In response to Dan DiBona:

Despite Dr. Dan’s lengthy statement on “Why harassing wall workers, local business and individuals kills resistance to the wall,” it all simply boils down to his opinion that “Everyone who is mad at me is wrong; here’s why.”

First of all, to claim that you’re at war with the wall and then open your RV park to the ones responsible for building it is as nonsensical as claiming you’re at war with hunting while renting out hunting lodges and pointing out the best place to store the guns they’ll be taking on their hunting trips.

People who join the other side of the “war” you’re fighting are the opposing side of said war. Quips such as “People are not battleground” wholly ignore the fact that people can, and in this case are, forces being used on those battlegrounds.

I highly doubt that a single contractor or employee from Kiewit Construction approached Dr. Dan, crawling over the hot ground, begging for food, water and work, lamenting that their family would starve lest he allow them to stay at the Terlingua Ghosttown RV Park. The entire workforce wasn’t going to be rendered homeless and destitute if not for the “altruism” Dr. Dan opening his RV park to them.

Dr. Dan decries screening who he serves? Good for him, that’s his choice. He’s allowed to make that choice. It is, however, a bit rich when he begins to bemoan the fact that no one is happy with his personal choice to accommodate people who have been sent to build a wall that he claims to oppose.

Mr. DiBona even goes so far as to compare granting border wall workers accommodation at his RV park to those same workers buying diesel at the pump, or other such things, ignoring the fact that the vast majority of gas stations and retail stores are owned by faceless corporations who pay lip service to “supporting small communities,” whereas Dan DiBona is a present, known face within that community. He is a man who has met with and known many of the people within it. He knows the effect the wall will have on the area and still made the decision to accommodate the people being paid to build it.

If the contractors building the wall cannot find accommodation, it stalls building the wall. If they have to build their own accommodation, it stalls building the wall and adds additional costs that will mount. If they have to find accommodation farther away, it stalls building the wall and adds gas, transport and vehicle maintenance expenses. If you open your RV park to the workers, you have made a conscious decision that helps the people building the wall.

Dr. Dan calls the situation a moral purity test that he will have no part of, but the reality is that his beliefs, his convictions and his word have a financial threshold. Which, according to his deleted Facebook post, needs to exceed $500,000.

If “[r]adical hospitality shatters [the] armor,” then I invite everyone to watch closely and observe if Dr. Dan’s radical hospitality convinces any of the workers staying at his RV park to abandon building the wall. He claims that it will aid with gathering “operational intelligence” regarding where corners are cut or if rules are being violated. Perhaps, then, it would be a good idea not to publicly advertise that plan online so that his opinion piece couldn’t be presented to workers who would then be cautioned to remain quiet under threat of termination or, even worse, made to sign an NDA.

Perhaps while Dr. Dan is busy serving iced tea to the border wall workers and trying to talk them out of damaging the land and community after they’ve spent 12 hours already doing it, the rest of us can focus on preventing them from even starting in the first place. If I had to choose between refusing to allow a man with a Molotov cocktail into my home, or sifting through the ashes of my home after he threw the Molotov cocktail in my living room despite the fact that I let him use my bed and asked him nicely to not throw the Molotov cocktail, I’m obviously going to favor prevention over salvage.

Then again, with at least $500,000, I suppose Dr. Dan has the freedom to simply buy a new home elsewhere if his plan of radical hospitality fails.

Maximilian White
Alpine