BORDER SECURITY--ACCEPTING THE FABRIC OF FEAR
We are not a fearful nation, nor (if we reject
Michael Chertoff’s continuing effort to scare us to death) will we become one.
That said, we are certainly and willingly Balkanizing ourselves, dividing a previously United States
into a rag-tag and very unAmerican obsession with what are essentially ghosts
under the bed.
Derby Line, Vermont is an unfortunate current example.
Homeland Security Comes
to Vermont, Changes in Border Town Unsettle Some Residents, blares a headline from the
Washington Post;
DERBY
LINE, Vt. -- The changes started coming slowly to this small town where the
U.S. border with Canada runs across sleepy streets, through houses and
families, and smack down the middle of the shared local library.
First
was the white, painted lettering on the pavement on three little side streets
-- "Canada" on one side, "U.S.A." on the other. Then came
the white pylons denoting which side of the border was which. After that,
signboards were erected on some streets, ordering drivers to turn back and use
an officially designated entry point.
And
along with the signposts came an influx of American Border Patrol agents,
cruising through the town in their green-and-white sport-utility vehicles with
sirens, chasing down cars and mopeds that ignored the posted warnings.
‘
The
changes started coming slowly to this small town’ sounds
like a badly written voice-over, opener to a Grade B movie. Fade to screaming
sirens and white SUVs chasing down—what?—international criminals? Not hardly. A
kid on a dirt-bike, rolling through the wooded trail he’s ridden since Dad
finally gave in to his pleas and let him buy a used Honda CRF 150.
“Don’t
shoot, for God’s sake, that’s my kid!”
Derby Line has peacefully coexisted somehow with its
American-Canadian divisions and friendships since 1791. The War of 1812 with
Britain caused hardly a ripple of dissatisfaction among American and Canadian
neighbors who shared church, the watching of kids and celebration of inter-marriages. The U.S.
invaded Canada in that ill-begotten war, but apparently not at Derby Line.
Washington, D.C. burned (partially) to the ground, but the New England area
kept up a brisk trade with Canada throughout.
According
to Wikipedia, the little village shared with Stanstead in Quebec is best known
for the Haskell Free Library and Opera House, deliberately constructed on the
international border and opened in 1904. The donors were a binational couple:
Carlos F. Haskell was a local American businessman who owned a number of
sawmills, while Martha Stewart Haskell was Canadian.
It’s not an accident that the line runs down the floor of the
library, bisecting it’s reading-room.
The intent was that
people on both sides of the border would have use of the facility, which is now
a designated historic site. Patrons of the library from either side of the
border may use the facility without going through border security.
Does Martha Stewart, the modern-day namesake of that
Canadian woman know about this?
For longtime residents
accustomed to a simpler life that flowed freely across a largely invisible
border, the final shock -- and what made most people really take notice -- was
a proposal by the border agents last year to erect fences on the small streets to
officially barricade the United States from Canada, and neighbor from neighbor.
"They're stirring
up a little hate and discontent with that deal," said Claire Currier, who
grew up in this border area and works at Brown's Drug Store, which has operated
on the same spot since 1884. "It's like putting up a barrier. We've all
intermingled for years."
For the Department of
Homeland Security, the changes are part of a gradual fortification of America's
northern border that began shortly after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks
and has accelerated in recent years.
Well, the stirring up of hatreds is an initial and
necessary step toward fascism. Too strong a word? That’s because you and I and
most Americans and Canadians have been used to hearing it applied to Hitler’s
Germany or Italy’s Mussolini. Calm yourself for a moment before writing me a
hot reply about the necessity of
protecting our cities. Look up fascism. The definition is: (noun) a political theory advocating an
authoritarian hierarchical government (as opposed to democracy or liberalism).
Fits pretty well.
Europe relies on efficient police work to track down
terrorists, with not always perfect, but less intrusive restraint. During the
worst of the IRA terrorisms, England never walled itself off from Scotland and (thereby)
Northern Ireland. The United States shares with Israel a less effective, yet
far more isolating rationale of walls, barbed-wire and checkpoints.
It has served them terribly and will serve us
terribly as well.
The
hardening of the northern frontier is unsettling to many in the small towns
along the border. For as long as most of these people can remember, the line
between the United States and Canada has been little more than a historic
curiosity, rather than the hard and fast demarcation that is America's southern
border.
Named
the Secure Border Initiative, the project calls for more than tripling the number
of agents along the northern border, adding boats and helicopters, and
deploying sophisticated new technology including hundreds of millions of
dollars in new communications equipment, radiation detectors and three
different types of camera-mounted sensors in the uninhabited wooded areas.
"It
was freer before, but we live in a different world now," said agent Mark
Henry, the operations officer at the Border Patrol's Swanton Sector,
headquartered in Swanton, Vt. The sector encompasses about 24,000 square miles,
extending from the town of Champlain, in Upstate New York, on the east all the
way across to the border with Maine. The sector now has 250 agents, up from 180
three years ago, and the number is scheduled to reach 300 next year.
I would submit that we only live in a different
world if we elect to live in one. To allow 19 terrorists in hijacked aircraft
to change our very form of government and constitutionally protected civil freedoms
of movement and protection from unwarranted inquiry is to have already
abandoned the game to the enemy.
What
are we but our freedoms? Just another too powerful loose
cannon smashing the china (small C) in the world order.
The nations of the world, who once looked our way with
hope and envy, now see us as disturbers of the peace. Disturbing the peace (the unsettling of proper order in a public
space through one's actions) is an American misdemeanor that is about to become
(if we continue to let it) a felony against the civilized world.
I am not merely angry at the stupidity enforced
against Derby Line and Stanstead. I am outraged at what has been asked of
America and how easily it has been given.
