The Last US Citzen

I saw where in a soccer match over the weekend, the USA lost to Mexico 4 to 2. No big surprise there.

In the stadium, there were reportedly about 20,000 USA fans and 80,000 Mexico fans. Again, no big surprise. The surprising part, according to the article I read, was that the event was at the Rose Bowl in Los Angeles, California, USA. The Mexican team, in essence, played in front of a home crowd in a foreign country. (That IS making the assumption that Southern California is still part of the US.)

I’m not sure which is the real story here? Is it that more fans showed up for a foreign team than for the home country, or is it that thanks to our lax, some might say non-existent, border enforcement, we have ceded control of portion of our country?

Various groups and persons in this country have been trying to make soccer a major sport for over 30 years. I remember when the New York Cosmos brought Pele to America (1975) in order to boost American soccer into the big time. This trend has continued right up to and through David Beckham coming to Los Angeles in 2007. And still, soccer in America is on par with the WNBA. Something of a curiosity for most of the country with a few diehard fans.

Those who are in favor of the gentrification of America have been pushing hard for 30 plus years to have soccer replace football as the preeminent sport in the country. They’ve sponsored youth soccer programs all over the country and ramped up the “football is dangerous” rhetoric in order to push moms to enroll their kids in soccer. And yet, after all this time, it’s still a backwater curiosity in this country. The majority of folks don’t give a damn about soccer. For most the surprise isn’t that ONLY 20,000 fans showed up to root for the US, the big surprise is that they found 20,000 folks who were interested enough to show up and root for them at all.

I’m firmly convinced that most folks who show up to soccer games and pay good money to walk through the gates are either relatives or they just want to go watch some sports outside and the soccer game is the cheapest option. I am willing to bet you dollars to donuts that if you charged the same price to go to a soccer game that you do to go to a football game, you’d see about one third as many native born Americans sitting in the stands. That coupled with the fact that there isn’t any REAL football to watch at this time explains most of the folks from the US who are there.

Which brings us to the other possible story here. I wonder just how many of those Mexican fans could have produced a Green card or legitimate citizenship documentation. If ICE had been at the gates to the Rose Bowl, those 20,000 US fans may have been an overwhelming majority of those present.

With the past several presidents being unwilling to defend our borders, the southwestern United States has become a no-mans-land. No real overarching authority attempting to maintain our national sovereignty. And when a state steps up to fill the void, our current occupant of the Oval Office sides with a foreign country in bringing suit against them. They have created an open door policy so every criminal, drug dealer, etc. etc. that would like to try their hand in this country can just walk right in. And while southern California is a beautiful place, I actually lived there for a short while in the early 70’s, the flight out of there is starting to reach epidemic proportions. It’s starting to remind me of a bumper sticker I once saw which read “Would the last US citizen out of Miami please bring the flag?”