AND SO IT FALLS ON US here at UMX—as well as at other blogs and independent news sites—to spread the word; to remember the name and smile of Brisenia Flores; to make clear that this killing is no isolated event perpetrated by a couple “crazies,” but is woven tightly to the anti-Mexican/anti-immigrant/anti-Latin@ sentiment that festers in so many layers of popular US culture.

From the fearful, punitive talk about immigrants espoused by Republican and Democratic politicians alike, to the video games that posit Mexicans as criminal invaders, to the movies that only present Latinos as gangbangers or cocaine kingpins or street thieves or knife wielding degenerates, to the movements in states like Arizona to wipe out Chican@ culture and history and aim to have us living in fear, to the judicial brutality and disproportionate police punishments meted out to the brownskinned, signals are continually broadcast to the public at large that mark us as less than human and offer us as viable targets for derision, fear, and violence.

Uncovering that—clearly—is far too big a story for any station today to break.

This episode of News With Nezua throws a pointed jeer at the contortions these mainstream news sites must adopt in order to justify turning away from this particular story and stories like this.

This episode of News With Nezua is brought to you by Center for New Community.

Apologies to my deaf friends; I will do my best to find time very soon to make another edit and manually add subtitles, at which point I’ll substitute a link for this apology. YouTube version here.

Past episodes of News With Nezua are archived here.

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.

SURPRISE, a cop is caught beating a Mexicano who lies on the ground while shouting slurs at him.

Obviously, the cop is racist. Worse, he is a fifteen year veteran on the force. This is not the first time he has done this. Were it not for the ubiquity of video in the hands of everyday citizens, these incidents would still be happening without witnesses or being reported.

The anchor on the television clip at FOX doesn’t play the police officer’s entire statement, so I don’t know if he apologizes to the innocent victim of his hateful brutality directly. Which is weird, but then again, not. I hear him express regret at bringing dishonor to the force, embarrassing his colleagues, and acting not in a “professional manner” before he finally gets around to apologizing to the Latino Community because he says he knows his “words cut deep.”

What??? Your words? Ay. Save your tears, dude. Sheesh. You and Glenn Beck.

The anchors say Officer Racista was responding to a tip called in where a man claimed four Mexicans with a machete robbed him. I say anonymous tipsters work hand in hand with William Gheen and FAIR and CIS and NumbersUSA and Stormfront and random teenagers in Long Island and Arizona and New York and California and Patchogue and Russell Pearce and Joe Arpaio and random gurgling cesspits of latent police racism—maybe without knowing it, all tapped into the same dank vein, the same gross vibe, all wanting to eradicate my people and our legacy on this continent, all handmaidens in the long war on the indigenous.

I note it here so I have a post to link to later when I speak (once again) about how the law in this land, and the prison system in this land are arms that work together with many other factors to bring sanctioned destruction on gente.

Mala at VivirLatino offers an important political reminder that many of us constantly have to remind DC folk:

The point is that laws like SB1070 and the current Comprehensive Immigration Reform framework put out there by Senator biometric Chuck Schumer works from the default position that immigrants, painted broadly as Latinos, painted broadly as Mexicans are criminals. It works from the framework that we need to prove ourselves worthy of humane treatment via speaking proper English, paying fines disguised as taxes, getting to the back of the line. Resistance to this, asking for legalization and/or basic human rights is seen as ungrateful and as an unwillingness to play the political game we asked to swallow in the name of political efficiency.

I am happy to see the boycotts and the civil disobedience in response to SB1070 just as I am happy to stand on a corner of my hood with my hija just talking to my vecinos about what this means for ALL of us. Pero I am bothered by the treatment of what happened to this man in Seattle, the disrespect towards the lives of our hermanos andhijas, and the accolades paid to Democrats for moving forward on a CIR plan that takes its lead from Arpaio. I am bothered that too many being credited with leading the movement talk about all of these things as if they are separate. As if one monster isn’t feeding the others and are all being led by the same master.

Kai Wright at Racewire agrees, and points out who bankrolls that monster as well as where the slime trail leads:

The officer’s obnoxious language can easily overshadow a deeper concern the video betrays: a casual and capricious use of police violence when confronting “gang” suspects. The fact that the offending officers are from a special gang unit is significant; the presumably elite special forces that federal dollars have supported in police departments around the country have long been criticized as acting with too little oversight as they militarize communities of color. As I’ve written previously, incidents like these exist along a spectrum of police violence that ends with the high-profile suspect-shootings that draw national outrage.

