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THESE DAYS, a good way to fall out of favor with the Reich Wing is to treat Mexican Migrant Homelanders (or “ALIENZ”; “Migrant Homelanders” is my papás phrase) as if they are human beings. That is just not cool, and you will be castigated and cast out for it. Guess Senator Jon Kyl (R-Ariz) of is figuring this out. But the man doesn’t care, apparently.

WASHINGTON - Democrats are praising Sen. Jon Kyl. Republicans are damning him.

This topsy-turvy political scene would have been unbelievable a year ago, when the conservative Arizona Republican was facing his toughest challenge yet in his bid for a third term.

But Kyl’s key role in this year’s failed immigration compromise has former supporters howling, foes taking a second look and everyone re-evaluating his record and his legacy. [… ]

Immigration is the No. 1 problem bedeviling Arizona, and despite the Senate’s rejection of his bipartisan prescription, Kyl says he has no intention of leaving the resolution solely to the majority Democrats.

‘Obviously, I wasn’t thinking of my political career when I took the leadership role I did in the immigration debate,’ Kyl said during a recent interview in his Capitol Hill ‘hideaway’ office beneath the Senate. ‘Sometimes you do what you have to do.’”

—How migrant-reform effort changed the image of a powerful conservative, http://www.azcentral.com

Ouch. Hideaway office! Nice sly phrasing. Too bad he wasn’t speaking from his “Master” suite or “Central office,” or something a bit more leaderly. (Must remember, no matter what. Never give interview from Hideaway office.)

Don’t get me wrong. Reading the whole article, I doubt that most of Kyl’s motivation is thinking of immigrants as “human beings.” He’s probably just a bit more politically savvy than his brain-frothy compatriots, who have lost all sense of balance and reason in the storm of racism that has also lately swollen the ranks of the KKK, the Minutemen, and other rabid non-thinking segments of America.

Along with McCain, Kyl has infuriated many Republican activists and bloggers, some of whom have painted him as a turncoat with insults such as ‘Judas’ and ‘Benedict.’

At the same time, he has earned respect from the other side of the aisle.

New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson, a Democrat running for president, praised both Kyl and McCain for their work on the immigration bill.

‘That’s leadership from the Southwest,’ Richardson said during a recent visit to Phoenix. ‘I don’t want to say too many more nice things about McCain and Kyl because that won’t help them, but I commend both of them for their efforts.’

—How migrant-reform effort changed the image of a powerful conservative, http://www.azcentral.com

How do these anti-immigration advocates see these Mexicans who work so hard to gather a bit of food and money with which to live? It’s easier for me to think of them with a human angle, of course. My father and Mama Lucha, his mother and my abuelita made their way working the fields in the American Southwest. Mama Lucha came to El Paso from Mexico City and that’s why I exist as a human being deemed citizen of one United States of America. (One of the reasons!) They were able to come because cousins Beto and Vicente Quintana joined the U.S. Army so that they could all be citizens. (These types of sacrifices and contributions to the U.S.A. by Latinos is exactly why Ken Burns’ omission of us in his The War documentary was so offensive and remains an important issue.)

But…green card, no green card. I don’t see these people as different, so different. We all want to eat, we want to grow, we want to prosper and not be ill or dying, and be able to take care of those we love. All of our economies and lives and means are influenced and limited by the political powers that be, moving things behind the scenes, opening up opportunities, or closing them down, and almost always as a consequence of them shoring up their own coffers. For Mexican immigrants, it is not so simple as “Stay in Mexico and make it better.” It is not so simple as “you are criminally invading our land.” Oh, if it were only so simple. But in our soundbyte society, these juvenile non-arguments actually have legs. Who cares about systematic economic war waged on a nation? Who cares to look up the history of Mexico and the U.S.A.? Who cares to understand more than the headlines they dump on our benumbed brains? And who cares for what the whole idea of the U.S.A. was once advertised to be.

