BROWNSVILLE: A MODEL FOR 21ST CENTURY AMERICA'S BRAVE NEW WORLD OF DEPENDENCY AND IGNORANCE?

It was as a twelve-year-old that I first visited Brownsville, Texas.  The city was characterized by broad thoroughfares, overhanging palm trees, friendly, well-dressed people and a vibrant bicultural ambiance.  It was little wonder that I eventually wanted to live there and work as a dean at Texas Southmost College and the University of Texas at Brownsville.  But now, fast forwarding to 2013, Brownsville has a population of well over 200,000, not counting untold thousands of illegal immigrants that are never part of an official census.  Today, its streets are strewn with trash, and, more often than not, used diapers account for a considerable amount of the refuse that one encounters in shopping center parking lots.

Ranked as America's poorest city,
with 40% of its citizens living under the federal poverty line, similar percentages reflect an overwhelming number of Brownsvillians on Medicaid and food stamp rolls.  Illiteracy is widespread, and local politicos are adept at using a woefully unsophisticated electorate to maintain their choke-hold on the reins of power in Brownsville's Cameron County Courthouse, the command center for the most corrupt county in all of Texas. It is in reality no laughing matter, but locals joke about the Democratic Party machine as being the northern version of Mexico's PRI, the Institutional Revolutionary Party, which ruled Mexico as a one-party state for 70 years.

DILIGENT ENTREPRENEURS WORK ON THE RIVER SIDE

Cameron County's governmental leadership regularly crows about how much is being done for the "pobrecitos," the poor little people whose lives are marginal at best; and, although they talk a great game, the politicos have done virtually nothing to  change  the status-quo for generation after generation.  Nevertheless, in this Third World setting, the public servants keep demanding more and more state and federal money; and, in the meantime, more and more of their constituents are content to live out their lives on the public dole, while contractors in search of labor are forced to rely on hungry, undocumented workers from Mexico.  For too many in Cameron County, welfare is the preferred option to working for a living.  But it must be admitted that there are not a few in the population who have applied significant ingenuity in profiting handsomely in the cross-border drug trade.

DA INDICTED & CONVICTED

It has been relatively recent that federal authorities have  subjected the Cameron political establishment to intense investigation. Consequently, a host of attorneys, a district judge and even a district attorney have been indicted and convicted for racketeering and malfeasance.  And, from all appearances, the line-up of indicted officials at the federal courts is destined to become even longer.

Oftentimes, in trying to make a very bad joke, I tell friends that if they wish to see the America of the future as envisioned for us by the Obama Democrats, they should take in Brownsville. Indeed, it is all here and so very plain to see:  one-party rule, poverty, ignorance, an easily manipulated electorate largely dependent on governmental handouts, corruption, soaring rates of illegitimacy, crime, and too many youngsters who have found school systems more intent on state examinations than learning.  It is little wonder, then, that dominant D.C. interests have done next to nothing to secure the southern border, as new generations of amnestied would-be Americans emerging from the Brownsvilles of this country would assure them of perpetual political dominance. For certain, the Brownsville model looms large on the socialist blueprint for America's future.