Detractors need taste of own medicine

Between Washington State and Florida, thousands of migrant workers are paid below federal minimum wage salaries in farms jobs and statesiders (like locals in the NMI) have categorized these as strictly designed for others.

Statesiders too don’t want to get their hands dirty nor chance contracting cancer (being literate of course) working with fertilizers and insecticides. I suppose turning their heads the other way is a convenient way to ignoring righting a wrong for as long as they aren’t the victims of abuse and for as long as the price of fruits and vegetables they find at the grocery stores are cheap. This very abuse of migrant workers is ignored and overlooked because farm owners needed cheap labor too. They are paid $2 an hour, so why report it when it means cheap farm produce for American consumers?

I’ve prayed long and hard for the thousands of children of migrant workers who are denied normal childhood growth because they had to join their parents in the fields picking farm produce from dawn to dusk. Their soft hands have turned into callous, hands that are supposed to be holding pencils writing and learning their ABCs.
It’s a sure way of fastforwarding adulthood in young children who will never learn what being a child is all about. And not when they must grow up as indentured slaves of US mainland farmers.

How ironic that as these ugly backyard abuses occur daily in farm fields across the country, advocates of human rights have simply failed to come to the self-realization that you don’t throw rocks at someone else’s glass house when in fact you live in one. Isn’t it time that they too get a dosage of their own medicine? Or have they gotten immune to preaching one thing while neglecting their own set of problems in their backyards? I must have been reading all the wrong literature about labor abuses in the US mainland.

How I wish that as simple our ways since time immemorial that our lifestyle would remain just that where the federal government is basically an inconsequence as is the case in most small towns between California, Maine, Florida and Washington states. Admittedly, I’ve sought long and hard to sift through the maze to understand the genesis of a now soured relationship between the NMI and the federal government. If I may say so with sadness: It’s special interest in the capital of garment manufacturing in California that has brought the current controversy into a war of the politically powerful and powerless.

In more ways than one, I am wounded by the condescending attitude with which our detractors have viciously campaigned against a powerless and helpless group of US Citizens. I sit and ponder too how the Clinton Administration view the NMI: A part of the US? If so, why has it been very reluctant to ensure that its policy of wealth and jobs creation is also shared by this tiny American community way in the Pacific? Mr. President, the people of these islands are US Citizens too! We deserve to be made a part of the greater American Economic Community.

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I watched CNN’s story of the O`Mallys (excuse the non-Irish spelling) who were evicted from their apartment when the landlord increased the monthly rent. They pleaded their case to no avail. They then moved-in with relatives. Mr. O`Mally spent weekends sleeping in his car or would take the boys camping at the park to spend some privacy with his family. The couple works on regular jobs living paycheck to paycheck.

One day Mr. O`Mally had to give into seeking for federally subsidized housing, but with moist eyes he remarked: “I can’t understand why both my wife and I work and still can’t make ends meet.” Now, this is a human interest story that ABC’s 20/20 must concentrate on not well orchestrated bullish and sensationalistic yellow journalism coverage of developmental problems in the NMI.