by Tom Driscoll
Growing season. The year of yellow flowers. Yellow flowers everywhere. Crazy like Van Gogh spattered all over variegated greens along the river running muddy’s chocolate milk with soil. It’s all this rain. Makes yellow flowers flame. Greens up the beans.
Must be a thousand cobalt butterflies anchored in a cranberry sea of eagle scat. Dog noses by. Butterflies fritter away like stars at dawn. Sky screams blue. No-wait. There’s a cloud in the corner. The corn grows some. Another yellow flower opens. Here comes another cloud, round-bellied like an invading spacecraft. Greens moan as more-and-more clouds chisel precipitous shadows across hardwood and cedared bluffsides. Soon, there’s a cloud for every yellow flower. There’s a cool pizzle. Growing season, like a hungry cat, mews for more rain.
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According to the LA Times, some 40 swing district Democrats in the House of Representatives risk angering conservative constituents if they dare to support “a pathway to citizenship” for roughly 12-million undocumented immigrants living in the U.S..
This despite the 21st Century rain-dance being performed by farmers, food-processors, meat-packers, manufacturers, contractors. Indeed, entire rural communities all around the Midwest have bought-into a compulsory economic growth model, the rain-dance that shifts the risk of drought onto temporary, low-wage, uninsured immigrant workers.
Don’t let terms like "Undocumented Alien" vex you, for it is neither Christian nor humane to even consider the possibility that immigrants you’ve invited to live 15-or-30 to a 3-bedroom, 1-bathroom house across the tracks may be technically – “finger quotes” – illegals. The poor after all take all the risk. And it’s growing season. And need the rain.
When the North Star turkey plant burned in St. Charles, MN last April, something like 200-temporary workers were left jobless. The exact number is fuzzy because the actual employers, Masterson Personnel and Global Employment of Rochester, have been fuzzy about providing the exact numbers. But a month after the fire, Workforce Development in Winona confirmed that none of the temporary workers had filed for unemployment benefits.
Since when does the rain take the risk?
Minnesota writer Tom Driscoll reports on politics, economic development and life in rural America at The Small of America.
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