By David Van Os - Friday, October 12, 2007

I'm an American and a Texan and proud of both. I live in a free society. The specter of living behind a walled border makes my blood run cold.

To erect a wall along the Rio Grande River is to advertise to the world that we Americans, the heirs of the noblest revolutionary vision ever bequeathed by one people to the rest of humanity, the very people who gave to the world and to all future time the soul-stirring example of a national identity based on freedom and equality, have so degenerated in our self-confidence that we are afraid to face the rest of the world without cowering behind walls.

Is the planned Rio Grande Valley wall a true reflection of the United States of America of Patrick Henry who proclaimed to the British king and the world, "Give me liberty or give me death"? Is it a true reflection of the America of Thomas Jefferson who wrote that all are "endowed with the unalienable rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness"? Or of the America of Franklin Delano Roosevelt who told us, "the only thing we have to fear is fear itself"; or of John Fitzgerald Kennedy who told us, "a rising tide lifts all boats"?

To my Republican friends who loved Ronald Wilson Reagan, does the border wall fit the vision of the President Reagan who told Soviet premier Mikhail Gorbachev to "tear down this wall"?

Will the construction of a Rio Grande border wall be a true reflection of the indomitable Texas spirit exemplified by Lyndon Baines Johnson, who insisted to us and our fellow Americans that we are capable of constructing a Great Society where hunger, poverty, and racism are vanquished forever?

The idea of building a border wall, I respectfully submit, flies in the face of everything dear about the values of the America and the Texas we learned about as children. The prospect of a border wall should wrench our guts.

The typical immigrants who risk life and limb to enter our country without legal authorization do so in the search for a better future for themselves and their posterity. They come in flight from blighted economies that offer them bleak futures. They do so because they know we Americans and Texans, despite our flaws and despite our being stuck with neo-con government leaders who are hostile to humanity, remain at the grassroots level a great, generous and compassionate people who are instinctively hospitable to strangers in need.

This great country of ours knows how to help impoverished neighbors in the world community build themselves out of despair into prosperity. We did it for nations and peoples all over the world after World War II, both for former enemies as well as for allies.

We can do it again. We are spending over a billion dollars a month in the neo-cons' illegal occupation of Iraq, an occupation that makes some of our very finest young Americans nothing other than bulls-eye targets for the multiple opposing factions of a multiple civil war. It is time not only to withdraw from the Iraqi invasion and occupation that never should have happened, but also to propose and negotiate a mutually agreeable but massive economic aid plan, a new Marshall Plan, for our neighbors to the south. It is the only way to stabilize the relationship between our economy and the economy of Mexico, and stabilizing that economic relationship is the only way to find a win-win solution.

As the more enlightened leaders of our nation's history have always shown us, having a prosperous world around us, where human beings live in hope instead of desperation, is always the best route to national security.

David Van Os

For more information contact Rachel Barrios-Van Os 210-332-7080 or visit http://vanosfortexasag.com.