What does it say about us as a nation and of our national leadership that we applaud the emergency deployment of the National Guard to assist in sealing our southern border from undocumented Mexican immigrants, at the same time scores of miles of the Louisiana Gulf Coast go unprotected from the billowing waves of oils now washing on shore? Which is the true calamity, and which is the product of well-intentioned citizens being mislead by hyper-ventilating politicians trying to out hard ass the next by being the toughest on illegal aliens?
 

Looking out at my trusty old sailboat Voyager riding comfortably on her mooring in front of my home, just down stream from the George Washington Bridge in Edgewater New Jersey, the fact hit me that I wasn't working on a weekend afternoon. Since 20001, Saturday has been a show day for 'Geraldo At Large', and this one is an especially pretty late-Spring day on the Hudson River, so I'm feeling guilty about missing work. But I've done the unthinkable; I've called in sick.

The big American flag flying over the sprawling New York Presbyterian Hospital complex in Washington Heights opposite my Edgewater New Jersey home was straight as iron, pointing left to right. A Nor-Easter was stiffening the banner, rustling the trees of Jay Hood Wright’s picturesque little park around the base of the buildings, including the famous Little Red Lighthouse and riling the great river below.

Weather is more personal and dramatic when you live on a big river like the Hudson. It has heft, especially when the wind blows down from the north. Wind from that point of the compass is channeled by the Highlands near West Point, by Storm King Mountain and the Palisades, and by the time the breeze reaches the George Washington Bridge and enters New York Harbor it is sharp and wet. Pushed by tide and by that wind, waves, two, three footers run down to break on the shoals and docks on the Jersey side.

It was going to be a bumpy ride.

The massacre at Fort Hood Thursday afternoon curiously caused me to flashback to my childhood, rather than my experiences as a war correspondent. After my family moved during the 1950's 'Ozzie and Harriet' era from Brooklyn to West Babylon Long Island, becoming the neighborhood's first Latino family, my dad used to say a little prayer whenever there was a particularly notorious crime. "Please God that the person responsible not be another Puerto Rican." Fighting discrimination and trying to overcome post-World War II-era discrimination as well as our new neighbors' hesitation to welcome our urban brood into their suburban midst, dad saw every act of infamy or notoriety committed by someone who looked like us or who had a name like ours' as an impediment to our ultimate integration.