"Home free home!"

Great essay over at, actually, HuffPo by Ronald Maxwell (who directed Gettysburg and Gods and Generals): The Promise of Home.

Here is one of my favorite excerpts, but do read the entire thing:

Because so many of our elite are profiting from the situation, either financially or as they see it potentially electorally, it will only be the common man, the regular guy, the American people themselves who I think at the end of the day will save themselves and their country.

Blue collar, redneck, everyday Americans of all racial and ethnic background -- because they have the instinct, even though they and their grass roots leadership are harassed constantly by a sanctimonious media accusing them of being racist xenophobes, or at best, selfish and mean spirited. But even after decades of media brainwashing and political propaganda the American People still have this feeling that -- no, we're right. This isn't immigration. We know what immigration is. After all, as the saying goes, we are a nation of immigrants. We know it when we see it - and this ain't it! It's something else again.

Our borders are turnstiles for coyotes, drug lords, human traffickers and terrorists. Our border patrol agents are being incarcerated for doing their jobs. We're under attack, under assault and our government is looking the other way. Even making excuses for illegality and promising rewards for law-breakers. Yes, unbelievably they are promising the reward of US citizenship to anyone who can run the gauntlet of the US Border Patrol and make it into the United States. Home free home! And then, to add insult to injury, they want us to believe this should not be called amnesty.

Our neighbors, fellow citizens and tax-payers -- know it is they, not the businesses who are luring them here and making money off their cheap labor, who are footing the bill for these increasing millions of third world migrants -- for health care, for education, for welfare, for added security and for their own depressed wages. The American people are a generous people - but they are not dupes and fools. They have moved from skepticism, to mistrust, to outrage. Where is our leadership? Who is defending America and our way of life? Not just in Iraq or in Afghanistan -- who is defending it here - in our own homes and our own communities? It's a healthy feeling of self-survival that the American people are feeling and which they are finally turning into political action and imposing on their elected officials who sometimes forget who elected them and whom they are supposed to serve. Americans intuitively understand that what's at stake here is nothing less than the survival of our country.

Really, read the whole thing.

You can visit Mr. Maxwell's official site here.