The stream of aspiring immigrants making its way through Mexico represents a burgeoning flock of chickens come to roost for the United States’ war efforts throughout Central America for most of the 20th Century.

From the Panama Canal “treaty” (during which development the term “gunboat diplomacy” originated) through the Nicaraguan revolt of the 1930s and the anti-communist repressions of the ’70s and ’80s, the U.S. government has propped up violent autocrats who were always in the pockets of multinational corporate interests.

Those same interests have now taken over the United States at nearly every level of governance, so that corporate rights override those of any other institution or individual, and the venality and greed that encrust the bottom of the big, slow boat of the state have become ever more shamelessly exposed to broad daylight.

The late jazz musician Gil Scott-Heron warned in a song that the revolution would not be televised, but that it would be real. The second half of his prediction might be true, but the first part is wrong. He did not predict what we see televised now.

The revolution might not even begin from our green grass roots, but from the ashen lands to the south that our national policies have scorched with violence for over 100 years.