I was telling a story the other day when it came up that I've sort of been to a Border Militia meeting. Not on purpose, mind you. I went to a meetup group on human trafficking. I thought we were all meeting at this coffee shop to come up with ideas to fight slavery and trafficking, but in reality...everyone was FOR human trafficking. No, no, just kidding. Everyone present agreed that human trafficking should be stopped.
But remember, this is a meetup group so any random yahoo or Yahoo accountholder can show up. I'm there with two friends, so we know each other. This meeting, however, has apparently been infiltrated and dominated by this couple, a man and a woman who each head a different racist group and are married to each other. Strangely enough, the woman is Mexican but she talks about people of her race as though they are, pardon the pun, alien to her. She disparages "the illegals" as though they're the most vile, despicable creatures on earth. And both of them keep steering the conversation to illegal immigration, and how the Border Patrol and federal government are to blame for immigration and slavery, and how "perverted illegals here in America want to import sex slaves from Mexico, and that's what most human trafficking in the States is--Mexican aliens being trafficked to serve the twisted desires of Mexicans already here." And they both pass out their business cards. Suddenly I feel like this is a Border Militia recruitment meeting.
So as they're talking, my friends and I are looking at each other across the table, like, "Uh oh, this is becoming something I don't want to associate with." Then we become aware that other people in the coffee shop are overhearing the racist comments these people are making and they're looking at us like you would look at us if you overheard a bunch of racists having a meeting in public. We try to steer the conversation back to human trafficking, and I talk about slaves coming in from India and Africa and third-world countries where that kind of thing is, sadly, more commonplace than in North America. But the Border Militia people aren't interested in that, they only want to talk about Mexico. And then they go off on the craziest tangent about how the Border Patrol/government is always after them. They complain about how Border Patrol unfairly "targets the militia while ignoring the real criminals, the illegals, and every time we have meetings or try to do anything to fight back against the aliens, the cops always show up." Well lo and behold, while they're talking two police cars pull up and remain in the parking lot for the rest of our meeting.
Obviously we were in a hurry to leave! One of the cops was parked next to me, and I was freaked out that he might record my license plate to add me to the militia shitlist. Since then I haven't noticed any BP surveillance on me or anything, but for a moment, it was pretty scary. Possibly even scarier than if I had been accidentally linked to some crazy leftwing nutjob organization. And this didn't happen in Arizona, it was right here in San Diego. And wow, guys, even Mexicans can be staunchly racist against other Mexicans, who knew?
