On Friday, June 27, 2025, I Spent Some Time With Some Of My Favorite Immigrants

On Friday, June 27, 2025, we traveled to Lexington to finally get new batteries in my wife's power wheelchair. They had been dead for about two weeks and it was a bad time. We needed a break and, for a while we got one. After spending time with the technician and his wife at the wheelchair company, getting the batteries installed, and then moving on to our favorite Vietnamese restaurant where despite living about two hour away we are regulars. We love the food, we really like the manager and his entire staff. We got done eating and then traveled to a little Asian food store for one item of a chile paste which we cook with sometimes. I will no longer name any immigrant, immigrant owned business, or other identifying characteristics of a business due to the danger which is being presented on a daily basis to ALL IMMIGRANTS by TRAITOR Trump and the Criminal Syndicate which poses as a "cabinet". We spent little time in the business and, it is my impression, that the family which owns it are American citizens. I chose the one item I was searching for, looked around the store and figured I didn't need anything else. When I walked to the counter to pay, the wife of the family was working in the store area away from the counter. Immediately, her young son who is about 7 or 8, in my estimation, moved from another spot behind the counter to the register and rang up my purchase, took my debit card and, with some help from his mother, completed the transaction, thanked me in perfect English. I was instantly taken back to my own childhood growing up in a country store in first Floyd County Kentucky and then another in Knott County Kentucky. I had also been trained to work in the store from a young age as soon as I could count change. I was flooded with memories and instantly told the little boy that I had also grown up in a store with my parents, how much I had enjoyed working in the store, and I tried to let him know, in no uncertain terms, that it is a good thing to be a young boy working with your parents in a family owned store. Yes, it is summer and school is out of session. I have no knowledge that the boy is ever in that store on a school day, or that he is ever working in any dangerous capacity, or that he is ever doing anything that makes his providing help to his parents is illegal. It is a parental choice they have and should always have to bring their children to the store with them, teach those children to work as young as they are capable of doing whatever job the parents choose to have them do. It is valuable training to help a child become a contributing citizen in the world and a worker who is committed to being a part of the working class. It is a damn fine thing to be a young boy working in a family store and I am an expert on that subject. When I was three days old, my parents carried me home from the Lackey, Kentucky, hospital and placed me on the counter in our store and, as I lie about sometimes, told me to "greet customers until you are big enough to do something else. I am proud of that boy and I am proud of his parents.

The photograph above is of my father Ballard Hicks sitting in our family owned country store at Dema, Kentucky.

Labor Day 2024, As We Face The Most Important Election In American History

 

As we celebrate Labor Day this year, I would suggest that we celebrate it with a sense of caution and use it as an impetus to renew our personal commitments to fight to protect the working class, the middle class, and all threatened classes of individuals with our vote on November 5, 2024, to elect President Kamala Harris.  Labor Day is a day which was set aside as a national holiday on June 28, 1894, when Democratic President Grover Cleveland signed a federal law making Labor Day a national holiday.  Labor Day had previously been celebrated in roughly 30 states.  Labor Day has been celebrated ever since both as celebration of the working class and a tribute to all the people who worked over the past 250 years to make America the country and the Democracy it has always been.  But this year we are facing the worst attack on the American working class, middle class, elderly, infirm, racial and ethnic minorities, women, children, and nearly every human in America who is, in one way or another, vulnerable to those who have no respect for laws, the US Constitution, constitutional rights, human rights, and any other idea which is intended to protect, defend, educate, provide health care, and all other basic rights to such vulnerable individuals.  That attack is being perpetrated by TRAITOR Trump, the Right Wing Radical Repugnican Party, Project 2025, the super wealthy, and those who comprise all such groups and their ideas.  

