...Once upon a time, in a crazy land called Flemington, there lived a boy named Adam. Adam had learned how to drive, and it was time for his first car. He was granted a wonderful Dodge Aries K, which he promptly crashed (with a princess named Jen in the passenger seat). After a few months of avoiding automobiles, he purchased a Dodge Omni, for a whopping $100. Okay, enough with the fairy tale crap. I drove the Omni all of twice before it caught fire. I ended up with an ice scraper that I now value at $100. So next up was a Ford Tempo. It was a good car, but I almost traded it to my brother for a powder blue Ford Taurus. I changed my mind after being stuck with that Taurus in a parking lot in front of the closed Rutgers Movie Theater on Easton Ave. for three hours after a coolant hose sprung a leak (on the night before I had back surgery). Yeah, so I stuck thwith the Tempo and ended up crashing that one too. This time I was racing to Staples in the rain to fill in for my supervisor who decided to not show up (don't worry, I got her fired a few months later and took her job) when I rear-ended someone in front of the dollar store (that used to be Eckerd). After that one, I bought a kickass 1993 Honda Accord which slowly self destructed, but still got me $1500 in the end. As of Saturday, my new ride is a blue 2002 Ford Taurus SES. I'm 25 and this is my sixth car. What's next? Who knows ... but if you take into account my track record -- there will be many, many, many, many more cars in my future.

I was forwarded this (via e-mail) a few days ago:

"In the first place we should insist that if the immigrant who comes here in good faith becomes an American and assimilates himself to us, he shall be treated on an exact equality with everyone else, for it is an outrage to discriminate against any such man because of creed, or birthplace, or origin. But this is predicated upon the man's becoming in very fact an American, and nothing but an American...There can be no divided allegiance here. Any man who says he is an American, but something else also, isn't an American at all. We have room for but one flag, the American flag, and this excludes the red flag, which symbolizes all wars against liberty and civilization, just as much as it excludes any foreign flag of a nation to which we are hostile...We have room for but one language here, and that is the English language...and we have room for but one sole loyalty and that is a loyalty to the American people." [Teddy Roosevelt, 1907]

This demonstrates the mindset in 1907, but it frightens me that it's a mindset that is still held by many people today. So many people are so fast to forget what made (The United States of) America in the first place ... immigrants from around the world. The idea that everyone should immediately drop who and what they are when they come to our shores is ludicrous. I'd say what defines us as a people, is the vast mixture of cultures that has resulted from that immigration to the USA. Take food for example -- if people were assimilated to be "Americans," we wouldn't have Italian food, Chinese food, Indian food, Mexican food, etc. -- we'd all be sitting around speaking the King's English and eating blood pudding. It angers me when I hear people complain about store signs written in languages other than English, complain that the cashier at their local convenience store speaks with an accent, or use ethnic slurs to describe people of other races. Just because people come to the USA doesn't mean they have to change who they are -- and expecting them to do so ridiculously condescending and ethnocentric.

Related to this is the is the legislation that is making its way through the US Senate right now, which will make it possible to for at least 11 million illegal aliens in the US to become citizens. They live here ... why not let them do so legally? Illegals that have been in the US since before 2004 must pay $2,000 in fines, pass a background check, demonstrate the ability to communicate in English, and must have worked for 6 years. In an interview on ABC's Good Morning America (quoted at abcnews.go.com), John McCain pointed out that we are not offering the illegal aliens 'amnesty' "this is the payment of a fine. This is admission of guilt. ... this is earned citizenship, that's what it is." (source) The proposal also sets up a "guest worker" system, adds 14,000 new border patrol agents, and sets up a "virtual wall" of unmanned vehicles, cameras, and sensors.

Oh, and if you were wondering (which I'm quite sure you weren't), I found my Total Rewards card (that I haven't used since 2004) about 2 hours later in a kitchen drawer. Go figure...