Bombed at Pearl Harbor, our entire Pacific fleet on
the bottom and 2,400 servicemen killed, Franklin Roosevelt addressed the Congress. That wasn’t three hijacked airliners, it was a deliberate attack
by 353 warplanes launched from six separate aircraft carriers. The time was
ripe for demagoguery and we had some (Japanese internment camps), but we also
had a president who brought the country together in purpose rather than
dividing it in fear.
Cicero told us two thousand years ago that ‘endless money forms the sinews of war.’ It was true two thousand years before him, but the writing has been lost.
300 agents now in Vermont alone,
eager and ignorant, chase down kids and annoy lifelong neighbors, where
there were but 300 along the entire Canadian border before Bush and Chertoff.
Bush and Chertoff? Cheney and Addington? Rumsfeld
and Gonzales? Are these the statesmen to whom we offer up our Founder’s
sacrifice? These rank politicians risk nothing of personal
wealth and power. Washington, Jefferson and their peers risked the very real probability that they would be tried for
treason and hanged, their fortunes confiscated. Not possibility--probability.
We have traded a sacred heritage for a handful of beads.
Not even beads, this travesty of
false preservation is worth less than
beads. Will the real America please stand up, less the last of us be left to turn out the
lights?
"We're
more visible," Henry said. "We've gotten more aircraft, more
vehicles, more boats, more ATVs -- pretty much everything, we've got more. And
we've got more people to man them."
"9/11
changed everything," said Border Patrol agent Fernando Beltran, the
operations chief for Swanton Sector's Newport station, which includes Derby
Line. "This may have been Mayberry before, but it's not anymore."
Not in my
America. In my America only your
ignorance is more visible.
.
. . for the border agents, Sept. 11 exposed the vulnerability of America's
northern frontier and the ease with which anyone -- a terrorist with a portable
nuclear device, for example -- could cross into the United States from Canada
using one of the multitude of unguarded back roads or forest paths, or, in a
border town such as Derby Line, simply by crossing the street.
Beltran
said he instructs his agents to use discretion and "common sense." It
goes like this: "If a kid [on the Canada side] throws a Frisbee over here,
he can come and get it. But if he got the Frisbee and kept walking down to the
Arby's to get a soda, we're going to stop you."
"We
can't be wrong once," Beltran added. "If we're wrong once, that could
be devastating to the whole country."
No Fernando, actually it’s your being there at all that is devastating to the country. You have
already been wrong a number of times, wrong to intervene in small border
villages, wrong to cut the streets of that village in half, wrong to disturb
the peace along the longest unmilitarized border in the world, wrong to institutionalize
what should be low-tech police work.
Martin Luther King, Jr. said it effectively and
correctly, if we can take a moment to listen to a word of advice from the past,
rather than the fear-mongering of the present:
The
means by which we live have outdistanced the ends for which we live. Our
scientific power has outrun our spiritual power. We have guided missiles and
misguided men.
Confusing the means and the ends. Sounds right. Ability to do outrunning the reason to do. That, when you sit down,
shut off the TV and put your feet up, feels right as well. Guided missiles and
misguided men. Bingo, Martin. And for that and the other truths of your
illuminated life, they assassinated you.
Illuminate:
(verb) Make free from confusion or ambiguity; make clear.
A president that our current president claims to
admire, said quite famously; “Mr.
Gorbachev, tear down this wall.” Not perhaps as catchy and bite-sized as ‘bring ‘em on’ or ‘we do not torture,’ but a better quote and a better legacy upon
which to be judged.
Amazingly, the choice of legacy is not his, but ours. We must choose the Bush legacy and lose our own or choose differently and save our nation.
It is as simple as that.
___________________________________________________
Media comment:
- Vancouver Sun-Canada-Canada needs to be proactive to counter U.S. protectionism
- United Press International-Vermont town decries security changes
- Washington Post-Taking Liberties At Homeland Security
- ASAP News-UK-Security online registration for US visitors sparks controversy
- Associated Press-Homeland Security setting up counterspy unit
As may be apparent from the title, I am going to
make comparisons to the early years of Hitler Germany, when he demanded and took
various powers by entirely legal and democratic methods. Hitler ended up a
dictator, but he was enabled to that ultimate goal by a population
terrified by an economic maelstrom and the ever growing lawlessness across Germany.
The Holocaust has taken Nazi Germany as ‘off the
table’ of political discussion as Nancy Pelosi’s unilateral removal of
impeachment and perhaps for similar reasons; sensitivity. It’s just too
divisive, says Nancy, as though we were frightened children needing to hide our
faces in her skirt. Never again, say the Israelis, as 800,000 Rwandans are
massacred and Stalin kills (by some estimates) 25 million of his own people,
Mao another 35 million and the carnage goes on, uncompared.
Comparison? We are denied comparison as well. Nazi,
has been made yet another N-word; unspeakable in polite society and therefore far more dangerous
to our civil rights and the lessons history has to teach. Author Aldous Huxley cautioned
us that "Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored"
With Germanic precision, Bush’s Department of
Homeland Security has put the nation’s police departments on the
intravenous-drip of federal money. Did you ever suspect that one day America
would be called a Homeland. Did you ever in your most Orwellian dream believe
that Americans would stand for that? Not only stand for it, but wave the flag? 
Bush, while still president
(and, in his own mind, still able to preside by decree) will absolutely protect
Cheney, Addington, Rumsfeld, Rice and whatever smaller fish threaten to fall into the nets of American
justice.
America has already been scared half to
death in preparation, but Blackwater stands ready to ‘assist’ local police,
should there be any ‘outbreaks of terrorist activity.’ New Orleans was the prep event.
Allowed
to target
