I received a terrific e-mail the other day. Here it is:
“A win-win situation. Dig a moat the length of the Mexican border, take the dirt and raise the levies in New Orleans, and then put the Florida alligators into the border moat! Any other problems you’d like me to solve?”
How about that for common wisdom? And that was thought up by someone just like you and me. It wasn’t the product of some Washington ‘think tank.’ It wasn’t developed by some industry lobbyist, nor was it negotiated by some Congressional committee. The author of this gem of a solution just used common sense.
Now let’s figure out who would be against it.
The environmentalists would scream bloody murder that we were defacing the landscape by digging the moat. And how many of God’s creatures would be displaced or have their normal migration routes blocked? They would also protest the mass evacuation of alligators from Florida and the introduction of a ‘non-native species’ on to our Southern border.
Then the ACLU would insinuate itself, claiming that we were committing human rights abuse against the illegals’ by creating the “Alligator Barrier.” (Question; What’s worse? Getting eaten or dying of thirst and starvation in the desert?)
And what about diverting the water it would take to fill the moat? Fast growing desert urban sprawls like Phoenix and Las Vegas would lobby against their loss of water from their already water-hungry communities.
And finally, Louisiana politicos would block the delivery of the displaced earth unless they could find a way to get a kickback for each truckload delivered.
I sure liked the simple solution, the commons sense one. The problem is that Special Interests just make life more complicated.
