tomatoes and oranges.

I recently got an email from a friend. It was one of those emails that had been forwarded countless times and finally made its way to me. The title of the email was 'What costs more per year than the Iraq war?' formerly in all caps and bold red. It then goes on to list various government programs for, what it refers to as 'illegal aliens', and the cost associated with them. For example, a food assistance program for poor families, that provides school lunches etc. The following is my reply to the email.

I think there are more important things to be concerned with at this moment than the vilification of some immigrants who have come to this country, probably cause our country is f__cking up theirs. Perhaps the author of this article would like to trade their job with the person who is picking their tomatoes, or oranges in Southern California. The Iraq war is projected to cost over 1 trillion dollars, and that investment has taken the lives of over 100,000 innocent Iraqi civilians, and 4,000 Americans. I'm sorry but i don't have any problem with our government spending 2 billion dollars (.002% of a trillion dollars) on a food assistant program, when we will spend over 1000 billion dollars on an illegal war. I can assure you that the information being spread via this email is thoroughly inaccurate. The idea that we are somehow spending over a trillion dollars on undocumented immigrants is frankly absurd. But that is not the point, this should not turn into a debate about the accuracy of the info laid out here, but rather what cause should you or i be championing... should we be picketing to remove food assistance programs for poor children? I think I'll pass.

The email suggest you... "send this to all you know. the entire population of the United tates needs to know this information..." again in all caps, red and bold. It's sad that this kind of garbage is polluting the internet, while we are asking our presidential candidates about flag lapel pins.