SubscribeWaPo: Wal-Mart Hicks Defeated Amnesty Bill
From our moral superiors at the Washington Post:
[Washington Post caption:] Billy Ray Smith and his wife, Uraina, of Gainesville, Ga., said they moved out of their subdivision after it was “taken over” by Mexicans.
Small-Town Resistance Helped to Seal Defeat
GAINESVILLE, Ga. — Stephanie Usrey strode up to her local Wal-Mart store the other morning with the steely look of a boxer about to step into the ring.
A stay-at-home mother of two, Usrey has dreaded shopping at this particular branch ever since a Friday afternoon about five years ago, when she said she suddenly noticed she was the only non-Latino customer.
“That was the first time I looked around and said, ‘Man, I didn’t realize how many Mexicans there were here,’ ” Usrey, 39, recalled. “And they don’t seem to feel any discomfort when they’re, like, six inches from your face and talking to each other in their language, either. I just felt very encroached upon. . . . It was like an instant feeling of ‘I’m in the minority, and if we don’t get control over this, pretty soon all of America will be outnumbered.’ ”
That sense of alarm, echoed in communities across the nation, helped seal defeat for the Senate immigration bill Thursday. Fueled by talk-radio hosts and Web sites, Usrey and tens of thousands of other first-time activists bombarded their senators with phone calls and e-mails decrying the bill as an unacceptable amnesty for the nation’s estimated 12 million illegal immigrants.
Nowhere were the bill’s opponents more influential than here in Georgia, whose two Republican senators, Johnny Isakson and Saxby Chambliss, originally helped craft the legislation. Two days after its unveiling in May, Chambliss was booed at his state’s Republican convention. Isakson’s office received more than 21,000 calls from opponents of the bill, compared with 6,000 from supporters.
Thursday, both Georgia senators voted to kill the bill they once supported…
Gainesville, an area of about 102,000 set along a lake in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains, is solid Bush territory. Even now, many locals speak of the president’s support of the Senate bill the way one would of a beloved son who has momentarily strayed but is sure to come to his senses.
This is still a place where men take their sons deer hunting and moms call out to one another in the supermarket in cheerful Southern drawls. And although the highways leading out of the city have been colonized by the usual sprawl of Home Depot, PetSmart and OfficeMax big-box stores, downtown Gainesville retains a tranquil, small-town feel. Colonnaded white mansions line one of the major avenues. Clothing boutiques and cafes ring a landscaped central square with a monument dedicated to "Our Confederate Soldiers."
A few feet away, in almost as prominent a spot, stands a statue of a rooster — a testament to local pride in the chicken processing plants that have given the region its identity as "poultry capital of the world" since the 1950s…
Too bad we can’t all be unbigoted and urbanely sophisticated like our betters at the Washington Post.
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9 Responses to “WaPo: Wal-Mart Hicks Defeated Amnesty Bill”
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June 29th, 2007 at 9:37 am
Leave it to the elightened, elite and oh so morally superior of America to make it sound like everyone from the ‘flyover’ states are inbreed, uneducated, racist, bigoted and un-employed morons.
Actually when I got here (’04) I thought the same thing of my local Wally World. Funny how after that big raid last year - uhmm, the ‘complexion’ changed all around here.
I lived in the Army world for 29 years next to people these intolerant freaks (the WP, not the Wal Mart GA shoppers) don’t even know exist. Done a couple of stints even in the trailer park world too. I have learned a lot - and one thing is that most of the tolerant, compassionate and truly understanding people live between the East and Left Coast.
They may sound stupid (especially when you intentionally seek out the most ignorant to quote) now and then - but they don’t look down their noses at anyone in the frequency and arrogance of those liberals who are touting their rabid racism - I guess it must be an attempt to deflect their own hypocrisy.
June 29th, 2007 at 11:12 am
Amen. Liberal elites who look at minorities not as empowered people, but instead, entities in need of social programs and exception because they know no better (when breaking our nation’s laws so give them special consideration).
Yet any non-minority, must only be ignorant if they don’t share this view w/ them. Anyone who expresses an opinion of being made to feel foreign in one’s own country isn’t eclectic enough or sophisticated to take a “world view”.
How about this? If I want a world view I’ll go see it (from outside my country) don’t have the world (third world in this case) come to my home w/ no controls.
Same old hypocritical song. “You need to be more open minded. You need to be more like me; and if you’re not you’re just wrong.”
June 29th, 2007 at 11:22 am
I shop at Wal-Mart. And Sam’s Club. So do most of my friends. And opposed the POS amnesty bill. Guess that makes me a ‘hick’. Life in the VRWC.
June 29th, 2007 at 3:37 pm
We have the same problem in massachusetts.
All the stores here, most times, are 90% hispanic and they don’t or won’t speak English.
The majority groups are not Mexican but they all speak Spanish!
We have laws on illegal entry in this coumtry. Why aren’t we enforcing them?
The fall of the USA will come from within if we don’t act!
Get the illegals out! Now!
June 29th, 2007 at 6:49 pm
[...] on the web, caught the Los Angeles Times in full sneer mode a couple of days ago. Today, he caught the Washington Post blaming small town Americans from places where men take their sons deer hunting and moms call out [...]
June 29th, 2007 at 7:52 pm
That’s because us “Wal-Mart Hicks” still believe in FREEDOM !
June 29th, 2007 at 11:55 pm
“Only look at Wal-Mart. Recently Wal-Mart has started giving enormous sums of money to radical pro-homosexual groups, and last year Wal-Mart gave more money to La Raza than to any other organization. What is La Raza? It is the mestizo pro-immigration group that has called for the complete elimination of the white race.”
You might find this piece rather interesting: http://newsbyus.com/more.php?id=6555_0_1_0_M
June 30th, 2007 at 12:00 am
I used to live in Talmo, Georgia, close to Gainesville, and I got an Associate’s degree from Gainesville College.
Gainesville is a good place, but they’re right–”Little Mexico” is half the town, knowing Spanish is almost a necessity, the roads ain’t safe, and there’s all sorts of other trouble–including a family that got in trouble with the law for slaughtering a goat in their suburban backyard.
And the vast majority of Gainesville’s Hispanic population is illegal.
June 30th, 2007 at 6:06 am
“Fueled by talk-radio hosts and Web sites” Well get ready for the Fairness Doctrine to come back. It’s funny how the MSM and the far left does not see how they discredit themselves by backing something that is really just censorship. They are like someone in denial, hearing something they don’t like and just putting their hands over their ears and screaming “Shut up, shut up, shut up.”. I can’t blame people for wanting to come to this country. But if you are here to turn this place into the place where you came from, then you are making a huge mistake. There is a reason you left that place to begin with. Think about it. Assimilation is vital to this country’s future. I don’t care what your skin tone is, but if you live here then be an American. This country will fall apart if we try it any other way.