42
Taté Ská (Ta-Tay Shka), White Wind, but half the time Miles called her Bud, and she seemed to respond just fine. She took care of him, as if she knew that he was inexperienced in the horse trade. She made him feel welcome, and that he was in charge of the situation, even if he knew that she was really the one holding the reins.
They escaped the rez with little incident, one little incident, a helicopter was cruising the border, but our team was able to take cover along the river until it passed. Other than that, Miles was just a little butthurt about the whole ordeal.
“That’ll pass,” promised Rowan. “Just a little sore in the saddle is all, give it a week and you’ll be as hard-assed as the rest of us.”
“Great, just what I always wanted,” he less than cheered, as he passed the pot of campfire beans. “Where we going, anyway?”
“It’s less about where we’re going on this journey, and more about where we’re at.”
“We’re headed south for the most part,” added Brooke. “But we’re stopping along the way to reseed food forests and restore the natural balance to the land.”
“Trying to make it possible to be a nomad again,” Rowan rolled on. “The Earth is designed to take care of us as we travel freely across her surface, it’s only because of our negligence that she ever stopped. So we’re on a quest to rekindle healthy relationships as we open pathways through the abyss.”
“Some of us are on the way to Mexico, to the border, to help with the relief efforts for all those waylaid travelers stuck on the other side,” informed Brooke.
“And maybe to put up a little resistance of our own,” nudged Tiana.
“Better get your zipline ready,” Jordan warned.
“It’s pretty atrocious how they’re treating people down there,” said Brooke. “People that are just trying to survive. Escaping whichever harsh reality has been inflicted onto their homeland, and most of it was by our society’s meddling in the first place. And it’s not going to slow down. The countries we’ve impoverished are the most affected by the ecological hardships we’ve created, we’re entering an era of widespread climate migration, and it’s our responsibility as humans to welcome the refugees with open arms and open borders, not heavily armed soldiers defending their exclusive right to American privilege.”
“When in our world’s history has a border wall ever been good for anybody?” wondered Tiana. “We used to fight wars to topple the tyrants who divided the people, now we sit back and relax as it’s happening in our own backyard.”
“But that’s all in the past,” Jordan devilishly advocated. “And everybody knows that we never learn anything from the past, especially not from the rest of the world’s history. America is the world, as far as we’re concerned anyway, and we already have a rich history of yesterday’s immigrants fighting the future immigration of job-theiving criminals, those with the malicious intent of diluting the authentic American way of life. And besides, we have to keep the drug dealers out somehow.”
“Oh yeah, right, forgot about them,” recalled Tiana. “Like the meth plaguing our most vulnerable people, no, wait, that’s made here in the US. And weed’s legal, basically. And the government’s the biggest importer of heroin, I personally know vets who have stood guard at the poppy fields we commandeered. Big pharmaceutical, now there’s a drug dealer worth mobilizing against, they kill way more people than the rest of them combined, oh never mind, they’re as above the medical board as it gets. So I guess that just leaves coke, not the high fructose poison that attributes to a quarter million deaths a year, they’re talking about the one that lands a thousand kilos per trip in Miami, not smuggled a balloon at a time inside a migrant already carrying everything they own. Haven’t they ever seen Scarface?”
“And ninety percent of the drugs that do travel across the border, come through legal ports of entry,” said Rowan. “And you know, they don’t even search every car that comes through there, only one out of seven. You’d think that if any of this had to do with the import of anything other than brown people, that maybe they’d thoroughly inspect the most convenient way of crossing the border first.”
“Well, they can just apply legally if they want to live here so bad,” egged Jordan. “Easy peasy. There are proper legal channels to becoming a citizen, just gotta fill out some paperwork or something.”
“Oh yeah, just fax it in and you should be good,” Tiana encouraged. “Except that the same people building the wall are tightening restrictions on immigration, slowing the process, and reducing the amount of applications seen. But anybody that’s for the wall, seems to be for the general reduction of mexicans anyway, so who really cares about the horrid conditions we’re creating on the edge of our neighbor’s yard, can’t be any worse than a day at the DMV.”
“Which form was I supposed to fill out again?” asked Jordan. “The one where my immigrant grandparents worked hard so I wouldn’t have to? Or is it the older version, where I just have to exterminate anyone that’s already living there? And is the back copy mine?”
“It’s just another cage,” said Rowan, as he relieved the dark comedy routine. “A fence, a prison, a lock and key to capture and contain, both ways, this gravy train ain’t gonna last forever. It’s not just a few stray nomads meant to be flowing freely, it’s all of life, the Earth is a liquid, and through those swirls of energy we should find abundance sprouting from every trail.
But then you fence off something that can never be owned, and it dies. There may still be some life surviving the isolation, but that ecosystem will only ever be a fraction of the puzzle piece it once was. And then another fence, and then another, and just wait til we ride through Nebraska, fences and cornrows for days.
90 million acres for corn, 650 million for cows, 25 million of concrete, 4 million miles of roads, which are really just as bad as fences, and even more destructive to the migration of the microscope.
The compartmentalization of life, an inventory of taxable existence, fences, prisons, reservations, cubicles, apartments, children in cages at a privatized border wall. They’re all layers of the same machine, and everyone’s too captivated with securing their own little neighborhood of oppression, the one that’s not so bad if you just work overtime and ignore the pleas of those caught up in the gears, they’re too consumed with being a loyal consumer to see that their exemplary inmate privileges come at a cost to another, and that they’re the only ones who can use that privilege to free those locked in the cells beneath them.”
