It was the beating of the drums and the strength of voices screaming in Spanish that seemed to shake the dust of jaded bitterness off of my political sensibilities.  My feet were moving and I also was shouting in Spanish with the crowd holding up U. S. and Mexican flags, bilingual banners, and babies.

The last time I properly celebrated a May Day there was barbecue and the singing of old activist songs from the 60′s, learned off of an old vinyl record owned by a fascinating woman who was there when the Students for a Democratic Society splintered off into the very weird direct action cell known as The Weathermen.

Before the march started, there was singing and a play about the struggle of crossing the border, the passing out of flyers and the meeting of new friends.  It was a fairly calm and fun event, but there was a tension underneath all of it.  My favorite poster had an image of an Aztec priest, pointing the way Uncle Sam points in his posters, asking, “Who’s the immigrant, Pilgrim?”  Walking back to my bike after the march ended at City Hall, I was watching the young family in front of me chatting animatedly in Spanish and smiling, when their little boy, maybe seven years old, suddenly started yelling one of the Spanish cheers from the march.  He was violently hitting the water bottle he held, and when his younger brother started chanting with him, they traded a couple of blows in the manner of small children, in rhythm to the chant. Their tiny faces contorted into strange and adult grimaces, and I beheld both the future of this land, and its amazing past.

The part of the continent that the modern world calls Texas and Mexico has been inhabited continuously by people since the end of the last ice age. Ten thousand years of people moving across the land, north to south, south to north. An ancient highway of economic, cultural, and even political exchange. The point of invasion during times of war, the point of escape when humanity was forced to flee the ravaging whims of nature during the great drought which turned the savannah into barren desert for two millennia. Ten thousand years of people doing exactly what they are doing right now. A cabal of ruling class imperialists now has the audacity to try and stop this ancient and unbroken line of history, by building a fence.

Families get broken up by the Border Patrol. Little children are tossed into a holding facility, and the stories are consistent that those children are only let out for maybe half an hour a day to play. On an old rusty and wooden play ground, the kind you can’t find in Texas really anymore, that was replaced every where by the new plastic jungle gyms because the old metal ones were deemed too dangerous.

The policies towards immigrants in the border states are racist, and show a complete disregard for the humanity of people trying to feed their hungry kids. Of people fleeing the same sort of desperation that the detritus and societal refuse of Europe fled only a few centuries ago. The manner in which these people, these human beings, are discriminated against, is born out of fear, illogic, xenophobia, and a complete and total lack of understanding of the history of the New World.

What is happening along the southern border of the United States is an injustice of the highest order. The pathetic attempts at establishing a border fence is an empty gesture against the surging forces of history. It’s also just generally one of the stupidest things the federal government has ever tried to do.

Immigrant rights affect all of us. You are a human being first, and the citizen of a nation second. I love Texas, and the ideals of the Founding Fathers I hold in the highest regard, but I will always choose the good of humanity over the interests of my country.

Anyone who has been paying much attention to the frightening details of our economy’s spiral into oblivion realizes that there are very strange times ahead. The rice shortages across the world are only the beginning. The playing field is eventually going to be leveled between the descendents of European migrant workers and the descendents of this land’s original migrant population. It’s the people we vote into office who are allowing horrible things to happen to the faceless thousands looking for something a little better. If you haven’t been making a point of paying attention to this issue, you might want to start caring. And I sincerely hope you end up as pissed off as everyone else paying attention has become.

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