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Dear Friends,
My girls and I stayed up late the other night to watch Red Dawn. The real one, not that ridiculous remake they did a few years back. They had never seen it, and to my everlasting horror neither of them had any idea who Patrick Swayze was. I—I—cannot even. I have obviously been derelict as a father. Not because I didn’t show them Dirty Dancing, of course, but seriously: they had never even heard of The Outsiders or Ghost or Point Break or Road House. The man was an absolute legend for a very long time and now he’s just… gone. And Hollywood just keeps on erasing him!
They remade Point Break. Outrageous.
Now they’ve remade Road House. You read that right. Without Patrick Swayze. No offense to Jake Gyllenhaal, but I hope it is the biggest bomb in Hollywood history.
Fun fact: not only was Patrick Swayze uncommonly handsome and a great dancer (originally a ballet dancer!), he also had a killer singing voice. He passed away due to pancreatic cancer at age 57, and is greatly missed. By GenXers, at least. We’re apparently the only ones who remember him.
Back to Red Dawn. It’s a classic of the Cold War genre—pure and very entertaining political agitprop. But as a boy it was just real. And growing up in a city that looks very much like the Colorado town in which the film takes place made it all the more real. We, too, have mountains to which we could flee in the event of an enemy invasion! And so my brothers and I prepped, as much as young boys could prep. We formed a neighborhood “gang” or “club” (called the “A-Team,” after the TV show), and we practiced army crawling and stealth and military discipline and the like. Those are happy memories.
Thankfully, the invasion never came.
Which brings me to something I think is worthy of some commentary. It seems there is a different sort of invasion taking place on our southern border and it is leading toward some kind of constitutional crisis. Migrants from Central America (and elsewhere) continue pouring over the border. Texas Governor Greg Abbot puts the number of border crossings in Texas at 6 million in the last three years alone. Our borders and immigration laws are clearly not being enforced—or at least not enforced effectively.
The vast majority of these migrants are not coming to engage in a hostile takeover of America or to engage in mayhem and crime. They are coming to America for the same reason immigrants have always come to America: the opportunity for a better and more prosperous life. But, as you can imagine, such unrestricted, large-scale mass movements of people also involve many who are not so idealistic—drug cartels gain cover for smuggling their wares into the country, as do human traffickers. Suffice it to say, millions of people pouring over an unsecured border is not a sustainable thing for a nation in and of itself, and it is dangerous given the opportunity it provides for people with nefarious motives or plans.
Now, I’m going to say something so deep and profound they should give me a Nobel Prize (I mean, after all, they gave one to Barack Obama for nothing more than vapid rhetoric): the answer to this problem lies somewhere in between “put up a wall, kick them all out, and never let anyone in again” and “get rid of the border altogether and let the masses in and we’ll all have a big group hug and sing Kumbaya and celebrate our diversity.” That’s the kind of insight you pay for. Okay, fine. I’ll say some more.
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