Pete,

I’m surprised that you had to go to a Senior Citizen Center to find out that everyone around you were from somewhere else besides New Mexico. I found that out way back in the dark ages of the Sixties when almost everyone I met was either an “Okie” from Oklahoma who got lost and strayed westward, a Texan stranded on a wild stallion and who couldn’t get the poor animal stopped until he hit the mountains of New Mexico, or a hispanic who swore up and down of being Spanish and was offended at the term Mexican. About the only native New Mexicans I knew looked very much like the redskins I had watched on the western Hollywood flicks in the Reform theater of Judge Farrar in Reform and were called Navejo. Most of these were offended even of the term New Mexican. All of this would have been expected if I spent most of my time on base, but I spent most of my time in Albuquerque: Hermosa Drive Baptist Church and the University of New Mexico. I still had difficulty finding a native New Mexican. I did take a lot of pride in the fact that, even then, my first cousin was a New Mexican transplant and was married to one and my favorite uncle lived just up the road in Thoreau, near Grants, at least for a while. And Albuquerque only had a population of barely 300,000 at the time. Now that it is over a million, I guess there really has been an invasion, not just of Okies and Texans, but from all over, especially from the cold, cold north lands. It is no wonder that you now go to your Senior Citizen Center and look around trying to find a bona fide native New Mexican and have difficulty finding one. There is a new breed of New Mexican there now, just as there is in Arkansas and most places across the South, which is rapidly filling with transplanted Hispanics, most of whom are illegal. Demographics are changing and will change as long as the only ethnic group in the world that has a positive numerical population growth is the Muslim. It has been estimated that Sweden will have a majority of Muslims by 2012; Germany and France, by 2020. Such a majority in the USA is further away than that, but they are the only ethnic group with a positive population growth here as well. Their women are still having babies. All the other etnic groups are aborting. This tells more about the future of our democracy than anything else.

It is a great state, though. Although I joke about all the “enchantment” flying around, I am very happy that I had the opportunity to do my military service there. If I can only convince Marina to learn to like it, I would like to retire there someday and add to the New Mexican transplants from faraway places further diluting the few natives who remain. I have always wished that I could have gotten a Ph.D. in some field, other than chemistry, and worked at AFWL, now called the Air Force Research Lab, on Kirtland as a civilian, creating weapons of war, peace, and space that would further serve to protect my country from all its enemies in the world. I am fascinated by the research going on there for a weapon of war that will destroy infrastructure but not people. Can you imagine fighting a war, destroying only property but leaving people unharmed? Just imagine the hatred generated when people’s homes and businesses are destroyed, but they are allowed to survive to come after you again. What kind of mixed up people do we have running our nation?

That wasn’t to be. So I had to settle for the Land that the Lord chose as a “hazardous waste dump” when He created the world and work in the hazardous waste business that no other state would have. Look how Arizona ran my former company, Ensco, out of their state because they were afraid that we would import huge quantities of California’s waste there. They were right because that was our purpose for trying to locate there. California wouldn’t have us. As it turned out, neither would Arizona. New Mexico wouldn’t even talk to us. We subsequently had to settle for our Lord’s hazardous waste dump, better known as Arkansas, where the people are so stupid that they cannot understand the difference between something that is hazardous to one’s health and something to eat. But our’s is the “natural” state, which is probably the reason the Lord chose it as a dump for His hazardous stuff that was left over when he made the world.