Borderline Thinking

I haven't crossed the border to the U.S. for about a month now, just because I haven't had any cause to. I've been thinking a bit about that process, and I have a few questions for what the old Word Magazine podcast would have called "the Xoghead massive" (editor's note: the iPad autocorrect dislikes the nom de plume - wants it to be Coghead, which doesn't work for me at all).

First: are border guards by and large wildly overqualified for what they do? Do they do things like go home and continue to close in on making cold fusion a reality when they get off work, or submit scholarly articles to The Lancet or National Geographic? Have basement rooms whose walls are covered with satellite images of major shipping lanes that they pore over and constantly update as they seek to develop algorithms for predicting the presence of ships participating in drug trafficking?

I ask because so many of them seem so angry so much of the time, like they all have deeply personal reasons to want to pull each and every driver out of their cars and smack them around, like their dog got run over at a border crossing or something. I think it must be just exhausting to run that hot all the time (honestly, one of these days I'm going to just not correct any of the autocorrects this iPad does ...we'll have a little contest among the 5 or 6 of us to see who can spot them all, beer to the winner), and so I wonder about what's driving it. I don't think it's compensation-related; if the cameras were taking our pictures as we came OUT of our little Interview With Satan, I could imagine them being given a bonus based on how many faces in the pictures looked like they were heading directly to a bar or a therapist.

I suppose it's probably just their training, that the realization has been that acting hostile towards people keeps them off balance or something. I hope they don't go home and complain about why people in cars act like the guards are Nazis, is all.

Another question: Why are so many of us so rattled by the experience of going past a person in a little booth who wants to ask a couple of basic questions and see some papers? I don't think that many of us think of ourselves as secretly evil, and go through our days just praying no one ever sees into our demented inner lives. Okay, maybe some of you, but not that many. What is it that we're afraid they're going to find out?  I don't think WE even know, but for some reason a lot of people seem to just be afraid that they're going to be found to be committing some crime they didn't even know about themselves, and that there's a dank windowless room equipped with rubber hoses and running water that we're heading for when that crime is discovered.

I can't tell whether it's the crossing guards' (oh, I bet they hate being referred to as crossing guards) surly demeanour that does it, or whether they get like that when they smell the guilt baking off some driver, hunched down and gripping the wheel with both hands. Some kind of sick symbiosis?

The last time I crossed I had my youngest daughter with me, and after a kind of testy exchange about my marital status, the guy snapped off a "What do you do for work?". I immediately told him the truth, that I was not working, had been laid off in February...which my youngest daughter did not yet know. She said "You got laid off!?" and I could pretty much hear the creaking iron door of the cell in the room under that little booth opening to admit me, the guy is going to think I kidnapped my kid oh my god oh my god...but he didn't blink an eye. I think he was still disgusted by my uncertainty as to whether whatever system he looks at would report "separated" rather than "single" if he looked me up; oh my god oh my god I have to get this right I can hear the door opening...so he waved us through with a "good luck" spoken in a tone that allowed to me clearly hear the unspoken "you moron" at the end (and yes, over the course of all the years I have in fact become quite familiar with that tone, if you must know).

Like I said, if they were paying those guys some kind of bonus based on civilian discomfort, I'm pretty sure my picture pulling into the glorious US of A would have upped his income. I also wonder how many people feel angry after their border experience, and whether anyone in the Keeping the Sheep Guessing border guard training school have given that any thought...like whether there's a certain self-fulfilling quality to the practice of treating people like they're contemptible criminals. I suppose, if I were a very cynical person (which by now you all know is far from true), I'd wonder about whether it's also good for the border guard business to keep up a certain level of danger and confrontation between the guards and the rest of the world, the people paying their salaries...

Okay, this isn't fun enough any more...if anyone knows the answers to I think just two (rather than "a few") questions, let me know...and when I disappear, thrown in jail because I may be a civil disruptor based on the contents of this post, don't forget me.