It’s horrible. And it’s the reality on the ground. Every day and for years. Any bets on the verdict of any investigation launched to determine his guilt?

Rituals and roles. Bodies and Souls.

the feedback loop of positive resistance and support

This is what needs to be understood by anyone warning me off of linking to (admittedly reactionary) trailers like Machete. Or the tone of my writing. This is what needs to be understood by online typists who muse that the Arizona Boycott will “surely backfire.” Cuéntame, in our interview a couple months ago, even asked me (among many other questions) if I thought I was making things worse with my strong stances! O, Cuéntame. I hardly knew ye. (But welcome to Facebook.) Only if you consider years of email responses from raza (and others) thanking me for stirring their fires and helping keep them going “making things worse.” Look, people. Indian-killing sentiment and brutality ain’t new! I call it the Long War for a reason. And guess what? It won’t get better by those being targeted and hunted stooping even lower and being even quieter. It will end when you stop asking those standing up to shhhhhh and start opening your mouth and standing with us. And loudly.

This is why black and brown and gold and red unite in so many cases to push back on white supremacy and racist currents and actions in our society. I welcome as many gente to join us as want to. We already understand what is at stake, and how long it has been at stake. We understand this danger. We all know it always awaits. We all  know the law forgives the violence in this direction. We know the TV stations don’t care much about violence in this direction. We know how it all ties together, in law, legislation, and media saturation. We know we are stronger standing together.

Crystal Dillman, the fiancee of Luis Ramirez, is moved to tears as members of Latina show their support for the couple outside the Schuylkill County Courthouse, in Pottsville, Pa. , Monday, Aug. 18, 2008. A preliminary hearing was held for three suspects charged in the beating death of Luis Ramirez, a 25-year-old Mexican immigrant who was severely beaten on July 12, in Shenandoah, Pa. Foto from RBB.

…BUT JUSTICE MAY TURN THEM OUT.

In July of 2008, Luis Ramirez was kicked to death in the street until he died by a group of whites who had been out drinking all night. Their screams and slurs while they beat him into the concrete made clear why they did what they did. Nobody was in doubt, and that’s the kind of town it is. A town where even the police collude to hide the murder of Mexicans, because it might besmirch the reputations of high school football stars if people knew they were cold blooded murderers. A town where the all-white jury finds the killers guilty of nothing more than aggravated assault.

But today we see a little justice.

Washington (CNN) — Five people, including three police officers, have been indicted in the fatal race-related beating of a Latino man in Shenandoah, Pennsylvania, the Justice Department said Tuesday. …

In June, an all-white Pennsylvania jury convicted Donchak and Piekarsky, then 19 and 17, of misdemeanor simple assault in Ramirez’s death and acquitted them of felony counts including aggravated assault, ethnic intimidation and hindering apprehension. The two were sentenced to up to 23 months in the county jail. The incident divided the small, rural mining town of Shenandoah into camps for and against the youths and became a flash point for racial tensions nationwide.

Jurors found Piekarsky not guilty of third-degree murder. Prosecutors alleged he delivered a fatal kick to Ramirez’s head after Ramirez was knocked to the ground in the alcohol-fueled brawl on a residential Shenandoah street.

After the verdict, Pennsylvania Gov. Ed Rendell sent a letter to U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder recommending the Justice Department pursue civil rights charges.

“The evidence suggests that Mr. Ramirez was targeted, beaten and killed because he was Mexican,” Rendell wrote. “Such lawlessness and violence hurts not only the victim of the attack, but also our towns and communities that are torn apart by such bigotry and intolerance.”

—CNN.com, 3 police officers among 5 people indicted in race-related beating

And we really should thank Mr. Rendell for doing so. Granted, he is probably as crooked as any other politician when it comes to raising funds and securing office, but he has helped bring about some justice in this case, and its an important one, I think.

A federal grand jury returned an indictment last week that charged Shenandoah Police Chief Matthew Nestor, Lt. William Moyer and Officer Jason Hayes with conspiring to obstruct justice during the federal probe of Ramirez’s beating. The indictment, unsealed today, also charges Moyer with witness and evidence tampering, and with lying to the FBI. If convicted, the officers face 20 years in prison on each of the obstruction charges, plus five years for conspiring to obstruct justice. Moyer also faces five years for making false statements to the FBI.

