[Part I] The Road to Hell Is Paved In MoCo

Every now and then I decide that it's time to throw caution to the winds and this seems like a time to do so.

I'm seeing this thing happening all over the County, thought of course it's worst in low-rent places like East Aspen Hill or Wheaton-Glenmont.

Here's the start of how it works.

Some national-scale or more-or-less national-scale retailer with a fairly well-established customer base -- or near-monopoly level market segment domination -- wisely decides that it would be good to comply with Federal regulations regarding employment of disabled persons, legal immigrants and/or legal work-visa grantees, and "persons of color".

This is all well and good so far, admirable, etc.

However, the road to hell is paved with good intentions, and that road to hell ordinarily is best avoided once you start to see where it leads.

But there are people in life -- abundant in numbers and those numbers are only growing or so it seems -- who have finally done the math and who have decided that they will be the ones who put others on the Road to Hell, rather than being stuck on it themselves.

How did we get to this place?

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Since the early 1980s, global population has doubled.

This isn't just me talking. This is a fact.

In the USA, we are a civilized nation of civilized people, and since the introduction of the Birth Control Pill in the 1960s, we have restrained our rate of reproduction to the point where we should have had little or no population growth after about the Year 2000. Indeed, absent out-of-control immigration -- legal and otherwise -- we should actually be seeing a slight population decline here on the even of the Year 2010.

With growth in population, of course, there is a growth in consumption of resources.

Even without the current economic downturn, the USA has become a land with no surpluses.

With the current economic downturn, we are indeed a land with such a debt burden that we will probably never again have any form of surplus.

Heretofor, we have been able to tax the wealthy to support a lot of social programs to ease the plight of the poor.

With these social programs such as Welfare, we were able to offer such effective basic support that almost nobody would ever truthfully say "I did not choose a life of crime and violence, it was forced upon me as a necessity of survival. Without living a criminal life, I could not eat".

Yet crime continued to grow, in some places, and fine tuning of the Welfare and social outreach systems had to occur, and it did.

That this beneficial change happened at the consecutive peaks of some of the greatest economic "bubble" booms seems to have been overlooked.

That people didn't get involved in widespread crime, that's a result of the fact that most people will always take the road that has the best perceived combination of ease and little risk. When there's a "help wanted" sign on every storefront window, and when it's easier to take home a decent paycheck than it is to burglarize your neighbors and fence the loot, the vast majority of people will work a job and take a paycheck. Anyone who does not, in such conditions, is almost certainly psychologically defective. Nobody other than sociopaths or other varieties of the criminally insane would choose crime when it is far more profitable -- not to mention safe -- to work a job or run their own legal business.

But when times get tough, even decent people from good backgrounds and of decent moral character, even these people can find that hunger is now a constant companion, that need only increases, that they are at the edge of homelessness, and that between them and every hope of employment are a vast cadre of hate-filled foreigners, many of whom are here illegally and who ran businesses from the shadowy underground of political patronage and backroom pay-offs and slickly skating past the checks-and-balances which all of the honest people honored because for the honest people, it was the right thing to do, the proper way to run a community or nation.

In the best of times, people are willing to look the other way as some people skirt the rules and live off of the fat of the land. When you have plenty of money, nobody complains too much about an increase in taxes, taxes needed to fill the gaps.

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I like to watch birds.

I don't make a big deal of it, sneaking around in the woods with binoculars looking for the Ivory-Billed Woodpecker or whatever.

I just put out a bird feeder and watch the local birds flock in.

The Robins are seasonal, of course, and they also are carnivorous; they don't care about bird-seed one way or the other. The Cardinals, Nuthatches, and even some of the woodpeckers, they come around for the seed.

Usually, squirrels will eat what they can steal from the feeder, but it's not essential for their survival. They're just greedy; they usually have plenty of acorns.

Acorns aren't just food for the squirrels, deer rely on them during the winter.

Last year, and this year, there are no acorns. The oak which usually buries the back yard nearly an inch deep in acorns has failed to fruit for the second year in a row, and the rest of the nut trees were similarly fruitless, or nearly so. This may relate to the catastrophe in bee-keeping which continues to unfold around us.

So, if I don't keep the bird-feeder full, the birds can fly away and find some better place... but the deer will starve, and so will the squirrels.

Yet so long as I feed the squirrels, and the deer, I also feed the birds...

And I also feed the RATS.

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Obviously, I don't want to feed the rats. While the squirrels will stay outside in their nests, the rats insist on coming inside.

And as we all know, when the rats come into your house, they invite all of their friends...

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More to come.

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