1/27/22

The Lone Star state, Texas, carved from a clash of manifest destinies competing for possession of land once settled by indigenous folk, pre-European migrants, a state that once defended its right to keep slaves, now defends its rights to decide who belongs there and who does not. It is filling jails with people it calls trespassers, many of them numbering among those much earlier peoples, some of them descendants of slaves. Once calling itself a republic, it has never quite surrendered that idea, it remains an independent monument to the memory of battles establishing racial supremacy at the point of a gun, of many guns.

This latest is called Operation Lone Star, and it has wrangled resources from a collaborating nation to wage a campaign of cruelty against humanity in motion, defending a line drawn in the earth. Not enough that the largest police force in the world patrols this line, it sends troops and local enforcers into the fray. It recruits judges and courts, and when those do not prove cruel enough, swaps them out for others.

We are told bedtime stories about our land being one of laws, but no laws hold, do they, when we are talking about that line. Mass expulsions that sidestep due process are the rule of the day for our national policy, so who can rein in the the Lone Star cowboys? Who are rogues when all are rogues?