A lot of people in the USA these days are going broke. It hardly matters if you have a G.E.D. or a Master’s degree. Unemployment is creeping through the populace like a billion-fingered thief. The number of people on food stamps in the USA today is unprecedented, and what’s left of our national safety net after Clinton and Bush took their turns hacking it apart is a threadbare mess with holes in it the size an entire city block can fit through without sucking in its belly.

More people were living in poverty in 2010, according to the census, than in all the time the census has been collecting data. People are dying from untreated dental problems, laws are appearing left and right that penalize the homeless and the poor, prisons are profiting, a dull rage is building, and the bottom line is a lot of people—far too many—are poor and getting poorer.

The kicker is that it won’t be getting better any time soon. The unemployment rate is predicted to continue to grow, well into 2014.

All of this is very bad news, indeed.

THE LAND OF HAND TO MOUTH

It’s an unhappy scene, poverty. And we’re not talking about the presence or absence of one or two niceties. The low, low place that living hand to mouth can bring you is much more complex and all-encompassing than not being able to afford one or two top shelf amenities that might make life a bit more enjoyable when you’re out there grinding away.

For most of my life I’ve been like most of the world, I guess—getting by without a whole lot of money. Sometimes it’s been real bad. Sometimes it’s been average. And sometimes, for a minute, life’s been pretty comfortable. The truth is, though, that those comfortable times have been pretty short lived. And even then, my standard of comparison is one you’d find in a person who grew up in a poor family.

What do I mean by “poor”? I mean at our worst we were homeless and cooking food in a campfire, or living in a house with buckets for toilets. And at our best, we were trying hard to fit into the suburban middle class, but still accepting bags of hand me downs from other families. By poor, I mean the regular presence of bargain brands; I mean the type of life where you grow up always thinking about how much things cost, and how you don’t have enough to do A, B, or C; and mostly, I mean the type of deeply-seeded awareness where poverty is a way of your thinking and acting. I’m not proud of this, and I don’t think it necessarily makes a person deep or interesting. It’s just how I grew up.

Even through all of that, there was the sense that you could escape it. Maybe. One day. Going to bed hungry means you and your little brother would meet up and sneak food from the fridge after everyone else was asleep. But even on nights you couldn’t quell the hunger that was so much deeper than stomach pangs, you imagined that if you were talented enough and motivated enough, you would be plucked out of such fates and arrive in the Land of Where You Have Always Belonged; that there was a golden cot with your name on it, just waiting for you to show your mettle. After all, woven deeply into the American consciousness are a few narratives. One of them is the Rags to Riches myth; essentially the Conservative notion of Bootstrap. The myth that we live in a land of abundant opportunity, and in which no matter what your meager beginnings, if you stick it out, there is gold enough to go around.

I guess we all buy into that in this place. But recent times have put a harsh dent into those kinds of ideas.

THE VERY AVERAGE AND SUDDENLY ELUSIVE LIFE

For a short time in Manhattan, when I was 30 and working in publishing, I was bringing home a very, very average paycheck, but it was a salary. It was not minimum wage. It was not Freelance. It was pretty okay. What helped a lot was that I was living with a woman who was also making a modest salary. Those days of combining our paychecks were the most comfortable of my life. I actually had money every check that I could do something with. Go out, buy clothes, buy gifts, save…live. Absent, finally, was the constant fear and shame and worry and self-loathing that can potentially accompany a lower income lifestyle in such a nation as the USA.

Again, mind you—in the scheme of things, our income was pretty average. A cousin of mine (our families went quite different directions) was making more all by herself and living on the Upper East Side of Manhattan before she was out of her 20s. Yet, that kind of “pretty average” to a lot of people out there is the Good Life. And the number of those people is growing every day.

That’s an important part of what I’m writing here. That must always be considered: the context of our culture. After all, poverty is a relative standard. Relative to what others have, to what is required to do or acquire certain things; relative to how others see poverty; relative to what means there are to live and survive without having lots of currency. And in a nation like the USA—where (increasingly) the rhetoric and value system is one that demonizes the poor; worships the affluent and the always-in-style; and penalizes with a severity that increases directly inversely proportionate to the wealth one commands—it is very hard to be poor.

For the past few years it’s been hard for a lot of people. I’ve been one of them. It’s been hard not only because, well, it’s hard to live in the emotional and practical reality of poverty, but because the idea that you can lift yourself out of it is in danger of extinction. That notion that if you get a degree, or work hard (or both); that if you are talented and ambitious, then it’s only a matter of time before you are  living comfortably—is suffering some heavy blows. When you are a child, you vow to “make it,” and you hold on because you know anything is possible. And then you get into your 20s, or 30s, you rack up some serious student loan debt—if you are lucky enough to go to college—and you work toward that dream.

Time stretches on….and on….and on….and nothing gets better. And what if things get worse?

I’m taking the time to write this post because I think it’s important to keep track of the experience I’ve been having. Not because I think it makes me very special to have been here. It’s just the opposite. It’s an important story because so many of us are living it right now. And the truth is, it’s an uncomfortable piece of writing that’s taken a handful of sittings over the course of a week. It’s a story I’d rather put behind me (but of course!), full of experiences I’d rather forget. (Wouldn’t we all!) It’s a reality you don’t want to sit in a second longer than you are forced to. But we need to be aware of where our fellow human beings are, and what they are feeling. Even if we are lucky enough to be living a different fate. Because our individual moments of good fortune do nothing to affect the fate of millions, or create big enough shifts to change systemic wrongs.

And when you are beset by these wrongs…well, you barely admit to yourself, let alone anyone else. When you’re in the thick of it, you don’t stop too long to marvel at the misery of it. That’s not sensible. You do what you have to do. From moment to moment, and from day to day. That’s what we do, right? That’s all there is to do. You try not to become so weary that you think of giving up as more comfortable than continuing to fight. But mostly, you keep your eyes focused on the next step, and you don’t give yourself time to wallow. You’d become mired.

I feel like I’m at a place where I can take a breath. After a long, thin, period, I’ve found a way to bring income home again. I dare to hope things might change, finally. And yet, I hesitate to tell this tale; to spin out all the moments and feelings and thoughts, and the reality of poverty. Why? Why is that?

THE WORST KEPT SECRET

Because you want to keep poverty a secret. as glaring and obvious is the global wreckage and domestic corrosion of economic inequality and violence, we still want to keep it quiet when it affects us. Which is, of course, very convenient to those who benefit the most from the (global) fallout. When what needs to happen is a great anger arise from the realities of injustice and imbalance so many are living, instead we hush up.

And we hush up for myriad reasons. Men are told that women will write us off if we don’t have cash at the ready. And many will. But that is not limited to women. Sure, there are engrained ideas about what MEN and WOMEN need to bring to the party to be viable mates. And many buy into those. But not all.

No, I think the factors are bigger than that in a capitalist system. Here, poverty feels like a rot. You can see and smell it from down the block. In a capitalist system, we perceive poverty as if infectious. Poverty pulses with a neediness that threatens to absorb your own power. When you are not poor, you will very probably feel confronted by it. Threatened by it. Powerless in the face of it. Without thinking, you back away. And in backing away, further isolate people who are extremely isolated already. All around them is a bustling, shouting, barking, neon cash machine that spins some people in big circles and drives them around like a roller-coaster, while for others, the machine does nothing but pollute the air and water and food supply; keep them up all night; and steal their friends, peace of mind, and children.

So, as much as possible, you  keep your troubles to yourself when you are suffering with lack. They are your troubles, after all! You eat bitter, as the Chinese say. No need to advertise your struggle. You tell yourself you are building character. Or…whatever you have to tell yourself to keep going.

Artists, entrepreneurs, and the self-promoting learn in many places that success! breeds! success! and it’s best not to disclose anything but the good news about your product and your company or your practice. Feed that positive buzz. I have spent a lot of time as a freelance artist, and this was one I grappled with. Social media circles make the conflict clear. These are both your friends and clients (and potential clients). I needed to tell the truth of my situation, but at almost every turn, I was pressured to keep quiet about it. Not by people saying hush…but by my own feelings, and the realities of living in this culture, and the realities of being a self-employed artist. Why would people bring their projects to me if I am going broke? They will look at one artist who is not broke and then, they will look at me, and then, they will think what capitalism has taught them to think: He clearly is no good at what he is doing. They will invest poverty (or wealth) with a moral value. As we all do. There will be no time to consider other factors that might be in play. They will simply walk their business over to the happy, bustling joint. And thus, the problem compounds.

In one of the more revealing moments I had with an artist friend who constantly preached authenticity and never editing who you were as an artist and person when you present yourself to the audience, I was told that this was the reason they never spoke about their own looming and constant money worries: It just wasn’t smart as a business consideration. Which makes sense! A practical sense. I can’t blame them for that, in the end. I personally couldn’t keep so quiet about things so pressing in my life, but then again, I’m a different sort of artist. I happen to be better at telling or showing you what I see and how I feel, than I am at running a storefront.

But that’s how strongly we are indoctrinated with this social rule. We are taught that be you woman or man, businessperson or otherwise, you just don’t let it be known too much when you are struggling with money. It doesn’t make you look able, strong, or cool. It makes you look like a failure (nevermind that at least 15% of the nation is “failing” as well!) You will make others uncomfortable. There’s that sense of jinx or magical vibes to the admonition: By concentrating and admitting the desperateness of the situation, you will perpetuate the momentum of your bad luck, and so shhhhh Fake it Til Ya Make It!

And again, in a nation like the USA, the fault lines and division are very clear. And not much room for gray.

The isolation this pushes you into is painful. When you are down and out, the last thing you need is isolation. You need community. You need help. You need a shoulder, an ear, another human to remind you that you are not contagious, or catastrophic. And that your problems don’t make you a bad person, but that they are part of a larger network of faultlines. And that you are not alone.

A GROWING LACK OF POWER

The notion that you don’t have enough, that you cannot do this or that—whether it is wash the clothes, buy the children new shoes, replace a candle, replace clothes, replace the batteries in a TV remote, or come along when friends go out to the bar or the bowling alley—is a disempowering one. And all in all, that is what being poor equals. A lack of power. A lack of power needed to affect your own destiny.

Sure, the lack is not absolute. You are a human being, even in the USA! You can still wield power. You can fight against the imbalance and the obstacles. You can be ingenious, and motivated, and entrepreneurial. You don’t have to let the baby stick paperclips or her fingers into electric outlets, you can whittle plugs from wood, if you can’t afford to buy them. You can wash clothes by hand with dish detergent. You can substitute water for milk in a recipe, or grow as much of your own food as  you can manage. And you do do many of these things.

What’s harder to do is stop the triggered thoughts that rise in your mind every where you look in your home. Each unpainted patch, each glued cup, every taped up wire or dark lamp whispers to your unconscious mind: broken…no good…expired. And the thoughts accumulate, and become a clamor.

wish i had a…. i can’t fix it…. useless…. this doesn’t work…. used up… insufficient… dying… corroded… waste

CAUGHT IN A GROWING WEB OF ENTROPY

The thorny patch of emotions grows thicker. The feelings and thoughts that are a result of this life situation grow entangled with each other, and in time, you can no longer tell where they end and you begin. You actually forget that they are attached to circumstance; that misery is not, necessarily, life. You forget that these thoughts are not you. Because they do not stay contained, these seedlings of hardship. Insecurity caused by finances bleeds over to the rest of your self-image and emotional experience of life. You are insecure about your cash, and so you are insecure about your ability to keep up your house, or keep the refrigerator full; insecure about your ability to parent your children properly, or about your appearance, or about your ability to respond to any given event that might not be foreseen. This insecurity becomes part of your wardrobe, your eye contact, your body posture, your walk.

An insecurity that persists long enough becomes dread. And dread, anxiety, depression, shame, hopelessness, and anger are lively spirits in the land of Hand To Mouth.

