No, not Mike Watt’s band. The OTHER Minutemen. The racist, belligerent, uneducated psychopaths who decided to “protect our borders” from… uh… our entire service economy. I always considered these guys some of the biggest pricks in our country… who VOLUNTEERS their time to “beat up the damn Mexicans”?
I grew up by the border and regularly witnessed the reality of border crossing… large groups of desperate, hungry people walking through huge passages of 120º, inhuman conditions to try and get to the other side, in the (often vain) hope of getting some money from menial labor to send back to huge families in Mexico (labor that “real Americans” aren’t willing to do anyway). People cross in large groups for safety in numbers—many don’t make it back alive; they drop dead from dehydration or heat stroke, or literally get picked off by human predators who hunt these people to rape them or rob them of what little savings they are bringing with them. Often the only way to get across is by paying Coyotes, professional border-crossers who are adept at smuggling people across, but usually charge what amounts to somebody’s entire life savings to get across. And they often just run off with the money, or kill for it. It’s hellish. Oh, and what does that sound like, by the way? Like every story of how white America got started? The pilgrims, the pioneers, the Mormon Battalion? That’s what it sounds like to me. If the American dream still exists anywhere, it’s here, with people who are willing to sacrifice anything and brave any danger for the chance for a better life.
Now, imagine going through all that, and having some scuzzy fuck with a “Don’t Tread on Me” hat shoving a gun in your face and telling you you’re taking American jobs—cleary not his, though, because he has nothing better to do then sit in the middle of the desert looking for people to fuck with.
Fuck them. May they stay dispersed forever.