Building Bridges Not Fences: What kind of a community shall we have?

I attended the so-called town meeting on the Border Patrol’s processing of undocumented immigrants at their Murrieta facility. It was a sickening display of racism, bigotry and ignorance. After two and a half hours of shouting, catcalls, and name calling my wife and I left this in despair and disgust.

This meeting was billed on the City of Murrieta web site as having an opportunity to make public comment, which my wife and I were eager to do to evidence to Council members that not all citizens were as hate-filled and ignorantly vicious as those who blocked the Border Patrol bus from delivering its children and families to be processed. However, when we got to the meeting we were informed there would be only questions for a panel of knowledgeable people to answer, which was promptly disregarded as the audience yelled their opinions or played grand inquisitor with members of the panel.

Lest Murrieta become Selma West, this community must take a very different approach to this very difficult problem both to heal itself and to demonstrate there is a better way to deal with this problem and the many similar problems we will face as global warming, food and water shortages and excessive population increasingly have their multiple, compounded effects.

At the root of this proposed approach is knowledge, not mere opinion nor personal belief. We should understand that the movement of poor people and those faced with the pervasive violence often attendant upon poverty is primarily from the Southern hemisphere of this planet to the more affluent northern hemisphere. It is a global phenomenon and will not be resolved until our human population and level of consumption are brought to a level consistent with the resources and health of this planet. Lester Brown, among the most knowledgeable people on world food and water supplies, says it would take about two and a half of our earth planets to support the current world population at the level of the American standard of living. Let this kind of knowledge inform any approach to dealing with this problem. Both our numbers and our level of consumption need to be drastically moderated lest we perish as a species and at our own hands.

In the particular case we are dealing with we should understand the role of our own country in producing it. The head of the Homeland Security Department said, referring to the mass migration of children and the Murrieta protest it incurred, that most of the children were from three Central American  countries, one of which is Honduras.

Honduras is one of the world’s most violent countries. Part of the reason for that is the coup that overthrew democratically elected president Zelaya. It was known that President Zelaya was contemplating a number of moves that the United States opposed, such as withdrawal from the Central American Free Trade Agreement because, as other countries of Central America  had discovered, this agreement opened their economies to the control and plundering of American corporations.

After the coup, roundly denounced by much of the rest of the world, the Colombian Drug Cartel found Honduras more hospitable and moved its major transfer point for drugs moving north to the American market. This introduced major gang warfare and continuing violence. Parents, fearing for their children, began paying smugglers to get them to the United States. The lesson yet to be learned in American foreign affairs is what knowledgeable people have termed “blowback”, the unintended consequences of inadequately considered actions.

Instead of the howling mob at Wednesday night’s meeting and the politicians trying to make political hay out of human suffering, we need to establish productive relationships with these people and their countries. We need to understand our role in their misery and set about changing that. I would suggest, if we don’t already have them, the establishment of sister cities in the countries from which these people are coming as a way to create dialogue and solutions to the problems that plague both our countries.

Ever since the Monroe doctrine of 1823 asserted American hegemony over Central and South America, this nation and its citizens have treated these regions as their own. The American standard of living was achieved substantially at the expense of these regions. It is time to redress this imbalance. Rather than erect fences we need to erect bridges.

Lest there be any doubt as to our treatment of these regions, I will close with a quotation from General Smedley Butler, the most decorated general in American history:

“I spent 33 years and four months in active military service and during that period I spent most of my time as a high class muscle man for Big Business, for Wall Street and the bankers. In short, I was a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism. I helped make Mexico and especially Tampico safe for American oil interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in. I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefit of Wall Street. I helped purify Nicaragua for the International Banking House of Brown Brothers in 1902-1912. I brought light to the Dominican Republic for the American sugar interests in 1916. I helped make Honduras right for the American fruit companies in 1903. In China in 1927 I helped see to it that Standard Oil went on its way unmolested. Looking back on it, I might have given Al Capone a few hints. The best he could do was to operate his racket in three districts. I operated on three continents.”