Don McKee - Rider on The 21st Century Paul Revere Ride of 2006
Don McKee, Boulder, Colorado and Venice, Florida
Rider
Why would a decrepit senior citizen grand-father join this long and arduous 10-week ride around the U.S.A.? First and foremost… to have fun… while serving my country in a VERY important role.
This country has been very good to me. Born and raised in southeast Michigan, I joined and served the United States Air Force for five years (enlisted, fighter-aircraft radar and flight-control systems mechanic), and served 20 years as a DoD research engineer… doing work which resulted in world-class command-control-communications systems. I also served in the U.S. ‘intelligence community,’ with details that cannot be shared. In my career I have resided in Aurora, CO; Rome, NY; Evergreen, CO; Annapolis, MD, Littleton, CO (twice); Centennial, CO; and Boulder, CO (thrice).
Don is a physicist (Syracuse University) and a Systems Engineer (University of Southern California), who has served as an electronics technician, physicist, electrical engineer, intelligence analyst, technical program manager, staff manager, and director… mostly in the military-industrial complex. My last corporate job was working for Lockheed-Martin, doing engineering management in the construction of world-class Titan (science) missiles. Subsequently, family, consulting and writing filled my Life. On and off, Don has learned from the experience of working with adeno-carcinoma… with a ton of help from many heroes and heroines.
My passion is riding my 2002 Honda Gold Wing (Pearl Orange). I have ridden motorcycles on and off since 1952 in Daytona Beach, FL. The people whom I have met in motorcycling are the finest anywhere. Thanks to them, I rode the Wing on the track at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway. Does it get any better? I have ridden the Wing on the streets of Key West, FL; along the shores of Lake George, NY; on the highways of Wyoming; New Mexico; Utah; Kansas; Nebraska; Oklahoma; and Texas… as well as Vermont, Missouri, Illinois, Indiana, Nevada, California, Georgia, Alabama, South Carolina, North Carolina, Ohio, Virginia, Vermont, Pennsylvania, Ontario, and many, many other locales.
Don is also very experienced in white-water canoeing, sailing, water skiing, snow-skiing, and hiking…. and has served as an elected school board member, president of a Family YMCA, president of the Adirondack Assn of the AAU, PTA president, as a certified NCAA Competitive Swimming-Diving Official, and in many, many other “do-gooder” roles. I am an active member of the Unity of Boulder Church.
I have traveled to Quintana Roo, Mexico on many occasions… as well as to Belgium, France, The Netherlands, Scotland, England, and many other countries. In each and every one of those faraway places, as well as in my own backyard… I have yet to meet someone that I disliked. That includes the many illegal aliens who live and work illegally in my community and neighborhood.
It is a distinct honor to be the senior member of the 21st Century Paul Revere Riders, visiting the lower-48 state capitals to carry the message of the merits of LEGAL Immigration, advocate for enforcement of Title 8, USC and to warn of the perils that come with ill-considered open-borders practices and beliefs.
The Unites States cannot any longer haphazardly serve as THE lifeboat to 5 BILLION disadvantaged beings. The Bear-Stearns Study tells us that there are some 20 million illegals now in-country, plus children. My personal due-diligence tells me that number is understated. I believe that some 5 million foreign nationals are crossing our southern border illegally to join us in 2006. This phenom is NOT sustainable, and is definitely NOT lawful.
We are a nation of law-and-order. We MUST demand that our law-enforcement and judicial communities work together to properly investigate, charge, try, convict, and incarcerate the unscrupulous employers who are providing the magnet-jobs that attract the illegals. As the other employers get the message, and STOP hiring illegals, the migrants will voluntarily return to their home-nation.
As a sovereign nation, our job is to put on our oxygen mask FIRST, agree upon a sensible-sustainable Immigration Strategic Plan… put together an appropriate set of tools, and fully fund-implement the techniques to carry that Plan to success. A key part of that Plan must be selective LEGAL immigration goals, to recruit the currently needed educated, highly-trained experts to replace the boomers who are leaving the ranks of the employed. At the same time, we MUST reinvigorate our lower- middle-class breadwinners as they get themselves off welfare and retake the jobs that they lost when the hordes of cheap-labor illegals arrived here.
Those citizen-taxpayers will gladly do, for reasonable wages, the jobs that certain greedy employers want to hire “guest-workers” to do. Every country in the world has learned that the concept of “guest-workers” does not work, and has never worked; it is a foolish and culturally expensive stop-gap. And worse, in the eyes of many U.S. Senators, it is a sneaky back-door approach to evade our sensible immigration laws.
We MUST corral the errant employers and politicians, and return to a balanced-reasonable-sustainable approach. To do otherwise is to erode and diminish what makes the United States the greatest nation in the world.