“Odd you an awmidican seeteezen seer?”
I was ready for the question, but it was three AM, and the accent threw me.
“Excuse me?”
“Are you an American citizen sir?”
I looked down into his well fed face, topped with a stocking cap against the cold. I took in his army fatigue green uniform, the bulge around his middle, and his side arm.
A flood of retorts went through my mind, but thankfully what came out of my mouth was: “Yes Sir.”
He closed his eyes and with all the magnanimity of a third world bureaucrat, he waved me through. “Half a nize day seer.”
I was at a regular Border Patrol check point in Texas. The entire countryside around me swarmed with Border Patrol agents, and their dogs. I couldn’t see it but I knew the airwaves around me crackled with voices on the radio, and hummed with high powered radar capable of tracking a human being from miles away. Even the earth itself was filled with motion detectors looking for the movement of people coming up from Mexico, Central, and South America.
The man that waved me through the check point could not have been long out of his country. The only difference between him and the people he was hunting was a piece of paper.
I don’t agree with the direction our country is headed regarding the “illegal immigrant” situation. I think it is based mainly on racism and hype, and very little is based on fact, let alone a Christian spirit.
In my experience, Hispanics are very hard working, and would have no problem contributing their share of taxes, and Social Security if they are given that chance. They are very family oriented, they work long hours, and then spend their Sundays off in church, and with their families. Then, they send what they can to relatives back home.
The problem is they look different than us, they don’t sound like us, and they raise large families.
Hmm, they sound like Eastern Europeans of 100 years ago, and the Irish, and the Italians after them, and the Porto Ricans after them.
I remember the first time I felt the cold roll of something wholly indigestible turning in the pit of my stomach. It was when I realized that something I was proud of; my country, and my U.S. Navy, was doing something that exposed the slimy underbelly of a policy run amuck.
We were in the Caribbean Sea, about 100 miles off the coast of Columbia. We were on a “Drug Interdiction” mission.
In actuality, it was harassment on the high seas. We stopped small ships, fishing boats, anybody that came up on our radar. Not because we had permission to do this from any government, but simply because we were manning a 250 foot warship with a 5” gun mount, and a harpoon missile system capable of launching a nuclear warhead 750 miles, and landing it on a dime. Plus, we were flying a United States flag at our mast head, so we must be right.
Right?
The moment I knew we were wrong was in the early morning hours, when we stopped a U.S. registered sailboat that was paralleling the coast. We hailed them by radio, and then sent 6 DEA agents over to search their boat. There were two men and a woman on board. They were forced to stand first in the cockpit, and then in the cabin while these agents tore their boat apart. They had no choices, they had no rights.
After they did not find anything they could charge them with, the agents left. In their debriefing, the discussion was about what they had done wrong that they had not found anything. The sailors were considered guilty, even after they were proven innocent.
My part in all this was holding a search light on the sailboat. I found myself getting physically ill, so I handed it off to someone that was only too willing to be a part of something they thought was a great idea.
When I see check points in the desert, and walls going up along our southern border, I know a boondoggle when I see one.
When I see people get yanked out of their cars and stood alongside the road with their wrists bound with zip strips because of the color of their skin, and the fact that they didn’t have that all important piece of paper, my stomach begins that now familiar roll of nausea.
In my opinion, as long as the United States enjoys a standard of living that is far and above that of our neighbors, we will always have an immigrant problem.
I am a big fan of our standard of living, so I recommend doing everything we can to help our neighbor. We spend billions of dollars on border patrol, and now building a wall. What would be wrong with building some infrastructure, hospitals, schools, etc.?
In any case, the harassment on the high seas program never did work, and the wall across the border program won’t work any better than it did for China or Russia.
Perhaps most disturbing is what all of this says about our Christian spirit.
My Bible tells me how to treat the “aliens” among us. It also tells me how to treat the “neighbor” that I find in the ditch.
Trussing him up like a turkey, and sending him back home is not what I read.
Agree? Disagree? Leave a comment, or send me and e-mail.
THAT, was when we met! It was a trend to forever change the Thanksgivings of my life!
