I was hoping I might get some insight onto the border situation and specifically I hoped I might “guard” the border with a group of citizens known as the Minutemen.  I took a seat by the agents and when they finally (they definitely took a nice long breakfast) got up to leave I asked one about the Minutemen.

    “They’re not around now.  It’s real slow right now.” 

    The agent explained that this is normally a slow time for border traffic but the economy and other factors too may be a reason it’s so slow.  I asked if the Minutemen were a help.

    He thought about it a moment.  “Usually they don’t see anything.” 

    When I was at the register paying my bill ten minutes later I heard a voice behind me.

    “The Minutemen do a great job.”

    I turned around and found a plump man with a white beard and sun blistered nose.  We conversed for about ten minutes.  He thought the Minutemen were great but the border patrol he wasn’t too keen on.  He said there were too many bad seeds in the rank.  When I pressed him further on this he told me the following - and I paraphrase:

    “We need people down here but there’s a right way to protect the border and a wrong way and some of these guys are bad people.  A while back they killed a guy.  I have a cb and I heard the whole thing on the radio.  They had some guys and they chased them back in the desert and starved them out - I heard the whole thing.  Of course when it came out in the papers it was a much different story, but I heard it.  They killed them.” 

    We talked some more.  He’d lost 30 grand trying to start a newspaper.  He owned a small radio station in town.  “Things weren’t always the way they are around here.  We got people claiming the holocaust didn’t happen and they’re teaching that in schools now.  They’re winning.  We gotta remind people it wasn’t always like this.  There’s something wrong going on now and it’s my generations fault.  We let it happen.”

    I told him I’d been driving around the country, looking to find out how far you could take a $500 car.  “Hell, I did that many years ago,” he said, “but with a $50 car.”

    I listened to his radio station on the way out of town.   The Alex Jones Show, a syndicated program out of Austin, was on.  Jones was interviewing a female veteran of the Iraq War.  The discussion was about how certain U.S. soldiers who know too much are being murdered by the government.  Something like that. 

    It’s really hard to know who’s worth listening to nowadays.  It really is.