Letters from Mexico is a Dream Machine Site The Dream Machine --- The Imagination of the World Wide Web

Borders Suck

The classic definition of an obsessive-compulsive is a person who repeats the same unsuccessful behavior over and over hoping that it will work this time or that mere repetition will bestow good fortune. If you or I observed someone exhibiting this kind of self-defeating behavior, we might well suggest a therapist, a cold shower, or a dose of LSD: something to shock them out of the treadmill of hopelessness and self-punishment they have devised for themselves.

Here is an example of sick, obsessive behavior with which I am familiar: This guy has a plot of land, and when he first got it, it was in a small town with only a few neighbors. No-one had any fences, and everyone freely crossed each other's property. Unfortunately, from his viewpoint, it was near a large city, and as the city ran out of room its inhabitants began to buy land in his town. He began to feel that too many people were crossing his property, so he put up a "do not walk on the grass" sign. As time went on, more people came to town, and inevitably there were some that ignored the sign. He put up a picket fence. At first just a few, and later more people jumped the fence. He put up a chain link fence. Kids climbed it. He put barbed wire at the top. His new neighbors started to get pissed off, and cut the fence. He got dogs, and they poisoned them. He ended up sitting in his living room window with a shotgun, unhappy and bitter. He didn't have time to enjoy his property because he was to o busy defending it. Meanwhile, his neighbors were all enjoying their neighborhood and each other.

You know this guy, too. He is Eurocentric America, the good old U.S. of A. And if he has any friends left out there, it's time for them to tell him that he appears to be out of his mind. Like most whackos, the US is no longer functioning in the real world, and the harm it is doing to the rest of the world's peoples is nothing compared to the harm it is inflicting on itself.

In every year of the last ten, the law enforcement industry (one of the fastest growing industries in a country which already imprisons a higher proportion of it's citizens than any other on Earth) has garnered more money, more personnel, more prosecutors, more jail cells, more and stiffer penalties for convicted lawbreakers, more exceptions to our Constitutional guarantees of due process, and more addicts. More people are coming into our country illegally, and fewer are bothering to become legal when it is available.

On July 7, 1996, the Los Angeles Times published an article entitled "Smugglers Own The Border, Ranchers Say". Concentrating on the area around Eagle Pass, Texas, the article details how smugglers -- Yankee and Latino (don't forget, plenty of our paisanos are in this business too) -- have come to control the Rio Grande valley in this area. The system is simple. First, they just cross people's land without permission. If confronted, they offer money for permission. If refused, they try to buy the rancher out. If rebuffed, they threaten. If ignored, they carry out their threats. Eventually, the ranchers either cave in or move away. Money -- and brute force -- talks. What are the results of all our draconian, punitive laws, our beefed up border patrols, our insertion of the US army into the situation? Fifteen years ago, it was officially estimated that only 10% of all drug traffic into the US was caught. A border patrol official interviewed in the Times article put the current figure at 5%. In other w ords, not only has the volume gone up, but the percentage stopped has gone down. Does this sound like the results of a wrong approach to you?

The latest wrinkle is one-stop smuggling: the person on whose back the bale of marijuana is entering the country is an illegal, who paid the smuggler for the privilege of carrying it. Who says those Mexicans don't understand efficiency?

As any Mexican and any Yankee who crosses regularly will tell you, in this post-NAFTA era, borders have outlived their usefulness. They can't keep out "the enemy", therefore they only end up hassling innocent people.

Guillermo Gomez-Pe¤a, in his new book, "The New World Border" (City Lights Publishers, $16.95 soft cover), says: "It is time to face the facts: Anglos won't go back to Europe, and Mexicans and Latinos (legal or illegal) won't go back to Latin America. We are all here to stay. For better or worse, our destinies are in one another's hands...Hybridity is no longer up for discussion. It, it is a demographic, racial, social and cultural fact.

"...rather than more border patrols, border walls, and punitive laws, we need more and better information about one another...We need to educate our children and teenagers about the complexities of living in a multiracial, BORDERLESS [my emphasis] society -- the inevitable society of the future."

The Dream Machine --- Network Services

...the best independent ISP in the Twin Cities

A travel agent near you.