To build or not to build? To abide by the rule of law or not to abide by the rule of law? That is the question.
Whether to suffer the abuse of our borders and outrageous enforcement or to insist that federal contractors follow the rules set before them according to a hundred years of precedence?
To take up arms against a tide of oppression and dominance by Donald Trump’s border wall by opposing and putting an end to it, or do we turn our back on our community, land, and river? Do we sell our soul to the highest bidder in the hope of anticipated returns?
Are we to jeopardize our standing and respect from our community in our desire to fill our pockets with thirty silver coins?
Do we rise up against authoritarianism, disregarding the laws set before us, such as our current administration has disregarded the laws that have been set before them?
The decision is ours to make and that decision is what our children and grandchildren’s children will inherit. What will we leave to them? The pride in protecting the land that our ancestors had a symbiotic relationship with and the settlers pioneered before politics were ever involved? Or to give in to the federal contractors, letting them bulldoze our historic and cultural sites, archeological sites and the graves of our ancestors for a handful of silver coins?
What will the generations that come after us remember us for? Being complicit in the destruction of their heritage and being cut off from their sacred land and river or being the protectors of their land, their river, their cultural legacy?
We must quit looking at the borderlands as ours. That is pure selfishness on our part. We must look at it as the future generation’s land and river. We will never regain what we will lose including the respect of generations to come.
David F Long
Shafter