In a second indictment, Piekarsky and Donchak are charged with a federal hate crime that carries a maximum penalty of life in prison. Donchak also is charged in three additional counts with conspiring to obstruct justice and related offenses. Each of the conspiracy charges carries a maximum sentence of 20 years, while the other offenses each bring a five-year maximum sentence.

The murder of Luis Ramirez was the first to be nationally spotlighted by many human rights groups as an example of the violence that a burgeoning anti-immigrant movement has produced.

—splc, Pennsylvania Police Officers Indicted in Cover-Up of Immigrant’s Killing

THE POLITICAL WORLD IS A WHIRL OF CHAOS. And change. And resistance to currents of change. It smells like thunderstorm.

When I was a young teen living in upstate new york and surrounded by wilderness on my parent’s land (we were caretakers of the property, of many properties, always moving, never owning), I would walk through the fields of overgrown grass, parting the slender stalks, moving toward storms that rolled through the valley. Slowly and with quickened pulse, I’d wade forward into thickening electricity, despite any warnings dully rising in my mind (Never walk into the fields during a lightning storm!)

Feeling spectacularly small and alive under the churning violet, blackening sky-soup. Platinum and cast-iron etched moments…I can see and smell and hear them still: trees moaning and bending as the wind blows harder. Layers of sodden clouds leaking, and then fully unleashing distress onto our cornfields. Rain smacking down on my forehead…I’d squint but not turn back. Swollen streams bordered the cornfields, full with the water now. Glinting platinum corners flaring into the sky.

Moving toward this chaotic beauty, I felt I was walking to meet with God. Mother nature uncloaked and untamed for a dangerous and delightful moment: roused, angry, splitting sky and spitting throaty growls that shook the earth all about me.

These moments fraught with danger tore away my typical caul of youthful indifference—itself a guarded spiritual defense against the ennui and hostility and pettiness of the everyday society I found all around me. Nature is risen. Watching lightning spear and splinter the dusk. And neither of us is pretending tonight…let us shatter this pretense that settles around us like plaster-cast sunny-weather dream state.

These dangerous storms I was warned against felt like magic in the middle of the day. Yes, like a threat. But also like a New Cleansing opportunity. Like reality.

—

Erika said it a couple weeks ago. Talking about that chaos “when the classroom bells break.” And why did we love that as children? Because we weren’t excited by what was going on, breathing too much dust, sensing the futility and inanity in so many of our schooltime activities. The non-reality and ineffectiveness and irrelevance of so much of what was going on, and what we knew would go on from period to period to period from September until June. Parents tell themselves it is all so useful. And children know how to behave and do what they are told. Perhaps not to all, but to many of us the unspoken, not-needed to be spoken was that the years predicted of our schooling ahead was a sentence, a spell of years from which there would be no escape. And class room bells breaking were like little summer mornings dropped down like depth charges into the solidity of an oppressive schedule.

In terms of the political and volatile world today, I actually am excited by what’s happening. I’m not happy about the danger and the threat, of course—not happy about the harm that will directly come about, that is playing out. But I am happy to see the gross wrongs that so many have accepted as bedrock reality now being exposed and challenged in a large, or vocal way. We have the chance finally for some real conversations on higher, more visible layers of society than where they normally flourish.

There are a few things in place in the world (that will undoubtedly be with us as long as we have a world) that have angered me since I was young. But…beyond “angered.” Certain realities that play out in people and in relationships and in the world. When I began to see, as a young teen, that there was inequality and exploitation and greed and emptiness and mostly bullshit&hypocrisy ALL about me…it was very confusing. I didn’t understand why people wanted a world that way. It was Wrong. Why did it go on? Why did nobody care enough to stop these things? Why did I want to grow “up” and “into” this world where adults tried to tell me That This is Just The Way Things Are ????

Did you have a time like this? Where you told it was a phase of your adolescence? Was it? Is it?

