I am writing this under circumstances I never imagined when I settled in Terlingua. As I prepare for an upcoming trial, the personal safety threats against me have become a daily reality. Local group chats and barroom gossip have boiled over into an ugly mob rage, condemning my property and my character to hell. The sanctuary I carved out here feels like a target zone — all because I rented RV sites to men driving earth-moving equipment and wearing high-visibility vests. Friends of decades have retreated and others say they’ll kill themselves should workers at Terlingua Ghosttown Rentals occupy their RV sites. It’s been difficult for me to even write this without succumbing to beliefs I’ve betrayed and permanently alienated myself from those I’ve spent the last two decades living with.
The prevailing demand from locals is simple: enforce a moral purity test at my door. Refuse water, power, privacy, safety and shelter. Make the wall workers’ lives miserable until they pack up and leave, never to return.
I refuse to do it. I’m at war against this wall. People are not battlegrounds. Anyone who knows me over time will understand my internal need to strive towards ethical consistency.
Setting up a political or moral litmus test is a cowardly and dangerously slippery slope. The moment you decide business owners must vet a customer’s morals before serving them, you hand over local commerce to whomever holds the loudest political and social whip. Where does that screening end? Who gets excluded next when the local consensus shifts? Black people? Mexicans? Christians? Gay folks? I will have no part in it.
To those claiming that providing RV sites and a location for shelter, water, power, communications and safety equals collaboration: look in the mirror. Every time a worker buys diesel at the pump, orders a taco, or buys a wrench at the hardware store, that money enters our local economy. Singling out a bed while ignoring the gas tank or bar is nothing more than ignorant, self-soothing hypocrisy designed to make people feel righteous while risking nothing. It is repulsive, mediocre and predicts catastrophic oppositional failure. The largest business leaders have remained silent about this. Short of server originated hostility and service refusal, no ability to implement such screening exists anywhere.
I’m striving to elucidate and communicate precisely how and why I arrived at this horribly uncomfortable, grief provoking and terrifying moment of absolute social rejection. I’m not trying to attack or implicate anyone else. I’m definitely proposing a radical and immediate change in the wall resistance strategy.
Beyond the moral failure, weaponizing personal hostility against wage workers is a catastrophic tactical blunder. We are walking right into a trap that has crushed opposition movements for over a century. Like it or not we are a small, poorly organized and led group of people who managed to obtain media traction. That’s all that’s happened. It’s time to elevate or fail.
Look at the history of American labor conflict — the Coal Mine Wars in West Virginia or the Homestead strikes in Pennsylvania. Whenever outraged local populations turned their anger on the line workers, scabs and security guards instead of the corporate bosses, the outcome was identical. The mine owners and steel barons did not suffer at all. Instead, they used local violence and harassment as political cover. They ran to the governor, claimed the locals were lawless mobs, and brought in state militias and armed federal troops to protect their operations [1].
By shouting at concrete truck drivers in parking lots, people in Terlingua are doing the contractors’ jobs for them. You are giving a multi-billion-dollar federal enterprise the exact excuse it wants to justify heavier security, bring in armed law enforcement and dismiss this entire community as unstable zealots.
We need to wake up to the sheer scale of what we are dealing with. According to Government Accountability Office reports, federal agencies obligated more than $10.7 billion for border barriers in a single three-year stretch, with individual mile costs blowing past $20 million [2]. To think that harassing a sub-contractor buying gas or renting a trailer spot in Terlingua will slow down a federal procurement machine of that size is pure fantasy. Multi-national corporations do not care if a bulldozer operator faces hostility at a local diner. They absorb it, bump up daily per-diems, or haul in their own self-contained camps [3].
The tragic irony in all this local infighting is that it distracts from the real issue: the wall itself is a massive corporate grift. Federal and state laws are aligned that any organized resistance against a government sponsored project or entity is terrorism. I am concerned that my written words right now compromise myself because if they land as intended, a greater element of organized, principled and reality-based opposition arrives.
Static physical barriers across rugged desert terrain do not stop black markets; they centralize and commercialize them. A physical wall simply drives cartel capital into underground tunneling, drone tech and targeted payoffs at designated transit points. Meanwhile, federal data shows that over 200,000 U.S.-sourced firearms and untoward billions in cash flow southbound across the border every year without a single barrier stopping them [4]. The wall is not a security system. It is a taxpayer-funded wealth transfer into defense contractor pockets. It is a giant grift none of us or the laborers are a part of. While our community tears itself apart over who can and cannot rent an RV spot, the corporations pulling down those billions keep collecting their checks completely unbothered.