“They’ve got their own problems,” suggested Brooke. “They don’t have time to worry about someone else’s struggle a thousand miles away. They’ll just have to figure it out for themselves, I guess.
Our country may have been built with slavery, but that was before our time, so it doesn’t count, ever since some proud Americans traveled a thousand miles to protect the freedoms of fellow human beings, those whose lives were the cost of their privilege. Whew, good thing we don’t have their sense of moral authority.
Or hey holocaust victims, sorry chaps, we gotta stay home and catch up on SportsCenter, maybe next time. And I know that the whole holocaust thing is a touchy subject and beyond parallel, even if those who get offended by the comparison and not the current events, were probably unlikely to have stepped in back then either. And even if we have to remember that the holocaust was not the beginning of the terror, but the end, and that it very much started by detaining an ‘infestation’ of minorities into interment camps, as the government funded the dehumanization of those whose survival was made illegal by the state.
But it gets harder for me not to draw connections when we talk about the American genocide of 98 million humans over race, spiritual beliefs, and land dispute. Far less survivors of a much larger genocide, albeit a more archaic version of evil, but the victims of this one are still concentrated into camps and showered with oppression, and they’re not on the other side of the world, and it’s not something from a time long forgotten, and maybe those who are so gung-ho about defending the American way of life, should consider taking responsibility for it.”
“But no,” said Tiana. “They’ll just send all the foreigners back to where they belong, anywhere but here, it’s the only way to preserve English as their country’s native language. Maybe if our people had been a little stricter on immigration, we wouldn’t have all this confusion over homeland security.”
“Think it’s too late to deport them?” wondered Jordan. “No offense.”
“As long as you guys show official tribal documentation you can pass, better keep it on you at all times though,” warned Tiana. “Yeah right, that’s totally different, this place was won fair and square in the heat of battle.”
“I thought we won that one?”
“Sure, we may have defeated the army, repeatedly enough that they still use our strategies to train today’s forces. And yeah, maybe we signed a treaty to spare their lives for a few concessions that they never had any intention of providing. And okay, so there may have been a few Geneva violations of biological warfare and flat out massacre. But hey, all’s fair in love and war, and America won that shit, otherwise we’d all be wearing loincloths and howling at the moon.”
Proud to be an American? Which part? Was it the founded on genocide or the built on slavery? Oh yeah, that’s all in the past, proud to be an American right now. Oh, so the border cages, gotcha. No? Not so proud of the unsavory reality required to facilitate the American dream of freedom? Just proud to be on the winning team?
“Or how about the people who are part of the lands we’re invading right now,” asked Rowan. “I’d imagine they’ll just have to figure it out on their own too, huh? When the most developed war machine in the world blows through their neighborhood, and all they want is for us to stay at home like we love to do, and somehow we’re surprised when they figure it out on their own and seek vengeance against the great nation that devastated their homeland, with no visible signs of remorse among its citizenship.
But no, why on Earth would any of us be responsible for the actions of our government, that’s somebody else’s problem, we’re just the innocent bystanders that consume the spoils of war, as we spill more privilege on the floor than most people in the world will ever even know exists.”
“Except of course for the undocumented housekeepers and their stolen American jobs,” added Brooke. “As the prisoners of privilege shame the victims of the same master that enslaves their own livelihood. We’re the ones that wrecked Mexico’s economy, policies like NAFTA destroyed their agricultural income, as our techno-corn claimed supremacy over family farms trapped in the maize. Entire communities left without sustenance, Monsanto consuming the last heirlooms of tradition, and millions of unemployed locals drowning in the fields, as John Deere diesels deport the workforce and strip any remaining culture from agribusiness.”
“That’s a story as old as the timeclock though,” countered Rowan. “Technological advances that streamline the inefficiencies of handcrafted quality. People have been losing jobs to machines for a long time, all the way back to the plow, but the future they were promised through the rise of job termination, has been buried deep below the unemployment line.
In the thirties, and then again in the sixties, we were told that by the early two-thousands, we’d have the machines selflessly handling all of our dirty work. We would live in a time of leisure, where children wouldn’t believe stories of anyone ever having worked more than fifteen hours a week.
Sounds like a dream, and it was. If we were all in this together, then it would be more than possible to sit back and relax as the techno-utopia took out the trash, who cares about jobs, why would we want one of those when Rosie works for us?
But that’s not how the title holders who own our time wanted to run the show, why share in the wealth and extend vacations, when we can simply extract even more money from the lifetimes of the working class? And we don’t even have to chain them up like that last batch of imported field hands, they’ll come begging to us for cheap labor, it’ll become their biggest priority as they vote to expand our market above any of those worthless human rights. If jobs are what they want, then that’s what we’ll give them, who cares if today’s occupation is devoid of anything meaningful. The only thing that matters is a population traded for a paycheck, and we’ve got a machine that prints those, so we’re golden.”
“So yeah,” concluded Brooke. “That’s why we’re headed down that way, because it’s our duty to stand up for those knocked down by our empirical measures. We may not be chasing some paycheck that promises an endless pursuit of unhappiness, but this work we’re doing is rewarding in all the ways that a job is intrinsically designed to drain you of.”
Miles was ready to fill out an application.