Somehow, I do. I know many of you do. And if it’s too hard for some of today’s politicians (some on both “sides,” but it seems mostly from the Right) to frame this issue in human or empathetic, compassionate terms? Then use self-interest. You still have some of that, I take it?

A registered Republican, Bermudez predicts that Arizona eventually will be a Hispanic majority state and says that Republicans such as Kyl and McCain are crucial to the party’s continued vitality. The strident anti-immigrant commentary from other Republican segments turns off many Hispanics, he said.

That wasn’t always so. President Ronald Reagan signed the 1986 Simpson-Mazzoli legislation that granted amnesty to more than 3 million illegal immigrants. Immigration restrictionists look back at the law in horror, but many Hispanic Americans see it as a breakthrough.

‘There are a lot of Hispanics who remember President Reagan as the person who came in and solved at least some of the problems for 3.5 million undocumented immigrants in this country in 1986,’ Bermudez said. ‘We consider him to be a hero, and he’s the reason why I became a Republican, for instance.’

—How migrant-reform effort changed the image of a powerful conservative, http://www.azcentral.com

Oooh! Sing it: Wouldn’t ya like to be a Reagan, too?

I know these politicians who condemn Kyl for his latest shift in outlook or behavior are in denial, but let me help you out (because I know you are reading this, ése). The “Hispanic” voting block/buying block/population? It’s not a joke. It’s not hype. It’s not a threat, or some radical Xicano activist pump-the-first bravado-inspired phrase. It’s simply reality. We are large, and we are growing at faster rate. And cálmate, porque it’s not about alienz flooding your borders. Natural born Latinos are the ones mostly swelling the census ranks. We are simply growing at a faster rate. High population numbers are a manifestation of the Latino destiny.

So, por favor, think hard on the human angle, or at least making friends with your fellow humans and citizens, Right Wing and anti-immigrant factions. Before long, it will be inarguably and utterly self-defeating to position the Hispanic/Latino population as adversaries. It actually already is. Just scope out the mass of corporations and merchants responding to the new markets. That’s all you have to do to sniff the maize-wild wind.

In a month or so, the Hispanic Chamber of Commerce of Greater Kansas City will unveil its new Web site, which for the first time will be bilingual. And the chamber’s meetings also are now in Spanish. […]

In addition to building a Web site, Gomez has been busy making sure that every one of the chamber’s publications is bilingual.

‘We’re making a concerted effort to embrace bilingualism and also focus on small businesses,’ Gomez said. ‘We had a series of lunch-and-learns we did in English. Now we’re doing them in Spanish. The response we’ve been getting from the Spanish-speaking community has been tremendous.’

Gomez believes he got involved in the chamber at the right time.

By the end of this year, one of every 10 small businesses throughout the nation will be owned by a Hispanic, Gomez said. […]

‘After a year of lobbying, I convinced the vice president of marketing to test it,’ Gomez said. ‘It went over so well, they decided to put it in every Best Buy store.’

—Bilingual push is part of Hispanic chamber outreach, kansascity.com

With harsh, unforgiving, or punitive conditions in your immigration bills or a hostile attitude toward Mexican@s, you can punish all those Mexicans who are not citizens, if this speaks to your fear and sense of territory. But you can’t deport us all, as is said (and in a fun and spicy video, even). And even after you’ve been intractable on this issue, or even if you manage to stuff the bill full of obstacles or fire up the hate and ignorance that is already sadly raging and having very real effects on many of us, remember: the rest of us live here. We do feel connected to their fate. Very often we are connected to their fate. We do see them as human. And we do care about what laws are now being passed, ignored or manipulated. And we do buy things. And vote.