These feelings are often touched on when people write about poverty, or unemployment. Rarely is the aura of entropy discussed. And to be poor means to be run through with the energy of entropy. All around you, everything is fading, failing, breaking, and turning to dust. Entropy is a fact of life, and this is the case always…but when you have disposable cash, you buy off that reality. You replace batteries. You buy a new toothbrush when the old one becomes smushed and worn out. When you break a tooth, you get a crown. You buy new lightbulbs when you need them, instead of juggling lights from room to room. You don’t wrap food in Rite-Aid bags to store them in the fridge, you use plastic wrap so you can see the food. You don’t keep using the same nasty old sponge in the sink; you buy a new one! Your shoes are clean and sharp and stylish, not worn out and floppy and faded. Your clothes, too. When you have regular income, and enough to pay more than rent, every day you put forth energy in the form of physical effort as well as currency and you rejuvenate your environment and you refresh your ability to operate and be mobile and effective in the material world.

But without that money, you see things breaking down right and left. You squeeze remote controls that don’t work. Pull doorknobs that don’t properly turn. Reappearing: a singing toy that sings too low, slow and draggy before stopping altogether. The ever present hand of entropy colors your overall perception of life and self.

Many of these things—utilities shut off, toys that can’t be used anymore, non-working lights—will lead to a discussion with your children that may be painful to you. A conversation that costs yet more energy because of how much effort it takes to repeat it over and over. A conversation that exacts an energetic toll because of how it breaks your heart each time. Maybe you lie to them about what the situation is at one time or another during the day because you don’t want them to also obsess about money or attribute everything painful in life to poverty. On one hand, you are glad that they will not take things for granted and understand that there is a cost to the comforts of life, but you don’t want them to be one like you: A child of lack who grew up with that all-pervading reality. Cheap brands. Knock-offs. Humiliation in school. Bag lunches. Inability to stay quiet on what something cost. Tendency to brag about how much your shoes cost. We can recognize each other, children of poverty. We know the signs. The desperation, the overvaluation of luxury, the ambition to never Be There Again. The ease with which we discuss money, crassly. The anxiety, the inability to save. Mostly, you don’t want your children to grow into adults who are invested with a powerless self-image.

Because no matter what you do, or how you decide to think of it, every way you turn, poverty is not just a lack of power, but a growing lack of power. And it is hard to fight because the power needed to counter poverty is basically an energy exchange in which the rate keeps you at a loss. That is, the time and energy you invest in whittling those socket plugs is going to cost you more than the investment you would have made simply by dropping 1.99 into a cashier’s hand. The wear on your body and peace of mind are not negligible as you scramble to bridge another gap, or pop a finger in a dam, or hold two ends together, or in some other way interject your body into an equation that is constantly crumbling.

A CHAIN REACTION OF LOSS

Poverty is alive, as if a virus. It grows exponentially. Poverty is a chain reaction of loss. There are so many ways to illustrate this. Here’s an obvious one: You don’t have money for a dental checkup, or cleaning. Your dental problems get worse. One day, when chewing, a filling falls out. The last thing you can afford is a trip to the dentist’s, so you do your best to brush that tooth a little more carefully. But of course, decay begins. And spreads. What would have been an easy filling when caught in time, soon turns into a black hole in your tooth that eats away more tooth the longer you don’t get it filled. You avoid it until a pain festers there, and grows more every day until it wracks your brain constantly, and soon you can’t sleep. Now, you either do a root canal with crown ($2000, roughly), or you have the tooth pulled (about $120). The tooth gets pulled, of course. You probably borrowed or hocked something to get even that $120, so there’s a little more debt and stress. And there goes the Kool Aid Smile you’ve been famous for since you were a child. There goes your self image. You smile less, embarrassed of the gaps in your smile. This affects how you interact with others. Which affects all those dealings and their outcome in some way. This little hole that crept into your tooth, too, creeps into your life. And grows.

Your glasses are broken. You don’t replace them. You can’t! You tape them together. You avoid wearing them. You can’t see. You stop talking to people who pass by on the street because you cannot see them without your glasses. Or your wear your contacts for far too long and cause irritation and infection to your eyes. You run out of saline too fast, so you store two contact lenses on one side of the holder, decreasing the effectiveness of the sterilizing solution. Sometimes you can’t afford saline/sterilizer at all, and you won’t wear the geeked out glasses with the tape on one side so you stroll down the street, nearly blind, keeping your eyes to the ground. Not smiling too wide, either! Remember.

Like bubbles of mercury on the ground—like that clamor of thoughts that your home life sends to you every day—these conditions begin to cluster and add to one another.

You wear things as many times as you can before they smell to cut down on costs of washing the clothes. You no longer buy the brands that are the most environmentally sound, or non-toxic. You do your best, but inevitably, your shampoos and soaps and deodorants simply become what you can afford. So your conscious will and personality and desires are less and less motivating your actions and you are becoming One Who Survives. Gone are the days of the shampoo in the cool bottle that smells so heavenly you feel better just putting in your hair. Gone is that little good feeling that you walked around with for hours simply for using something that made you feel good. Gone are the sharp razors; hello store brand. Gone is the full fridge, gone are the desserts.

And, unbidden—even if not in your own home—the day becomes, yet, a thread of thoughts and instances in which you Don’t Have Enough. Those thoughts drag behind them bags weighted with shame; with fear; with worry and insecurity; with anger. Being full of those feelings all the time erodes your health. (Which costs more money.) And being full of those thoughts and feelings take up your time, too. Those take energy. This week, two tall cups of coffee are needed each morning, instead of the one!

And what about something as simple and reliable as coffee in the morning? Even coffee is a luxury, despite your addiction. It’s actually very expensive. Of course you buy the cheap stuff. And in a rare pinch, maybe you use grounds twice. Maybe you cover up your cup when it grows cold and put it in the fridge for tomorrow. Maybe you run out of sugar and just drink it black, no sugar. Maybe you do all those things. The days when you could saunter over to the bakery and buy an Americano with two extra shots for a $3.00 coffee seems very distant. And extravagant as hell!

All these subtractions and detours build on themselves. You feel out of breath with the hustle, because when you are poor, the hustle never ends. The need to be creative and enterprising never ends. The need to Make Do never ends. The feelings that you are a loser are ever-present. You know it’s a losing game, and you know it’s a crooked one. But who wants to lose, even at a crooked game?

PERVERSE PENALTIES…AND ANGER

It’s no wonder you end up feeling so exhausted. Perversely, a life of poverty is a life in which you need to run even faster. Because being low on cash marks you. It marks you like a tiny rodent scrambling under the hot desert sun, and the birds of prey sure do come. Late fees, disconnection fees, early cancellation fees, overdraft fees, bounced checks, low balance fees, higher interest rates, poorer terms for the poor…there is a network of vampiric thorns in place designed to trip up, puncture, and suck the life from those who cannot afford to stay sufficiently solvent. You know it. You are very aware of it. You grew resentful. You grow afraid of what the next penalty will be. It’s only a matter of time. You grow afraid, even, of the mail. You avoid it. You don’t empty the mailbox for a week straight. What do you care? There will only be more news about how much you owe. A recipe of penalty. Another mouthful of dread.

There is always this pushing upon you. This force pushing down upon  you. It is entropy. Resisting it is painful, and gets harder the less money you have. Somehow, you believe in yourself. It’s a rough patch. the whole nation is suffering. And then you think Well…most of us. There are those who are not.

Some may handle poverty better than I describe it here. Poverty will not feel the same in different cultures, perhaps. And there is a difference between living on a meager income, and being both broke and unemployed. So there is a continuum, no doubt. I am not pretending to know the minds of millions of people, and ultimately, I speak only from my own experience.

In my experience, it is inevitable that living in these conditions long enough, an anger will grow in you. An anger that in this whole dumb lottery of power and chance, you drew the bad card. Not because you deserve it, but because that’s the luck of the damn draw. The well-coiffed sons of privilege laughing as they duck to get into their Porsches or slide into their Senatorial seats are not inherently more worthy souls, or righteous beings. No matter what the movies and advertisements try to tell us. At best, they got lucky by birth or other circumstance. At worst, they were blessed by an institutional corruption that favors them. In any case, why should they get top notch dental care, a car at 16, and a full, nutritious menu every day of the week? Why should they never know a night in jail? Why should they get bailed out of every scrape and set back on the path of good fortune, while you end up running yourself ragged and broke over ten bucks? Why should there be such different worlds, and some born to hardship from the start? What makes them so special as to be given such carefree lives? Why shouldn’t your worries also be theirs?

The anger pervades, pollutes, poisons you. Poisons your heart. You push it away and try to talk yourself back to the generous soul that you know yourself to be. You are careful not to cultivate self-pity. You read your books that help breathe spirituality back into your life. You meditate. You focus on the good. But…you still live in the U.S.A. And you’re not 22 anymore, where it’s easy to frame things romantically. You “should” have it all figured out by now. You “should” be comfortable. You “should” have an IRA and savings, and a new-ish car, and be spending money. You should have some security for tomorrow.

And despite your best efforts, the bitterness grows. The Mr. Hyde within grows. He is, in fact, fed by hunger. And before long, you have a hard time feeling good for other peoples’ good fortune. You live in a vicious competitive environment, and you are losing out. Each tip or wobble of the personal coffers signifies your own moral worth and competence as a human being. It’s no wonder your emotions run high; it’s no wonder you feel worn out. And you feel disappointed in yourself, as well. Even for having such thoughts and feelings. You know you are kinder than your emotions are revealing. But maybe you are not. And you wonder. It’s very easy to call yourself kind when you have a full belly. Let the resources run dry for too long and you may find yourself to be quite another sort of person. Either way, you can’t help it. You feel cornered by circumstance and you snarl like an animal with its leg in a trap. You need out, that’s all. You can’t think and you just need a goddamn break, already.

Sometimes the only break you will get comes in the form of escape. Liquor is a handy one. After all, liquor can be the poor man’s friend, deity, and medicine all in one. A reliable tonic for when you can’t afford to treat physical ailments, or when your mind grows weary from racing, fretting, or fearing. Just wash the worry away at the end of a day. Get back to a simple, relaxed state where you don’t care about money, and where you feel no pain. Of course, you are lucky if you can afford the bottom shelf stuff. It’s about $10. It bites a little harder and is a bit rougher on the body than the good stuff. But you get used to it pretty fast.

I AM VITAL, STRONG, AND REEK OF POTENTIAL. I AM THE CAPTAIN OF TIME.

The flip side to that feeling of entropy that surrounds you when you don’t have money to throw around at even the essentials, is a feeling of power and vitality and possibility when you have reliable and disposable income. Yup, when you have a pocketful of plastic or cash, and a good amount more in the bank, the horizon lays out before you like she’s your starry-eyed bride. You can be part of society at any juncture you desire. You might glide over here and buy a new shirt. (They’ll let you handle them because you look well-dressed already.) You might stop at the corner and scoop up some Shwarma. You might have a laugh with the flower vendor as you choose an arrangement with which to surprise a friend—all on the spur of the moment. You might see a movie. You might buy a slice. Who knows what you’ll decide to do! At any node in this culture you can plug in. You have that power. You can collect. You can browse. You can nibble. You can gift. You can fund. You can donate. You can bargain. You can walk away. You don’t need to rush. Time moves slower for you when you are solvent.

It’s true! When you are always lacking cash, you end up stressed out. About deadlines, schedules, closing times, bank holidays, end of the month, first of the month, bus schedules. You are very aware of time. And it is not your friend. Penalties await. Last chances await. Bounced checks await. Overdrafted accounts await. Shutoff notices await. And you better stay sharp on all of it.

When money is not a worry, it’s as if the whole world slows down. It literally feels that way—that the world is turning slower. You don’t need to try and drink the milk before it goes bad…or to make it last longer than natural. Because buying a new container is not an issue. You don’t need to run like mad for the bus stop. You can call a cab. You don’t need to beg a friend for a ride to the electric company before five p.m. because you’ve already paid your bill! In fact, you paid it as soon as it arrived instead of racing against a shut-off notice. You don’t need to rush for much of anything. You can wander and muse. Because your life is not a constant battle to stay alive. Because having money means having leisure time.

