I, Suzanne Saturday, am responsible for my nation's crisis at our southern border

Working as a dancer in Manhattan’s gentlemen’s clubs, I’ve enjoyed an ideal work/life balance. The first thing I do when I wake up is drink coffee and write in my journal. As a stripper, I’ve had time to think. I, like Jeff Bezos, “like to putter in the morning.”

And during one of these journalling/puttering sessions I got to thinking about what’s fueling all this migration at my country’s southern border.

It’s hard to wrap my mind around the numbers — they’re so big. I’ve read the details of agonizing journeys. Images of parents carrying small children are extra heartbreaking. Things must be beyond awful in their homelands. Staying put must be even more terrifying than the horrors of crossing the border.

So I asked myself: why is this happening?

Well, because of the drug trade, of course.

Drug dealers are running the show in many countries south of the U.S. border. Ordinary people are afraid for their lives. Afraid for their families. They can’t make a living outside the drug trade, and they’ll do whatever is necessary to get out.

And it makes me wonder…

We can project power halfway around the globe. Why do we allow this appalling situation to fester in our own backyard? It doesn’t make sense.

And if there’s one thing I’ve learned as a dancer, it’s that when something makes no damn sense, it’s because there’s money involved.

Someone on our side of the border must be allowing this illegal drug trade. I don’t know who and I don’t know how, but I do know why — because they’re getting rich off it.

Politicians love to claim that Americans don’t want drugs coming into this country.

But that’s not true.

Americans do want illegal drugs.

We’re buying them.

I used to buy them myself— specifically cocaine.

Cocaine is the perfect stripper drug. We need to be the life of the party until 4am, night after night, and coke makes that possible. My customers were mostly successful banker-types who began their days at 7am. Cocaine is the perfect late-night party drug for them too. The club I worked in for many years (before it closed during the pandemic) was sloshing in booze and cocaine. Those days seem a world away now, but cocaine was the cornerstone of my life for a long time.

So the problem at my nation’s border has been created by people like me.

There would be no illegal drug trade without customers like me.

All those infants smuggled through rivers in the dark of night suffer because of people like me.

There’s no war to be fought against drugs.

The only way our fellow humans south of the U.S. border will feel safe in their homelands is when people like me wake up to the consequences of our actions.

We need to stop giving the drug dealers a marketplace in which to sell their products.

There is nothing to fight but our own destructive behavior.