Sailing To Oblivium: September 3, 2017

“Problem solving is a little different in City Hall than it is in the coffee shops. We have to live with the solutions.”

I was talking to Mayor Furlow Thompson of Pot Luck, Arkansas. We’ve benefited from his insight before. He’ the one who’s been called “the best mayor in America.” Born in 1943 after his daddy came home on leave before shipping out to the European Theater, he has presided over the town of Potluck for as long as folks can remember. I value his wisdom, so we talked and I took notes.

He continued. “For one thing, we have to deal with that there thing (he said ‘thang’) they call the ‘Law of Unintended Consequences,’ and it can be a tough teacher.”

“Oh, how?”

“Well, take that time the cities around here got a bunch of grants for law enforcement. Some police chiefs wanted to buy tanks and machine guns with the money but their wives put a stop to that after some of the cops over at Backway ran over Charlie Elwood’s chicken roost in a half-track they called Hell Buster.”

“That was the Law of Unintended Consequences in action?”

“Naw, that happened next. There wasn’t all that much property crime to fight, so a bunch of the towns around here decided to go after sex crimes. We opted out ‘cause we was busy with a citywide mentoring and sex-education program.”

“That sounds worthwhile. What happened?”

“The one real big sex crime problem was boys having sex with underage girls, you know, what they call ‘statutory rape’ around here. So they put the grant money to good use—or so they thought—and put a stop to that kind of sexual perversion. They filled up some prison cells, let me tell you.”

“What could possibly go wrong with that?”

“They wasn’t a high school anywhere near here that fielded a football team for nearly four years, except ours, and we had nobody to play. So we just expanded our mentoring program with some vocational training.”

“Lets’ move on. Anything else different in dealing with problems from city hall?”

“Yep. We have to face the problems as they are, not the way we would like for them to be.”

“How so?”

“Well take how agitated folks is about our Mexican neighbors.”

“And?”

“I’m talking about the ones that ain’t got the right papers.”

“I see.”

“We’d like them all to look like that ugly man on TV that does all those commercials. More than that, we’d like for them all to have rap sheets and be locked up already, easy to deport, and all that.”

“That would make it easy, couldn’t it?”

“You got that right,” he said. “Problem is, our only illegal is Consuelo O’Malley.”

“O’Malley. Is she Hispanic?

“Her mama was. Her daddy had been born in Nuevo Laredo, stayed there, and married. They would come over here on a work contract every year and follow the harvest. When Consuelo was a baby, they took her along. There were four families lived in the back of flatbed truck while they followed the work. Each family had a corner where they ate and slept.”

“So they ended up here?”

“She did. They was this wreck one day and her folks was both killed. Everybody was killed, except her. Nobody had no idea what to do with her until Fred and Rosalie Bohanon took her in. They found some Mexican papers in the wreckage that identified her and they thought that was all they needed.”

“What happened?”

“They raised her.”

“And she is still here?”

“Until next fall, a year from now, unless they send her to Mexico before then. If’n they don’t, she has a full scholarship to that college out in Palo Alto California. At ‘air one where President Clinton’s daughter went.”

“Stanford?”

“I think so.”

“English is her second language and she got into Stanford?”

“On one of them academic scholarships, physics or something. And English ain’t her second language. She was only ten months old when the wreck happened. She can’t speak no Spanish, but she speaks English as good as me.”

“Does she have relatives in Mexico?”

“Who the hell knows? We haven't found none. It’s a crappy mess if you ask me. Folks around here are pretty upset about it, even Roedoc Tiggens, and his bunch has voted Republican since before Herbert Hoover got us into that mess.”

“Well, I hear folks ask, both of those senators from Texas included, ‘what part of ‘illegal immigration’ do you not understand? How would you answer them?”

“What part of ‘don’t build your cities where it floods’ do they not understand?”

One final thought from the Mayor:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zOqjlRsUnBM