here comes a rant

Wow.......does this replace "Dear diary"? Could be interesting. What to say? Where to begin?
Perhaps I'll wax philosophical about deep thoughts........nope. How about.........illegal immigration?
OK!!!
First of all, I do think our borders need to be strengthened. That said, I feel that the vast majority of immigrants (legal or not) do really just want a shot at a better life. I have neighbors from Colombia who bust their butts day in and day out, he works 7 days a week to provide for his wife and son. They have cleaned Target stores at night. She has cleaned houses for people who can afford to pay to have their houses cleaned. They are the kindest, most courteous people we have ever met. They would give you the shirts off their backs if you needed a shirt. Literally. So my MIL sends me an email today, it's a YouTube clip of some hospital administrator in Florida listing the costs incurred by 2 patients, both illegal immigrants, the dollar amounts were in the millions, and the hundreds of thousands. Since we're talking money, let me appeal to your monetary security sense: if we didn't have immigrants in our fields picking crops (yes, they are the ones working long days EVERY day in every kind of weather) or working construction, or cleaning malls/office facilities after hours, what do you think we'd pay for these services? If those costs for labor increased to pay what spoiled U.S. citizen teenagers, say, would work for- What if U.S. citizens organized these particular areas of the service industry into unions? What do you think a head of lettuce would cost then? 5 bucks a head? More? The cost always gets passed to the consumer, somehow. How many able-bodied adults do you know who would stand in 100-degree weather picking fruits, vegatables,nuts, etc? Or teenagers? No, the teens want to work at the mall or something equally minimally strenuous, and the adults, well, like my MIL, she'd rather go broke waiting for the real estate market to pick up than take a job at Wal-Mart. That's beneath her.
Um, OK, MIL is NOT a U.S. citizen (and she's lived here for 40 years, but the whole process of obtaining citizenship is "inconvenient") and is also uninsured. Can't afford it, she says. So in essence she's.............an uninsured non-citizen immigrant? Gee, is that the pot calling the kettle black? I think she channels FOX news at all times........which is a different subject for a different day (and another bottle of wine!)

I'm going to start volunteering at a free clinic,maybe once every 6 weeks or so, I'm excited. It's for the working poor, who are uninsured. With 4 kids myself, 2 with asthma, one with a (now healed!!!) congenital heart defect, I cannot imagine what my medical bills would be/would have been without insurance. I am so truly blessed, it would be wrong to not give back. I work with the doc who runs it, she is awesome. Truly gifted as an M.D., she is also a very kind, intuitive person. They always need nurses, so that's where I come in. I get very jaded from working in Urgent Care------so many drug seekers, so many addicts, so much hostility and dysfunction. Occasionally I get to take care of someone very sick, who is actually appreciative, and whom I can actually help, and when I do it's a real treat.
We'll see.............I'm the eternal idealist.