Pam Stone, I just want to say, ‘Hi’

By Drew Millard

I don’t know if you’re reading this, Pam, and I don’t know if my sentiment will make you feel old, but wow, I’m honored. I am thoroughly amazed that I get to share the same newspaper with the same woman who I used to watch on TV. Coach. Radio.
Comedienne. Wow. Again, she was on Coach. I’ve never been on the news. I don’t know if this drags her reputation down or pulls mine up — I think that she is quickly becoming a vastly more popular columnist than I am, though.

That said, Pam, if you think that my generation is doing fine, you’re kind of wrong. We have no idea what we’re doing. To give us any credit otherwise is to flatter us, and we’re young — we don’t need flattering, seeing as we know everything anyways.

It honestly astonishes me that I share this space with her. I’ll stop sucking up in a moment, but let me both plug my blog and her existence in the same paragraph:

The link to my blog on the Tryon Daily Bulletin website is right above the link to Pam Stone’s, which makes me one degree (if one were to operate within the universe of the board game Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon), which makes me probably at most four or five degrees away from anyone you can name/shake a stick at. I guess the point I’m trying to make is this: Hi, Pam. I’m Drew. We might not ever meet, but I feel like I know you, probably because I’ve seen you on TV. You’re much more famous and much funnier than I am, but maybe you’ll make me better by osmosis, I guess, if somebody picks up the wrong edition of the Friday paper, and hoping to see your column in there, instead sees mine. Hell, it could happen. Either that, or you’ll inadvertently force me into a very early retirement.

I can say the h-word in the paper, right? I mean, Pam got to swear in her column, so I don’t see why I wouldn’t be able to. Oh gosh, I’m turning into a prima dona. Sorry, I’m rambling.

But anyways, if you’ve wondered where I’ve been all summer, I’ll tell you where I am right now. I am currently sitting on a bed in room 306 or Brewer Dormitory Hall at Meredith College in Raleigh North Carolina. The occasion is Governor’s School East, and I am attending in the field of English. This is the first in a series of three columns dealing with life at the Governor’s School, and even though I’ll probably be back in town by the time these hit the news stands, my hope is that it’ll be a nice little retroactive tale from the world outside of Polk County.

I realize that I’ve kind of used up all of my allotted space at this point, so I’ll just leave you with this: I love it here. I love getting up at 7:30 in the morning when none of my friends have thought of going to bed. I love having to sometimes walk to another dormitory if my water gets shut off as a result of construction work. I love having a roommate — it makes Governor’s School almost like going to a six-week-long sleepover, only you can’t go and spend the night with anybody else.

I love my classes here; they challenge my mind and the way I view the world — they literally are expanding me as a person. I kind of even love the fact that the food here is worse than low-grade dog food, which means everyone pigs out in their room at all hours. I love the fact that there are only about ten places in the outside world that we can go to, and I love even more that at least half of these establishments are owned, operated, and run exclusively by hippies.

But most of all, I love the people here, and I love the lesson that Governor’s School is teaching me: the journey is paramount; the destination is secondary.

That said, if Pam’s still reading, I really want her to know that she should probably give my generation a chance. We’ll all come out of this alive. You did.

A smart aleck’s view of immigration

By Drew Millard

I feel slightly silly being a seventeen-year old and writing about political issues — I can’t even vote, you see — but I feel that since everyone in the entire world has an opinion on immigration, I should throw my two cents in, at the risk of losing my hard-earned credibility as your favorite farcical bimonthly columnist.

I have a policy of trying to take the long view on every political issue, and to remain stoically without an opinion on many matters. To illustrate my point, I quote pop-culture guru Chuck Klosterman: “You want to have an abortion? Fine; take my car keys. You think abortion is murder? Well, you’re probably right.” Both sides of an issue have valid points, or else they wouldn’t be presenting their argument. I just try to see these points, and then make judgment as I see fit.

Right now, there is what the pundits call a “crisis” regarding immigration. People are coming into the country in droves illegally from Mexico, and people in America are getting extremely angry about it. Some are even taking the law into their own hands by camping out and watching out for those durned Mexicans, possibly out of nativism or racism, or just good old-fashioned xenophobia. The Department of Homeland Security said in an official statement that “illegal immigration threatens our communities and our national security.” Now I don’t know about you, but I think that’s a little alarmist — I’ve never seen with my own two eyes an illegal immigrant commit a crime, other than being in America when they weren’t supposed to be. Our own U.S. Senate went so far as to officially declare that our national anthem was to be sung in English, which may show that racism, or at least nativism, is not dead in this country, especially in Washington.

Now that I’ve written that and lost my credibility as a columnist, I think that the issue as a whole is much, much too complicated to hold a concrete, partisan opinion on; as I hinted previously, both parties present partially valid arguments.

On the conservative side, I agree that we cannot just let anybody into the country who wants to come in, and the fact that people are coming into America and probably taking jobs from average, hard-working Americans, somehow tweaks that quintessentially nationalistic nerve that everybody has. I think that we need to have more strict enforcement of our borders to protect us from the drugs that are brought into America every day from Mexico, and I think that if someone is living in America, they need to pay taxes on what they earn.

But on the other, more liberal hand, for the most part, illegal immigrants take jobs that traditionally have been taken by, well, illegal immigrants. Undeniably, America is the land of freedom, and I also believe that if somebody wants to get in here, we should let them in, unless they give us a reason not to let them in, like having killed somebody or having ties with organized crime. We don’t need a fortified border to protect us from somebody who just wants to get a job, and in addition, many immigrate to America for the sole justification that they need to support their families, and in America, even working for a nominal wage can support a family in Mexico just as well as any middle-class American could support theirs. Just because somebody is trying to illegally enter a country does not automatically brand them a bad person — I know some illegal immigrants, and they are some of the most honest, hard-working people that I have ever met, and I do not see why we should be stopping people like that from entering this great nation of ours.

Now that I’ve stirred up some ire, there is one position that all Americans do agree on: something needs to be done. Right now, we don’t even know how many people live in America because there are so many undocumented illegals here that we can’t take an accurate census count. The government eventually issues green cards for many, but the only problem with that system is that it can take months to apply for and receive one of those magical green cards. What would probably need to be done is a DMV-type system of issuing Green Cards where you just show up, fill out a couple forms, smile for a picture, and in ten minutes, get one and get on your way. I think that this, however improbable it might be (being 17, I have no knowledge of how the logistics of such as system could be worked out), could, you know, be kind of a good idea.
But I’m just a kid, and this is just a newspaper, so feel free to write to them and tell the world why I’m wrong, which no doubt I am.
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