And just as with cash you feel empowered, belonging, and able to tap into the society machine at will; when you are broke you feel like an outcast. You don’t belong. You are a criminal. A potential drain. At no point in the chain of societal nodes can you take command. At no point can you enter. At no point can you negotiate anything, unless it is by the good graces of another. You best not loiter. You will be okay if your clothes are new, and the lighter skinned you are, generally. But if you are walking in a circle at the mall, but not holding a Subway sandwich bag or a Pizza Hut cup, and are wearing ragged clothes, and especially if you are brown—then you are an arrest or police harassment waiting to happen.

TWISTED OUT OF SHAPE

Do you note the narrow focus of this writing? How it all becomes about your own self, your own mind, your own body, your own future? Even reading through it feels like being stuffed into a hole all alone with your rancid mind. And that’s what these situations do to a person. That’s part of that isolation. And the survival instinct, which is running on overdrive. There’s nothing more selfish than the instinct to survive, after all. And living in that place for too long can make you grabby, and make you mean. And it can make you ugly. These fears and feelings distort a person. I’ve seen it up close in the faces of people in my life; people stressed out about gas every day, or about their kids’ clothes. People who are living with all the feelings and stressors that I’ve written about here. People who are kind and beautiful souls, but after years of living this way, those qualities become harder to see…because poverty can twist you out of shape like that.

It needn’t be that way, of course. There are  many shapes a culture can take. And a wiser society would be built more compassionately. A wiser nation would not view poverty or unemployment as a personal failure, but as a societal one. A kinder nation would have, as a reflex, a more communal spirit in which we looked out for each other. In the USA it is very hard to be poor and/or unemployed. How do you get your food if you do not buy it from the store? In some cases, people have tried gardening as a solution, and the city turns around and outlaws yard gardens. A city often will outlaw panhandling, or giving food away, or paying other peoples’ parking tickets. Our culture is not arranged in a way that people can easily help each other, or provide for themselves outside of the rigid, narrow, selfish, and tyrannical capitalist path. There is a sick and ugly network of mechanisms in place in this country to both shame you for being poor, as well as to keep you from escaping your situation. This is why going broke in a place like the USA can lead an otherwise rational and balanced soul to such desperation.

A HUNGRY MAN IS AN ANGRY MAN

Poverty engenders a feeling of powerlessness in you beyond what some might imagine. It’s like that insecurity I wrote about earlier. That feeling of powerlessness doesn’t stay contained to one area. It grows in you when you are not earning enough money, or can’t find employment and can easily metastasize into you feeling and acting generally powerless, and thinking of yourself as powerless. You don’t even see it happening. And one day you look at your thinking or actions and say “How did this happen? I am not this person. I don’t think of myself as ineffectual and unable to change things!” But it sneaks up on you, living in that mental and physical aura and environment every day.

And all the emotions that poverty breeds do this; carry over into areas where they are destructive and possibly consuming. And you forget what it is like to view things differently. And you feel there is no salvation for you. You can easily begin to burn inside with the injustice that is all around you, the injustice that is reaching into your home and snatching teeth from your head; the injustice that is mocking your manhood, and degrading your personhood, and is causing your children pain. And it doesn’t take too much of this, or too long of this, to bring you to the point where you feel you are ready to blow. Because being poor doesn’t mean you are stupid. And it doesn’t mean you can’t see what’s going on. And what’s going on is that everything is failing, divided unfairly, and for you and yours is pain—while for others, its pure pleasure.

It’s important to remember that when we are talking about a “divide,” we are not talking about how one person has a BMW with leather interior and the next person has a beat up 1990 Chevy. The divide is much more meaningful and dangerous than that. We are talking about a divide in overall peace of mind. A divide in the feelings of self-worth that some have and some lack. A divide between ideas like “I belong here and there is hope and good times ahead for me” versus “I am tolled and harrassed at every turn and I can’t rest and there is no way out for me.” A divide between “I want this society and system to work out and I’ll do what I can to perpetuate its success” and “It will be best for everyone if this thing topples and all those who benefit from its standing scream on the way down.” We should not underestimate the volatile nature of a public—or even one person—who feels s/he has nothing left to lose; that the deck is stacked beyond righting; that nobody is listening, and nothing will change. In fact, the roots of enmity against the United States from abroad, I would venture, is in large part caused by this dynamic. Many who suffer outside our borders and live in squalor and in pain see so many Americans living obliviously in great comfort and know it to be unfair, and further, know the situation to be exploitive. I do not see the terrorism this breeds as so very different than other violent domestic reactions to economic violence. I’ve lived for a while now at what felt like the edge of everything. It’s a maddening place.

I think it was about two years ago when I heard of a man in a city nearby (Portland?) who went on a violent rampage that was explained by his losing his job, and by the pressures of the economy. At the time, I responded in a way that I see now as disappointingly smug, and not just a little nâïve: I wrote that he obviously had other issues if losing his job caused him to become violent in such a jarring way. Now, that may be true. But on the other hand, as I hope this writing has helped illustrate, in my opinion and experience, prolonged poverty and unemployment are big enough factors in and of themselves to destabilize a person. You don’t really need much more than that to send you off the edge. And the fact that despite my upbringing, I could have been oblivious to that simply because I had regular income at the time is just as worrisome as the idea that the conditions that pushed that man toward destruction are common today, and only growing more ubiquitous.

Take a society; blend ignorance of the comfortable with desperation of the poor, and you have a dangerous mix. And in times like this, ignorance thrives. I’ve not even touched on other important factors related to this recession/depression. For example, the fact that if you’re not white, you are being hit even harder by this economic downturn. Or what it feels like to have a name that you know will decrease your chances of getting an interview just by the nature of your ethnicity, all while hearing increasingly more scapegoating by other destitute people who are blaming their troubles on people with names or skin like you. In a time when those of us struggling ought be united in our plight, wizened demons of racism and division rear their ugly heads and keep us squabbling and at each others’ throats.

NO MORE WAR ON THE POOR

A photo of the Wall Street protests going on right now.

It is very much in the interest of society that we not let economic inequality continue as it has. The momentum of today’s class war on the poor has accelerated to a dangerous fervor. This war, and all the forms it takes, is, of course, an accepted part of the American Dream; it’s values seeded deeply in all of our ideas of what wealth means and what poverty means. It is a long-running war. But any student of history knows that the pitch of a war can pivot on the smallest happening. Winter might strike early. The crops might rot. The supply lines might be interrupted. The troops might get dysentery. The villagers might have more to fight for than a worn out cadre of mercenary soldiers. An unforeseen geographical or meteorological aberration can upset everything. And then, the tide shifts with barely a moment’s notice, and woe to those caught unprepared.

Warren Buffet has a sense of this, and that is why he is one of the rich people in this nation who has spoken up about the inequality. That is why he has recently advocated for people in his income bracket to pay a fair share in taxes. I doubt very much that this statement is purely motivated by altruism. Not to be ungenerous to him; I still very much appreciate and credit him for saying what is true and obvious, and what is easier to forget when you are very comfortable. I do think he comes from a good place, too.

But I have no doubt that he sees the writing on the wall. It’s there for anyone who cares to look around today. The proles will put up with a whole lot. A whole hell of a lot. But they have limits, make no mistake. If you leave people with no way out of Hell, they will tunnel. Even if all they have are their own fingers. Put everything beautiful on one side of a wall, and they will tunnel. Lock up all the resources in one building and reinforce the walls with steel that reached fifty feet underground—but don’t forget that you have to pay someone to make the key to lock it, pay someone to empty the garbages, and pay someone to come read your meter. Those people will not be in your income bracket. And the tricks of division will not work forever, or on all people. Warren Buffet has made a simple calculation and would rather pay some more taxes than fear his janitor, his maid, his mailman, his lawnboy, his locksmith, his pizza delivery person, and every other blue collar or unemployed person in his path.

The real people who are scared are the power elite. Of course, they’re trying to make you scared and us scared. But I can tell you, having been a reporter for the New York Times, that on the inside they’re very, very frightened. They do not want movements like this to grow, and they understand on some level — whether it’s subconscious or, in other cases, even overt — that the criminal class in this country has seized power.”

—Journalist Chris Hedges

But he should fear them. And all those who would run an endless array of tricks to keep the poor from escaping their lot should fear us. And all those who would enact laws to further game this crooked system should fear us. And the politicians who collude with their wealthy benefactors should fear us. And all those who would make the mistake of thinking the poor are their own private milk sack to be forever squashed and kneaded should fear us. And all those who would stay quiet and inactive in the face of this class war, believing they can drop enough coin into security systems and gates and guard dogs to keep us at bay will come to regret such errors of judgment.

They keep us as far away as they can, don’t they?  They do it with high rents, and loitering laws, and unwritten dress codes, and police, and expensive price tags on meals that cost a week’s pay for most of us. It’s easy for them to keep squeezing the yoke around the necks of people who never can answer back; people who are too busy trying to make rent to be effective activists or in some other way address the injustice that is crushing them. It presents no moral quandary to kill people slowly and by degrees when they are an abstract concept to you. And the poor remain abstract to rich because the media refuses to tell the truth of things, as the media exists as fairy-tales for the rich. And they don’t want to bother their beautiful minds with such icky details. The news blackout of the recent protests at Wall Street insure they won’t have to.

But what if the poor and exploited were to begin showing up everywhere? What if there were no place an Uppercrustian could go without seeing signs of our anger? What if we began leaving our mark…and with it, a strong phrase adopted as our calling card? Something like No More War on the Poor? What if the 1-Percenters began seeing this phrase everywhere they turned? What if it were spraypainted on every Mercedes? What if this phrase were spray-painted on the pretty black asphalt driveways of every congress member’s driveway? What if cards with No More War on the Poor scrawled on them turned up in the dry-cleaning of every Senator? What if that dry-cleaning had poison ivy in it, too? Or bleach? What if their Mercedes began coming back with scratches down the side instead of a wax job? What if their landscaper watered their prize rose bushes with weedkiller instead of water? What if  they could never pinpoint where the ongoing action was coming from…because it was coming from everywhere?

Nobody in the world, nobody in history has ever gotten their freedom by appealing to the moral sense of the people who were oppressing them.”

—Assata Shakur

It would be a voice they could not escape. There would not need to be any organization or central group. It would be a project that millions could undertake. People wouldn’t need to devote ten hours a week in a week already jam packed with duties and exhaustion. A note here, an action there. Wait for opportunity to show itself and then speak in that voice that speaks for us all. And what if a million people were spreading this message? What if ten million were? What if the newspapers had no choice, eventually, but to begin covering the strange flurry of messaging that was showing up on napkins in restaurants, and car doors, and driveways, and in flower deliveries and grocery bags? What if the right people began seeing the many, many disaffected and suffering humans they previously never had to stare at? What if they began feeling cornered and surrounded? What if we remembered that we do surround them?

Perhaps bit by bit, changes would happen. Think of it as a haunting. Or think of it as advertising! Advertising works, you know. If there is no way to turn away from the Coca Cola ad, you will eventually come to memorize it. And whether you like it or not, it will work on you. What if the rich and the crooked were to be haunted by the anger of millions? There would be no formal advocacy group or official that politicians or billionaires could bury under or buy off with good PR, or kickback. There would be no weaseling away from action. Action is all that would alleviate the million-pronged assault. Better conditions for people. Change angry, hungry people who need a way to vent against the injustice into people happy with life because justice is alive and well and affecting them for the better.

It would be one thing if the poorest of us could leave it all up to those who benefit from ignoring their plight. But that would make no sense. Collective anger needs to give voice to the conscience that too many powerful people lack today. Perhaps this particular imagining of a nationwide project—a faceless but inescapable voice—is not the answer. I don’t claim to have an answer. But I know one needs to be found. I know today’s so-called solutions are getting us nowhere. After all, this is not really about an acute crisis, but a long-term pattern and a systemic imbalance. And this systemic imbalance will remain, even after the last of the protestors on Wall Street have gone home.

There is a power differential in play in our nation that is killing most of us. And we need to take some of that power back. It is not only possible for us to do that, it is the only way out.

