NOGALES, Arizona – Tony Estrada spoke hard reality in a soft gentle voice:

“If you haven’t lived on the border, you don’t know what it’s all about. As long as you have a demand for drugs, a demand for labor, people will come across. As long as people need to make a future for their families, they will take whatever risks they have to. It will never stop.”

He would know. Estrada, 80, was a Nogales cop for decades and Santa Cruz County sheriff for seven terms until 2021. He has seen an open friendly frontier evolve into a Berlin Wall. I scribbled notes, nodding as he triggered my memories of mornings in an earlier Mexico.

People who demand a Concrete Curtain miss the point. That won’t stop anyone determined to go over it, under it or around it. Instead, it seals off Americans from a richly human culture with deep family values and a back-breaking work ethic just out their backdoor.

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TUCSON – This is an urgent note to friends everywhere – and eight billion others. In the unlikely event that some in that last group may not receive this message directly, please pass it around. Considering what we’ve seen in America so far in 2023, we need a New Year’s Revolution.

Homo sapiens have been at odds since we first began lobbing stones at each other. If we can together settle differences and repair the damage, human ingenuity can create an unimagined future for those to come. If not, we will be the generations who switch out the lights on Earth.

This is not hair-on-fire hyperbole, but rather the considered conclusion of a working reporter who has spent 60 years covering war and peace firsthand on seven continents. I hope I’m wrong, but I suspect I’m not.

After the Great War left 200 million people dead from conflict, hunger, influenza and genocide, T.S. Elliot wrote in “The Hollow Men”: “This is the way the world ends, Not with a bang but a whimper.” Unless we collectively lower the heat, literally and figuratively, it will be both.

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HEREFORD, Arizona — Doug Ducey’s last erection as governor was a three-mile makeshift barricade of shipping containers, a fitting monument to himself and the elephants he rode in on: an illegal, idiotic, destructive, short-lived, transparent con job to exploit gullible voters.

It typifies irreparable damage caused by Donald Trump’s futile attempts to build his Wall on a border already fenced off or protected by mountainous terrain. Even if completed, it would have been no more effective against human tides than sandbags piled up against rising seas.

Governor-elect Katie Hobbs was blunt: “It’s not our land to put things on. It’s a political stunt.” Plus, she added, “I think it’s a waste of taxpayer dollars.” And how.

By the time trucks chew up yet more desert to haul it away, it will have cost well over $100 million, or 2,500 “TGTs,” the Mort Report parallel currency based on third grade teachers’ annual pay. That would cover Arizona’s classroom shortfall and allow for long overdue raises.

Had the stacked containers remained in place, their only practical purpose would have been as staging modules for smugglers. Holes cut into them on the Mexican side with camouflaged exits on the other would help them traffic migrants, drugs and perhaps a few terrorists.

TUCSON — After dropping $17 billion on midterm elections, much of it to sell scoundrels bent on crippling democracy to ill-informed citizens, America ought to parallel the dollar with a currency unit that keeps things in perspective. How about the TGT, short for third grade teacher?

A TGT would track teachers’ average starting pay in a nation that uses money to keep score. After falling $2,000 in the last decade, that is $41,000. Hedge-fund hogs — or election-deniers’ lawyers — can earn more in a slow week. Adjusted for inflation, it is less than in the 1970s.

Strict spending limits in a brief European-style campaign could have paid for 400,000 teachers like lovable Miss Lot at Peter Howell Elementary, who inspired us kids in the ‘50s to ask questions, think things through, then trust our own eyes and ears.

TUCSON — Paul Simon’s long-ago South African trip echoed in my head as I flew to Arizona from Paris after votes were finally tallied. Human nature hasn’t changed since Aristotle pegged it. When decent people synchronize, hatemongering demagogy hasn’t got much chance.

“Thank you, Pima County, for saving America,” I said with mock formality to the deeply suntanned rental car lady. She smiled. It was hardly just Arizona. We both knew a nation at war with itself is far from saved. But still. America seems to be inching toward Graceland.

Simon’s original “Graceland” single was about Nashville, but he used the name for 1985 recordings in Soweto that called out social injustice. Concerts in blazing color went far beyond black and white. Joyful sounds and painful lyrics exposed what Apartheid had masked.

The unmissable message: harmony, not wealth, puts diamonds on the soles of our shoes.

Simon ignored a U.N.-imposed cultural boycott, a decision that nudged history hard. Five years later, Nelson Mandela was freed from Robben Island, and a fractured society began to heal.

As the doomsday clock ticks ever louder, a sense of global harmony is growing among Americans who see what is at stake beyond their narrow issues at home.

Young voters made a difference, yet only 27 percent of them cast ballots — 4 percent fewer than in 2018 midterms. Two years remain to make up for decades of insular schooling and news coverage. Americans need to synchronize with the other 95 percent who share a dying planet.

With all its problems, America is hardly comparable to South Africa at its worst. But I see troubling parallels between today’s rural Republicans with radios spotwelded to fact-free bullshit, and rural “rock spiders” — Afrikaners fearful of “replacement” — I covered in the 1980s.

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