I suppose one could look back now and say I was in an Existential Adolescent Phase. We label things and think we are done with them, though. I shrink back from that tendency, always have. I can call a gun a “feroxa” and it can still kill someone. I can call a “seed” a “protein sheath/husk protecting the genetic material within” but it can still grow when I shove it in soil. No matter what we label my thoughts at that time, in this language, in the framing of our culture—I was seeing something real. I was seeing injustice, and I was seeing the excusing of that injustice, and I was seeing hypocrisy. And it hurt my heart.

Honestly, I had given up on many things. Sometimes giving up on something (however you define this) is a very healthy thing.

But now…this BlackPrez dynamic has shifted things about. Obviously, Obama is in a very hard place. Simply for Presidenting While Black, his life is in danger. Imagine if he tried to be half as radical as his fearful opposers pretend? They’d have to recall half the troops just to guard him.

But aside from the systemic resistance to his changing anything, he is of course not very radical-minded. It’sjust not part of his (apparent) makeup. Obama is a huge cultural shift and it’s important and no way do I regret my vote. But I have to admit that while he physically represents a massive change, that does not mean he can enact lots of radical changes. Just what he has done is a lot. Even simply Presidenting While Black is shaking the foundations of this nation, and threats against him have risen like 400% and the USSS agents are being told to work longer, and that no more men are available to protect the POTUS from what I’ve read online. So in all reality, what more could he do? I mean, yes. He could do it anyway. He’d go down a hero. Instead of an icon used in the name of Imperialist war and a nation with massively institutionally entrenched racism. But that, too, is perhaps a bit harsh and cannot hope to contain all that he is, has done, and means to us. When the wind is whipping your eyes, it can be hard to make out the horizon.

This storm is unfolding as it will, and we are yet to see how it will end. The electricity feels threatening at times and it is. But here is a chance, now, finally to talk about the things we need to talk about. Which means the chance to make real change.

It is not just The Reality of Obama forcing these discussions. Such as the class divide always justified in this nation. Or the rich ruling class. The for-profit health racket. Racism. Wars of imperialism. The prison-industrial complex. It is all these things, and the feeling that they all approach to become an integrated part of the political dialogue. And this is due to so many things, just as a storm is a confluence of different temperatures and winds and factors which influence how hard or how long the rain falls. One part is the Reality of Obama, one part is how reporting and national dialogue is being taken back by the People, from institutions and unreliable liaisons and mouthpieces.

And it is the blatant non-representation we see that we have in these bought politicians. They continue to take money from all interests at their own danger, and at the peril of the nation’s wholeness. Because if the Left AND the Right feel you are bought and not representing the People…who is left to have your back? And vote for you? And believe in the system? Continue to take payola in place of doing your true work, and you bring on destruction of integrity, writ large. So as you go, so goes the nation. But these politicians are used to being able to get away with fakeness and hypocrisy and paid favors. Do they realize times have changed?

Now the conversations are no longer restricted to bitter rants on a street corner, or in huddles on the stairs of the college library or in loud, smoky parties or cloistered areas of the Nets, but on the main stage. And the proliferation of New Media does help in that it bridges these “small” conversations and the “big” ones in the MSM.

The major voices on the media will do its utmost to nurture and host those conversations honestly or doom us a possible step up in societal evolution. Yet I think there is no way around having them, and these conversations will separate the dying from the living, the lost from the struggling upward.

It makes me very interested in politics right now. Real conversations are coming to the fore, ones I’ve longed to have for over…25 years.

What will be left standing when the storm passes? Will the sun shine down upon our happy faces, or upon a quiet, razed countryside…peaceful, but empty?

I think this is up to us. But I wonder how many know we are making the decision every day….

MARCELO LUCERO’s is one of those stories that haunts you. Stories that become iconic because of how terribly well they illustrate great wrongs that our human society has yet to escape. Marcelo’s story is very plain, the truth very ugly, the loss permanent.

I shudder to think of what it means to die in such a way. It should happen to nobody. That’s one of the parts that haunt me. I know what it’s like to be set upon by many hands. But to never make it home? To die there, bleeding to death in the dark. Because someone decided that you are a spic.

Because you were on the way to meet up with a friend and some crazy human or humans projected demons from their own soul onto you. And for sport they band up and go “beaner jumping” to scratch their sadistic itch. Mexican, Guatemalan, Cuban…they don’t care what kind of spic you are. “Beaner” is good enough.