We’re the passionate ones with the long, long memories right? I mean if you’re going to buy into the old stereotypes, go all the way, vato!
Continue reading at Feministe …

THESE DAYS, a good way to fall out of favor with the Reich Wing is to treat Mexican Migrant Homelanders (or “ALIENZ”; “Migrant Homelanders” is my papás phrase) as if they are human beings. That is just not cool, and you will be castigated and cast out for it. Guess Senator Jon Kyl (R-Ariz) of is figuring this out. But the man doesn’t care, apparently.

WASHINGTON - Democrats are praising Sen. Jon Kyl. Republicans are damning him.

This topsy-turvy political scene would have been unbelievable a year ago, when the conservative Arizona Republican was facing his toughest challenge yet in his bid for a third term.

But Kyl’s key role in this year’s failed immigration compromise has former supporters howling, foes taking a second look and everyone re-evaluating his record and his legacy. [… ]

Immigration is the No. 1 problem bedeviling Arizona, and despite the Senate’s rejection of his bipartisan prescription, Kyl says he has no intention of leaving the resolution solely to the majority Democrats.

‘Obviously, I wasn’t thinking of my political career when I took the leadership role I did in the immigration debate,’ Kyl said during a recent interview in his Capitol Hill ‘hideaway’ office beneath the Senate. ‘Sometimes you do what you have to do.’”

—How migrant-reform effort changed the image of a powerful conservative, http://www.azcentral.com

Ouch. Hideaway office! Nice sly phrasing. Too bad he wasn’t speaking from his “Master” suite or “Central office,” or something a bit more leaderly. (Must remember, no matter what. Never give interview from Hideaway office.)

Don’t get me wrong. Reading the whole article, I doubt that most of Kyl’s motivation is thinking of immigrants as “human beings.” He’s probably just a bit more politically savvy than his brain-frothy compatriots, who have lost all sense of balance and reason in the storm of racism that has also lately swollen the ranks of the KKK, the Minutemen, and other rabid non-thinking segments of America.

Along with McCain, Kyl has infuriated many Republican activists and bloggers, some of whom have painted him as a turncoat with insults such as ‘Judas’ and ‘Benedict.’

At the same time, he has earned respect from the other side of the aisle.

New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson, a Democrat running for president, praised both Kyl and McCain for their work on the immigration bill.

‘That’s leadership from the Southwest,’ Richardson said during a recent visit to Phoenix. ‘I don’t want to say too many more nice things about McCain and Kyl because that won’t help them, but I commend both of them for their efforts.’

—How migrant-reform effort changed the image of a powerful conservative, http://www.azcentral.com

How do these anti-immigration advocates see these Mexicans who work so hard to gather a bit of food and money with which to live? It’s easier for me to think of them with a human angle, of course. My father and Mama Lucha, his mother and my abuelita made their way working the fields in the American Southwest. Mama Lucha came to El Paso from Mexico City and that’s why I exist as a human being deemed citizen of one United States of America. (One of the reasons!) They were able to come because cousins Beto and Vicente Quintana joined the U.S. Army so that they could all be citizens. (These types of sacrifices and contributions to the U.S.A. by Latinos is exactly why Ken Burns’ omission of us in his The War documentary was so offensive and remains an important issue.)

But…green card, no green card. I don’t see these people as different, so different. We all want to eat, we want to grow, we want to prosper and not be ill or dying, and be able to take care of those we love. All of our economies and lives and means are influenced and limited by the political powers that be, moving things behind the scenes, opening up opportunities, or closing them down, and almost always as a consequence of them shoring up their own coffers. For Mexican immigrants, it is not so simple as “Stay in Mexico and make it better.” It is not so simple as “you are criminally invading our land.” Oh, if it were only so simple. But in our soundbyte society, these juvenile non-arguments actually have legs. Who cares about systematic economic war waged on a nation? Who cares to look up the history of Mexico and the U.S.A.? Who cares to understand more than the headlines they dump on our benumbed brains? And who cares for what the whole idea of the U.S.A. was once advertised to be.

