…but we’re taking it all with us.

All right.  You win.  You think this land (i.e., California, Arizona, New Mexico) was stolen from you.  You want us to leave.  Never mind that—among other issues involved in how we ended up with that land—we purchased that land for a total of 25$ million dollars in two land deals (i.e., [1] The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo which concluded a war that you lost, so that we could just have taken the land instead of shelling out $15 million; and [2] The Gadsden Purchase which cost us $10 million).  In todays dollars that amount would be  about $554,457,077.76—almost twice Mexico’s 2005  public debt (which I have calculated to be about somewhere in the neighborhood of $420 million dollars; but I’m willing to stand corrected).  By the way, no one is certain exactly what your politicians did with the money we paid them.

Also, we are not sure who you are.  Are you Native Americans?  And by “us” are we talking about descendants of European invaders?  If so, when you say that you want us to leave, do you also want us to leave Mexico also?  We have fellow Europeans (i.e., “criollos”) in Mexico.  Do you want them to leave also?  I mean, they too are thieves.  (And Spaniards comprise only 10 percent of your population and own just about everything. [My source for that comment is Terrence Haverlock, who teaches Geopolitics at the U.S. Air Force Academy, Mike Rosen Show, 3d hour, KOA-AM, Denver, Colorado, 25 April 2006.]  No wonder they want you to come up here!)

Some of us are not too sure where we should go back to.  Should I go back to Spain, Scotland, Norway, England?  Those of us who are half-breeds—where should we go?  Perhaps I am just latino enough to be permitted to remain.  Can my non-latino wife remain?  What about our children?

Finally, we don’t understand your claim to this land.  Given that you are coming here from Mexico and claiming this land as yours, you must be claiming that this land rightly belongs to Mexico.  But Mexico’s claim on this land was inherited from Spain.  The people who lived in the area now known as Mexico had no claims to this land before the Spaniards arrived.  Mexico acquired a claim to this land by conquest (i.e., by defeating Spain in a war for independence).  We also acquired a claim to this land by conquest (i.e., by defeating Mexico in a war).  (Some conquest.  The conqueror pays the conquored for the privilege of taking the territory he has won.  That’s just like a white guy, isn’t it?)  If it is wrong for us to have this land by conquest, then it must be so for you as well.  (Why didn’t you give it back to Spain?  They had it before you did.)  So we don’t think you have a claim to this land.  It belonged to others even before it belonged to Mexico or Spain.  I am not sure which country’s flag should be flying here.  But I know this: if the U.S. flag shouldn’t be flying here, neither should Mexico’s.

But never mind all that now.  You want us to leave.  Let’s say we do just that.

We leave.  You get your land back.

And just to be fair, we should leave it as close to the way we found it as we possibly can.  I mean, really, if you want your land back, you must want it in the condition it was in before we took it.  After all, you had a different kind of culture, a different kind of life.  Surely, you want that life back.  And you can’t have that life if we leave all our stuff here.

So, we will take everything with us.  There were no paved roads here before we got here.  So,  since you obviously want to live the way you did before we got here and started building stuff—like paved roads, we will remove those pesky roads for you.  The automobile too.  All those houses in Beverly Hills?  Gone.  Movie production companies?  Gone.  Recording labels?  Gone.  Radio and television stations?  Gone.  Sea World and Disney World?  Gone.  Power plants, skyscrapers, ports and military installations?  Gone.  Airports and railroad stations?  Gone (including the planes and the trains).  Bridges?  Gone (I mean, as long as we’re undoing the roads, right?).  Schools?  Gone (including universities, well the public ones anyway).  Wineries?  Gone.  All those tech companies?  Gone.  Everything that we brought with us, we will take with us when we leave.  It’s only the right thing to do, right?  Leaving it the way you had it set up before we took it all from you?  We shall return it to its pristine condition—the way you were living on it before we tore it all up.

I know that you will want to say that actually we should leave it to you the way it now is because you did all the real work of building it.  (Of course, that would not have happened but for our money, which we obviously had before we got here.)  But think of what you’re saying:  we made you tear up your land.  It just wouldn’t be fair for us to leave it the way we screwed it all up.  It’s okay.  We don’t mind cleaning it all up when we leave.

It’s the right thing to do.