The "good" Border Patrol Agent VS the "bad" Border Patrol Agent Conversation! to be continued

My heart, my hat, my deepest admiration and awe goes out to the volunteers who work along the border, day in and day out – not just for a few days a few times a year, like me.

I can land on the border, choose what kind of work I’m going to do and with whom, and I represent myself alone but most of all, I can leave. And I do leave.

But the people who live and work here 24/7 have to reach some kind of balance between the border patrol, the vigilante groups and individuals, their neighbors and residents, while trying to provide humanitarian aid to human beings who already have a huge barrier to accessing the amerikkkan nitemare yet are going beyond human lengths to grasp – and I’m not necessarily talking about the 30 foot steel girders and reams of fuckin barbed wire.

Yet these volunteers, like all of the people who are privileged enough to not be the ‘normal’, designated targets of military, police, or border patrol, seem determined to defend and point out the existence of the “good” border patrol officer. Or the “good” cop; or the “good” soldier.

When I mention that it’s really more than about the individual but that both these individual good or bad agents are employed under the same ruthless institutional umbrella whose sole purpose is to hunt down and capture if not control and incarcerate other human beings our country has deemed “illegal”.

So even if the individual who has the job of hunting down humans, or policing the poor to protect the wealth of the rich, or killing around the world to defend u.s. business interests, even if that individual who engages in these agencies believes he (95% of bp agents are male – womyn are not usually hunters) is a “good” person or conducting himself with honor, it is still his job to do cruel things.

And yes of course, I’d rather be arrested by a kind officer who doesn’t cut off my circulation with the tightness of the cuffs; or I’d rather see a kind bp agent attempting to be humane finding the sickest child and mother to be the first to enter the bus that will take them to detention. Of course.

But this is nothing to be grateful for, really. These are human beings caught, often willingly, in a system that harms others.

Then there is the privilege I have that I have never been desperate enough to consider attempting to get this kind of job. It is another pull