usual arguments and stuff that couples go through and I know there were many rough times for them like there have been for me in my adult life. Overall, childhood was probably not much different than most kids had in the 1950's through the 1960's in this country.

When I was in High School, it became fairly evident that I was not going to be in the top of my class. In fact I was always teetering on the brink of failure. I can't really say why I was at best slightly below an average student but I did find out by tenth grade that I was a person with a fair mechanical aptitude so I entered the auto shop class and did quite well. In fact, this all seemed to work so well for me that I bought my first car the week after my sixteenth birthday. It was a 1927 Ford Model T and a complete pile of trash. The only thing my father said about it was; "well, you just threw away an entire summers worth of work in a car wash on a car that will never run." But for me, this was the best day of my life so far. It took me three years to pull it off but I managed to completely restore it and I still own it and drive it forty six years later. Maybe this car was my clue as to how my life would work out. I found a car that I loved and I will likely still be the owner of it on the day I die. Well, I later on found a girl I love and I feel like we will be together until the day I die too. In fact, this experience worked so well for me that I have owned many antique cars, mostly Fords, and now have a small business repairing them for others. Most of the other cars have moved on but my first car and my first love are still part of my life.

Of course since then I have had many things happen in my life and many of them I could easily say have been the happiest of my life. The birth of my two children is certainly at the top of the pile and of course the birth of my seven grandchildren is right up there too. I even had the unbelievable gift from God to be able to witness the first breath of both my children and two of my grandchildren. I was also given the honor of chauffeuring both of my kids and four of my grandkids home in an antique car. It just seemed to be a cool idea for these people to someday tell the story to their great grandkids that the first car they ever rode in was a Model T Ford. However, should anyone ever ask; "what was the absolute best day of your life?" I would have to answer that it was, still is, and probably always will be my wedding day. After all, without it, all of the rest, with the exception of the old car, would not have happened and my life would have been somewhat without challenge and joy. What was the worst day of my life? The death of my daughter's best friend Amy, which I have written about in these pages, is without second the absolute most terrible thing I have had to live with so far.

While my growing up should be left for another book to be given to my children, many of the things I learned and attitudes I inherited are what this little bit of reading is all about. How I feel about many of life's issues and our nation's problems today as well as how I have dealt with them are pretty much what is on the following pages. I hope you enjoy these thoughts but I am pretty sure most today will want to scream at me as to how wrong I am on all of it. Such is life and I have been far too worried about what others thought of me to express my feelings up to now. Most of what I have written is contrary to anything you might hear on the streets or in our various types of news media. Well, at nearly sixty two years of age, it is time to man up and share my feelings about these few subjects for my family to have. Much of it will be upsetting to them and any others that might read it. I do hope and pray that they will forgive me because I am not writing this in some lame attempt to have them follow me. I am merely writing this so that they might know what might have been passing through this mixed up mind of mine for these many years.

I have been to probably hundreds of memorial services of family and friends and too many of them have been short emotional services that left one wondering; who was this person? I have also been to a few that made me feel as though I had been in the presence of greatness without even knowing it. Wouldn't it be nice to at least leave something in between for the people you loved and left behind?

Chapter Two

Where are you from?

There has been a lot of noise on broadcast news and in print lately about illegal immigration, amnesty, border security and the cures from all of the experts. Much of this noise has been about the many options being considered to stem this tide of humanity crossing our international border with Mexico. Not being an expert but merely an average American with an opinion that I have been afraid to express forever, it is time to write a few words about how I feel on this subject. The general consensus on this subject seems to run down two streets that differ greatly in direction. One street feels that a very large fence manned by our military along our southern border with Mexico is the final solution to this problem of illegal immigration. This coupled with severe penalties for anyone that employs an illegal immigrant or even rents them a place to hang their hat. Of course this is only the basic idea. I seem to recall a period in my young life where a country in Europe was divided by a fence. One side was the east and the other side was the west. This fence was protected by armed military personnel to keep people from crossing from one side to the other. The ultimate solution to this problem after many years was to tear the fence down because the original idea was a complete failure. Too many lives were lost or ruined during this separation period and thankfully it has ended. Do we really want to create a similar situation right here on our own continent? I hope not and I will resist any action that sets the stage for this sort of solution.

The other street seems to want to offer amnesty to all of those here already and I suppose make it easier for those waiting to come in. Of course the folks from the first street point out that many criminals will be granted this amnesty and some even feel that they are all criminals. Yes, there are many criminal types crossing our border to the south but the vast majority is guilty of only one thing. They are guilty of being hungry because they are poor. Since when is being poor a crime? Wasn't there a time when poor people were coming to this country and being welcomed? Now, while I don't agree with turning a blind eye to this problem of illegal immigration or giving them amnesty, I think there must be a common sense solution that would make us all winners. The amnesty believers say make them legal since we will never be able to send them all back anyway and no real Americans will do the work these people are willing to do. WRONG. The first street is pretty tough and say we need to be tougher by sending them all back to where they came from and tighten up our porous border to the south. MOSTLY WRONG.

