It's Halloween! Time To Scare You!

 OK fine it's the day after Halloween.

You wanna know what's scary?  When you live in a border town and the international line is breached.

A couple of days ago someone tried to blast through customs without stopping, and suddenly there arose, at 11A.M., the background track from every documentary concerning the London Blitz you've ever seen at full, screaming volume. Those loud wailing sirens, whistles, all kinds of holy horseshit. I was expecting to see those ICBM contrails come arcing over. I had no idea what was going on at that moment.

Here's the deal.

I live in the Constitution-free Border Zone. 

 A quote from the ALCU website: "The expansion of government power both at and near the border is part of a trend toward expanding police and national security powers without regard to the effect of such expansion on our most fundamental and treasured Constitutional rights. The federal government's dragnet approach to law enforcement and national security is one that is increasingly turning us all into suspects. If Americans do not continue to challenge the expansion of federal power over the individual, we risk forfeiting the fundamental rights and freedoms that we inherited—including the right to simply go about our business free from government interference, harassment and abuse."

Yes, this is a very real thing. Look up just what that means here. NO, SERIOUSLY. DO IT RIGHT NOW:  

                             https://www.aclu.org/other/constitution-100-mile-border-zone

 

                                         Old broad goes alt-freak with political post! News at 11!

 

When you contact me, our online interactions are being monitored by Homeland Security and who knows what all Agencies and shit with guns and badges.  

Now, me being me, yap first and think later, I have been contacted by some pretty shady entities from all over the world during the course of my online presence, including extremist groups from overseas and Anonymous.  It's all on record somewhere. NO I did not respond, fuck that action! It's one of the many reasons that I'm no longer on Facebook, though.  All of this contact came directly through Facebook. Yup. I did nothing to encourage it. But the wackos out there also have keyword bots, and they use them. In a worst case scenario, just having those cookies on your machine could be construed as highly suspicious by people in positions of authority. Paranoid? With good reason. Homeland Security agents aren't hired to use their abilities of independent thought and judgement, kids. One power-tripping bully can ruin your whole life.

                                                      

When the child internment camp scandal down at the Southern Border exploded, I went to the Homeland Security installation a mile from where I live, in person, to ask about it. Yes, they have a whole back room full of holding cells - I saw them before they closed the door on me - and more shit underground because I remember them building the place during G.W's 'reign', the same time they put up the spy towers (without a public vote or notification of purpose/ expenditure) all along the northern border of the U.S. Of course I was handled by a flak catcher and gentled along and given no real answers, but the place is serious as a heart attack, and those black and gold helicopters and SUV's are omnipresent, just another part of everyday life here.

When I heard those sirens and alarms go off I went right past panic into zombie mode.  I did not know what was going to happen. There's no 'Public Alert' system in place - I had no idea what to expect, and just stood there waiting for something to explode, gunfire, bombs, crashing planes, immanent death, whatever.  Why not?  Clearly there's something going on.  Why would they not want to inform the public?  Gracious, what purpose might that possibly serve; koffkoffintimidationofthecitizenrykoffkoff.

I do know that the border is being breached nearly every day, though, that important arrests are being made and serious shit is being apprehended, and that none of that information ever hits the news. I know it for a fact. I've seen it happen.  If you live around here you've seen it happening too...out in farmers fields, in the woods, on the roads, in stores, you name it.  People talk about it. It's known. But less than one fraction of one percent of that activity ever makes the local news outlets, much less the national news.  Think about that.

No, we don't have a wall (yet) but there is a long-distance detection protocol in place; it's referred to as 'motion sensors' when it's mentioned at all.  I know for a damn fact that it's more than motion sensors, and I get that the Border Patrol doesn't want to reveal their hand and give the bad guys a tutorial in how to breach the system, so we'll go with 'motion sensors' for the remainder of this paragraph.  Now usually it's tagged animals that trip the alarm (like bears and such that carry tracking devices for the forest service on either side of the line.)  It also catches a lot of on-foot drug traffic and groups of people trying to come over and get work during harvest season; and also ordinary hikers, small aircraft, trained dogs with knapsacks full of oxycodone, 4 wheelers, snowmobilers, cross country skiers, logging trucks, road equipment, farm equipment, and even by flying payloads delivered via trebuchet. 

 Seriously.  They load timber-built trebuchets with drugs and a tracking chip all wrapped in duct tape, find a nice empty stretch of forest and fire the bundle over the border. Someone is waiting on our other side with a marker detector and goes tootling back through the woods whistling a merry tune, carrying ten pounds of XTC. 

I can see the clearcut line of the border going right up over the mountains through the timber, laser straight, from my front room window - and the spy towers too.  And those spy towers can see me.

Close enough to what ours look like.  They aren't just in a neat line down the border, though - they're dotted here and there all over within the zone.  What you might think is just a cell tower has about a 50/50 chance of being a spy tower with a different configuration. Hit up Google images for more.
 

Right after they first went up, I used to go walk my dogs near the ones here in town and moon them, I was so angry about not having been informed or given a choice (all while GW was crying poverty and recession and shutting down public services right and left.) It was a HUGE construction operation, very intensive, very sudden, very organized and well funded, whammo, out of nowhere, blocking traffic, ripping up streets and digging up private land.  And those towers are built to look scary, too.  You can clearly see the binocs on top when they level around and tilt until they're aimed right at you. So to answer your question, yes. Homeland Security has pictures of my bare ass on record. Your tax dollars at work.

 A couple of times my dog Opie would catch a scent and run right across the freaking line into Canada and I'd have to go chasing after him because there's a road right on the other side, and the little dipshit didn't have any sense whatsoever once he latched onto a fascinating aroma. He'd run into walls, fences, cars, people on the sidewalk, out into traffic, just mesmerized.

                                          Sub in a short, fat stinky dog and you have the idea.

So there I am again, on record as having crossed the border illegally at least two or three times, trying to keep my Opie dog from rolling in a dead Canadian possum or being creamed by a Buick with B.C plates. I could see those sensors  tracking me as I ran, too, every time. Hi there! I just thought I'd invade Canada with a farting dog!  Lock up your daughters, Huntingdon!

In this day and age I don't know if these measures are necessary, are enough, or too much, or already obsolete.  I do know that this 'Constitution Free Zone' was imposed, not decided upon by the public.  I know that the public has never been given enough information about the border situation to be able to make a decision about it, too.  I live that truth every day since I've moved here.

So there you go. If you have a scarier story than this? Post it. Tell me.