Murder at the Border?

This post is a comment I wrote in response to a diary at the Dailykos by a blooger going by the name "Moody Loner". If you click on the title of this post, it should take you directly to the diary, in which ML references a video found at Hatewatch, blog maintained by the Southern Poverty Law Center, at http://www.splcenter.org/blog/. My post will make better sense if you read ML's post at the link. Briefly though, the subject is a video allegedly made by one of the "Minutemen" (the vigelante yahoos who build silly fences and "watch" our southern border for us) as they apparently shoot and kill someone trying to cross the border illegally. I do not know if this video is genuine, and even Moody Loner and many others who commented are hoping that the video was faked. This post reflects my discomfort, which I worked through as I wrote it as a comment. By the end, I discover the source of my discomfort, which was the dawning realization that whether or not this video is genuine, there is no doubt for me that such shootings do, in fact, happen.

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I went through several sudden urges on how to respond to this diary. The idea that this could happen at all to anyone is so horrifying that people of conscious desperately want it to be faked.
Humor is always an immediate defense mechanism against facing something profoundly disturbing, and I thought about posting a link to a clip from either the Daily Show or the Colbert Report on these Minutemen at the Canadian Border.
But that made me uncomfortable, because if the video is genuine. . . that was someone's son or perhaps daughter being murdered (I can't actually watch the video at the computer I am using at the moment, and frankly do not plan to). Or perhaps someone's dad.
I grew up in a rural community in central Washington State, where Hispanics make up the bulk of the seasonal agricultural work force. My parents owned apple and grape farms. There are smart, well-informed people in rural Washington, and some dangerously ignorant, racist and violent people too. I remember one of my siblings describing one cretin who went to our small town high school who bragged about going "n****r stomping" in the Tri-cities for his weekend entertainment. God knows what fate awaited any man of color on a date with a white woman unfortunate enough to be seen by these clowns.
This same individual ran cheering and whooping when the news broke that Martin Luther King Jr. had been assasinated; "Yahoo, I'm glad someone nailed that n. . ." you get the idea.
There is a bit of a pseudo-plantation mentality that seeps into white-owned agricultural communities like my hometown - "The Mexicans" are always doing this or doing that. But those very same people also form long, genuine relationships with individual hispanics and families.
The family farm owners of those days (60s and 70s), including my family employed lots of immigrant workers, mostly from Mexico. One family I remember owned their own orange ranch (I think in Texas, but perhaps Florida) and came to the Yakima Valley to pick apples, since nothing of particular importance was going on at their farm. I remember huge celebrations that this family would throw at the end of Apple harvest, for both of our families. I learned to appreciate genuine Mexican cooking.
There was one group that was, frankly, hard to appreciate at all, and that was the occasional white people who wished to pick apples. The Hispanic work ethic was superior in every way. I'm feeling funny about setting all of this down here, but here goes. The whites were lazy. They didn't know how to work hard at all. They would try to tell you how to run your farm and demonstrate overt hostility towards the hispanics. When these behaviors got them fired, they would sometimes take revenge, such as spreading garbage all over the congregation or loading areas during the night.
It is now thirty years later and I am a public defender in Seattle. When anyone is arrested on a misdemeanor charge in Seattle, that person is likely to meet me, as the Attorney of the Day (AOD) in the in-custody arraignment calendar which convenes in a courtroom located inside the county jail. My clients include hispanics who often get into trouble because the available work here is not as great as they may have imagined, and Seattle is not always as unforgiving and gentle a place as you might think. Sometimes it is, sometimes not.
Many of the people I have met in my work no doubt came into the country illegally. Why? Because they have families, brothers, sisters, widowed mothers, grandmothers back home who live in poverty, and it is a simple truth that they will make more here hanging out at Home Depot than they will at home.
I have seen grown, but young men cry about how ashamed their fathers would be if they found out about the arrest. Or worry that their arrest will prevent them from working, because even though they are homeless, they still send home most of what they make - one client in particular cried as he explained that he sent what he made home to his mom, because his dad was dead and his little sister was sick. In fact, over the years, I have had the honor of meeting hundreds of noble human beings like that, arrested because at the end of the hard day, a drink is sometimes quite nice. I'm planning on having one tonight. I have a home, where I can drink legally.
My hispanic clients for the most part are homeless, so their lives are incomparably harder than mine, and they are much more in need of that drink.
But they don't have a home, and drinking in public has a way of leading to problems.
I don't know what my point is anymore. I know that I will take the company of my sweet, noble, family supporting, risk-taking for their families, brave hispanic clients over a bunch of murderous white border thugs any day.
It matters not what was in that backpack. And I related my story about the guy from my highschool because when I read this diary, I knew, without doubt, based on people I knew years ago, that people are being murdered crossing the border. There is simply no doubt in my mind. And I think that is why I am so uncomfortable right now. This had simply never crossed my mind.
So regardless of the source or intent of this video, we should continue to confront the issue in hopes that the MSM will eventually pay attention.
Because destitute mothers and sick little sisters should not have the hero of the family murdered because he set out to make life for the family better.
Finally, yes, here in Seattle, I often hear the term "half-rack" referring to a 12-pack of beer. I also sometimes hear "12-pack". Sort of the same think with soft drinks. They are often called "pop" here, and friends from the East Coast laugh at this; someone can correct me, but I think they use "soda" back East?
"What didn't?" said Rabbit. "Didn't what?" said Piglet. Pooh shook his head. "I don't know," he said. "It just didn't."
by Duncanives on Wed Aug 15, 2007 at 05:50:50 PM PDT