WE BEGIN, but do not end, with the sensational incident where the Obama White House, under Trumpian pressure, produced for public inspection the President’s “long form” birth certificate.

I do not know how successful I will be in my attempts to navigate the journey, but I think it’s important to move from an immediate feeling of hurt or anger to a broader view of the very thing that moves behind this event and is so upsetting about it. This is what I will try to do.

__

Why can’t we roam this open country?
Oh, why can’t we be what we wanna be?
We want to be free.

–Bob Marley, 3 o’Clock Roadblock

ROADBLOCK

What a frenzy.

What a storm of feelings, thoughts, tweets, and emotions were exploded into view with that one event, where the President of the United States of America—a man of color—answered the insincere jeering of a single white citizen by producing his identity papers for inspection. As if our duly elected President was but a teen at a police checkpoint, wearing baggy pants and with his hands up against the hood. As if he were a young man standing on a corner looking Mexicano, immediately suspect and thus beholden to the law man to prove he was not up to criminal acts. What a shaking of the timbers of racial history were felt up and down the blogosphere in this one simple happening.

And rightly so. What a harsh reality we trade in; that it will take far more time than our grandparents’, parents’, or our own lifetimes to evolve past the sickly, sadistic, inhuman history we Americans share on matters of race. In matters of history—look to Mexico, or China, or Egypt—this country is in an infantile stage. And the things that were done to African Americans, and Indians (indigenous peoples from el Norte as well as from south of the “border”); to Chinese and Japanese and Chileans and so on…. these ghosts will not fade fast.

Donald Trump is one of those ghosts, his ailing caricature of a human form cavorting to and fro, swaying recklessly but cleverly. Almost as if animated by an actual soul, he bellows nearly-intelligible sounds, and the media flocks to absorb the spittle. His expression remains forever puckered like a lemon-shocked anus-mouth, his mind alight with tired stereotypes and bursts of fart-static. A clown who doesn’t have the decency to laugh at himself.

And Donald is so easy to hate, isn’t he? Because he is a hateful man. And because he enlists the powers of hate, hate long rooted in American soil. Hate that long ago drew blood and tossed ropes and smiled for the picture as the body cooled to a dusk-like temperature. Hate that raided Native American villages to murder sleeping children. Hate that buffed its boots before demanding that black men duck their eyes, and go drink from some other fountain. Hate that considers women, and Blacks and Cubans and Haitians and Iraqis and Afghanis and Mexican and Chinese and Vietnamese and Puerto Rican as less than human. Hate today that spends Joe Arpaio’s paycheck, props up his decaying frame, and parades his prisoners in pink. Hate yesterday that reneged on treaties, and swallowed up gold, and burned codices.

Donald Trump is animated by the very same hate that is used to divide so many people today, and strives to obscure the roots of our liberation as it obscures the hands that lock the cuffs on us. It is a disease of the mind and soul called White Supremacy. And in the land wherein this virus thrives, certain kinds of men, with their ballooned minds and feverish egos, get to demand certain concessions from other people: that you surrender your papers; that you not harbor anger in your eye or your tone lest it be beaten out of you; that law shall endorse such beatings; that you prone out on the ground with a gun in your back at a moment’s notice; that you swallow a bullet if the bully feels sexy while perched up there and straddled around your spine. It is a land where you apologize for a role you never asked for but is ascribed to you by thieves and liars; where They will always have the right to tell you to pull over and prove yourself, and where You will always comply and perhaps be allowed to live with just humiliation if you are lucky enough to walk away with your life.

And so the target of so much history, for a day, becomes Donald “I am the Patriarchy” Trump. And many hearts seethe for his being so cruel as to remind us of our history, and to imply that even when you gain The Most Powerful Office In The World, it means nothing next to the anger of a White Man. It was the same reminder Republican Senator Joe “YOU LIE” Wilson gave us when he shouted down the President of the United States in the middle of an address that was adorned with all the pomp and decorum as we see fit to afford our nation’s executive leader. That shout, that demand to show papers, that insistence that you duck your eyes, it hisses You can even become President, but you still are not White. Which means you are not really the President. Don’t go dreaming that somehow you are now more powerful than me, darkie.

And as an immediate and visceral (and predictable) reaction, what did so many of us people of color need to see the President do? We needed him to scoff at the implication that such assertions could be true. We needed him to refute that reality. To deny it exists. To stand up and stand proud. To destroy that reality with a new action.

Was coughing up the papers but then roasting Trump at a gala dinner in front of the Press enough? Was ordering the home invasion and murder of a wanted man of color in Pakistan enough to erase that reality? Perhaps for our empathy with Obama being humiliated, it was. Perhaps now the unpleasant memory of watching the national daddy figure bow to a carnival barker has been mitigated for most. Maybe now that feeling, as if we watched the POTUS hand over his lunch money to bullies, has been nullified, gunsmoke wafting about our heads like purifying incense smoke.

And I suppose it is best to take the man at his word: he saw the Birtherism (also known as “Racism”) wasn’t going to go away and wanted to squash it and force the GOP ravers into a corner by removing what he saw as their last leg in what was left of the Birther argument.

But I do not think it does the larger issue any service to forget it when the feelings fade, or to imagine it resolved because the President has shown his papers, is in the clear, and we are feeling tough again because, damn son—he’s got that killer instinct. Just as Rosa Parks’ challenge was not to one bus driver, but to an entire system of inequality, this matter is much broader and deeper than the pageantry that recently unfolded between two rich men on TV.

Yes, the dynamic where we identify culturally or ethnically in some way with President Obama (and as a man of color, I do) leads us to watch the disgusting Trump claim victory for making the President skip on command, and we fume with empathy. We gnash our teeth and swear our allegiance all over again to Barack, this poor besieged man who has to endure the barbs and slings of Age Old Racism. This intelligent, thoughtful scholar, statesman, gentleman, father and husband. This President who bears up nobly in conditions potentially humiliating, conditions asked of no other President has been before him. We spit on the ground and growl Trump’s name. We swear to show up in the voting booth for the Democrats…as if that in any measurable way addresses the larger issue of Them Who Shall Be Asked For Papers.

CONQUER AND DIVIDE

I should probably clearly state the obvious in case it is not as obvious as I’d hope: the American Black experience is deep, unique, and I highly respect it. I would never claim to see it in all its parts or stand within it. I am not pretending to have any stake or voice therein. At the same time, I have my own experiences as a Xicano, and there is some degree of overlap between the experiences of all people of color in this nation. This I know from years of activism and friendships and conversations with people of different ethnicities.

Also—quite important to suss out and account for—there are (exploitable) gaps between our experiences. It is in those gaps that divide and conquer wedges are introduced by the ruling class.

Strategically, it is in marginalized peoples’ great interest to discover these gaps ourselves so they cannot be exploited casually. It is in our great interest to find them, examine them, and prepare for the attacks that will be launched; attacks that would seek to exploit the latent weaknesses that could threaten our unity as people marginalized and exploited by the oppressive, racist hand of law. Black and Brown alike suffer behind the racist criminal justice system, for starters. Statistics for both Latinos as well as Blacks are disproportionately high for the actual number of crimes that run rampant through all communities, when compared. This is so because the law continues old power differentials and is implemented by human beings who have been conditioned by the same society .

And because law begins as idea, and only becomes strapped with force when enough people agree on that idea.

One of the ways that unfortunate ideas become commonly accepted is by the use of emotional triggers to mislead thought and obscure the true machinations of state or corporate power.

It is necessary to deny the apparent binaries here.

This is not just a black/white issue. Take it from Chuck D. And for all of us who care, there is a way to channel the need to see justice done in the wake of this ugly moment. There are other peoples and communities who would greatly benefit from our consideration in the current context. People who would suffer in continued indignities and abuse were we to avoid using that lens in a broader sense. Other communities that are having their own dignity denied, with not just social pressure demanding they suborn themselves and produce papers for how they look (not white), but laws. Laws and actions, I’m sorry to say, that are supported very much by President Obama. Laws being snuck under the radar that increase the reach of the surveillance state. as well as that feed into the growing prison and detention industry in the U.S. Like the actions of the Department of Homeland Security’s Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE).

I will be more specific on these both in a moment. But I wanted to prepare the soil of your imagination for this turn of thought. I invite you to explore these ideas:

• The President, seemingly the unwilling subject of this degrading and dehumanizing shape of act before our eyes—being forced to show papers in the course of his day, with no reason but for the fact that he is not a pale man called Smith—supports that very idea being implemented for others who Appear Foreign, and is directly involved with making this a reality across America.

• If it bothers me that he, as one person (and a very powerful one on the continuum considered) is subject to this, how can I engage the larger fight where millions are subjected to this? Millions of very vulnerable people. Not graduates of Ivy League schools; not powerful politicians with millions of dollars at their disposal, and millions of people clamoring to back them up.

2. This is not a struggle between Barack H. Obama and Donald Whatever Trump. Nor one between their persons or personalities. Sure, let us consider their power and from where their power derives, and what they use it for. Let us give context to the scene and the players. But we really don’t need to make either of them a demon or a hero for us to successfully engage this important fight. In fact, doing so will dilute our powers of observation and thought.

3. The battle is not between the Evil, Rich, Racist Ole GOP and the Beleaguered, Liberal, Bullied, Righteous Democrats. If I may presume to know and say so, the battle at the heart of this outrage and hurt here, is for principles. For human dignity, and human rights. The battle is for integrity. The battle is against racist hate shaped into popular opinion and finally, given the force of the masses’ will—be it in the shape of social pressure, law, violence, or all three.

Going forward, we must recognize the possible faultline that divides certain viewpoints rooted in the Black American experience from certain viewpoints in the Mexican American community, as well as in the Pro-Migrant community. Especially when exploited by the powers that be. We must dwell in our connectedness. It’s not hard. I know I don’t just care for Mexicanos. I care for all people who suffer behind the racist machinations afoot in the nation today.

4. It’s not citizens vs. immigrants. Human rights, dignity, fairness: these are not things we should let legal terms determine. These are things we want human beings to have. Don’t let the squirming exploiters and vampires at the top whisper to us the nightmarish myth of scarcity. Things only seem scarce when a small group of people need to capitalize on many people’s energies and resources, and this profit-making pyramid shape enforces an artificial scarcity.

When we feel we cannot even take care of “our own,” it’s easy to let a feeling of solidarity slip away. It makes me sad when I see people of color who should understand and join in the struggle that Mexicanos and other immigrants face today, but who veer away from that struggle imagining that immigrants represent a threat to their own community. This is the voice of White Supremacy, and it’s a bullhorn turned on all day and night in this land, so I understand. But when in all important ways our struggle is the same, “our own” can be an expansive thing—and these larger numbers will render us more powerful to fight those exploiters at the top, already unfairly given advantage.

Many of today’s most important issues deal with power differentials between the very rich, and the rest of us. Immigration is one of the most important area for us to mind. Many issues come together here. Drug war. Commerce, and the Economy. Lines of ownership; lines that signify an US and THEM, borders that we end up believing need small army units and millions of dollars of technology in guns, drones, and surveillance equipment to maintain their reality; their solidity.

In the issue of immigration and corporate abuse of borders and employees is revealed the secret of how towns and communities become economically destroyed by corporate powers being above the law, and exploiting the worker. In the selling of the idea that the only people affected are Criminal Illegal Alien Invader Types, the elite continue to exploit our vulnerable brothers and sisters.

In Immigration politics, we see the manipulative hand of Economics, and the fallout of Capitalism and Neoliberalism. Domestically as well as Internationally. Within this struggle are handholds to engage the struggle for working class rights, women’s rights, family rights, culture, reproduction, human rights, our national ethics.

As more and more strife becomes about resources and mobility, more conquer and divide tactics will be put to work in this area of Immigration.

We must remember first and foremost (and again at the end), that the forces that benefit from our being divided will seek to exploit all these key areas. A simple lens adjustment would make that impossible. We must come to realize how many of us share this same struggle; fighting that power that reared it’s ugly naked head recently under the glow of sunlight bouncing off skyscraper windows, and hissed at the President with breath as old and rancid as years of gallows sweat.