Somehow, I do. I know many of you do. And if it’s too hard for some of today’s politicians (some on both “sides,” but it seems mostly from the Right) to frame this issue in human or empathetic, compassionate terms? Then use self-interest. You still have some of that, I take it?

A registered Republican, Bermudez predicts that Arizona eventually will be a Hispanic majority state and says that Republicans such as Kyl and McCain are crucial to the party’s continued vitality. The strident anti-immigrant commentary from other Republican segments turns off many Hispanics, he said.

That wasn’t always so. President Ronald Reagan signed the 1986 Simpson-Mazzoli legislation that granted amnesty to more than 3 million illegal immigrants. Immigration restrictionists look back at the law in horror, but many Hispanic Americans see it as a breakthrough.

‘There are a lot of Hispanics who remember President Reagan as the person who came in and solved at least some of the problems for 3.5 million undocumented immigrants in this country in 1986,’ Bermudez said. ‘We consider him to be a hero, and he’s the reason why I became a Republican, for instance.’

—How migrant-reform effort changed the image of a powerful conservative, http://www.azcentral.com

Oooh! Sing it: Wouldn’t ya like to be a Reagan, too?

I know these politicians who condemn Kyl for his latest shift in outlook or behavior are in denial, but let me help you out (because I know you are reading this, ése). The “Hispanic” voting block/buying block/population? It’s not a joke. It’s not hype. It’s not a threat, or some radical Xicano activist pump-the-first bravado-inspired phrase. It’s simply reality. We are large, and we are growing at faster rate. And cálmate, porque it’s not about alienz flooding your borders. Natural born Latinos are the ones mostly swelling the census ranks. We are simply growing at a faster rate. High population numbers are a manifestation of the Latino destiny.

So, por favor, think hard on the human angle, or at least making friends with your fellow humans and citizens, Right Wing and anti-immigrant factions. Before long, it will be inarguably and utterly self-defeating to position the Hispanic/Latino population as adversaries. It actually already is. Just scope out the mass of corporations and merchants responding to the new markets. That’s all you have to do to sniff the maize-wild wind.

In a month or so, the Hispanic Chamber of Commerce of Greater Kansas City will unveil its new Web site, which for the first time will be bilingual. And the chamber’s meetings also are now in Spanish. […]

In addition to building a Web site, Gomez has been busy making sure that every one of the chamber’s publications is bilingual.

‘We’re making a concerted effort to embrace bilingualism and also focus on small businesses,’ Gomez said. ‘We had a series of lunch-and-learns we did in English. Now we’re doing them in Spanish. The response we’ve been getting from the Spanish-speaking community has been tremendous.’

Gomez believes he got involved in the chamber at the right time.

By the end of this year, one of every 10 small businesses throughout the nation will be owned by a Hispanic, Gomez said. […]

‘After a year of lobbying, I convinced the vice president of marketing to test it,’ Gomez said. ‘It went over so well, they decided to put it in every Best Buy store.’

—Bilingual push is part of Hispanic chamber outreach, kansascity.com

With harsh, unforgiving, or punitive conditions in your immigration bills or a hostile attitude toward Mexican@s, you can punish all those Mexicans who are not citizens, if this speaks to your fear and sense of territory. But you can’t deport us all, as is said (and in a fun and spicy video, even). And even after you’ve been intractable on this issue, or even if you manage to stuff the bill full of obstacles or fire up the hate and ignorance that is already sadly raging and having very real effects on many of us, remember: the rest of us live here. We do feel connected to their fate. Very often we are connected to their fate. We do see them as human. And we do care about what laws are now being passed, ignored or manipulated. And we do buy things. And vote.

We’re the passionate ones with the long, long memories right? I mean if you’re going to buy into the old stereotypes, go all the way, vato!
Continue reading at Feministe …

I HAVE WRITTEN A NUMBER OF POSTS lately that talk about the lack of empathy that I see dissolving many efforts and alliances among the politically active, or just feeding unnecessary negative exchange. By “politically active,” I mean those who care very much about people and how we live and grow or suffer or progress. That is, at least, the idea. That is the purported agenda. Sometimes in reaching for precious and important things, though, we forget that the journey is the Now, and the goal but a trajectory in reality, a direction. How we do is the room in which we sit, and What We Fight For a map tacked on the wall.

