Summer protests are nothing new as it heats up

In the old days before air conditioning, May and June were when the women and children were sent to the mountains or San Diego because it was just too hot here, and everyone went crazy. There are certainly statistics somewhere that show the crime rate goes way up once temperatures get around 100 degrees.

Thus, it is not surprising to see protests around the area.

Checkpoint: Tubacians are staging protests at the Border Patrol checkpoint protesting the decision to build a permanent Gestapo stop just north of Tubac.

The Tubacians have a real point here. There would not need to be road blocks on interior highways in the United States if the Border Patrol was deployed right at the border to stop people and drugs from crossing.

The Border Patrol has never provided a satisfactory answer why it can’t deploy its thousands of agents closer to the border. Instead, they’re scattered around all over Southern Arizona, allowing thousands of undocumented migrants to slip past.

The checkpoint is a drug roadblock. Ordinary police cannot run a permanent drug roadblock, but the Border Patrol in the guise of enforcing the immigration laws can. Meanwhile so-called “illegal aliens,” just walk around the roadblock because there are no Border Patrol agents covering the flanks. I know this from first-hand experience having flushed many of these folks while on the Crebbs’ property just southeast of the checkpoint.

The Tubac protest ought to be a little more creative given the place is a haven for artists. I’d send a bunch of white Chevy Astro vans through the checkpoint painted up as “Alien Transport Vehicles” with people dressed up as space aliens, and film the encounters for YouTube.

Santa Gertrudis: Another group of mostly Rio Rico residents is fulminating over the closure of Santa Gertrudis over the Union Pacific railroad tracks.

That the residents east of the tracks have historic rights to cross seems irrelevant to Union Pacific. If the railroad had its way, Santa Cruz County would be divided in half at the tracks and no one would be allowed to cross from one side to the other anywhere in the county. The railroad puts its business self interest ahead of everyone else.

In my former life I tangled with the railroad in Nogales, where trains would routinely block city street crossings making it impossible to get police cars and ambulances from one side of the city to the other. The railroad’s response was to whine about the federal government subsidizing the trucking industry with the interstate highway system and port facilities for trucks, and then chiding the city for allowing growth to occur across the tracks.

What do we need a railroad for in Santa Cruz County anyway? Maybe the real solution is for the railroad to route its cargo to and from Mexico through Yuma or Douglas, and shut the system down between Tucson and Nogales.

(Holub is the editor and publisher of The Frumious Bandersnatch www.bandersnatch.com, a satirical newspaper.)