Watch any movie from the 30s, 40s, 50s and even 60s and you’ll see porters and stewards shoving carts piled high with enormous steamer trunks. You’ll also see travelers huffing and puffing onto trains, buses, steamships and airplanes hauling heavy suitcases, yet not a single person ever stopped to ask, “Why doesn’t someone put wheels on these things?”
Not until Bernard Sadow came along.
Bernie Sadow was granted the very first patent on rolling suitcases, in– are you ready for this? — 1972! Think about that. From the time Og the Caveman developed opposable thumbs until the Nixon/McGovern campaign, nobody had thought of putting wheels on bags until Bernie finally took the lug out of luggage.
There are, of course, other seemingly soluble problems still awaiting an equally simple fix: mass shootings and open borders.
With 6 dead in Atlanta, 10 dead in Boulder, and hundreds of thousands of illegal immigrants entering the country every year, including thousands of unaccompanied children, the political circular firing squad has once again sprung into action, guaranteeing no action will be taken on either issue.
Eventually, we’ll move on to new distractions until another round of mass murders and border surges starts the cycle all over again. Year after year, decade after decade we say, “enough is enough”, yet it never is. Sandy Hook wasn’t enough. Las Vegas wasn’t enough. Parkland High School wasn’t enough. From 1990 to 2007, our undocumented immigrant population more than tripled, mushrooming from 3.5 million to a record high of 12.2 million. That wasn’t enough.
The immigration can has been kicked down the alley by Republicans and Democrats ever since the Hart-Celler Act of 1965 and the Reagan Amnesty of 1986. Now it’s President Biden’s turn.
He’s off to a terrible start.
Biden passing the immigration hot potato to Vice President Harris, who, as District Attorney for San Francisco and Attorney General of California, never meet a border she didn’t want open.
Thousands of desperately poor people have already overwhelmed border towns across the southwest, along with ICE facilities and the social safety net of cities and towns. This latest surge will put even more pressure on the nearly nonexistent low-income housing market, while pricing even more people into homelessness.
Fingers will be pointed, but not toward a solution.
Former President Trump correctly pushed the immigration issue onto the front burner. Unfortunately, often with bullying and even racist language that fired up his frustrated base but did little to actually secure the border. COVID-19 did more to curtail illegal immigration than all the president’s bluster about “a big beautiful wall” which he never built.
As swarms of children crowd into inadequate facilities and video is shown every night on the news, our new president’s tone has shifted. Now he’s talking tough. “The border is closed.” Except it’s not and everyone knows it. The incentive is still there for people to risk their children’s lives in the hands of human traffickers. This is not compassion.
Meanwhile, after a year-long hiatus, mass shootings are a thing again and so is our bifurcated response. We are suffering from national cognitive dissonance when it comes to guns. Every opinion poll shows Americans overwhelming support a new assault weapons ban, but good luck getting anything through congress. Meanwhile, 6 killed in Atlanta and 10 killed in Boulder caused a media meltdown while the 4,033 shot in Chicago last year barely made the news.
We had a federal assault weapons ban for ten years without the hammer and sickle replacing the stars and stripes. We still had the Second Amendment. Nobody had their guns taken from them. But since that law expired in 2004, “We the People” have become even more distrustful of each other and the government itself. Each mass shooting sends scores queuing up at gun stores as if Costco were having a toilet paper sale. After Sandy Hook, President Obama pushed for an assault weapon ban and gun shops put his picture up with the caption, “Salesman of the Year.” Guns aren’t going away. Ever. They are part of us.
While some questions are eternal: what’s the meaning of life, what awaits us after death, why can we exit the eastbound 210 at Lake Avenue without getting crushed by a big rig? Border security and keeping weapons of war out of the hands of lunatics are not metaphysics. Put the damn wheels on the suitcases!
If we continue to allow partisan politics to paralyze commonsense solutions, we’ll carry the baggage of open borders and mass shootings far into the future.
Doug McIntyre’s column appears Sundays. He can be reached at: Doug@DougMcIntyre.com.
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