We are a society that values and cherishes stuff. Things. Memories. Ask any household in America and I bet they would say they wish they could get rid of some, but the memories they have stored away are so much more important than more space. You don’t really realize how important these things are to you until they are taken from you, sometimes unexpectedly and harshly.

The recent six-alarm fire in New York City in the Hamilton Heights neighborhood did just that to me; I watched from afar as my building, and my things, and my memories from a lifetime of collecting, were burned and washed away.  It is one thing to value the things you have kept; it is another to be forced to reckon with the things you have lost and now have left.

I was devastated when the news came that my home was now uninhabitable. Thankfully I am safe, as are all my roommates and other tenants in the building, but we lost everything. It is a feeling I have never experienced before, a sort of hollowing out of yourself. I was numb, unable to believe that the things I had surrounded myself with, a protective cocoon of memories and love, could be gone forever. My childhood collection of Calvin and Hobbes; a photo of my beloved grandmother, Mimi. Things that I thought I would never lose and would never have to account for not having as a presence in my life.  

But, in a bit of surreal timing, it happened right before Thanksgiving. I am home, surrounded by my closest loved ones, nieces and nephews that shower me with love, and am aware of how blessed I am. 

The outpouring of support has been overwhelming. One of my best friends started a fundraiser for us and I am, at this very moment, wearing a donated sweater from a network of moms in Brooklyn, organized by a friend, that responded like a critical response unit to this tragedy and as they have done so for other people in times of need.

The Red Cross has been a blessing, present and responsive, pointing us in the direction of housing assistance, providing us with emergency funds for necessities, and assuring us they would see us all the way through the process into a new living situation. 

City Council member Mark Levine, representative to District 7, hosted a dinner in order to give everyone a warm meal, aware of how close to the holidays this was and how that would hit home for many particularly hard. The Public Advocate’s office distributed care packages to people from the community. 

In a particular instance that deserves praise, a firefighter passing by from Ladder 48 helped us as best he could to get us back into the building, my roommate desperately needing his ID to travel home for Christmas.

In every one of these instances, people have shown that no matter our credo, no matter our ethnicity, they were willing to extend a helping hand, stretch their already scarce resources, to accommodate those in need. 

These moments of love and support from people, some I haven’t heard from in years, has been one of the purest examples of love and gratitude I could imagine.

In each of the above examples, and I am sure there are countless more, people have put others before themselves. They have made sure that strangers are comforted in a harrowing time. 

The things we have in our lives, the stuff we buy and surround ourselves with can be whisked away in a blink of an eye. This holiday season, be thankful for the special people and connections you have in your life. Be appreciative, every day, of the wonderful blessing that is love and friendship.

Brennan Lowery is an actor currently on tour with the Education Theater’s production of Beauty and the Beast.

Establishment support for legal mass immigration is allowing and concealing large-scale illegal discrimination by U.S. employers against American blue-collar workers, says a new report.

In American Affairs, Pennsylvania professor Amy Wax and D.C.-based researcher Jason Richwine describe many underreported academic studies which show immigration-enabled discrimination;

study after study reveals that employers display a clear and avowed preference for Hispanic and Asian immigrants over lowskill natives of all backgrounds for a host of entry-level jobs across a range of industries in a variety of geographic locations.

Those attitudes were exemplified in a lawsuit filed by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission against a bakery company in Houston, Texas. According to the Houston Chronicle:

The EEOC settled a … Hispanics-only hiring case last year for $1 million against Lawler Foods, a commercial bakery in Humble. The agency accused the bakery of favoring Hispanic workers and telling black, white and other applicants it would not hire them. The company was able to create a Hispanic-dominated workforce for its production line by relying on Hispanic employees to recruit friends and family, and advertising for Spanish speakers when the company had openings, according to the EEOC lawsuit.

Wax and Richwine say these problems can be addressed if elites recognize the harm caused by their pro-immigration priorities and if sidelined American blue-collar workers also recognize their own shortcomings.

Cutting off the flow of low-skill immigration could force a renewed commitment to getting Americans back to work—a commitment that must include, among other things, aggressive job recruiting and training by employers, reviving the social expectation that prime-age men must work, ending the “college for all” mindset that devalues blue-collar occupations, and strengthening work requirements as a condition of aid …

Why restrict immigration? Replacing American workers with fresh waves of low-skill immigrants is not a viable long-term strategy for our country. Despite some immediate economic benefits for employers, large shareholders, and consumers, albeit with substantial offsetting fiscal costs, mass importation of low-skill workers is both demoralizing and risky in the longer term …

Sustained mass immigration is also in bad faith, because it facilitates a wholesale evasion of hard realities. Too many low-skill Americans are poorly socialized to work and considered undesirable by American employers. The current immigration status quo allows this to be papered over. Changing the status quo will force this situation to be confronted and addressed. Society and workers themselves must face up to native workers’ perceived, and actual, inadequacies, and also to the need to take the low-skill jobs that exist and are available.

White-collar Americans are also suffering discrimination because employers prefer to hire young foreign graduates who will work long hours at low pay in the hope of the valuable prize of citizenship, say advocates. A ComputerWorld report about a 2016 lawsuit by four American plaintiffs said:

David Neumark, a professor of economics at the University of California, Irvine, analyzed Infosys’ U.S. workforce for the plaintiffs and wrote a 76-page report filed this week in federal court in Wisconsin, where the case is being heard …

One plaintiff was hired by Infosys to work on a $49.5 million Affordable Care Act, government-funded development project for the District of Columbia. There were about 100 Infosys employees working on the healthcare project, but only three were American, the lawsuit claimed. The plaintiff alleged harassment, and was denied promotion, the complaint said.

