A woman of East European heritage is floating out in the middle of Axehead Lake. She’s about five foot six. She weighs about 300 pounds. She’s wearing a string bikini.
There’s another one on the other side of the lake. I drive over in my squad. “You! Get out of the water!”
The toothless guy finally staggers out of the water. He’s drunk, of course, and grinning like a monkey. “No swim!” he laughs. “Hah, hah, hah!”
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It’s no use. Half of them don’t speak English. They speak Polish, they speak Spanish, they speak Thai, they speak Korean, they speak obscure dialects from remote third-world countries. As for the other half, those who do speak Eng–
“No swim! No swim!” he cries, and suddenly he’s fighting me.
One of the toothless guy’s friends speaks a little English. “He always no good. Even in Poland he no good.”
People are worried about immigration, you hear them crabbing about it on talk radio all the time. “Make ’em learn English,” a man complains. “Build a wall,” a lady suggests. What a laugh. These people, sitting in air-conditioned homes and cars, calling on cellular phones, don’t know the half of it. It’s over, I want to tell them. The world changed while you were looking the other way, and it ain’t never going to get changed back.
