http://www.statepress.com/issues/2005/0 ... ons/692701

Arthur Martori is a journalism junior. Reach him at arthur.martori@asu.edu

Dman1200, here's someone you can e-mail. As a journalism junior, Matori really should educate himself on such a serious matter before he opines. Folks, here's the new wave of unfair and unbalanced journalism ... just about to graduate and bring us biased news.

Martori: Minuteman Project embarrassing
by Arthur Martori published on Monday, April 4, 2005


Martori

With all the Arizonans gathering at the Mexico border, you'd think a new Wal-Mart was opening in Nogales. But in reality, a group called the Minuteman Project has mobilized itself to protect the foundations of American culture -- like our right to cut our own lawns and wash our own dishes.

Valuable jobs paying minimum wage or less are at stake here and the only thing standing between us and the hordes of Latin looters that threaten to take away the below-poverty line jobs are 1,000 "Hee Haw" fans calling themselves the Minuteman Project.

The Minutemen claim they lock and load southward-pointed assault weapons out of love for the stars and stripes. But upon closer examination, an ulterior, more sinister motive could be interpreted.

When Sonia Melendez of the San Angelo Standard-Times decried such vigilante action, Minuteman Project pundit Kenny Graves wrote in an online forum that he is "...not surprised that someone named Melendez would come out with an article such as the one I just read..."

Kenny goes on to ask his readers, "Why don't you shove most of the blame on the Mexican government, or lack thereof, for not taking care of its citizens[?]" Shades of a conspiracy theory darken the horizon as he enlightens us that "Mexico admits to its plan to repopulate the southwestern U.S..."

Perhaps Graves is a blatant racist, but maybe Mexico has lurked too long as our disadvantaged southern neighbor that looks upon its norteno big brother with the utmost adoration.

Perhaps we are living right next door to the TJ Maxx of the labor pool and are unwilling to admit to our frugal shopping habits. Even nationally, La raza is taking a lot of heat from our vaunted Department of Homeland Security for letting known terrorists across their border. It could be that this explains the sudden patriotism in trailer courts Arizona-wide.

Sure, the Minutemen say they just want to protect our tanking economy, but it's hard to believe that Americans with a few years of high school under their garishly-buckled belts are thinking along those lines.

In reality, it has become a philosophical issue.

In the case of the Minuteman Project, good ol' boys from southeastern Arizona are unlikely to flip their satellites from the tractor pull to al-Jazeera long enough to develop the kind of serious enmity towards al-Qaida that would warrant putting down a perfectly good can of Natural Ice to protect America's borders.

I suspect that sharing has gone out of style as an American tradition. Maybe patrolling the border to protect the crappiest jobs in America from crafty thieves parched from thirst, having paid their last peso to a swindler just to arrive here could be construed as going too far.

Even our own president came across as skeptical in a summit with Mexican President Vicente Fox and Canadian Prime Minister Paul Martin, saying: "I'm against vigilantes in the United States of America. I'm for enforcing the law in a rational way."

So maybe the Minuteman Project really is just a bunch of rednecks trying to justify riding around on ATVs with shotguns strapped across their backs and are pretty much incapable of comprehending the existence of more than one type of brown people.

We as a nation are becoming the fat kid who cries on his birthday -- amidst a mountain of presents -- when he realizes that he has to share his cake with the neighbors' kids who came over on the spur of the moment. That cake, metaphorically speaking, is the glamorous jobs that illegals get in the U.S.: landscapers, domestics. You know -- the power brokers.

That mountain of presents is the benefits we enjoy from being the richest and most powerful nation in the world. Let us not forget that a few of those presents are from our southern neighbors, as we have our lawns mowed and our babies burped for a pittance.

Sen. Victor Soltero, D-Tucson said it best when he denounced illegal border crossings, but ironically noted the benefit of illegal immigrants, saying: "It really concerns me that people will enjoy the good things -- the good services that immigrants provide -- and, on the other hand, saying that immigrants are only a drain on our country."

He's obviously al-Qaida. To Guantanamo with him.

Arthur Martori is a journalism junior. Reach him at arthur.martori@asu.edu