Minutemen

It is curious, I thought, that this California mission town with its bright sunshine and sweet cool air, is so tied to Boston. Driving over to the Convention Center for the Conference Center on The Great America Parkway, I passed streets named in honor of early patriots Sam Adams and Patrick Henry, and battles of the Revolution.

I stood at Sam Adam’s grave just last week, in the old burying ground off Beacon Hill. There were Minutemen buried there, too, and Paul Revere who rode to get them stirred up against the British.

It seems part of the blur now, but it was as real as this Silicon Valley boulevard, and the Great America Theme Part across from the Westin Hotel and hall where the conference was being held. The patriotic theme helped to pump me up for the advanced technology conference.

The Coast Guard was holding affair, since under their new masters in the the Department of Homeland Security, they have the responsibility of protecting the borders of the United States.

There has been a lot of focus on the issue of late, with posse of interested citizens camped out on the Arizona border, watching and cataloging the Mexicans coming north across the muddy stream of the Rio Grande. They call themselves the Minutemen, cloaking themselves in the mantle of the Patriots.

Some of them are armed, which is their right. No one got shot, thankfully, and many crossings were documented because there are not enough Border Patrol officers to do their assigned mission.

This is controversial, since activists seem to be saying that it is likewise the right of the people on the other side of the border to come north and to be well treated.

I don’t know what to make of that argument. I am for foursquare for humane treatment, and against abuse of innocent people. I am generally in favor of the concept of freedom of navigation, be it afloat or ashore. I am horrified by the tales of what happens to people who are abandoned in the baking desert by their cynical shipping agents.

I also shouldn’t characterize the migrants as Mexicans, since without talking to them it is difficult to determine who they actually are. It might be properly said that they are people coming from the direction of Mexico and leave it at that.

Which is where my interest in this politically charged issue comes in, the Homeland Security thing, and that is why I am feeling dazed in the San Francisco Bay this morning. If we want to ensure that migration is handled in a manner consistent with the law, we should enforce the muddy stream’s authority as an international frontier.

But we don’t, and haven’t in a long time. It is one of those things that public discourse seems to meander around, like the Rio Grande itself. Like devaluating the currency, or mortgaging our children’s future to a ballooning national debt. The people that run things seem to be content to let the great issues resolve themselves.

The gradual change in sovereignty of the Southwest is just something that is happening,

I know my history, and I know that no line in the sand has any particular merit, save by the power to enforce it, and the line that the Minutemen are observing was established by force and subsequent negotiation. They could be looking at the edges of the Gadsden Purchase, for all I know, and the teaching of that came late in the school year and I am still a little fuzzy on the details.

All this surpasses my understanding, and I am not equipped to deal well with this age of relativism and deconstruction.

The point of my interest is that since we do not know precisely who is coming across the border, they could very well not be guest laborers or political or economic refugees.

Some of them could be Bad Guys, at least that is the rumor, and that is why there is a Program, since there can be no Problem without a Program in Washington.

The name of the border protection Program is grandly titled “The America’s Shield Initiative,” or ASI. It is a grand sounding thing, evoking the Great Shield of the United States and missile defense and all sorts of high-tech things. Not a bunch of private yahoos sitting in lawn chairs with yellow legal pads and pens.

The ASI as funded is actually about replacing some video cameras on rickety poles. That is a result of an earlier program in which certain mistakes were made, and certain issues of mis-management are alleged. The government would like to fix that, and had made certain vague promises that it will do something really cool in the future, if there is money.

That is the Golden Rule, as practiced in the government. That does not mean what you might think, in a faith-based context. It is even simpler. It means that “He who has the gold, makes the rules.”

The Department of Homeland Security is too new to have much control over the budgets of the various component departments like Customs and Border Protection. CBP is itself an amalgamation of older organizations, and never had much discretionary funding. So there is a Program with a grand name, and not much in the way of money to pay for it.

I sympathize. I managed the day-to-day affairs of a government program one time, and I know what it is like to have a vision without the money to pay for it. Like the man once said, “Visions without resources are hallucinations.”

The land component of Homeland Security is just part of the problem. In case you hadn’t noticed, North America is surrounded by water. That is partly the jurisdiction of CPB, but mostly under the authority of the United States Coast Guard. That venerable organization, which combines law enforcement, public safety and military functions, has been tasked with creating a Program to deal with the Problem of what is coming across the water at the American coasts.

The grand name of this program is “Maritime Domain Awareness.” Under this program, the Coast Guard will coordinate the activities of the Navy, Law Enforcement and the Intelligence Community to have a good handle on what is happening out there on the waves.

That way they can protect us from the importation of weapons of mass destruction, port security, illegal migration, smuggling, polluters, smugglers, illegal long-line fishering and drunk yachters.

I’m not sure it is in that precise order, but it is a close-enough approximation of the mission.

The Golden Rule comes in here, too, since the Coast Guard is like the Marine Corps in its no-frills approach to mission accomplishment. The Guard is a great value for the money they get. But the Problem of Maritime Domain Awareness is impossibly vast, and the Guard has traditionally been resource-challenged in the Department of Transportation.

Now transferred to the Department of Homeland Security, they are expected to come up with something that works. Pronto.

So that is why we are in Santa Clara, and in the auditorium promptly at 8:00 o’clock sharp. There are government people looking for great innovative ideas to help the Program. There are a lot of us ready to provide them. To do this mission is going to require a lot of innovation and a lot of stuff. Think of the magnitude of it, defending the approaches of the shining seas!

Radars and blimps and towers and buoys and networks and beacons and correlation centers, tracking everything, dispatching swift responders to stop the bad guys.

Regrettably, there isn’t a lot of money available to do this. In fact, there is no money at all in the program until at least fiscal 2007, unless the Congress adds some.

In the meantime, we may have to rely on some concerned citizens on beach chairs. There might be enough money for yellow legal pads.

Copyright 2005 Vic Socotra

www.vicsocotra.com

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