Unlike Johnny Cash, I picked Cotton.

In the late 1950's and early 60's, we lived in a farm community.  Hester, Oklahoma.  When we moved there it was little more than a KATY Railroad spur to the abandoned cotton gin.  We lived in a church parsonage next to Hester Baptist Church.  The church was a concrete block WPA school converted to a house of worship.  The kids in the area had long since been bused to school in Mangum.

We were surrounded by cotton fields.  At 7 or 8, I hoed cotton, I picked it.  It was nasty back breaking work.  You put the cotton in a long cotton sack you drug behind you.  It was then weighed and you were paid by the pound.  The cotton hulls would cut your hands, and if you weren't a "clean picker", you got too much leaf and hull in your cotton, you got yelled at.  My folks insisted I work in the cotton fields.  I guess it was to let me experience life should my scholarly efforts fall short.

In those days, Mexican families still came up from Mexico to harvest crops, beginning in the spring and following whatever crops needed picking as they moved north.  My dad taught Spanish at Martha School, so whenever there was a problem, farmers sent them to my dad to translate.  During Cotton harvest, it was not unusual to get a knock on the door in the middle of the night with a woman giving birth.  Farmers in the area had shanty villages on their farms, used only at harvest.  Some farmers cared about the workers, had nice accommodations while others didn't really care.  The good farmers attracted the good crews year after year.  Some farms hired the same families for 20 years, knew the children, their grandchildren, mourned the patriarchs passing over the winter.

As a child, I was fascinated by the crop dusters as the daredevil pilots did acrobatics under power and telephone lines.  I played in the irrigation ditches, sometime trapping fish in the channel grids.  I once brought home a dozen such fish in a cardboard box.  Filled a wash tub, with water, placed the fish in the fresh water and ran in to get my mother.  We returned and I was proud to show her my catch, only to discover the feral cats had eaten all of my ditch fish.  Being a preacher's wife, mom was always worried a lady from the church would come by and the house would be dirty.  Surrounded by cotton fields, with the western wind, the tractor plows, I think it drove mom crazy as the dust was inescapable.

As we debate immigration today, I am reminded that we once had a migratory worker program in this country.  Families would load in caravans and head north following the crops. Once winter came they headed back to warmth of Mexico.  Below are some notes from Wikipedia about migrant works from that period.  The history is little known today.  It is interesting to me that this issue seems to be never solved, and politics make strange bedfellows.

But they too picked cotton.

The UFW during Chavez's tenure was committed to restricting immigration. Chavez and Dolores Huerta, cofounder and president of the UFW, fought the Bracero Program that existed from 1942 to 1964. Their opposition stemmed from their belief that the program undermined U.S. workers and exploited the migrant workers. Since the Bracero Program ensured a constant supply of cheap immigrant labor for growers, immigrants could not protest any infringement of their rights, lest they be fired and replaced. Their efforts contributed to Congress ending the Bracero Program in 1964. In 1973, the UFW was one of the first labor unions to oppose proposed employer sanctions that would have prohibited hiring undocumented immigrants. Later during the 1980s, while Chavez was still working alongside Huerta, he was key in getting the amnesty provisions into the 1986 federal immigration act.<sup>[22]

The Bracero Program was initially prompted by a demand for manual labor during World War II and began with the U.S. government bringing in a few hundred experienced Mexican agricultural laborers to harvest sugar beets in the Stockton, California area. The program soon spread to cover most of the United States and provided workers for the agricultural labor market (with the notable exception being Texas, which initially opted out of the program in preference to an "open border" policy, and was denied braceros by the Mexican government until 1947 due to perceived mistreatment of Mexican laborers[1]). As a corollary, the railroad bracero program was independently negotiated to supply U.S. railroads initially with unskilled workers for railroad track maintenance but eventually to cover other unskilled and skilled labor. By 1945, the quota for the agricultural program was more than 75,000 braceros working in the U.S. railroad system and 50,000 braceros working in U.S. agriculture at any one time.</sup>

Art Linkletter and the five penises.

Some of you will have never have heard of Art Linkletter, 1912 to 2010.  He was a stable of daytime television when I was a child.  He once wrote a book "Kids say the darnest things."  Some of you may remember that Bill Cosby picked up the mantle with his show in the 70's.

My son says the darnest things too.  When he was 4 or 5, my wife was trying to answer questions about where baby's come from.  She was using all the clinical terms.  A baby is formed in the uterus, then comes out the vagina.  I told her, "You sure you want to do that?"

Time passed.  One Sunday afternoon we were in my wife's home office.  She was at her desk and I was laying on the sofa.  My son comes in and asks my wife, "Show me your china."  My wife is puzzled, why does our son want to she her mother's china dishes.  He says it again, this time placing his hands on her knees.  I got it and I fall off the sofa laughing.  My wife is still puzzled.  Then he says, "Show me your china, I'll be you best friend."  My wife got it.  I then said, "Hun, I bet that's not the first time you heard that."

Once on a family trip, the silence was broken when out of the blue my son asks, "Do all girls have a universe?"  Yes, son they do and they know it.