In this election, we have what is actually the most clear cut choice ever posed in an election for an electorate to choose between Good and Evil, Right and Wrong, Human Rights and Total Disregard For Such Rights.  The choice is between Vice President Kamala Harris who represents all those positive possible outcomes and TRAITOR Trump who represents all that is Evil and Destructive in the world. Kamala Harris is a person who has spent her life fighting for and defending all that is Good and Positive in the world.  TRAITOR Trump has spent his life fighting to destroy literally everything in the world which he cannot find a way to dominate, control, and hoard unto himself.  This choice is so simple that it baffles me and millions of other good, decent, rational Americans to understand how any human on earth can fail to understand the simplicity and the seriousness of this choice.  TRAITOR Trump and everything he represents is geared to destroy America, American Democracy, Constitutional Rights, Individual Rights, and to wipe all that is good and productive off the face of America.  

I am asking each of  you who read this to either make or renew a personal commitment to fight every day from now until President Kamala Harris can be elected, protected, and sworn into office to uphold the Constitution, to elect President Harris, and to insist that TRAITOR  Trump finally be held criminally responsible for all his crimes against America, American Democracy, the world, and the planet.  He must be convicted, sentenced, and imprisoned for his crimes.  If he is not, this country cannot survive as a Democracy.  We are literally facing a choice between the future of America and the total destruction of all that America and American Democracy represent.  We will either save America and American Democracy or we will lose them forever as a result of this election.  

Right Wing Radical Repugnicans In Frankfort Declare War On The Working Class

On February 10, 2024, I wrote in a blog post about the current Kentucky state legislature and their active effort to become the worst legislature in America.  I had promised at that time to continue to write about their effort to destroy democracy and individual constitutional rights in the state.  I have to admit that I have been remiss in not having written about them on a daily basis since they have been working on a daily basis to pull off their plan.  This post in particular is about one pending piece of legislation which is as diabolical as anything passed in any state legislature in the nation.  It is literally a declaration of war on the entire working class in the state.  It is labeled House Bill 500 and the key elements of it are listed in the image below which is from the Kentucky State AFL-CIO.  

 

 As you can see in the image above, House Bill 500 will repeal several elements of pro-labor legislation which have been considered sacrosanct all across America for more than 50 to 100 years.  Union men and women literally fought and died for these rights all across the United States and the working class has grown to assume that they would never be attacked or eliminated in a democratic country or state.  But Kentucky is no longer a democratic state.  By the phrase "Kentucky is n o longer a democratic state", I do not mean that the state is being run by Right Wing Radical Repugnicans which it is except for the governor and his appointed staff.  I mean that the Right Wing Radical Repugnicans in the state legislature and the majority of statewide elected offices have been working to destroy democracy in Kentucky on a daily basis since they gained control of the majority of the elected offices in the state.  When a state legislature even quietly considers taking away the rights of workers to have a designated lunch period, a designated break or rest period, or to receive overtime pay if they are forced to work 7 days in a row, or the other rights they want to destroy with this legislation, they are declaring war on the entire working class in the state.  And the only reasonable response to such an act must be for the working class to declare war on that state legislature and remove every one of them from office in the November 2024 election.  A vote for any Right Wing Radical Repugnican for any office in Kentucky is a vote against the working class; against teachers, nurses, EMT's, police officers, and every other blue collar worker in the state.  This is a link to House Bill 500 as described above.  You can go to this link and read the bill for yourself to see exactly what it and its sponsors intend to destroy.  This bill will literally rob every worker in the state of their individual and collective rights to have a decent, acceptable working environment.  Every legislator who votes for this bill or even speaks out loud in favor of it must be voted out of office in the November election.  We must remove these people from office all across the state and we must give Governor Andy Beshear a Democratic majority in both houses of the legislature for the last three years of his term so all the actions of this legislature can be repealed, revoked, and never again be thought of in this state.   Phillip Pratt is the original sponsor of House Bill 500 and is also sponsoring another bill, House Bill 255 which is intended to weaken child labor laws in the state.  He must be defeated and so must any other public figure at any level in the state of Kentucky who votes for, publicly speaks out in support of, or commits any act in defense of these two bills.