BORDER LIFE WITH BORDER TAX

The words ‘border life’, living on the border, goes more than one way.

My closest borders are my city limits, then the county line, state line, and one state up, an international border.

I like seeing the border signs, Welcome To Oregon, but other than that, what are these borders but tax districts.

City tax, county tax, state tax, federal tax.

That’s one way of looking at a border.

Another way? Protection.

We pay the city for safety from the neighbor’s renovations that reduce property value.

The city building codes keep things in check, which is great until you find the code means upgrades you didn’t budget for in your own projects.

If you add more plug-ins and lights to a maxed out electrical panel, you upgrade according to code to avoid burning your house down, and your neighbor’s house.

You pay county taxes for fire coverage if you live outside the city limits, even one street over.

That’s if you own property you had before the city annexed land all around.

You fight to avoid city taxes because it’s not in your budget and you’d have to move.

Sometimes the line dividing city and county looks like a saw-toothed blade.

During one election cycle the point was made with a series of entering town and leaving town signs placed every half mile up the street.

 

The Fair Border Tax

No one agrees one hundred percent on how the money you pay in taxes is spent.

Taking it down to nuts and bolts, that’s a good reason to vote in elections.

Either vote for the candidate with a record of spending your tax money the way you’d like, or the other thing.

The other thing is voting for the candidates who promise to suck up to the ideology that hits home for you.

That candidate, at whatever level of government, fits into the voters’ individual mythology based on ‘feelings.’

The big guys like being around who they perceive as big guys, bigger guys.

They are all on the same wave length, the same page, sharing the same vibe.

If they don’t like how their tax money is spent, they find a candidate to promote, to primary the one they don’t.

Hat’s off to the likes of Senator Tuberville.

 

In his first political campaign, Tuberville won the Republican nomination for the 2020 Senate election in Alabama and defeated Democratic incumbent Doug Jonesby over 20 points.

Establishing himself as an ally of President Donald Trump, he was among a group of Republican senators who attempted to overturnDemocratic president-elect Joe Biden’s victory over Trump in the 2020 presidential election.

Tuberville became Alabama’s senior senator in 2023 when Senator Richard Shelby retired.

For 10 months in 2023, Tuberville blocked all promotions of senior officers in the U.S. military.

His protest of Defense Department policies on abortion temporarily deprived the Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marine Corps of confirmed top officers and delayed the filling of more than 450 other senior positions.

 

All in a days work for a rubber stamped boiler plate.

The people in the great state of Alabama didn’t like the way their tax money was spent?

Or was it was something else.

 

Border Life Defined

I feel guilty watching documentaries and news clips about big strong men because I want to be one.

Who doesn’t want to live off the grid, miles from the only other person you know, and feel good about it.

If you do it with a wife and kids it’s a big load.

Is it homesteading, or kidnapping?

If a family gives it a whirl, they dive into gardening, home schooling, and isolation.

Once they give up on gardening and home schooling they find themselves in the car most of the time taking kids to school and buying things in town.

But they’re still outward bound, just ask them.

Their most important border is their property line.

If they ignore the other aspects of modern life, rest assured others don’t.

They don’t like how their tax money is spent so they stop paying taxes.

That’s when they learn more about what they left behind for the wild frontier.

 

As a history professional I can say this with complete confidence:

The authorities, on whatever matter comes to their desk, will find someone to do the house call.

Some nobody from nowhere will gladly ransack your shit if that’s what’s called for.

You see it in every cop show. There’s the guy with the breaching tools working a door.

Sometimes it goes badly.

 

Outside the Mount Carmel complex, the F.B.I. assembled what has been called probably the largest military force ever gathered against a civilian suspect in American history: ten Bradley tanks, two Abrams tanks, four combat-engineering vehicles, six hundred and sixty-eight agents in addition to six U.S. Customs officers, fifteen U.S. Army personnel, thirteen members of the Texas National Guard, thirty-one Texas Rangers, a hundred and thirty-one officers from the Texas Department of Public Safety, seventeen from the McLennan County sheriff’s office, and eighteen Waco police, for a total of eight hundred and ninety-nine people.

 

It might go badly, but it goes.

This is in essence my personal take on how to live that border life:

Be friendly, or you might find yourself on the shit-end of the stick with some badge on the other end poking it at you.

Be understanding when you find people you used to know under arrest for their legal acts of protest.

Most of all, look at the motivation for those trying to sow the fields of higher education with their own research.

You don’t get to do that if you don’t have the right stuff.

But you can if you are a badge.

While you’re getting your assed kicked, just remember the ass kicker is a citizen just like you for small comfort.

Hey, Buddy.