Online, given enough commenters, we so often see so many threads on topics important to people devolve into anger and flaming, and in its worst instances, abject ugliness and vile hate. You say what happened here? Why is it that we must tilt in this direction? People burn out in their efforts. Not simply from frustration born from bearing a heavy load or fighting hard against tough odds (not that those are not enough). But from meeting endless barrages of anger, or negativity, or disrespect, or non-understanding. This does not replenish us, it drains. It does not nourish us, it does not unite us, it convinces nobody of any point, it is not effective for much of anything, it overwhelms, and one day, in the middle of it, you say What the hell am I doing here, anyway? What was the purpose of this?

Somehow we have lost the capacity to recognize ourselves in each other. You know, people talk a lot about the federal deficit, but one of the things I always talk about is an empathy deficit.”

—Barack Obama

There is a false dichotomy available in what I imagine is every person’s mind, one easy to buy into. Sort of a built-in downhill slope, path of least resistance that leads into imaginary constructs…that become traps. We become guided into these divisions, these paradigms, told these are the two options. We become “Pro-this” and “Anti-this,” “Democrat, “Republican,” “Left,” “Right,” etc—and that is the end of it. We fall fast upon one side or another…and there we grab tight. And we do this in so many areas. We hear a word or two or phrase from someone, imagine we have sussed out their angle on an issue, and/or know of their sex/ethnicity/background or party, and summarily slot them into the “opposite” camp. That is the end of it, and we treat them with all the consequential anger or invalidation we feel the Opposite Campers deserve. We go head-to-head as if after enough battering, one side must give way, revealing a victor. And even if we say we do not believe in this shape of contest, our actions testify otherwise.

Our capacity for empathy in public life has been diminished, and not solely because of inattention or callousness. Habit, custom, and our political and philosophical theoretical orientations have conspired to make the political sphere a colder place.

Since the Enlightenment, empathy, friendship, intimacy, and companionship have been all but exiled from the political sphere, a place ideally reserved for dispassionate and objective deliberation about brute facts. This was a radical break from classical political theories. Aristotle believed the health of the polis depended upon close bonds of friendship among citizens. But Kant believed ethical relations must be based on universal, disembodied reason. Empathetic acts might be good, but they are not legitimate cases of moral action because they are not based upon purely reasoned obligation and duties. Adam Smith, of course, believed the invisible hand of the free market could do for us what fleshly hand-holding could not do in modern society: reduce frictions among people and make for more amiable if more superficial interpersonal relations based upon commercial transactions.

Furthermore, empathetic bonds between citizens threaten loyalty to the state, or even to lesser organizations like businesses. […]

—Seeing with Tucker Carlson’s Eyes, Glenn Smith, Huff Post

Theory (at least theory I learned in one of my Soc classes) would tell you that the more social marginality someone suffers, the more empathy they have. But that is why Theory is not Truth. It is thought. Because while the social marginality = empathy formula is very often true, sometimes those who have suffered being an outsider or being stepped upon turn to making others into outsiders or doormats, as a way of compensating. But it is these very traps that truly stab at my heart; to see us perpetuating what it is we seek to escape. It is so very human, and I know that path too well. Sometimes, even for moments, we trade off the risk and pain of personal work and growth for the readymix of self-righteousness and anger. But I suppose that is, funnily enough, another false dichotomy. Maybe they are both the same thing at moments, or related in a cause and effect way, rather than an either/or.

