For years Canada was known as the sleeping giant to the north of us, a huge expanse of red splashed across a world map where so many countries had ties to a red Great Britain.
Mexico was always a neutral color on the Mercator Projection which hung in our schoolrooms, and was thought of as our sleepy neighbor to the south, though today it no longer appears quite so neutral.
Ooooh, Mexico, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, James Taylor now croons, selling the scene of a beautiful bucolic Mexico.
This is a finely crafted view of Mexico, which costs millions of dollars every year in advertisements, and consists of the many beauties of Puerto Vallarta, Cabo San Lucas, acapulco and Mexico City, to say nothing of Mazatlan, Cancun and the temple complexes which dot the interior. Maintained at great expense, and serving as a vast mesh to ensnare the touristas, this façade serves as an inducement for american dollars with offers of a warm, immaculate and tidy Western vacation at third world prices, while the booklets and magazines offer photos of gaily liveried locals mixing brightly colored drinks, serving delightful delicacies, riding spirited stallions and torturing bulls.
Sadly, within just a few miles of the glorious destinations and venues of rapturous sport, the veneer wears off very quickly, law and order disappears precipitously and the appellation of the sleeping beggar often creeps into the imagination in an uneven exchange with neighbor.
Mexican governmental control in the states is tenuous at best in many areas. Even today water purity in most locales remains iffy, streetlights remain a luxury, telephone service is spotty, emergency services and medical treatment infrequent at best, public safety a canard and the bureaucracy, when identified and operational, decidedly anti-Yankee. and the average annual income of the local inhabitants remains absurdly low.
When traveling in Mexico it remains wise to drink beer directly from the bottle, to always purchase Mexican car insurance even when you've been advised that it has been "taken care of," to steer clear of ice cubes in your cocktail unless you are in a self-enclosed and administered resort and to be extremely wary when leaving relatively secure premises to "rough it" in the countryside, for safety's sake.
Years ago, when a group of us used to travel to Mexico's outback on a regular basis, we always used to pay a Captain in the National Police to accompany us, as well as purchasing, of course, the important Mexican automobile insurance. Thus were protected from the predations and vagaries of both Napoleonic law and the lawless and would be kept out of jail in case we suffered an automobile accident with injuries to a citizen of Mexico. None of us felt the need for a prolonged stay in a foreign prison where we would be forced to rely on the aid of the local inhabitants for food, clothing and for the passing of messages to our families. Because of these precautions, our journeys always ended without a mishap and we arrived home, for the most part, in the best of health, feeling little the worse for wear.
Recently, however, I have my doubts about the safety in many areas of this third world country. With the uncovering of massive tunnels linking the two countries and serving as a fully illuminated conduit for tons of drugs and thousands of people, with the incursions of heavily armed renegades outfitted in Mexican army battle dress shamelessly shooting it out with the US Border Patrol and local sheriff's deputies, with thousands upon thousands of illegals being snared by overworked agents, with the constant barrage of anti-american propaganda issuing from Mexico City, with travel aids being issued to the illegal border crossers by the Mexican government, and with increasing intelligence that international terrorists find the Mexican border a mere nuisance, it is becoming more apparent that Mexico has become our primary local security problem in the international war on terror. These problems, when combined with the Mexican government's obvious lack of control over its own military and the continued growth of the gangster and drug dealing element, who seem able to prey on Mexico's own military stockpiles and motor pool's at will, indicate a decided lack of will at Mexico's federal level.
For some reason, whether for political expediency, or to curry favor among Hispanic voters, america has never had an effective and long term policy directed against the daily hooliganism perpetrated along this increasingly violent periphery. We even go so far as to bow and scrape before the President of Mexico, often sending him a back door message of appeasement while pounding on his front door yelling about his incursions. are we really so cowed by this paper strongman and his threats to send even more coyotes across the border line that we run off with our tail between our legs at the slightest hint of his feigned indignation? Do our environmentalists hold us in such an iron grip that his oil shackles us to the criminality of our shared border?
Our leaders - the President, Congress, the governors of the bordering states and our citizens - have a very serious choice to make in the near future. To either accept the Mexico as it appears in the advertising section of National Geographic, with the beautiful coastal resorts, dynamic Mayan ruins and gorgeous panoramas or to simply view it as it really is — a clear and present danger to the safety and security of the United States of america.
Whether or not the state of affairs in Mexico has resulted by design, by a lack of governmental control or the growth of sheer banditry should be of no concern and require no hand-wringing or Clintonesque tears of empathy. The escalation of violence associated with the border, the growing amounts of drugs confiscated at or near the border, the massive numbers of illegal aliens crossing the border, and the corresponding ease with which terrorists and their weapons of destruction can cross this same line of demarcation should be speaking very clearly to those who are elected to manage the affairs of this nation and dictate the path of response. The fact that there is no concerted effort to halt this madness speaks to a deafness and blindness inherent in all parties inside the beltway which borders on obdurate recklessness.
Should our leaders fail to recognize the size and magnitude of this threat and continue to pander to the effete liberal forces which advocate for the maintenance of the status quo and offer further perquisites and payola to the fence hoppers, they must be either awakened or replaced.
america can no longer afford to protect three sides of her home and leave her unlocked back door unguarded, open to all and sundry, including those who would destroy her with nuclear weapons willingly supplied by the mad mullahs of Tehran.
There's a great scene from Michael Mann's gritty movie drama, Collateral, where the bad guy describes a Mexican folk tale featuring Pedro Negro, Santa's helper, who makes the bad children disappear.
It is now our choice to decide how to respond to Mexico — are we going to continue being the fat, happy and easily misled Santa, continually giving the store away no matter how many border patrolmen and local deputies are killed, no matter how many weapons of mass destruction and drugs are carried through how many new tunnels by how many terrorists in order to kill how many millions of us, or are we going to wake up and eliminate the growing menace to our survival, like Pedro Negro.
The choice is ours, only so long as there remains time to act.
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