Chapter 12

Detroit ... nice town ... Henry was just getting started. Windsor, across the river, was a bedroom community for Edison Electric's white collar workers ... small, clean, upstanding ... it had the reputation as the baby capitol of America ... the upstanding had a lot to do with the birthrate. White collar workers learned about sex in college and didn't want to give it up.

America, having never had slaves, didn't have race riots. The things I was finding out about the place certainly made sense.

Mexico ... the country ... suffered European exploiters and the sea between their north coast and our south stopped illegal immigration ... especially the cocaine traffickers. We really didn't need it. If one took the modern map and moved all the land south of the RioGrande river and followed a rough out of the line between the Texas border over to the Gulf of California and moved all of Mexico ... except Baja California ... south 300 miles replacing it with more Gulf of Mexico, you would be doing fairly well. Add ... or subtract ... all the land bordering the Rio Grande on the west side north to 300 miles west of Hudson Bay and move all the land west of that line 750 miles west, you would have the sub continent of Rocky.

Rocky was Asian ... almost exclusively.

Sort of like the United States was European before it was the United States ... except it never got to be the United States ... it was and is ... America.

There were Europeans from every nationality. When they finally settled coast to coast, they elected officials. One for every nationality. The biggest debate was what was going to be the official language. English won over German by one vote.

After the second election there was a vote for a national religion. No single religion got an extra vote. The elected officials decided ... no national religion...

Immigration? If you knew someone you thought might make a decent citizen ... you sponsored them. It was your responsibility to see their kids learned English and understood that no one was royal or better than anyone else.

It wasn't that you taught them ... You made sure they went to school.

After five years, the adults had a test to take ... the sponsor swapped with other sponsors and administered the test. It was pretty comprehensive. Kids who made it through seven years of school were citizens. Since EVERYBODY was in the National Reserves, military service didn't count towards citizenship.

At the present moment, we weren't mad at anyone ... but we were keeping a watchful eye on Rocky ... they being responsible for the last attempted invasion.

Really ... it's all about land for the young to expand to. We may not have been mad at Rocky ... they were certainly mad at us. Our weapons technology was advanced enough to sink their entire fleet, seven hundred fifty thousand Rocky soldiers, sailors and marines died as did every politician involved in the 'wishful thinking' stages.

Oh ... my boat ... or one just like it has been sailing these waters for 15 years ... Damn straight I'm a citizen.

It's a nice sail up Lake Saint Clair and the river into Lake Huron. For some reason, Stevie was in a hurry, so we did no sight seeing ... well ... Mackinac Island ... can't miss that. Great candy store ... the rest is tourist trap. A lot of English and Irish ancestry folks in the neighborhood.