TO PUT IT ANOTHER WAY

There are so many discussions about the Arc of Obama in the eye of popular opinion as of yet. We’ve all had an intense experience of some sort from election day until now, though our specific experiences may vary, and our current feelings vary just as much. Some have offered arguable reasons for becoming disenchanted with his administration. I will avoid the political laundry list, some or all of with which you may or may not agree with. That’s not the conversation(s) I am here for. I don’t want to get sidetracked. I don’t want to exploit or even risk the potential differences and faultlines in our unity just for a moment. And when I say “our unity,” I mean working class people. I mean the 99% of income earners in the nation. I mean many many Black, Puerto Rican, Cuban, Mexican, Guatemalan, Dominican, Chinese, Korean or otherwise golden brown beautiful red black people. I mean white people. Here, I talk to all those people marginalized in some way by the powers and status quo that men like Donald Trump act in the service of.

I propose that what we have in common here is the idea of how wrong it is to deny the full dignity and rights to the Other in the name of safety and legal procedure. I suggest that this fight and furious sense of injustice cannot and should not end with the humiliating press conference, nor with the empowering roast of Trump at a dinner you and I had no means nor invitation to attend.

PROMISES, PROMISES

Candidate and President Barack Obama made some very specific promises to crowds of Latinos, in speeches to NCLR and to the immigrant community. He decried the ICE raids that tore parents away from their children, he called the system broken. In passioned speech, he told desperate immigrant families that he had their back. That he understood their pain. That he was determined to make a difference for them. He said he was an ally to Latinos and to Immigrants and that we could count on him.

He then turns around and continues the raids, but in other shapes. He deports more people than George W. Bush does, insuring that many, many children are torn from their parents, after all. He does this in the name of Papers, not in the name of human rights or dignity.

President Obama and Janet Napolitano brag to the Republicans that they are deporting record numbers of undocumented immigrants. He turns his back on his own disabled aunt when the cold eye of ICE falls upon her. He sends troops to the US’ Southern border, when the economic refugees flee conditions in Mexico that have been greatly caused by NAFTA policies (A Democratic accomplishment under Bill Clinton). Those people risking rape, murder, starvation, and poverty to cross the border to find a chance at life don’t need bullets in their heads, they need help accessing resources so they don’t need to flee their homes and families.

Obama’s Department of Homeland Security offers a program called “Secure Communities” (S-Comm) that ties in the FBI and ICE to local police so that anyone apprehended by local police has all their info shared with these other agencies, even if a person is not convicted of anything. We’ve seen how successful Arizona’s SB 1070 has been in disrupting society, and at driving a wedge between local police and many communities where people fear either being detained or simply being hassled based on ethnic signifiers. Many police have protested the implementation of S-Comm, understanding right away how it would harm their relationship with the immediate community and lend a hand to the proliferation of many crimes that would exploit this wedge. A few cities attempted to opt out of S-Comm, but voila! The cloak came off and Obama’s DHS suddenly informed these cities that the program was not, after all, voluntary. Whoops.

Immigrant communities understand that they are being targeted when they are just trying to feed their kids and make a living, often exploited by workplaces that know they live without protection from law or society. But to console the rest who don’t know this, Obama’s White House claims it is only deporting serious criminals. The most cursory examination of reality shows this to be a complete falsehood.

One easy example of this is shown quite blatantly by how the White House is going after activist, friend, and law school student Prerna Lal. Prerna is a positive role model, an engaged, passionate person and organizer. Hardly a serious criminal. (Please sign the petition to help Prerna fight deportation. Her crime? The creation and success of DreamActivist.org. Prerna was simply too successful in organizing students behind the DREAM Act, which—unlike these sly and disingenuous actions by the Department of Homeland Security—does exist in the service of human rights. We don’t need to be frozen in the sixties to aid those fighting for communities before it becomes common sense to do so. We can look Prerna’s way.

The stats tell the same story. The Obama administration is not deporting scores of dangerous criminals but people who have an old offense, or minor offenses, or who get caught up in the widening and growing web of “immigration enforcement,” or who are simply students and children of immigrants and dared to make a valedictorian speech at their school, or reach out to help other people in the same plight. Sometimes they are simply driving home from work, and get pulled over by an old, white, sheriff who might as well be Donald Trump. They get asked for their birth certificate because their name sounds…un-American.

COME TOGETHER

It’s so easy for us to stay firm in our personal experience and all the ways it feeds our own heart. One of the major premises in this article (or ramble depending on how you look at it) is that we proceed deeper and deeper into times when it will be important to not let ourselves be divided in the wrong ways. The Earth, mother of all, is increasingly poisoned and robbed…and those plunderers conspire to keep us misinformed about her condition. As she sickens in different ways; as our reckless, imbalanced, capitalist society veers drunkenly to and fro; as the divides grow starker and the ultra rich more intoxicated by desperation, the powers that be will work harder and harder to keep us at each other’s throats; to offer us others who we can throw to the curb in order to keep our own apparently threatened freedom.

We can feel empathy, kinship, or even an affection for the person named Barack Obama; for the challenges he faces navigating a system so strongly interwoven with racist currents, yet simultaneously see how today’s policies enacted by the creepily-named Department of Homeland Security exist to grow the racist prison syste<[/a>, and aid racist behaviors and values through the normalization of certain laws.

Final notes: Thanks to friend (and immigration lawyer) Dave Bennion for help with resources.

Crossposted at Shakesville

CHE GUEVARA IS A HERO not only to many Cubanos, but to all people who understand and fight for autonomy from oppressive forces and human rights for all.

Why do I write of this now? Recently a question was posed as to if he deserved his place as a Chicano icon and legend; after all, went the argument, why should we revere this Argentinian who fought for Cuba’s independence? After all, it went on, he did nothing for México. He never once uttered the word “Chicano.”

But posing this division—that Cuban icons (or Argentinians) ought not be embraced by Mexicanos, or Mexican Americans—is not only ignorant of Che’s legacy, but at heart yet another symptom of the colonized mind. And I should make clear that my reply here—and any hints of ire you may pick up in putting down my thoughts—are not directed to the online friend who inspired this post. I think it was a good set of questions. And I’m glad I have the chance to answer it. Any intensity I employ here is aimed at the matrix of obfuscation and lies that demonize gente in our ancestral lands and attempt to keep us mental and physical captives of a corrupt system. If I wanted to play snarky, I’d simply reply that much-revered Chican@ (and Mexican@) icon Nuestra Señora de Guadalupe certainly never uttered the word “Chicano,” either. But I think the question deserves some thought, not a cheap semantics volley. Which is why I brought it here.

What is it that Latin America has in common? Why would México understand revolution? What unites the movements in Latin America—from México to Venezuela—so often? What oppression is it that has spread throughout all of Latin America and does to this day? What shadow covers one and all, despite their other struggles? It is the same shadow that has fallen on Haiti, on Iraq, on Afghanistan, on India, and on México. It is greed and white supremacy. It is non-concern for human rights. It is a loathing of the poor. It is a yearning to be of the elites at the expense of all else. It is the audacity of hypocrisy—such as President Obama’s criticizing China’s Hu Jintao on human rights while the USA maintains torture sites on foreign soil, the right to assassinate US citizens without due process, and drone attacks that slaughter countless innocents in illegal and undeclared wars abroad.

This shadow that unites Latin America specifically is cast by the imperialist exploitive forces of Europe and North America who time and time again install occupational forces throughout so much of the world, steal resources, undermine populist efforts, and then, propagandize the media with tales of Latin America’s deviance; their criminality; their weakness. Do we, as Chican@s, suffer here in the USA from the echoes of this propaganda? You better believe it.

This is why the politically involved Chicano understands Che’s fight. Che ought only be a Cuban icon? Perhaps. Many Cubanos do not embrace Che for where some of Fidel Castro’s choices, or for the same reasons as posed at the link above. Che was not Cuban, but an Argentinian whose family lived in Mexico while he fought in Cuba. He was a doctor in el D.F! But what took him away from his familia? Corazón did. Concern for imbalance and human suffering. Che Guevara was horrified by poverty and by peoples’ inability to be treated for sickness. He was not someone who wrote in a blog every day thinking that was somehow going to attain this goal. He was a man of action. Is that something a Chican@ ought to get behind? Yes, he was extreme, and willing to bring violence behind such goals. Only unlike powerful nations in that they bring violence to continue an unfair imbalance of wealth and hegemony in the name of fossil fuels. Just as Batista’s military brought violence on his own citizens, torturing adults and executing even children attempting to squeeze them for information on the rebel forces in Cuba. Che’s violence was meted out in the name of human rights. Much as the mythical character Robin Hood. But instead of wearing tights, he brought a rifle and machete. Che’s vision was for global revolution to attain justice. Not just for Cuba. After Cuba, he wanted to take his fight first to the rest of Latin America. Which is why he died in captivity in Bolivia, after all.

Why did so many campesinos in Cuba accept him, ultimately, and support the revolution? Why did he win the support of not only the poor but the middle classes eventually? Do not the divisions that cause this question about whether us Xican@s should celebrate his life and efforts exist, too, between all Latin Americans? They do. And as you know, there is no common and all enduring bond between “Latin@s” within the US. The USA holds a microcosm of those divisions. Cubanos, Mexicanos, Puerto Ricans, Chileans, Argentinians, Venezuelans, and so on—you don’t need me to tell you that we struggle within the hierarchies and divisions sown between our peoples by the government that rules this very nation. Despite our being lumped together as Hispanics, or Latin@s—or Spics. These divisions, even while we all live here, are a product of colonization themselves and too often, prove stronger than the bonds that ought unite us.

Why was Che able to bridge the differences in ideology and methods that created various rebel factions in Cuba when he brought Fidel’s war to Santa Clara, closer and closer to Havana, and united them under his command? Why did Che speak (in the UN, no less) about blacks and Latinos and other minorities in the US living in “invisible cages”? What did he mean, referencing a sleep that we would (and should) wake from? He was reminding us, in public, in the full glare of cameras and history, standing in the belly of the beast that these cages—oppressive containers created by corrupt systems we cannot see—determine so much of our fate. And they keep us fighting amongst each other. They pose divisions between peoples who ought to band together to fight the real oppression. He warned us not to buy into the “Self Made Man” myth.

The amount of poverty and suffering required for the emergence of a Rockefeller, and the amount of depravity that the accumulation of a fortune of such magnitude entails, are left out of the picture, and it is not always possible to make the people in general see this.”

- Che Guevara

Che’s philosophies and speeches and diaries reflect ideas much larger than an effort to oust Batista from Cuba. When he talked of love in the revolutionary’s heart; a love that enables her to fight for justice, her family, and her puebla, he talks of ideas that unite all people. (Or should.) When he speaks of the Imperialist US forces that divide and suck blood from Latin America, he speaks of ideas that affect not just Latin America, but you and me—we “Chicanos.” Us, the hybrid results of that colonization meeting the indigenous with a sprinkle of distance and comfortable living thrown in the mix.

Some of us, far too many of us, who are descended from Latin America (often with family there even now), fight to defend those very divisions and that exploitation, because we benefit from it or because we have been brainwashed by the ocean of propaganda that informs the mainstream of literature and film and television, all intended to continue the influence and inertia of anti-populist reign. Imperialist nations punish severely any of their intended subjects for remembering the truth, for having heart, or worse—throwing off the chains that bind. Haiti, Cuba, and México are all nations that pay this toll to various extents. It was the USA that sent weapons into Bolivia and trained their soldiers, aiding and abetting in the capture and murder of Che Guevara. Just as it is the USA today who sends weapons into México to aid the corrupt and installed Felipe Calderón as he slaughters the citizens of México. You see what the USA’s vision of human rights and health care is. It certainly isn’t to treat all and any whenever they suffer. It certainly isn’t to educate any and all, despite what nation they came from. Look to Arizona.

Where ought the Xican@ stand in this continuum?

