No longer the Golden West at the end of westward trekking, our once-proud Manifest Destiny is in shambles. California is now presented as the symbol of America’s welfare society led by rich Democrats out-of-touch with the Third World squalor they’ve created.
The above email forward has arrived from various friends throughout the country during the past two weeks. Even Hollywood comes across as not so glamorous. This is not the California that foreigners think they’re visiting. Consummate sales folks, Hollywood and television have done their jobs too well. Then again, all tourist spots around the world do the same. Just stay within the prescribed boundaries so as to avoid poverty and wretchedness. All Sanctuary Cities the same.
Even wholesome South Dakota, with rural delights on every hand, could be made-up to look bad if the documenters focused on the Smithfield meat plant in Sioux Falls, with sick and dying immigrants working elbow-to-elbow in sweat factories, stoking the coronavirus, to keep middle-class people from having to give up their unemployment benefits and do some real work for a change. Perhaps the cameras could mix-in some scenes of not-so-free-roaming chickens and hogs packed tightly together in feed lot operations–not exactly the way God intended his Creation.
We can’t forget that Ronald Reagan depicted a different kind of California in the Death Valley Days series, where everyone was more or less poor, but with frontier dignity. The Joad family from the Dust Bowl reminds us of what calamities can quickly overtake the world when financial and political bubbles are stretched too far. Enter FDR and the New Deal welfare state that is still with us. The rich and poor still believe that everything should be free.
BBC News for April 17, 2020, reported the immigrant concentration in the Sioux Falls meat processing plant as “The workforce at Smithfield is made up largely of immigrants and refugees from places like Myanmar, Ethiopia, Nepal, Congo and El Salvador. There are 80 different languages spoken in the plant. Estimates of the mean hourly wage range from $14-16 an hour. Those hours are long, the work is gruelling, and standing on a production line often means being less than a foot away from your co-workers on either side.”