I have a crisp $20 bill in my wallet and I’m prepared to remit the price of this newspaper to the first 10 people who walk into the office complaining about my column.
Today’s gripes are focused on the “traffic disruptors,” who, in the name of climate change awareness, briefly plagued Boston streets on Wednesday, and the sanctimonious people who continue to be outraged by the surprise arrival of Venezulean immigrants on Martha’s Vineyard last week.
I am all in favor of people coming to this country to work; especially since a lot of us living here aren’t interested in employment.
But you’re going to have a hard time proving to me that the Martha’s Vineyard arrivals were “asylum seekers” fleeing a repressive South American regime. I think they are more accurately described as people who got tired of living in a place with a crappy economy and dysfunctional government who risked their lives to get to the Mexican-U.S. border and cross it into the Land of Opportunity.
The Vineyardites who pulled their Polo, J. Crew and Talbots cast-offs out of mothballs and rushed out to clothe and feed the immigrants are the same people who griped at the start of the summer about how their favorite island coffee shops and ice cream parlors couldn’t seem to hire enough help.
If people on Martha’s Vineyard and a dozen other similarly-wealthy communities in Massachusetts really cared about immigrants and anyone else on the lower end of the Commonwealth’s economic scale, they would make building public housing a priority. Don’t hold your breath on that one.
The only person in the immigrant airlift saga who is flying his true colors is Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis. An unapologetic opportunist, DeSantis looks at voters the same way a carnival barker looks at people strolling around the midway: gullible bumpkins who are ripe for the picking.
DeSantis scans the political horizon and sees himself standing in the White House. It was easy, politically-speaking, for him to use Massachusetts “sanctuary” status as leverage to exploit the Venezuelans.
That brings me to the climate crazies. Did these self-centered idiots really believe they could advance their cause by engineering a morning rush-hour traffic jam that would complicate the lives of people heading to work, dropping their kid off at school, going to medical appointments and job interviews, visiting a sick relative in a hospital, or volunteering to help someone less fortunate than them?
The answer, obviously, is yes. From the disruptors’ perspective, everyone sitting behind a steering wheel is a lazy, environmentally-unaware dolt who deserves to be jolted into a state of hyper climate-change awareness.
I wonder if the climate kooks paused for a second on Wednesday to contemplate the irony of their decision to protest the carbon emission infrastructure even as they drove a Ford F250 pickup down to their protest’s staging site.
I think we can tie up the whole immigrant absurdity and disruptor fiasco with a bow by deporting the disruptors to Venezuela, where I am sure their efforts at affecting change will be welcomed, and letting the Venezuelans move into the disruptors’ Newton and Jamaica Plain residences.