Yet, sometimes I think we do “other” our pain onto people, and turn others into the symbol of the wrongs we feel; make them our problem. Actually, I’m sure we all do this at different moments. I assume that it is another internal path of least resistance for a human. And bound to be utterly counterproductive to all the good energy we pour into moving against the tide, working for change. Batting at others, fighting ourselves….

As far as much of our modern-day arguments, I have no idea when we decided we were all so simple, so easily bisected. It seems everything from our political party system to each and every political issue is cloven into two warring sides, arguments, paradigms. And if there is only one of two sides to fall on, what more choice does one have? Acting and thinking as if there are only two viable positions to take in any area curtails reasonable conversation, thought, and alliance. It necessitates division. Is this how it has always been? Does it really need to be that way?

We need the constant presence of a “third party”—and not just in terms of our political parties. We need a third party showing up in all our bisected ideologies; to personally install a reflex that deemphasizes or counters the “Fallacy of Bifurcation” wherever it attempts to assert itself, and in any of its aspects. How on earth do we reintroduce this kind of paradigm shift into such a well-entrenched system of reinforced dynamics that claim otherwise?

Sometimes I use the word “labels” when talking about these traps. Some say “othering,” as in when you Other someone; make them alien to you, distant from your experiences, essence, and empathy. I guess another way to say it is that this habit or approach is about reducing wonderfully unpredictable and complex human creatures and their realities into pre-conceived boxes and slots and theories and doing it to bolster one or more old arguments that we are pleased to continually reinforce. And in the interim, forgetting the interconnectedness of all of us. That is—and not to lose anyone in HippieSpeak, I mean this very literally—forgetting that if a person is allowed to speak their truth honestly, to the Whole, and without pressure to conform to anything/side, theywill bring an angle to the common reality that the larger whole very much needs; a piece to the puzzle of what is best for all.

“Every dictator and tyrant is aware of the potential threat of friendship.”

—Kurt Riezler, philosopher

Speaking for myself, I find that regardless of what I say right away in reaction to a new thought or even just the introduction of someone else’s thoughts, sometimes I still need time for everything to stew, to move on its own, to reach out and touch the other pieces of my awareness and experience base and thus find its own scale and sense. We are so quick with our conclusions and classifications. Not every statement or idea or essay needs to be immediately shaven and plucked and sized up and tossed on one or the other side of the truck. Maybe we need a little more time, or to shift down a gear.

Maybe there is no Two Sides. Maybe that is an illusion whispered into our ear over the course of many years. Maybe there is a snapshot or portrait of where we should go, an image we all paint together, every view and voice needed to create the large, multi-shaded and colored mural of our collective karma. Doesn’t it seem that way with all the varied types of people with varying views who all feel their voices are crucial? Could we all really arrange ourselves so dichotomously as to fall on opposite sides of a hundred different divisions, and yet, feel harmonious? I am just recently understanding so much of this. Again.

Maybe the shape of This vs. That—this dynamic of two armies clashing vanguards and one falling away is a socialized political shape, and that rasping bugle of reveille not a call we need to heed.

and I think in the end it’ll be the kindness that makes all the shit come crashing down, eventually.

not the theory. the kindness.

—The Strangest Alchemy

Taking firm sides and intense sparring have their places, just as internal cellular forces in our own bodies continually attack and defend as processes crucial to our healthy physical functioning, just as heat produces a diamond (well, sometimes forces more sinister than heat are involved). We will always disagree and seek to test each other’s arguments. Sometimes it’s just plain fun.

But so much is in the approach. I must remember I am always in between one thing and another. (And that so are others.) And my relationship to everything need not be fixed. What would make me hostile to someone’s thoughts or ideas but my own fear that I could have mine so easily shattered? This is a death grip. No Thing is fixed, and rarely any person truly unreachable until they have decided they won’t be reached or that they have reached their own end. And if we leave so little room for our commonality, and our humanity, what do we hope to become through these hostile and aggressive means? What will be left standing when all the dust settles?

