Random Thoughts & Questions: (Submit comments to: archinsc@home.com ) (October 30, 2001)
President Bush said Monday (October 29) the U.S. would get tougher on immigrants with student visas to assure they are in school and not off somewhere plotting something illegal. The already overworked FBI, Immigration and other federal officials obviously cannot take on this workload. About 600,000 foreigners are admitted each year on student visas and more than 26,000 U.S. colleges and universities are authorized to enroll them, according to the Associated Press. This security checking ought to be farmed out to local authorities in the area where the student is scheduled to enroll? The colleges should also be required to certify attendance and report absences via a nationwide computerized hookup, which will alert the Feds and local authorities. Searches for missing immigrant students must be undertaken promptly upon alert.
Since the overwhelming majority of Americans cannot read, write or interpret Arabic, why hasn’t the computing community (are you listening Bill Gates) developed the means to capture Arabic speeches and writings and run them through a converter/translator into English so we can all have a better idea of what Arabs think, write and say?
On a map of Kabul recently I saw the location of the Taliban’s Ministry for the Preservation of Virtue and the Elimination of Vice, which still holds eight Christian good doers in jail for allegedly throwing in a few words about Jesus along with advice on how to dig a well, plant a garden and turn stones into turnips. Not since Barry Goldwater’s 1964 ad hominem (“Extremism in the defense of freedom is no vice and moderation in the pursuit of liberty is no virtue.”) at the Cow Palace in San Francisco has anyone put virtue and vice in the same sentence.
It is not un-patriotic to disagree with something President Bush and the Congress are doing. It is not un-American to criticize politicians in this day and time. Politicians who expect everything they do to be accepted at face value are wacky or deluding themselves. America is all about independence of thought. It is also a Republic, where we elect officials to represent us and we abide, albeit sometimes reluctantly, with their decisions. This doesn’t mean we can’t have our own opinion or that we must shut up and wallow miserably in absolute silence.
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