Here the US government is occupying Guantánamo as we speak! The USA’s military forces reside on Cuban land and have constructed a torture and prison facility that the government stocks with individuals from Afghanistan in a perverse retaliation for an attack on Wall Street that was (ostensibly) perpetrated by Saudi Arabians. And all the while, we well-to-do, well-educated, well-fed offspring of both the oppressor and the oppressed who ought to be using all our power to help our disempowered brethren in Latin America are instead, arguing against a liberator and rebel worthy of lionizing, if any ever were.

Those who criticize youth for wearing Che's image would much rather you be too embarrassed to continue than actually inform yourself.

When Che was able to recruit so many peasants and townspeople to his cause, his ability and methods echo the dynamics that allowed the people in México to defeat the imperialist French at the Battle of Puebla, using ordinary objects. Rakes, sticks, stones, stampeding cattle. Like the mythologized early American patriots who attacked the Imperialist British scattershot and hiding out in the woods; like the Han warriors in China who defended against Cao Cao’s superior forces in the Battle of Chibi (Red Cliffs), Che fought off larger numbers and more powerful weapons, and eventually gave his life, for the Peoples’ right to be free from tyranny. How involved in la lucha today are you to believe that changing avatars on a social media application is resistance to government oppression?How revolutionary is it to sit in a well-cooled theater, chewing red licorice and cheering for the rebel alliance to defeat George Lucas’ imagined Empire, but then return to the bosom of the actual Empire and condemn true rebel forces?

Does Che deserve to be an icon for Xicanos, Xicanas, Latinas, Latinos? Only if we remember where the struggle lies and what it is about, at heart. Only if we believe that truth and autonomy and human rights are worth dying for. Only if we truly believe that those with the truth, and the welfare of the People, on their agenda are in the moral right, despite how many guns, tanks, or hypocritical speeches about Democracy and Justice are on the other side.

This episode of News With Nezua is brought to you by Center for New Community. YouTube version here. Past episodes are archived here.

YESTERDAY’S SICK WARMONGERING SCION OF AMERICA, George W. Bush, once appeared on television and sternly scolded the People for taking television too seriously.

That is, this pampered rich boy who had every thing stolen for him in his life, swaggered up on his pulpit and berated the entire nation, warning us not to have too many emotions and thoughts due to all the televised news about death in Iraq; about suicide bombings in Iraq; about the Empire spasms that lashed out taking lives, maiming babies, weeping spent uranium. “The explosions on your TV.”

And I think that little irony there says it all about today’s media, about today’s “News” channels. We are supposed to take them seriously, even as they tell us not to do so. An inverted knot of suppressed and sublimated emotion and mangled thought process is how they’d have us. A busted open container they can pour poison into. But before that, like a vampire, suck up the energies and spirit of so many, and from all sides of the political spectrum. Inside this beast’s festering jaws are clenched a fabricated world brightly and wretchedly illuminated as if by 100,000 limbs set alight by white phosphorus.

Inside that box, the Iraq disaster is done with. Inside that box, it makes sense to keep bleeding billions into the Afghanistan sands. Inside that box, no important questions matter. Inside that box, your own heart and mind can’t fit. What would (does) our world look like outside of that box?

Today’s Right wing is not worth listening to any more than it makes sense to stick your arm into a spinning garbage disposal. What of those those who watch these hell-hearted plasticmen and seethe? Or mock them on a blog? Or debunk TV arguments every day of the year? A massive amount of energy and time is spent doing this. It’s sort of weird. Who do they watch for? Not for me. Some will claim it is a service. Do they do it for you? They deplete their own energies, and accomplish what? What is accomplished each day by doing this?

In truth, I’m sure it is a service for a few. Is it the most valuable service? Perhaps not. What of pooling all that time, pooling any monies, and creating a new station. Or perhaps a new network via radios. Yes, radio. This tool that many more people can use, and even carry mobile. A tool that many of lesser means can broadcast with, no less.

And to do what? Simply reporting the state of the world as it truly is. Sowing the airwaves with hope, with positivity, with history lessons. With plans, with campaigns, with community. Completely tuning out the false narrative as you would tune out  a sick individual on a corner, ranting about death, devils, and disaster. Would you follow that person around, reinterpreting all their madness for the crowd? Would you shout side by side and call it a service?

This motion is not so much popular, though. The shape of thought that would completely swerve away and build something new in the place of something unsightly, unsafe, or unsound. Is that a revolutionary act? It is, by definition. Reform seeks to take something broken and reshape it. Redundancy says do it over and over even when it does nothing much. Revolution says that Thing is not worth reshaping, nor is it worth your energies and time. Revolutionary thought says you have the power and means and ability to make something new, in place of the old. But today’s Left is not revolutionary, of course.

Lately I hear a lot about how while so many are misguidedly blaming ALL muslims for 9/11, it was only a small cadre of radical extremist muslims who attacked us on 9/11.

Is that true?

Do you even know–as a person–who attacked us on 9/11? I don’t. How am I to know? How are we to know? I still have the newspaper where some foggy screen caps of a Fake Osama Bin Laden were shown supposedly crowing about the WTC attacks. For a tape that would be the hardest evidence in USA possession of who made the biggest hit on our country in its entire history, it faded out of existence very fast, eh? But then, I already said it’s fake.

Do you know it was the Taliban? Really? Why? Because your TV told you? Because the lying, corrupt government told you? That same government that was making deals with the Taliban in August of 2001? The same government that has been trying to sink its derricks into Central Asian oil fields for years? Why? Because they claimed 19 passports floated out of the completely exploded plane down onto the street and somehow stuck out in all that clutter, debris, ash, and litter?

What evidence do we have that the WTC were taken down by the people our government claims? What evidence personally? What trials brought to light the guilty? What process made this clear? What oracle pronounced this truth? The very same TV that our own government’s head of state told us not to take seriously? What forces forbade you to question this? The Right, and yes, the Left, too. From Bill Maher to DailyKos—earnest questions about this catastrophe that changed everything in our nation, from law to war to monies spent in congress, to school lessons—were verboten. Despite the shabbiest case ever built against any major crime. And those who insisted we examine it were demonized by those same Liberal forces, as we are today. Just as it has been the Liberals overwhelmingly leading the charge to sneer at those of us who still believe in protest, rallies, and boycotts.

That is your (Professional) Left.

Obviously, in 2010, what is ancient is again new. The empire is well into its recycling phase. We see conquer and divide. Hucksters and snake oil salesmen. Blatant class war. PSYOPS and a host of control mechanisms to provide a manufactured reality that keeps the People scattered, confused, scared, angry, and mostly, full of fake information. We were attacked and traumatized a decade ago, lied to about it by those who are supposed to protect us and be of us, and this rending of the truth helped destroy us as a confident and sane people.

We tried again to hope and believe in truth when Obama was elected, but as much as some “progressives” still cling to their ideology and party, it’s clear on a gut level that we were had and that the strongest forces in our nation today are those of war, greed, and deception.

And now, nobody believes in much of anything anymore as a result. And we are fast unraveling. Truth means nothing and TV pays it not even the tribute of a gesture. Racism is part of everyday speech, political campaigns, and dialogue. Hate groups are hand in hand with government. White supremacists roam the border and carry badges and guns, too. Laws that let police be even more racist in their operations than before are being launched left and right.

Even those who fight every day to maintain belief know, in their belly, that the game is rotten to the core. This is driving us mad, it is wrecking national sanity. Or causing people to simply turn away.

It’s not just because Obama is black that the nation is flipping out. It’s also because all the illusions of national identity and ideology that we were given as children have fallen apart. Now naked power rules, and shows itself in gross class war and cooked up news shows, court rulings, and police actions that make clear who will be okay tomorrow, and who will not. Those of us with little money or position understand we will soon be living in mildewed tents on the outskirts, while those with money or power will continue to enjoy tax breaks, ballrooms, and well-buttered toast smothered with imported jams.

Dreams of justice and fairness have been toppled.

Once that sinks in fully, things will become very ugly indeed. But many of us are in denial, in shock, or yet to see the final foundation buckling. Still listening to the siren song of TV.

Were there someone or some ones capable of organizing even a fraction of us—they’d need lots of money, and yet not to be beholden to the ideology of the Right—we might have a chance against our enemies. Our enemies are greed and disinformation. And a state out of control. It is those same illusions given us as children. It is the inertia that shoves us cliffward. It is the voice of the Television. It is today’s Liberal brain, brain like a slave, stooped over with the load of delusion, but weary and with no place to go to get away from it. The Left is a zombie holding a flag, with all its sly use of the Right’s most drastic weapons, with its reinforcing at key moments, what harms the People, with no real plan or courage to enact something better, something revolutionary. At every juncture where the Left might make a real stand and make a difference, it suddenly caves in. Just when the People might again hope or benefit. But it must. Because, you see, even the “left” politicians on the national stage know the deal. They hold no hope for justice or truth, either. But LIBERAL is their brand and they are stuck with it.

The GOP? The GOP is but the blood-flecked ID expanding like a rogue universe of wicked cells, the diseased and disintegrating lobe of the human condition. The freaked out, frantic, midnight acid-head mind that whips and coils like a half-smashed snake in the sand.

I’m not better than anyone else in all of this. I soothe myself with TV, too. I dive deeply into illusion. I simply happen to turn to it for storytelling, for movies. Otherwise, I’ll be out in nature. Give me the sun, the wind, the water, and the touch of someone close to me. And give me stories. Stories of clear-eyed humans, of paths lined with golden wheat that sways in the sun, trod by brave souls undertaking important journeys. Give me stories of unpolluted hearts, and simple, wise, and humble humans. Give me stories of the past, of over there, of a day faraway. A day when this looming tower of babbling bullshit has finally collapsed and lain itself upon the ground to bake and bleach under an aging sun, before long to be but a skeleton for tomorrow’s mountains.

IT’S HARD TO KNOW WHAT TO SAY anymore on Arizona. The pus-ridden boil on the back of the USA’s purported ideals of justice for all. The exploded sore that reveals the ugly fragments and fibers of truth that typically weave so skillfully behind all our polite society lies.

Some say just as well; let this fight be on. It has always been here, skulking. And then sometimes, we fear what that fight will bring. Do we really want to see things go down this way? Can this not, finally, be avoided?

Pundits, bloggers, thinkers, people reach here and there, fix on this or that aspect, comment on what we can. But mostly, we watch in slow motion as reason and kindness crumble and a gross, vile, vindictive, dishonest, persecutory agenda dusts off its bone-spurred wings and launches into the Arizona sky. Who will bring this beast to bay? What cost by then?

And do we now see a sad mutation of our once-beautiful América? Or do the scales fall from our eyes to reveal the true, gleeful, unabashed visage of the monster we’ve been riding so many years, so high over these here crimson waves of grain?

NAM EthnoBlog, by Sandip Roy, Jun 14, 2010

Where is Nina Simone when you need her? Arizona needs her.

First there was Sheriff Joe Arpaio, shackling the undocumented, and marching them to camps down the baking streets of Phoenix.

Then came SB 1070 which requires the police to stop anyone who “looks” like they might be illegal and demand papers.

Then came word that ethnic studies programs were being targeted for being divisive. HB 2281 banned classes for particular ethnic groups or any courses that promoted ethnic solidarity instead of treating people as individuals.

If that wasn’t enough teachers with heavy accents were singled out. The Department of Education wants to reassign teachers whose accents are too heavy. The goal, apparently is to make sure there are no teachers with “faulty English” in Arizona. Let’s hope former President George W. Bush never goes looking for a teaching job in that state.

And now Sen. Russell Pearce, the man behind SB 1070 is revealing his true aim – the Fourteenth Amendment. A story in Time Magazine says buoyed by poll numbers for his illegal immigration crackdown Pearce wants to deny birth certificates to children born in Arizona of parents are here illegally.

Pearce says democracy supports him – 58% of Americans polled by Rasmussen think that children of illegal immigrants should not receive citizenship.

Friends say is the Grand Canyon state going off the deep end?