If we actually want to disrupt this project, we have to stop fighting the wage earners and start attacking the enterprise itself. That requires a paradoxical embrace — meeting hostility with tactical discipline rather than emotional tantrums. It requires widespread and absolute adoption of a higher level of values. Not everyone will agree. I respectfully acknowledge this.
No worker who comes to Big Bend is immune to this land. We already know this y’all. The heat, the silence and the sheer scale of these mountains work on a person’s head whether they want it to or not. That sacred influence is real, but when you surround those workers with mob hostility, you force a bunker mentality into existence. You give them a reason to harden up, band together, and ignore everything around them. The hardwired need for social acceptance is real. Marginalizing, ostracizing, bastardizing and gossip mongering fails. Yes it hurts other people (I find it to be the most overwhelmingly grief-provoking experience of my life), but strategically it fails.
Radical hospitality shatters that armor. Tourons, lazy rudeness and unkindness, drunken bullying and snide schadenfreude moments are just excuses to remain wretched and base. And that’s easier than transcending a moment. But we must become supernatural in our strategy or prepare for failure at a deeply personal level. I don’t want anyone failing down here. We must refuse to let our local community be fragmented into proxy wars. By welcoming workers into our spaces and refusing to participate in social ostracization, we disarm the conflict locally and protect our own community standards from degrading into arbitrary exclusion and irrelevance.
We must replace parking-lot tantrums with Strategic Humanity. When you sit down with a worker and treat them as a human being, you do two things this current oppositional strategy cannot do:
First, you get direct operational intelligence. The men on the ground know where the contractors are cutting corners, wasting taxpayer money, violating environmental rules and failing structurally. Hostility buys you their silence; basic human decency opens the door to actual transparency and real-time facts we can use to hit the corporate entities where it hurts.
Second, it creates a labor bottleneck. When you treat workers decently and engage them humanely, you build a logistical off-ramp. You make it possible to connect skilled operators with alternative, ethical jobs elsewhere — giving them a reason to walk off a project they might already have doubts about. If you want to slow down a massive construction project, you don’t burn bridges with the labor force. You give them a better option and drain the site of skilled hands. High employee turnover causes operational friction that money cannot easily fix.
I know this approach will anger people who prefer the immediate rush of screaming at a stranger. Moral rage is easy, cheap and addictive. Strategic discipline is hard work. I’m not at all advocating that everyone needs to change their personalities. Well, perhaps some maybe, but what I do imagine is a rooted and broadly normalized routine of higher social behaviors. The time for wicked groups reminiscent of middle school is going to end. I hope it is voluntarily and by choice. I know this isn’t easy at all. Please just consider the possibility that what I’m trying to convey offers an alternative strategy based on objective reality and historical data, alongside well described components of human behavior.
I have felt the real grief of watching my home turn into a battleground, and I know what it feels like to live with daily concern for my own physical safety. But I will not let fear or local mob pressure force me into cowardly ethics, and I will not stand by quietly while self-destructive tactics ruin any chance we have at real accountability.
We will never stop a multi-billion-dollar wall by picking fights with the men laying gravel. We stop it by exposing the financial grift, keeping our own community intact, and pulling the labor force out from under the project. It is time to drop the emotional theater and get serious about winning.
Notes & References
[1] Green, James. Devil in the Mountain: The Collective Violence and Politics of the West Virginia Coal Wars (Yale University Press). Analyzing how corporate operators utilized local hostility and labor skirmishes to justify state military intervention and martial law.
[2] U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO). “Southwest Border: Award and Management of Barrier Construction Contracts” (GAO-23-106893). Documenting $10.7 billion in obligations and cost escalations exceeding $20 million per mile.
[3] Congressional Research Service (CRS). ‘Border Security: Barriers Along the U.S. International Border” (Report R44882). Outlining procurement frameworks, mobilization contingencies, and contractor per-diem structures.
[4] U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO). “Firearms Trafficking: U.S. Efforts to Disrupt Gun Smuggling into Mexico” (GAO-21-322). Documenting the unchecked southbound flow of 200,000 firearms and bulk cash across linear border infrastructure.
