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<>The 300 By Jack D. McNamara 
“How are the Alpine 300?” a witty friend asked last Friday. He was referring of course to the mass meeting Tuesday, March 13 at Alpine High School where as many people were standing as sitting, thanks to poor advance planning. At least 300 Big Bend residents met with Texas Department of Transportation (TxDoT) spinmeisters to discuss the pending project “La Entrada al Pacifico,” aka LEAP. More than a dozen spoke. Only one man spoke favorably of the highway expansion proposed to run from Midland-Odessa through Ft. Stockton, Alpine, Marfa, and Presidio and on across the Sierra Madre to the port of Topolobampo. A trucker for many years, he suggested the LEAP project was economically inevitable — a consequence of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and economic globalization. Other meetings took place last week in Presidio and this week in Ft. Stockton and Midland as part of specific steps in a “Project Timeline” toward study completion some time after March 2008. Many of us have received a four-page brochure. They have a website: www.dot.state.tx.us. Peggy Thurin, the project spokesperson, said twice in Alpine “I swear on my mother’s life this is not a done deal.” The bottom line, visible to all is that some people elsewhere than here in the Big Bend, intend to use public money to run multitudes of exhaust-spewing Mexican diesel semis through here for their own private profit. To put it another way, they intend to destroy our public space for their private advantage. That is called globalization and presumably it is our turn, just as U.S. Midwest manufacturers, North Carolina textile workers, and Mexican corn farmers have been previously pauperized. Our
local newspapers all registered our protest, as has KVLF. Carpools have
formed for citizens to travel to out-of-town meetings. And on Sunday
Barbara Novovitch of Marathon wrote a New York Times news story of the
Alpine meeting. At that time an unusual movie, “The 300,” was rocking the U.S. with box office revenues over $100 million in only two weeks. An unusual production which relies on fantasy and science fiction graphics, the movie recounts the Battle of Thermopylae in 480 B.C. Spartan King Leonidas took 299 Spartan hoplite warriors with him to a narrow pass in northern Greece where they joined with a few thousand other Greeks to oppose the invasion of Greece by the Persian King Xerxes. Thermopylae is a narrow pass with the Aegean Sea on one side and a steep mountain on the other. The Spartans formed their Greek phalanx with shields and spears and for three days held off several hundred thousand Persian troops. On the third day Xerxes enveloped them when a fellow Greek, Eltiades, led the Persians around the mountainous pass. The Spartans held in order that the other Greeks could retreat and perished to the man on the third day. A recent 2006 book, Thermopylae—The Battle That Changed the World by Paul Cartledge, reminds us that at that narrow pass free men voluntarily stood and died for the bright principle of democracy just then being realized in the Greek city-states. What is increasingly clear is that the principles, which guide us today in our public lives as citizens, were forged long ago by those men, all of whom were fighting men. The Persian army was composed of mercenaries and slaves. The Spartans had some distinctively unpleasant habits and un-modern ideas so we insist we are not trying to “equate” them with us. By all means do not rush to Paisano Pass with your broomstick spear and trashcan shield (though you might well take up your pen for a letter to the editor of the Odessa American or the Midland Reporter-Telegram). The book is probably enough of Ancient Greece for many and the movie (now at Rangra Theatres) is too bloody for young children. But no matter how you come to it, what the 300 Spartans did that day is with us still. The poet Simonides wrote 2500 years ago the elegiac couplet and epigram which is on a memorial today at the pass — Go tell the Spartans, passerby, That here, obedient to their laws, we lie. The
Spartans and their Greek allies lost at Thermopylae. But they won with
their Athenian allies later that year at the naval Battle of Salamis
and again at the land Battle of Plataea in 479 B.C. Small numbers of
free men fighting with discipline for a principle which includes the
defense of home and hearth can and do win. These days we fight with
words but so did they. •
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