When four young black girls were killed in the Baptist church bombing in 1963, the story goes Nina Simone locked herself in her room and said she wanted to build her own gun.

In her book I Got Thunder – Lashonda Barnett who interviewed Simone, says her then husband dissuaded Simone telling her “Music is your weapon.” Four hours later she emerged with Mississippi Goddamn.

No church has been bombed in Arizona. And Gov. Jan Brewer assures the public that SB 1070 will be implemented without racial profiling. How? Don’t worry everyone is getting training. Hopefully. That will make former Arizona Governor Raul Castro, a Mexican American, relieved. He has been picked up by the police when he was a superior court judge and asked for his papers. He didn’t have them on him and they almost took him into custody. What he was doing was that most suspicious of activities, the “illegal dead giveaway” – painting a fence. (Oh, Tom Sawyer, where are you now?)

Constitutional experts say that if Arizona really goes after “anchor babies”, the courts will quickly strike it down.

But that’s not the point. The point is, Arizona will have moved the needle so far to the extreme on the issue of immigration SB1070 will start looking fair and balanced. Activists and politicians will think they have scored a victory because they beat back the attack on the Fourteenth Amendment, while SB 1070 remains in place.

Already in post-SB 1070 days, you hear less about all those other agreements already existing between sheriffs departments and ICE, where sheriff deputies can act as ICE agents. At least they are just checking once they pick up someone for some crime, we think, they aren’t just demanding papers because you look illegal.

It’s just like how John Ashcroft suddenly became a portrayed as a brave hospital-bed defender of our civil liberties, once Antonio Gonzalez came on Attorney General the scene.

As Arizona turns up the heat, pushing the rhetoric to even more ludicrous heights, SB 1070 will start sounding more mainstream.

Can’t you see it
Can’t you feel it
It’s all in the air

Lord have mercy on this land of mine
We all gonna get it in due time
I don’t belong here
I don’t belong there
I’ve even stopped believing in prayer

Arizona Goddam.

THE ARIZONA BOYCOTT situation is an interesting one. I’d warn against thinking this is gonna fade away. There is a reason that progressive alliances, black leadership and organizations and others are referencing civil rights struggles. There is a reason today that aspiring conservative politicians like Rand Paul and pundits like Glenn Beck are openly arguing against the Civil Rights Era’s gains. This is one of those moments in time.

This is much bigger than one law in Arizona, and these times require our energy and hands, should we have them to lend.

Around the nation, the signs are encouraging. The boycott against SB 1070 grows stronger every day. So stay strong, gente. Many people refused to ride the bus that would not permit Rosa Parks  to sit where she wanted. They did it in solidarity, not because they needed a jog; not because they wanted the inconvenience; not because they did not want a ride! Many others rallied around Rosa Parks—and all others throughout time who stood against injustice—because they knew the sacrifice was worth fighting for what is right.

The Diamondbacks games continues to function as a bullhorn for the boycott:

Politics and sports came together Monday evening when several hundred demonstrators used the opener of the Los Angeles Dodgers’ three-game series against the Arizona Diamondbacks to protest that state’s new immigration bill.

Holding placards that read, among other things, “Arizona Shame on You” and chanting “Boycott Arizona!” demonstrators marched up Elysian Park Avenue toward Stadium Way and assembled on the four corners outside the entrance to the stadium, walking back and forth across the streets. …

“We’re not going to stop them from attending the game,” said John Morales, one of the organizers of the protest. “They’ve already bought their tickets. We’re trying to make a connection between sports and politics…. The Diamondback team is not just from Arizona; the ownership has contributed to the Republican Party that has spearheaded the legislation.”

The Progressive Leadership Alliance of Nevada may soon come on board:

Several cities around the country are already boycotting Arizona in response to the law. Now, the Progressive Leadership Alliance of Nevada, or PLAN, wants city councils in Reno and Las Vegas to do the same. “We want to send a message to Arizona that this type of police state tactic is not welcome in our country,” said PLAN’s Communications Director Launce Rake. “Let’s not do business with Arizona businesses and let’s definitely not send any government people there to conventions.”

Pablo Alvarado, President of the National Day Laborer Organizing Network joined thousands of protestors and concerned humans in Phoenix on Saturday to protest SB 1070. He talks about how there will soon be a way to keep supporting companies who are oppose SB 1070, and leave the others in the cold:

Alvarado said the National Day Laborer Organizing Network — who organized the rally and march along with Puente Arizona, a human rights organization spear-heading the anti-SB 1070 movement — is working on a method for companies that oppose the immigration law to be identified by shoppers who participate in the boycott.

“We are creating a ‘human rights zone,’ and all of those [sympathetic] businesses are going to be hit in the next few weeks,” Alvarado said. “And those businesses are going to have a sticker that says … ‘This is a human rights zone, come and sponsor this business.’”

Kanye West, Zach de la Rocha, Cypress Hill, and other musicians are on board with the boycott:

“Fans of our music, our stories, our films and our words can be pulled over and harassed every day because they are brown or black, or for the way they speak, or for the music that they listen to,” said de la Rocha, who has been outspoken about the law since2 the bill was first introduced earlier this year. “We are asking artists the world over to stand with us, and now allow our collective economic power to be used to aid and abet civil and human rights violations that will be caused by Arizona’s odious law.”

The Los Angeles Unified School District and the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors may soon join the Los Angeles City Council in boycotting Arizona:

On Tuesday, the Los Angeles Unified School District and the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors will consider adding their opposition to the law. The school district is considering a resolution condemning the law and exploring ways of curtailing support for Arizona and companies based there.

The resolution, proposed by board President Monica Garcia and members Nury Martinez and Yolie Flores, would call for LAUSD civics and history classes to include a discussion of the Arizona law “in the context of unity, diversity and equal protection for all.” …

Last month, the Los Angeles City Council approved an economic boycott of Arizona.

Minnesota Native Americans and others gathered this past weekend to support the boycott:

May 29, Forth Snelling, Minnesota. Minnesotans of many ethnicities gathered to support the Arizona Boycott in protest of new immigration law (SB170) and to prevent introduction of similar laws here.

Alpha Phi Alpha Fraternity Inc., America’s oldest African American college fraternity, has decided to move their national convention from Phoenix, Arizona to Las Vegas, Nevada in solidarity with the boycott against Arizona, and in opposition to the recent passage of SB 1070. The decision is “an expensive one,” according to The Root:

The decision to boycott Arizona is not without a cost for Alpha Phi Alpha. Breaking contracts with Phoenix area hotels, catering, and meeting rooms means the fraternity is now in litigation with contractors. And while Mason can’t give an exact amount on how much the boycott will cost the fraternity, he estimates that Alpha is looking at over $300,000 in penalties. That doesn’t include over 3,000 Alphas who will have to change their flight and hotel reservations as soon as possible.

“I’m ecstatic that our dear fraternity took a hard-line stance with a state known for attempting to block our Brother Martin Luther King Jr.’s national holiday,” said Terry Calhoun, a financial planner and Alpha Phi Alpha member from Illinois. Calhoun purchased his discount airline tickets to Phoenix months ago, and will now be paying extra for the trip to Las Vegas. But he’s fine with it.

“I would be willing to go to a campfire to hold the national convention as opposed to going to the oppressive state of Arizona,” Calhoun said.

Senator Robert Menendez, Democrat of New Jersey and chairman of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, is urging major league baseball players to boycott the 2011 All-Star game, which is scheduled to take place in Phoenix, to protest SB 1070:

In every century and generation, immigrants have contributed to the progress, prosperity and vitality of this nation. This law undermines that shared history by promoting discrimination against one group of people. As someone who has and continues to fight for comprehensive immigration reform, I believe the Arizona law is a call to action for reform of our nation’s broken immigration system. However, while I understand the frustration about the failures of our current system, states should not be permitted to enact their own discriminatory immigration laws while the federal government works to reform our laws. The Arizona law is an embarrassment to our country and a call to action to our communities to stand up against injustice.

For these reasons, I ask that you consider boycotting the All-Star Game in Arizona until SB1070 is repealed or the League decides to move the game to an alternate location.

Of course, as FOX news and others love to broadcast whenever possible, a MSNBC/TELEMUNDO poll taken at one point showed that a majority of whites support SB 1070, even while a majority of Latinos did not. (Do you think this is accurate, or being used by media branches to divide us? If it is a real divide, do you wonder why this might be? Why racial profiling consequences intensifying does not affect whites’ peace of mind?) And you can easily find many op-eds, articles, pundits and even politicians who run the gamut from baffled as to why the boycott even exists and keeps growing, to enraged that it does. There are people doing their best, even, to organize spending sprees in Arizona! They seem to love the idea of SB 1070 that much. As if they personally need there to be increased scrutiny and policing and Your-Papers-Please checkpoints in the nation.

The faultlines between whites and non-whites in perceptions, feelings, realities of jail, social repercussions of state violence—it all becomes clear, now. Of course that faultline has been there all along, though we’ve all become zoned out, used to dealing, adapted in our own ways. Either blinded by comfort and privilege, or just dealing with the imbalances wherever they exist. Or some mix of both?

Either way, something has happened in America. Something inexorable, no doubt. We are living in important times, just as every other person on Earth did. And here we live through an unveiling. Of our own natures. How we deal with that will define us, no doubt. In my wildest dreams I hope we all come together. I don’t see that we are there yet, as a People. Those in power are mostly holding on tighter. Which means status quo, more suffering, worse division, more racism, more prisons, more death, more poor people, more disease, more environmental disaster, more war. Those are all kindred to increased racial profiling, greater numbers of people in prison, more divided families, greater police powers, greater state power, further persecution of people of color as well as vulnerable families, men, women, and children.

This is much bigger than one law in Arizona.

But the big battle is the little battle, too. Which is why when I see factions of people or people baffled at the boycott, or in support of SB 1070; when I see them clamp down harder on views that support the corrupt status quo, I see there is a lot of fighting left to do.

Last week, Ohio radio station WTVN-AM (owned by Clear Channel, the station quick to act against errant curse words or bared breasts) actually had a nifty little contest in support of SB 1070:

610 WTVN would like to send you where Americans are proud and illegals are scared, sunny Phoenix, Arizona! You’ll spend a weekend chasing aliens and spending cash in the desert, just make sure you’ve got your green card! Win round trip airfare to Phoenix, hotel accommodations, and a few pesos in spending cash – just register below!”

This weird (not-racist) contest was a reaction to Columbus mayor Michael Coleman’s decision to join the boycott and ban city employees from visiting Arizona in any official capacity (they are of course free to go on their own time and dollar if they like). You’ll note that article has Mister Coleman’s somber and poignant and personal thoughts on the Civil Rights struggle that affected his family. His great-great-great Grandmother was a slave, and she lived to 105. And he was infused with her memory and her experience when he made the decision he did.

And what was Clear Channel’s little radio station Dj’s response to this? To give away a weekend trip “chasing aliens”; where “illegals are scared” and as the winner of the contest, you are free to sun and hunt, and spend cash.

This is much bigger than one law in Arizona.

NCLR’s Janet Murguia reacted to the station’s contest:

“The passage of SB 1070 has provoked a lot of reprehensible anti-Latino and anti-immigrant rhetoric but a radio station bankrolling someone to ‘hunt’ human beings for sport represents a new low,” stated Janet Murguía, NCLR President and CEO.  “The owners and directors of WTVN might think that this is all in good fun but what is happening to Latinos – citizen, legal, and undocumented alike – in Arizona is no joke.  We are asking for an immediate and unequivocal apology from the station and its parent company.”

Noting that the station’s contest has triggered considerable outrage in Latino communities in Ohio, Arizona, and nationwide, Murguia concluded, “It is important to keep in mind that the American people own the airwaves over which WTVN broadcasts.  As such, we will ask FCC Commissioners to ensure that threats against American citizens — such as the one encouraged and promoted by WTVN  – are not taken lightly and dealt with in an appropriate manner as soon as possible.”

