There is a passage in Ernest Hemingway’s 1926 breakthrough novel “The Sun Also Rises” that is applicable today.
It occurs during the run of the bulls at the Pamplona Fiesta in Spain where Hemingway and his drinking buddies — disenchanted World War I veterans of the “Lost Generation” used to hang out, go to bullfights and get drunk.
It takes place during a boozy conversation between Mike Campbell, a roguish playboy who has squandered his fortune, and Bill Gorton, his drinking buddy.
“How did you go bankrupt?” Bill asks.
“Two ways,” Mike says. “Gradually and then suddenly.”
A similar question might be asked of Americans today in the wake of the illegal immigration invasion along the southern border, an unaddressed trickle of a problem that has turned into a disastrous flood.
Sipping wine at an outdoor cafe on Boylston Street today, Bill might ask “How did you lose your country?”
“Two ways,” Mike would respond, “Gradually and then suddenly.”
Gradually, beginning when Joe Biden halted construction of the border wall, and ditched former President Donald Trump’s “remain in Mexico” policy — among other things — and then suddenly when Biden refused to extend Title 42, the last shred of any semblance of border control.
The pair then might look over at Boston Common where, like in New York’s Central Park, tents may soon be going up to handle the record-breaking number of illegal immigrants Biden is letting into the country.
In addition to all the Biden-induced mayhem and misery, Biden early on signaled to the world that the southern border was wide open. Come one, come all, no questions asked.
And who would not want to come to a place where handouts abound? I’d come too if I were not already here. You don’t need a profession or a skill or an education. You don’t need a job. You don’t have to speak English. Transportation is free. Medical care and hospitalization are free, as is schooling for the children.
So, they came, millions of them, even as Biden had no plan to deal with the problem he created.
Asked about end of Title 42 last week, Biden said things will be “chaotic for a while.”
Chaotic for a while? Things have been chaotic at the border ever since Biden took office and signaled to the world that the border was open.
Now the one-time sanctuary cities across the country — New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Boston and others, who cannot even cope with drugged-out homeless and mentally ill people they already have haunting their streets — are being flooded with thousands of more homeless people crossing the border.
And big-city mayors like Eric Adams of New York and Lori Lightfoot of Chicago, who have attacked Texas Gov. Greg Abbott for busing illegal immigrants from Texas to their cities, are now doing the same thing. They are busing the immigrants from their overburdened cities to surrounding suburbs, whether the suburbs want them or not. Boston is doing it too.
States of emergencies have not only been called in El Paso and other border cities in Texas and Arizona but in New York and Chicago as well, as shelters and emergency-bed capacities have been overwhelmed.
Boston will be in an emergency next. Already immigrants from Haiti have sought shelter at the Boston Medical Center because they had no place else to go.
Immigrant families with small children are being housed in motels in Concord, Kingston, Plymouth, Shrewsbury and elsewhere, often sent there without notifying local officials. There are currently close to 900 immigrant families housed in hotels and motels in Massachusetts with more on the way.
In March the state came up with an emergency appropriation of $85 million to deal with the situation and Gov. Maura Healey has asked for $324 million more in her proposed budget.
Which is all the good for Massachusetts, but does nothing to solve the open border disaster Joe Biden created and then ran away from.
How did you lose your country? Ask Joe Biden.
Peter Lucas is a veteran Massachusetts political reporter and columnist.