If we treat people around us with an angry heart, people will inevitably respond with anger. We then have an environment of violence vs. violence. However, if we treat people with kindness and compassion, they will not find it so easy to remain angry with us. So we need to start from within ourselves and learn to cultivate an attitude of non-harming and non-violence. Then we will have a standpoint from which to build peace. If we have peace in our minds, then the world we experience will be at peace, even when from an objective point of view, the world is in conflict. When we are at peace in our mind and we are not generating conflict and violence, then we can truly begin to help others attain peace and eliminate conflict.”

—A Buddhist Master’s Advice to Young Leaders, Master Sheng Yeng, Shambala Sun Magazine, July 2007

If you watch over your own shoulder, you realize that when you listen or read, you do it in different ways. Sometimes you do it very openly, accepting; you feel something resonate and you open to it, let it flow through you, ring you up and down like a silver bell symphony. Sometimes you listen very carefully, guardedly, a voice in your mind almost sounding out after each statement you hear—to provide context, refutation, or doubt. Sometimes you listen with a pointed agenda, blurring anything but words or ideas that you maintain a “Search” for, as the information passes into your ears and through your filter. I’m sure we shift gears back and forth, for different reasons and purposes. But clearly there is no one way to “listen.” (Despite the fact that we speak of “listening” or “not listening,” as if there is a switch that only flips back and forth, two slots).

Sometimes a “conversation” or “debate” moves into an area and there are no more open hearts or minds. I don’t think it is always so irreversible. But then, sometimes you have to know when to walk away, as Mister Harper said. Because sometimes the “fightbuzz” takes over, and the fight forgets its reason for being. Or adopts a new one—a dull, and inertia-driven and pointless one—along the way.

I feel expansive and at peace, when I can listen to a fellow human being with a different kind of intent. Where I remember that the person in front of me may be just like me. Too often, instead of using the facelessness of online dialogue to strip away those visual and aural cues that might make someone Otherly and thus more easily identify with them, we use the anonymous, dissociated vehicle of online text to dehumanize; to strip the message of worth or heart or meaning so that we can pounce or perhaps just to rouse the negative energy buzz.

Sometimes people talk to me certain ways in threads and I say to myself Where are these people? Who are they? Because they only seem to exist online. I do not meet them in my life walking about. I have lived and grown up in a number of places, and for almost forty years and in city, country, and suburb—and I have never seen a conversation in a room progress, on a regular basis, into people rising up, shouting, leering, screaming, getting high on mob fever, dropping cruel and indiscriminate barbs. That’s jail behavior, if anything. But in everyday life and society? I do not run into people spitting invective or insult at me in our disagreements during the course of a day or in their very first statements to me being utterly and blatantly unfeeling. Nope. It does not happen. I do not instigate it, and people do not bring it on me. Not unless they are intentionally attempting violence. Or mentally ill, in which case it’s hardly personal.

So the Internet sometimes becomes surreal. Where is this place where people talk like this upon first meeting? Who are these people? Where the hell did they grow up? What are they thinking???

But what happens if you take an utterly infuriating comment someone says or writes and you imagine it as being said by your best friend? Or family member, loved one, sister or brother or child? A (possibly—) hateful, irritating cluster of words is then transformed, at worst, into a misguided view that you hope to temper with what you feel is truth, and at best, it is sentiment you don’t quite agree with, but might consider plausible. Maybe before it would make your belly knot up, but once you imagine a sibling saying it, you laugh.

What do you opt for in your life? Fear or trust? You can reason and find fear. But with understanding, you realize there is so much more beauty than I could ever fathom… .”

—Fear, or Trust?, Prem Pal Singh Rawat

What makes the difference? Whereas first it was a statement beyond understanding or tolerance, you have added love and understanding to those same words. And now they are not the same at all.

When listening, when speaking, when conceiving—I feel that the more we find those things that unite us, the stronger and larger we become. I must be larger than my habits and my comforts and my fears if I want to make something new. I am not always up to it. But I know that nothing worthwhile is made without love. Love is revolutionary and irresistable and positive change is impossible without it.