Those bad seeds in Patchogue, the hate-pundits on the radio, the hate groups calling themselves “immigration restrictionists” while broadcasting the evil of that monster in their soul against the very same targets? They are all part of a fungal faction of our society that must be seared clean from the conversation so that sanity and a modern-day sense of humanity can prevail.

We must remember and act upon the better parts of the human spirit. We must not tolerate hate aimed so carelessly, into energy so fatal. We must band up to remember the truth and to remain moving forward. And to fight on in the name of Marcelo. And Luis. And all the others. And hope there are not too many others too soon. At the same time, we have to have each other’s backs.

We can all change this. If we want.

Salúd, Marcelo.

———————–
There will be a vigil in Patchogue

THE PROBLEM with instituting a terror program such as the Department of Homeland Security’s ICE has done—wherein violence, raids, SWAT team-like tactics or routine demands for “Your Papers” are normalized—is that it not only models gross behavior as a moral compass for the rest of the nation, but it also sends a message to Latinos and immigrants that they should expect and submit to this type of behavior whenever it comes their way.

And then sickos like Shawna Forde and Eugene Bush of the Minuteman Defense corps or whatever they call themselves bust into a home pretending to be Immigration officials conducting a raid and bring murder into a family’s bosom.

Or you get something like this latest piece of heartrending news:

An AMBER alert remains in effect for a 4-day-old infant who was abducted in Nashville by a woman posing to be an immigration worker. …

The boy has not been found, police said, and the alert for him remains active.

On Tuesday, the child’s mother, Maria Gurrolla, 30, told police she allowed the kidnapper into her East Ridge home in south Nashville after she asked to see her immigration papers. Once inside, the mother was stabbed eight times and her child was taken, police said.

Also see the follow up article here:

Wheelchair-bound and bandaged, Maria Gurrolla, the mother of kidnapped newborn Yair Anthony Carillo, spoke Wednesday afternoon to reporters at Vanderbilt Medical Center about the traumatic events that have set off a national search for the missing child.

After the press conference Metro Police said it was searching for the driver of a dark colored Kia Spectra that appeared to follow Gurrolla as she left a Walmart store on Nolensville Road Tuesday.

“All that I can tell you is I was attacked in my home,” Gurrolla told reporters in Spanish. A cousin, Norma Rodriguez, acted as an interpreter.

Visibly bruised from yesterday’s ordeal, Gurrolla recounted how the unknown robust white woman knocked on her door and identified herself as an immigration officer.

“The only thing that she said was that she was going to arrest her,” Rodriguez said.

Gurrolla and the assailant became involved in the physical struggle. The victim told reporters the woman was not armed when she came into the house, but during the struggle found a small knife already in the residence and turned it on the mother. Gurrolla was stabbed nine times.

The sooner they find these people, the better. The better chance for the baby’s health, and the faster he can be back where he belongs. What an entrance into this world. Four days old.

UPDATE:

Yair has been found! (Thanks for the link, Aunt B.) Oddly, the page states the charges pending are “kidnapping and assault charges.” But if stabbing someone 9 times is not Attempted Murder, then what is??

UPDATE 2: I cover this and further developments of the story in the October 5 News With Nezua.

What the US is now doing to México by way of NAFTA and the overwhelming of México’s  market by US-subsidized Agribusiness (gutting their farming-based/corn-based market and glutting it with our own products, while employing many of their citizens at substandard rates and in substandard health conditions in order to help our own economy and prepare/manufacture/sell our food) it does directly in other nations through coups and forced legislation, Nations that are further from our border, and thus beyond the radar of the average US citizen. For example, Haiti, where the US’s Wilsonian fantasies and greed and neoliberalism led long ago to the destruction of the rice farmer’s ability to sustain him/herself and are a direct prerequisite to the food crisis they are experiencing now. USGOV has long been sucking the lifeblood of much of Latin America, and in the case of Haiti, refuse to let go the neck.

We can go further and talk about the undeniable thirst for the Strategic Crescent, the oil-rich Middle East, the wars to gain footholds (bases and massive “city within a city” embassies being built in Iraq as well as Af-Pak + lest we forget the “reservoirs of oil” that Iraq is “floating” atop). The US economy is collapsing, the nation is heavily armed, but hollowed out at the heart, waving numb fingers, and with a belly soon to feel real hunger pangs. It is supporting itself by draining the lifeblood of other nations and peoples. This is happening on many levels.