First, before we talk of a possible alternative to the immigration problem, let's look at the job situation. Way back in time when I was a teenager and wanting money, I found, as well as most of my friends, that I could easily get work in a car wash, restaurant, gas station, or any number of lower level jobs that today the "experts" say real Americans won't do. Give me a break, since when? The problem, as I see it, is that we have become so spoiled and have done such a good job of spoiling our children with an unearned prosperity, that they cannot or will not now do those menial jobs. We have also made it nearly impossible for employers to hire those under eighteen years of age as somehow washing dishes is just too dangerous for someone that is sixteen years old but perfectly safe for someone two years older. When did this happen? Why can't we take a second look at our labor laws and improve them to allow young people to work part time? Perhaps this could be a valuable teaching tool that will give them some much needed life experience and even the incentive to get a better education and strive for greater things. Many young people from my generation managed to pay for a college education with the money they earned working part time in high school. Perhaps working young people will have less down time to get in trouble and maybe they might not become overweight couch potatoes. Given this thought one might wonder someday what ever happened to those jobs that Americans wouldn't do.

When our son Michael was about fifteen years old, my job was consuming over 80 hours per week and keeping the yard work up was an impossible task. My wife Lynne suggested I hire a lawn service which we did. Then one day, Michael came up to me and let me know that the young man helping his father mow our lawn was a classmate of his and that he felt sorry for the kid. I asked Michael why he felt sorry for the kid and he responded that while he did not have to do such menial labor; his classmate had to help his dad earn a living. With that I stopped what I was doing, looked Michael directly in the eye and told him that the young man was earning an honest living for which there is never any shame and I would never want to hear him talking down to or about someone that is also earning an honest living. Michael never brought it up again. Our son now earns an honest living and he does his own yard work. So now, let's get back on subject and consider an alternative to illegal immigration that I have never heard talk of.

Now, not too long ago, the president of Mexico visits our country and lectures us on our immigration problem as well as giving us major grief about our lack of gun control because we are the reason why the drug cartels in Mexico have major firepower. Of course our current President lacks the courage to counter this and merely stands there and accepts this beating. Well guess what? Everybody is wrong except the poor folks from down south.

About 15 years ago, while employed by a major American manufacturer of industrial products as a manufacturing engineer, I was sent into Mexico to help set up a manufacturing plant for the same products we were manufacturing here in the USA. Of course I expressed concern about the possible loss of jobs here in favor of cheap labor there but was assured by upper management that the products produced there would be used only for the industrial, mining and farming markets in Mexico and Central America. Being the good corporate boy that I was, I bought the story completely and agreed to work in Mexico City for as long as it took to get this factory my company had purchased into production of our products for the Latin American markets. Ultimately this assignment lasted about three to three and a half years along with my other projects and assignments here in the United States.

During my visits to Mexico City, I had the pleasure (and I do mean pleasure) of working directly with the people in this factory from the engineers down to the people on the shop floor of all skill levels from skilled machinists to janitors and to this day still consider many of them to be my friends. Also, throughout my life, while having had traveled to Mexico many times, I have never traveled there as a tourist like most Americans. All of my travels were of business in nature and I took the rare opportunity to get to know these people and learn what is important to them and their families. I also had the chance to make some observations of the people in general throughout this incredibly large city.

One of the first observations I made was that nobody was in charge. Imagine a city of some twenty five million people and nobody was running the show. The show was running the city. The next observation was that just like here in the good old USA, there were several levels of people. Here we refer to the largest group as the middle class and I suppose we could call the others the upper class and lower class or affluent and not or less affluent. This condition also exists in Mexico but that is where any similarities stop. We all know that here in the United States, your status in society can change dramatically and it is likely to be of your own doing. You could be born filthy rich or dirt poor and your actions and choices in life can make you the exact opposite.

In Mexico, this is not the case. By my observation and limited education, I would call this difference in societal position the closest thing that I have witnessed to a caste system. In Mexico, if you are born wealthy, you will die wealthy and likewise if you are born poor, you will die poor and nobody has any plan of changing this. Not the politicians, not the business people, not the middle class, nobody except possibly the very poor who are the very people this little essay is talking about. Even the big fat cat American business people that take jobs down there. They like the pay scale. I don't know what minimum wage is in Mexico today but when I was there it was around fifty cents an hour. Try living in Mexico City on that.

So who can we blame for this problem of illegal immigration into the United States? We can blame the poor people of course. After all they are the ones flooding across the border like an infestation of roaches right? Give me a break. THEY ARE HUNGRY! That's it. The government of Mexico doesn't care how hungry they are. The upper classes don't care how hungry they are and neither do the corporate big wigs of the United States and other countries that have set up shop there to benefit from the cheap labor. Is it possible that we here in the USA have helped create this major problem? I don't know but I'm pretty sure we need to stop blaming the millions of hungry people south of us.

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from I Made My Choice—Have You? by Blair Stevens Copyright © 2012 by Blair Stevens. Excerpted by permission of iUniverse, Inc.. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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