I have been teaching my children to shoot.  I have stressed safety and gun handling rules.  Treat every gun as though it is loaded and never point a gun at anything you don't want to destroy.  Recently there was an article about a 18 year old Florida boy, Michael Smeriglio, who shot off his penis and testicle while "Cleaning" his gun.  I printed out the article and took it home to drive home the lesson.  My son pondered this story for sometime, then asked, "How will he go to the bathroom now?"  To which I replied, "I guess he'll have to sit like a girl."  There was a puzzled look on his face as he pondered his next question.  He then asked with a certain sense of surprise, "Girls have to sit to pee?"  "Why?"  To which I replied, "Plumbing's different, go ask your mother."

The past few years, my wife has had a both at the state fair.  We trailer our Welch pony and miniature pony and she uses them to introduce equine assisted psycho therapy to the public.  I took the opportunity to take my son through the livestock barns.  The baby lambs are always my favorite.  We go to the dairy barn.  There, folks of all ages are washing and brushing there show bovine.  The barn has a fully equipped milking room, as these dairy cattle still produce milk, even when being shown.  We walk up on a very nice lady who engages my son and begins to tell him about her Jersey cow.  She points to her udder and teats and then was left speechless when my son exclaims, "Look dad, 5 penises."

Magazine Drives and Transvestites

Each fall our children's elementary school PTA has a magazine drive.  We buy our fair share of magazines and then twist the arms of aunts and uncles to do their part so our children can win copious amounts of cheap Chinese crap.

One year our daughter won a 3/4 mile limousine ride to our local pizzeria for selling the most subscriptions, 60.  I think that is still a record.  A few years back, our son won and committed one of the most selfless acts I have seen a child do.  First prize that year was a life size cut out.  You could select from any number of pop culture icons.  Our son chose that Canadian music icon, Justa Beaver.  He kept his choice secret as the school had to order it.  After a few weeks, I took him up to school and with great secrecy he claimed his prize.  We took it home where he surprised his sister with the live size cut out of Justa Beaver. 

I got so tired of looking at the image of that silly dork.  I once hid it in the furnace closet only to scare the crap out of my wife when she opened the door.  I was going to hide in the tack room once but was a afraid my wife or a horse boarder would have a heart attack and die.

As I said, we buy our fair share of magazines.  I always get "Texas Monthly".  I like the magazine, and it cheeses my wife off as she eschews all things Texan, except cowboy boots, cowboy hats and this author.  While thumbing through the latest issue, I discovered an advertisement in the back that brought me consternation about my beloved birth place.  An advertisement for fashions aimed at cross dressers.  Suddenlyfemstyle.com.  If you google it you get 6.7 million results.  Suddenly fem style.com takes you to crossdresser.com.

For some strange reason my mind wondered to the Llano County Courthouse square of the 1960's with its mixture of Civil War, World War I and II statures, plaques and heroes.  There under the live oak trees, sitting on the red granite benches the spit and whittle club met.  Old men in their worn khakis and sweat stained Stetson hats chewing  tobacco and testing the sharpness of their Case pocket knives on the fallen branches.

Not a scene one would associate with pantie hose and silicone breasts.  But then again, the odds say one of those old cusses had occasion to put on his wife's girdle..

Shoe on the other foot thoughts...

What if the 2nd Amendment stated?

"The right of a woman to have an abortion shall not be infringed."

What if the following happened?

The Supreme Court ruled that the 2nd Amendment is a individual right but the government can make reasonable restrictions by a 5 to 4 vote, and you are one vote away from abolishing it.

There were reams of writings by the founding fathers explaining the foundation and importance of the 2nd Amendment and politicians and legal scholars all ignore it putting their own uniformed interpretation to it.

Abortions were banded in all the world except the United States and Switzerland. Every household must have at least one abortion in Switzerland.

Returning veterans are denied abortions because the government has determined they aren't mentally stable enough to have an abortion, despite no diagnosis or evidence reflecting this determination.

Major newspapers published a map showing the names and addresses of every women who had an abortion.

You had to register with local authorities before having an abortion.

You have a bumper sticker that reads, "If abortions are outlawed, only outlaws will preform abortions." And "I will give up my abortion when you pry my dead cold fetus from my hand."

Editorial pages in major newspapers called for the president and executive director of Planned Parenthood be killed.  The killing of all members of Plan Parenthood was advocated.  The razing of Planned Parenthood's headquarters and the salting of the ground was advocated.

The government's own statistics showed that unrestricted abortion actually showed it saved lives in the long term.

The National Rifle Association received half a billion dollars a year from the public treasury.

Piers Morgan held a week of shows dedicated to abolishing the 2nd Amendment, calling representatives of Plan Parenthood women's rights and abortion advocates "Stupid."  Guests advocate a late term abortion for radio host Ed Shultz because he is a proponent of unrestricted abortions.

Local governments placed exorbitant taxes on abortion equipment and facilities.

All abortion clinics and doctors must have a federal license and pay a fee to operate.  They are heavily regulated by the Department of Human Services.

Illegal gangs and criminal organizations will not close their clinics.

All the talk of restricting abortion let to millions of women getting pregnant so they can exercise their right to an abortion, creating a nine month backlog at clinics.

Joe Biden is put in charge of commission to limit the 2nd Amendment.

A conservative president decides he can't get legislation or a constitutional amendment to prevent the killing of the unborn and decides to act unilaterally, through executive order to make reasonable restrictions to the 2nd amendment, no abortions after 30 days, a national registry of woman who had abortions, background checks for all women who want an abortion, a limit to one abortion a lifetime. 

And if you say to yourself, guns kill children, you lack a sense of irony.

There are just some thoughts with the shoe on the other foot.