(By the way, if you feel that contest was an unacceptable use of OUR airwaves, voice your feelings about that contest directly:)

WTVN Mailing Address:
2323 W. Fifth Ave.
Suite 200
Columbus, OH 43204

Telephone:
Main Office: 614-486-6101
Main Fax: 614-487-2559

Mike Elliott:
Executive Producer – Program Director

mikeelliott@wtvn.com

So we fight on.

You cannot help but look over to the White House every now and then to see if the Bipartisan Bubble that shields the DOJ and the Oval Office from further Fierce Urgency of Nows being afflicted upon them has weakened, or lifted. But whether it’s lukewarm statements on flotillas, hazy afternoon beer summits, or impassioned (but later rescinded or ignored) bankster-scoldings or denunciations of ICE and in favor  of swift immigration reform, the Obama administration has made clear its shape and method. This is no fire in the belly leadership. This is a loud sound, stall-em-off, change the subject, do-just-enough-to-quell-the-outcry, make no fast or dramatic moves administration.

That means we really do have to push our “representatives” hard. Even harder. And keep waking up the nation. More writing, more talking. More calls. More art, more videos. More letters. More boycott actions, more people, more towns. We must make the chronically comfortable feel that the situation for others is exactly as uncomfortable, untenable, and unlivable as the rest of us know it to be already.

Keep on, and we can make change. Think back to all those who sacrificed to bring us where we are today. True, there have always been sneery, bloated defenders of the status quo like Glenn Beck, but social change that changes the lives of many for the better began not with millionaire puppets with vapo-rub under the eyes and book tours under the arm, but with regular people. Every day people. Who made a stand. That’s what we can do. We don’t have the Beck bullhorn or the Rupert riches, but we are many more, and we stand on the shoulders of many regular people who discovered they could be giants, given the right cause.

This is the right cause. This is much bigger than just one law in Arizona.

Okay. They aren’t children so much as the children of undocumented parents. They are young adults, and they act because they must. Ah, if only politicians possessed as much courage and morality.

News With Nezua vids first appear Monday mornings at La Frontera Times. Wednesdays they show up at UMX, as well as in a dim setting at The XOLAGRAFIK Theater. View YouTube version here.

Tam Ngoc Tran and Cinthya Natahlie Felix were hard workers, deep thinkers, and big hearted people who left the Earth suddenly on Saturday when a truck crossed over into their lane and crashed into them.

Tam and Cinthya were accomplished students, both well-loved and well-known warriors in the undocumented civil rights struggle of today, and advocates for the DREAM act—which only decent and moral politicians support.

These two humans dedicated so many hours of their lives and energy from their hearts to speak for a greater awareness of these challenges, as well as to try and make the DREAM Act a reality…I am confident they would want this part of their lives to aid the same fight.

So, for the ones still living and forced into a limbo none of us would want for ourselves; and in honor of Tam and Cinthya, we must pass the DREAM Act. These are not “issues.” These are people’s lives we are talking about.

SOME POSTS begin as a reaction. A reaction to ugly events involving hate crime, or discrimination, or persecutory legislation, or some other spur that launches anger, protectiveness, or an instinct to fight. These are necessary when they arise organically. And so is outrage in the social body.

I remember as a child being so amazed that so many (everyone, insisted my immature mind) took everything in stride. I mention this now and then: the sensation I had that the world was upside down and burning and everyone in the world (i.e., school, stores, etc) was happy go lucky and not talking about it. (I am sure this had something to do with the conversations and teachings in my early home and community.)

So, I grew to feel out of touch with society’s reactions and evaluations of life as presented in larger settings, TV, newspapers, general social dialogue. And I suppose that is part of the age. These are normal conflicts we have to evaluate at a certain age.

In too many cases we simply have to accept untruths or mechanisms that confuse the mind. We read the real thinkers in college, and then we pretend it was just for a course. We accept that when X is really going on, the TV will frame it as Y. We accept that advertisements, essentially, lie. We learn to restrain, perform, operate in society. We are taught not to be ourselves, as it does not pay. We are sent on job interviews to offer a well-groomed doppelganger which may have little basis on truth, but have more  to do with how you can appear a valuable commodity to a corporate mechanism. The media helps sell wars that feed the fatally wealthy, and focuses on celebrity nose jobs while the public is robbed blind on the backside by the bankers.

You know how this goes, top to bottom. Same as it ever was.

But did it jam at you in your adolescence? Did the first sweeping vista of disappointment make you weep? Did that initial understanding of how little we expected of ourselves make you angry? Did it nearly topple your mind to gaze out at the wasteland of hypocrisy? Did the wrongness matter? Did it touch your inspired soul, your feeling soul, your uncallused soul and provoke a reaction?

There was too much pretend-truth and too much noise and too many lies in the world, and too much apathy. When I was young, it chewed at me. It would not let me be. I could not imagine why there were not armies of citizens banding together to fix every ailment facing the People.

I was a little naive.

But to me, this is adolescence in US society as I’ve seen it, in more than a couple cities and states. Children, those vast stores of human possibility, reach the end of the playground grass. They must grapple with letting the reality of our sickened culture overwhelm the childheart with one, long, coal-tinged static-studded sigh.

We at least make a decision about how we as people fit in and engage when truth is a disrespected and nearly non-existent entity in a thriving system, when greed and fear are leveraged and fed, when misdirection and manipulation drives the media in most cases.

And with this body and mind…with this amazing system meant to rebel against untruth and to wade toward joy, we must force non-sense and illogic and ignorance into our own tubes. You are required to Get Over It and Learn How to Manage. It makes us ill.

Get on a few stomach drugs, some head drugs, have the doc say its cool, grind out the salary. Protest virtually. Do what you can and have time for which is mostly go mad or be distracted.

The American Dream?

Too cynical?

As I grew up, those times when someone was inflamed about injustice and saying “HELL NO, THIS IS NOT RIGHT AND WE WILL NOT ACCEPT THIS!” I felt my spirit respond in kind. The scales, as they say, fall off of my eyes. I could feel that truth ringing sharply right behind my breastbone, a massive silver bullhorn calling to me. And I loved them for that. For taking that on. I thanked the universe for whatever it was that compelled that person to speak, at that very moment, from a place that was truthful and outraged at whatever entity or action was trying to establish itself in our world.

That voice belongs to nobody, it belongs to all of us. We access it when it is time, when the moment calls for it. There will always be that moment in this very flawed world!

There is another voice, too. One that rises in the absence of reaction, maybe. One that needs a bit of stillness to emerge. One that listens, and hears those things being said, and lets them melt into the moment. And finds where they don’t quite nourish. Finds where they fail to adhere to a true shape. And seeks not to batter, deflect, crush, or challenge…but only to question. Only to probe and discover what may be overlooked.

If you listen to the dialogue on immigration, you hear so many voices rising up from fear. From fear of being diluted, to fear of being killed. You hear fears given voice every decade or less or more. You hear so much about—and from “both” “sides”—Securing the Border. Building the Danged Fence. Securing Our Borders. The Insecure Border. Lasers Every 500 Feet and Surveillance on The Border. More Troops to the Border. Nothing Can Happen Until We First Secure the Border.

We might rebut with the rational. With statistics about how crime generally (and now) goes down as immigration goes up. Or how there is no increase of violence that Leaps Over the Border. Take El Paso, Texas for one obvious example. El Paso, across the border from the very violent Ciudad Juarez, Mexico. El Paso is immediately accessible to non-supervised entry. El Paso is known as one of the safest cities in the USA.

Or I may sketch less specific and talk about how until we take on Mexico’s problems as our own; until we be fair to their economy and their chances of opportunity and stop acting like some rich cat on the Upper East Side calling the cops on a lone hungry figure in the street; until we see our economies intertwined, amassing violence and troops on the border is a super-destructive non-effective stopgap to the cold wind rushing into so many fearful minds.

But in the general, when I hear this shaming, persecutory, prison-preaching talk, what occurs to me underneath those thoughts or before them, is that these people talking about immigration in the public lens are very insecure. And that they may need to secure their own borders. To feel out their own perimeters, find where the air gets thin, and the feet scramble for purchase. Peer into their shadows to dispel the figures they imagine.

And I think until that happens, we can and will have no real progress.

After all, how can  you approach an issue that is so important and affecting so many people, and involves so many areas (Economics, Environment, Migration, Culture, Race, History and so on) if you have not yet first secured your mind? And your heart? If you do not do those things, you cannot honestly evaluate these dynamics.

To one of these politicians obsessed with force and armies and walls…I ask you: How will it feel (in you, personally, in your body and belly and throat and mind) to imagine millions of workers in today’s workforce being celebrated for helping to run this mighty engine? To see millions of unauthorized workers simply swept into the bosom of our workforce and economy? Legitimized?

Does your lip curl?

I’m not talking about reparations, just a shift in lens and consequent behavior, regard, and legislation.

I’m not talking about some abstract past workforce, or one that creates goods the rest of us never actually handle or purchase or use. I’m talking about the workforce out there right now. Many today, this moment. Many more will report tomorrow, on Monday. Those ones, those humans who are working. (Yes, for a moment I’m simply going to talk about workers.) The ones who accept not being paid when the boss feels like sticking them. The humans with no benefits, and who work long hours and for substandard pay. The ones who are on edge lately and ready to drop everything and run if ICE shows up.  Those ones. I ask you how would it feel, Mr. Politician, Mrs. Politician, for you to ponder their being given protections that insure they work a happy and safe workday and enjoy a fair paycheck? And instead of being vilified were suddenly welcomed and celebrated as part of the large, always changing, colorful, and strong American community? No shame, no criminal record, no more pummeling around people trying to hang on with one hand. Can you even possibly house that imagination in your body without any serious instinctive gag reflex?

Or do you feel a need—before connecting empathetically to another human who may be in slightly different circumstances for the moment—to first punish and shame them for not signing in at the door? Do watch them slink to the magical Back of the magical Line? To admit complicity. And error. And wrongness? All while ignoring the rest of the chain of consequence, which of course leads back to our own nation and government and even our own home.

Does this punitive projection soothe you?

With this litany of demands that unauthorized/undocumented immigrants admit wrong, be charged with a crime, pay thousands, take a walk of shame, and so on, it does occur to me that some people are certainly trying to secure something. But it’s not a border.

And I ask you, the People: Can those politicians evaluate what might be an honest and fair approach to these fluctuations in our population and workforce if they harbor gross ideas about Mexicans? Or if they see borders as a way to legitimately express socially-unacceptable race-based or white nationalist-related ideas? Obviously not.

If we want to pretend life is very simple, we might point only to the GOP. But many on the “Left” are certainly chomping at the bit to punish immigrants (aka Mexicans.) If you’ve read the concept paper drawn up for the possible forthcoming immigration bill, it involves much more ICE, much more money for them, more surveillance technology, body armor, and so on and so on and so on. Fact is, the forces that desire a police state are using the public’s general apathy toward immigrants and Mexicans to institute measures that would never, ever fly coast to coast, were the perceived target to be Regular Americans. That’s on top of scapegoating Mexicans, which is always in American Style.

Would that these mentally and spiritually and emotionally lacking political and punditry players would disqualify themselves from the dialogue, but that’s not how things work. However, if your mind is self-deceiving in this way, you cannot hope to fairly render an opinion about issues so large concerning so many. Period.

Political gamers, humanity is in dire shape.

This challenge comes to us in many forms right now. Wars over petroleum. Poisoned oceans with petroleum. Police state pre-pubescent and gangly. Class divisions becoming untenable. Economy severely unstable. Political dialogue false. Media turning to sheer propaganda stations. Banks taken over our economy. Corporations taken over the courts and both wreaking massive havoc on our national security.

It is an age old reaction to blame the powerless when we panic. We are better than this. California already apologized in the 1930s for panicking and shipping Mexicans to Mexico—many who had never been there in their lives! The focus now on Mexicans does not feel so different to me.

Our society is, in the next few decades, going to undergo some drastic changes. We must secure our own hearts and minds and be ready to deal with these changes in a way that is reasoned, loving, progressive, broadminded, flexible, and kind. We must first secure our own consciousness in a grounded, positive place before we can pretend to represent millions of human beings.