[DerailAmnesty.com]

The high school I attended (LAUSD) MIGHT have had half a dozen Latino kids during the time I was there. I'm not sure if there were even that many, and this was on a campus of about 1500 students. One of them is my oldest friend. He was an illegal, too. He got amnestied in in '86 and has been leading a very successful professional and personal life.

As I look back, from the vantage point of living in L.A. now and being in my late 40's, a couple of things I heard in classrooms from teachers will never be heard by today's crop of public school students in SoCal. When I was in 10th Grade, my Spanish teacher complained that President Carter had used the term "undocumented" aliens rather than "illegal." He opined that this term was a dishonest whitewash and was a step in the wrong direction This lead to a class discussion wherein he said that unchecked immigration from Mexico would be our ruin. I distinctly recall him telling me, and several other students who said we should be willing to give up some of what we have to help poor people from desperate countries, that "Some of what you have is not an option. Be prepared to give it all up if too many illegal immigrants come to the U.S."

Wow, was that guy ahead of the curve. Can you imagine what would happen to a Spanish teacher who mouthed those remarks on an LAUSD campus now?

There was also this nice African-American woman who taught a U.S. History course I took in 11th Grade. Somehow, for whatever reason, the subject matter of race relations came up in class (My school was a busing campus and about half the student body was black) and she stated that things between blacks and whites were pretty much OK at this point in time, after the civil rights era, but that she thought the Mexicans had to get out because "there are just too many of them." She added that she hoped they didn't start showing up in school in large numbers because she had no interest in dealing with them.

No, I'm not making this up. She was very candid about it (she was a well-liked instructor b/c her classes were interesting and informative) and nobody batted an eyelash. We chuckled a little bit. No one was uncomfortable or offended. Political correctness was not a mainstream reality circa '79 or '80. Needless to say, there wasn't a Latino in the room.

Boy, are those days gone. Honesty or "intolerant opinions" are commonly unwelcome across the board in places where our children are being raised and indoctrinated.