INTERNATIONAL BORDERS

It sounds so dramatic;

"As I walked carefully through the moonless night, the only lights visible were on the horizon were across the international border."

Images of French / Italy - Germany / Austria borders - toasting wine glasses - wearing berets - international intrigue, right?

Not looking across the San Pedro River from Arizona into Mexico, and trying to see if Cananea has electricity again and what the heck are two Border Patrol trucks doing south of my place.

Blah.

However, we are in the national news.... a lot. When they are talking about virtual fences, drone planes and discovering huge catches of drug coming across the Mexican border - well, that's home for me.

And I found out yesterday that we (well, about twelve miles east of me) will be hosting the Olympic Torch. The real one - that's going to end up in China for the next world games. It was supposed to go to San Francisco, but a lot of people there are trying to get the U.S. to boycott the games, and were planning protests as the torch was carried by.

So someone, who probably will get a pay raise because of this brilliant idea, thought, hey, let's instead send the torch to a little itsibitsee historical district, Bisbee, known only through the valiant efforts of the Cochise County visitor's bureau for an old copper mine which is no longer operational and an annual stair-race that (in theory) rivals the hills of S.F. Even the county government offices in Bisbee are actually west of Bisbee city limits.

Come on, almost every American has heard of Tombstone, for crying out loud, and that's only about twenty-five miles north of Bisbee. And Tombstone actually DOES have a tourist industry that could benefit from something like the Olympic Torch going through it.

I would ask if someone could explain the sense of all this to me if I could only be convinced that there WAS some sense to it.