Did Aliens Take All The Aliens?

Omigod! The entire Hispanic population of Albertville, Alabama has disappeared overnight. Streets in Hispanic neighborhoods all over the state are empty. What could have happened? In order to find out, I consulted the New York Times. I now know it wasn't space aliens who absconded with the earthly aliens after all. It was the Hispanic Rapture.

In the wake of a federal court decision upholding Alabama's tough new immigration arrest, detention and reporting statute, Times reporter Clay Waters rushed to Alabama to say good-bye to his Hispanic immigrant friends, only to discover that they had all disappeared before he could get there. Says Waters: "In certain neighborhoods the streets are uncommonly quiet, like the aftermath of some sort of rapture."

Waters reports that "the vanishing began on Wednesday night (after the court decision), the most frightened families packing up their their cars as they heard the news." And these were not insubstantial Hispanics who were vanishing. Waters goes on to say: "They left behind mobile homes, sold fully furnished for a thousand dollars or even less. Or they just closed up and, in a gesture of optimism, left the keys with a neighbor. Dogs were fed one last time; if no home could be found, they were simply unleashed."

(Give me a moment to stop sobbing over this tragedy, and then I will choke back the tears and continue writing)

It's a good thing God knew in advance what the court decision would be. That way, He could cause the Hispanics to vanish before the law enforcement agencies could arrive. Oh, the humanity! Where God has plopped them down, Waters can't say. "Two, five, ten years of living here, and then gone, to Tennessee, Illinois, Oregon, Florida, Arkansas, Mexico--who knows? Anywhere but Alabama." Now I'm not on personal speaking terms with God, but I did notice that overnight the Hispanic population of Los Angeles increased by several hundred thousand, so maybe He transported them to California.

In Albertville alone, 123 Hispanic students did not show up for school the next day. A local real estate agent reported that his Hispanic occupancy had suddenly dropped by twenty-five percent, and might drop further. Waters did not report that the number of Democratic voters throughout the state had declined in approximately the same numbers as the vanishing Hispanics. Coincidence?

Says Waters: "Near the plant that is the largest employer in town, in the Hispanic neighborhoods, it is hard to differentiate the silence of the workday, the silence of abandonment, or the silence of paralyzing fear." Waters is apparently unaware that it's also hard to differentiate between purple prose and plain bulls--t.

Perhaps Waters will do a followup article in which he breathlessly describes how he found Hispanics all over town who had mysteriously not been taken up in the rapture. Why were only some of the Hispanics taken, and the others left behind to go on with their lives as usual? Perhaps it will turn out that it has something to do with how the remaining Hispanics got here in the first place. Ya think?