Neumark brought a statistical analysis to the discrimination claim. Specifically, the economist wrote, “from 2009 through 2015, 89.39% of Infosys’ United States workforce was South Asian while only 11.45% of the United States’ Computer Systems Design and Related Services industry was South Asian.”

President Donald Trump’s deputies are taking some steps to deter and penalize anti-American discrimination.

Also, Trump’s popular immigration principles call for the passage of the RAISE Act, which would help American workers by halving the supply of new immigrant workers. The act would end the visa lottery and the “chain migration” laws which allow new immigrants to award green cards to their foreign relatives, regardless of the relatives’ skills, education, ideology, and age.

Polls show that a lopsided majority of Americans oppose cheap-labor immigration which undermines U.S. workers.

Although industry-funded “nation of immigrants” polls pressure Americans to say they welcome migrants, the alternative “fairness” polls show that voters put a much higher priority on helping their families, neighbors, and fellow nationals get decent jobs in a high-tech, high-immigration, low-wage economy. That political power of that fairness priority was made clear in during the GOP primaries and again in November 2016.

Each year, four million Americans turn 18 and begin looking for good jobs in the free market.

But the federal government inflates the supply of new labor by annually accepting 1 million new legal immigrants, by providing almost 2 million work-permits to foreigners, by providing work-visas to roughly 500,000 temporary workers and doing little to block the employment of roughly 8 million illegal immigrants.

The Washington-imposed economic policy of mass-immigration floods the market with foreign labor and spikes profits and Wall Street values by cutting salaries for manual and skilled labor offered by blue-collar and white-collar employees. It also drives up real estate prices, widens wealth-gaps, reduces high-tech investment, increases state and local tax burdens, hurts kids’ schools and college education, pushes Americans away from high-tech careers, and sidelines at least 5 million marginalized Americans and their families, including many who are now struggling with opioid addictions.

A Colorado man who was convicted on multiple counts of human trafficking, child prostitution and sexual exploitation of a child – including pimping – has been strangled by the long arm of the law.

The 31-year-old scumbag Brock Franklin was the ringleader of a criminal gang who used social media to lure their victims, then abducted and drugged them – selling them as prostitutes to sexual deviates.

It was one of the most diabolical sex trafficking operations in Colorado history and last week, a judge in Arapaho County sentenced Franklin to a whopping 472-years in prison meaning that he could be a free man around Christmas of the year 2489 or so.

‘The tough ones are us women:’ Colorado pimp gets 472 year sentence https://t.co/kKehDHkXxa http://pic.twitter.com/G6V5kAqHYe

— 9NEWS Denver (@9NEWS) November 21, 2017

Via Denver NBC affiliate 9 News “‘The tough ones are us women:’ Colorado pimp gets 472-year sentence”:

A man convicted of sexually exploiting women as a pimp will spend the rest of his life – and then some – in prison.

In a sentencing hearing Tuesday afternoon, Arapahoe County Judge Peter F. Michaelson sentenced the man found guilty of running a child prostitution ring to 472 years in prison.

That is more than four times the minimum required sentence – and the largest sentence brought down for a human trafficking case in the country.

Brock Franklin was indicted in 2015 by a grand jury for allegedly using drugs and violence to control young girls, often forcing them into lewd acts as part of a child sex trafficking ring.

Four others have already been sentenced for their involvement in the human trafficking ring.

Prosecutors said Franklin preyed on young women and girls who were vulnerable. In his trial, a jury heard from eight of the nine victims in the case.

“Damage isn’t lessened because of where someone came from or where someone did not come from,” an attorney for the Arapahoe County District Attorney’s Office said in court Tuesday.

In a packed courtroom Tuesday afternoon, prosecutors read two letters from Franklin’s victims.

“Every morning I wake up I have to remind myself the defendant will no longer be able to hurt me,” the first letter began.

The victim, identified only as “DY,” wrote to the court about the PTSD, anxiety, and depression she suffers because of Franklin’s actions.

“I began to doubt myself, thinking everything the defendant told me was true,” her letter read. “I am a mother and a soon-to-be wife and I am not all the defendant said I was or to become.”

Then, one of his victims spoke directly to the court – in person.

“I miss myself, my confidence, my laugh. I miss my happiness,” she said, as she described her three “long months” under Franklin, beginning in Jan. 2015.

She discussed her recurrent PTSD, anxiety and depression.

“The tough ones are us women,” she addressed the court. “The prison time [the defendant] will serve does not compare to the damage he has caused to these women or myself,”

“I forgive Brock Franklin, but only because the Good Lord says I must,” she said tearfully to the court.

The victim finished her impact statement by saying, “Today I let this demon go.”

In March of this year, Franklin went on trial for 34 counts including pimping a child, patronizing a child prostitute, kidnapping and assault.

He was found guilty on 30 counts including human trafficking, sexual exploitation of a child, child prostitution, kidnapping, pimping of a child, and racketeering.

He was acquitted of several charges including distributing marijuana and assault with a deadly weapon.

The lead investigator on Franklin’s case also spoke to the court.

The detective with the Arapahoe County Sheriff’s Office described the case as “emotional and hard” on everyone who touched it.

Now Mr. Franklin is likely to get a good deal of education in how a pimping operation is run from the other end.