There's more work to be done

Imagine the horror. It’s late and you’ve just gotten into a fight with your boyfriend. You’re walking home in a neighborhood you’ve walked hundreds –maybe thousands –of times before. You feel safe. You feel invincible. And then there’s a flash of light.

You stammer for a second, before blinking your eyes. There’s another flash. You lose consciousness.

When you come to, someone is barking orders. Suddenly, you’re inside, and your head is smarting like it was recently clocked with a cinderblock. You try to understand what is going on, and decipher the shouted commands, but no rational thought can make heads or tails of what is transpiring. Your muscles begin to shake in an involuntary fashion.

From here, there are two paths to take. Both lead to gut-wrenching uncertainty; life or death. The commands are getting louder and the threats more brutal. You act as if it’s the last worldy choice you'll make.

This is the shit we used to see on the ABC afterschool special. This is the fodder of every parent’s worst nightmare. This happened in our city. And sadly, it wasn’t the first time.

Fortunately for us, there were some good cops on the streets this week, and they performed with startling precision. In the case of the Locust Street abduction, special thanks must be extended to the New York State Police, a body that remains the premiere law enforcement agency amid a veritable sea of semi-professional and sometimes backwater cops. Also, to the rank-and-file among the Saratoga Springs Police, the cops who realized this case couldn’t go cold for the sake of the city. Kudos, folks; this is one that you can feel proud about. So in a sense, this missive is to congratulate these authorities for job well done. Give yourself a pat on the back, because you scored in a major way.

But these accolades are finite. Thursday’s horrific episode isn’t nearly over. There is at least one person that won’t readily forget what happened on that night. Not today, and certainly not tomorrow; maybe not ever. There’s another who sits in a jail cell thousands of miles away from his native land; a place he should have never left.

This brutal event is a wake-up call to Saratoga Springs, New York and the United States as a whole to change its immigration policies so that sadistic bastards like Victor Hernandez-Perez don’t end up in the country running amok; raping and pillaging to their hearts’ delight. Or even worse yet, so that a bunch of vigilant racists don’t decide to wage a pogram against all non-native Hispanics; even the ones who toil for pennies on the dollar and work until their fingers bleed.

Either way, this country is at a breaking point; a boiling point. For fucks sake, it’s past the breaking point to find a reasonable solution. Here are the facts: There’s a new untouchable class in New York, sucking up the hours that no self-respecting American wants. The influx of Latino labor has proven to be an invaluable thorn that a select few like to jam in the side of hyper-aggressive unions. The presence of so-called ‘illegals’ has promised a windfall to chiseling business owners –those too stingy or too desperate to pay a livable wage.

Then there’s the other side, the one with people who wander downtown wraith-like and below the radar. They are unaccounted, unrecognizable and for all intents and purposes, invisible. This is a trait that behooves both them and the sizeable fraction of the business community that feeds f off their labor. And they’re in no hurry to change this.

Yet for the sake of this union, there needs to be an answer or a response that appeases both sides.To put it bluntly, it’s time for both sides of this issue to pony up and find a solution, because the masses can’t take much more of this shit; or as the good doctor once said, this fear and loathing. There’s too much gunpowder in this room and way too many people chain smoking cigarettes.