The crickets are singing outside. It's late. We just walked in. Our boy was home for college, and we drove him back down to U of Illinois. I thought we'd get back before supper time--plenty of time to post IMMIGRATION MONDAY for y'all. But the highway (I 55, Old Route 66) was shut down. Dead. We were caught in the traffic for hours, trying to get outof town. When we got close enough to the cops to think we'd see the wreck, we found the entire highway closed down and nothing in sight as far as you could see. Hourse later, we made it through a maze of side streets into the country and back onto the road. Hours of driving, and then, on the way back, I hear on the radio: "A van carrying twelve crashed on I 55 this afternoon." And I heard, "The driver did not have a license." You know as well as I do who crashed in that van. Whenever you hear about a vehicular slaughter where a van full of humans is scattered across a freeway, you know it is my sad constituency. Los paisanos. The slavery-class, sneaking to another secret payday in middle America. And sure enough, the driver was also, in the delicate words of the newsman on the radio, "without immigration documentation." Two dead...so far. Awful, awful, but as Stephen King says in his books: Same Shit, Different Day. Do you pray? Pray that is stops. Pray that it changes. To hell with prayer--do something. Act. Stop the horror show. The filth of it. The endless repetitive nightmare of it. The squalid bloody fates of the invisible men and women. The blood. How much of it must spill?

Tomorrow, then. I'll put up the blog tomorrow. S.S., D.D.
L

# posted by Luis @ 10:20 PM