2007 May 07
Copyright © Brian Wright
The Coffee Coaster™

Border Blues
Keepin' in the riffraff

Kevin O'Connor set down his field glasses and raised the canteen to his mouth for one last swig of resolution.  He gazed south on the 12-ft.-high skeleton of rebar poking through the 5-ft.-thick concrete pilings crawling along the north shore of the Rio Grande. 

"Wonder how deep the river is today," he worried.

He turned to wave up the others.  Conversation was hushed, although the chances of anyone hearing them in this Southwest Texas wasteland were slim. Kevin and his band of migratory irregulars were staging at a point 80 miles west of where the last road out of Big Ben State Park ended; Border Patrol (BP) were as sparse here as cool summer afternoons.

Staging for what?

His young wife, Katy, joined him on the ledge.

"How you taking it, babe?"

"Not bad," she said.  Katy was two-months pregnant.  A week ago they were living in Massachusetts.  Two weeks from today she was scheduled to appear before the Culling Committee. These were the federal pregnancy Go/NoGo folks. They could either nip your zygote in the bud or diddle it somehow to produce multiples.

She wanted this one; so did he.  Which is why Katy came
with him this time, and why this would be their last run... together.  The 20 to 30 others were mainly 20 to 30 somethings, some with children, way tired of being told what to do by the US government(s) with their own bodies. 

Months ago, Democrats had won a midterm election promising to end Republican war crimes and Constitutional butchery.  Unsuccessful with ending those things, the Dems did manage to pass minimum wage, universal smokeless bars, and substantial, secure new benefit packages for anyone supported by tax monies of any kind.

Their crowning achievement, though, was to roll back health-supplement freedom of choice by passing S1082, the FDA Revitalization Act (sadly, I'm not making up this bill's real name)—which gave the FDA the power to arbitrarily ban any substance it regarded as "bad."

Naturally, it banned products considered "bad" for Big Pharma's corporate profits.  Many such bad products were demonstrating broad-spectrum life-extension responses of a decade or more for real, honest-to-goodness people; others were curing diabetes, heart disease, Alzheimer's, many ailments coming to real families near you.

Because Canada had wholly succumbed to health dictatorship, most of the semiconvenient life-saving, life-enhancing alternative therapies and nutritional products were being sought and sold South of the Border. 

To solve that problem, Congress passed the Omnibus Real ID, Internet Interdiction, and Immigration (ORIII) Act to restrict freedom of trade and travel.  Now, people-smuggling, drug-smuggling, and state-database hacking (for 'antireal' ID) had become trillion-dollar enterprises.

Which brings us to the Wall. 

Which brings us to Kevin and Katy's band of "Wall runners." 

Halliburton got the contract to build the massive structure
(25 feet high in some sections) to seal the entire southern US boundary.  It was a doozie, too— razor wire, gun turrets, guards, spotlights, dogs, guns, badges, you name it... everything one expects of scorch-the-earth government boondoggles.

The original idea was to keep out the Hispanics (excuse me, "terrorists").

Largely because of the Wall though, several border provinces in Mexico had been transformed into Spanglish-speaking Hong Kongs, bastions of liberation farming, environmental hemp, wind and solar energy fields, medical marijuana, massive water desalination and irrigation projects, unparalleled crop diversity, free enterprise, home schooling, complete freedom to pop pills, all without laws against smoking or for wearing seatbelts.  Only rule: don't aggress.

Now the Wall stood to keep in millions of Americans.

Only the authorities were archetypical state employees, and it was hot down here: many weakened, underbuilt, unattended segments sat plenty close to the thriving border cities.  Like this segment in front of Kevin's 'illegal emigrants' now.

"C'mon everyone," Kevin said, "today it's a walk."

As they made the uneventful crossing into the new Mexican paradise of liberty and abundance, Kevin and Kate unfurled two Bill of Rights flags, then set them securely, one on the north side in English, one on the south side in Spanish.  Eventually, the BPs or the federales would find the flags and possibly make something out of them or show them to someone who would.  Quien sabe?