The Empire, in yet another shape, sprawls and burps and bleeds and chews up humans as it moves into its final phases—the phases where it self-destructs as all Empires do, as all man-made power-suction gold-glory death machine-staircases to the halls of the Gods must always do when they forget their place in the overall family of creatures and balances. It isn’t pretty, it will get uglier, but we must be ready. Because the danger we are used to reading in books and seeing in movies, or hearing about happening in a faraway lands is crawling closer and closer to our front doors, and in more cases than many of us care to think about, has already woven its caustic threads into the tapestry of our small, ambitious lives.

Borders are illusions, and they are perhaps necessary to some degree in a world where spirit is somewhat bound by containers. But in many cases they are a deadly illusion behind which humanity chokes. The illusion is disconnection. The illusion is that our worth is greater on one side than en el otro lado. The illusion is Us and Them. The illusion is that we are in control of nature’s deepest rhythms.

How to wake ourselves up from these dreams that suffocate so many?

THIS IS A MOMENT THAT OCCURS over and over on TV day after day in one shape or another. Granted, it’s FOX TV (the channel that is known for showing “Baby Snatcher” type chyrons “accidentally” next to a photo of Barack Obama as well as naming anyone arrested for impropriety in government a “Democrat”, etc etc), but FOX is a massive voice in US culture, funded by billions and pushed out to millions.

So what’s going on in this moment?

Well, here you have three white dudes talking about how wrong and how it is an “abuse of power” that a hate crimes bill was added to a defense spending bill.

The three rich white men also discuss how the Defense spending bill omits cashola for their new lusty F22 plane which McCain laments has never seen action in either Iraq or Afghanistan. (Isn’t that a dear smile on the old chap’s face?)

So. They want more money to kill brown people oversees and they call the protection of brown people here in the US an “abuse of power” by US government. And they end by saying (as you can see by the lil subtitle at the bottom of the image) that this combo leaves ‘us’ with inadequate defense.

Which ought to make you wonder…Whatchoo mean “us”?!

SHOULD I BOTHER LINKING to any of the posts where we talk about how the energy of stalled immigration combined with lunatics like Michael Savage combined with the hateful energy of groups like the Minutemen combined with the Democrats’ obsessions with appearing vicious in order to get love from GOP have all resulted in a toxic brew of anti-Latin@ hate in this nation with very drastic consequences? I mean why? You, being a regular reader, already know all about it and read it almost every day. Then again, maybe someone new needs to find out about all this. I don’t know.

Something needs to change, when US citizens already suffering from a terrible loss are attacked by other citizens en masse, and for what? For having Spanish names! Wow. I feel like the past has reared up, the days of Civil Rights era struggle, the days of anti-Greaser hate, the days of Los Vatos Locos and the dangerous fabled Pachuco. We are still fighting. La Lucha Sigue.

WASHINGTON – The family of a woman killed Monday is dealing with more than just grief in the aftermath of Metro’s deadliest accident in history.

The family of Ana Fernandez says they have been getting hate-filled telephone messages about whether or not Fernandez, a mother of six, was a legal immigrant.

Are there, truly, such people out there? They read a Hispanic last name, read that she had immigrated years ago from El Salvador, read all of this in an article about her death in a public transportation crash, and call her sister and six children to badger them with cable news-esque spittle about their deceased family member’s immigration status?

—Metro Victim’s Family Getting Hate Calls

Today, at least, I do not struggle to contain the barely containable rage I once did to hear things like this, to watch my own nation turn on my own people, be it in the form of the law, the mob, or supposed allies. These days, I harbor more of a deepening anxiety and a quiet wariness. There is conviction and hope. Oh, and there is anger too. Pero I am being careful about how much I add to the mix, and when. Not only do we out here need to stay clear and ready, but there are enough dangerous elements bubbling all around for my liking as it is.

I am, however, prouder than ever of my heritage, my name, my family. You will not beat that out of me or terrorize that away from my community. Nor will the Democrats be able to walk back from what they are helping to bring about. Even if Democrats take to swinging sticks at errant Latinos on the street, they won’t please either the GOP or the hate groups like FAIR.

President Obama and others: you can talk all you want. Know, meanwhile, that only action will push back on this terrible trend of hate and violence unleashed in our nation. Dally at risk.