Here’s how Kurt Riezler, philosopher, pre-World War I assistant to the German chancellor, and friend of Leo Strauss, summed up authority’s dread of interpersal bonds among its subjects. His is not an extreme view. He just had the guts to say out loud what other theorists of authority disguised in less blunt language.

‘Whichever way friendship is defined in a given society, whether it is considered a private concern or a public matter, it always is a political phenomenon…friendship can easily become the basis of conspiracy. Every dictator and tyrant is aware of the potential threat of friendship. Dictators know that friendship often provides a bond more enduring than other social bonds and hence can become a power base from which their power can be assailed. In political persecutions and proscriptions of all manner, inquisitors have always included the friends of their primary enemies in their attack. History has numerous examples to support this point.‘”

—Seeing with Tucker Carlson’s Eyes, Glenn Smith, Huff Post

We are so many people, with many different interests. With different ideas of where to go and how to get there. With different needs and different hurts and different backgrounds and different histories. We can focus at every moment on all these differences, and this keeps us splintered in myriad miniscule ways. Note, this is not the common mainstream line out to knock “Identity Politics” or “Special Interests” or “Feminism” or any other group not in the mainstream of power that feels the need to address differences. To my mind, those are crucial agendas and needed areas of thought and action. I am saying something very different, although I know the “O, you’re splintering our unity” argument is made against these groups.

But the splinters do not lie in varying experiences being joined, or varying approaches to life, the political arena, and public dialogue coming together. The splinters lie in batting away people who—upon first blush—do not think or look or sound or talk in the manner that you do. The splinters lie in our tight grip upon the conceptual bat that we too often use to whack down that which immediately seems at odds or strange—or resembles closely a thing we already dislike, or to prop up a scarecrow in the fields of our own imagination.

So, many differences, but there are also a few basic feelings common to all of us. And a few basic rights that we feel all people, all humans, should have. A few things that no person should suffer. A certain dignity and kindness that all of desire shown to us. I’m sure that rather than getting mired in the myriad of variances between all our positions, we can agree on these basic things as guiding forces in finding our way to higher ground.

Imperfect, foolish, zealous, passionate—we are what we are, we make our way there. I just want to remember to keep my sight on the horizon, not on the guardrail. I tend to steer toward my eyeline.

—Crossposted at The Unapologetic Mexican

I HAVE WRITTEN A NUMBER OF POSTS lately that talk about the lack of empathy that I see dissolving many efforts and alliances among the politically active, or just feeding unnecessary negative exchange. By “politically active,” I mean those who care very much about people and how we live and grow or suffer or progress. That is, at least, the idea. That is the purported agenda. Sometimes in reaching for precious and important things, though, we forget that the journey is the Now, and the goal but a trajectory in reality, a direction. How we do is the room in which we sit, and What We Fight For a map tacked on the wall.

Online, given enough commenters, we so often see so many threads on topics important to people devolve into anger and flaming, and in its worst instances, abject ugliness and vile hate. You say what happened here? Why is it that we must tilt in this direction? People burn out in their efforts. Not simply from frustration born from bearing a heavy load or fighting hard against tough odds (not that those are not enough). But from meeting endless barrages of anger, or negativity, or disrespect, or non-understanding. This does not replenish us, it drains. It does not nourish us, it does not unite us, it convinces nobody of any point, it is not effective for much of anything, it overwhelms, and one day, in the middle of it, you say What the hell am I doing here, anyway? What was the purpose of this?

Somehow we have lost the capacity to recognize ourselves in each other. You know, people talk a lot about the federal deficit, but one of the things I always talk about is an empathy deficit.”

—Barack Obama

There is a false dichotomy available in what I imagine is every person’s mind, one easy to buy into. Sort of a built-in downhill slope, path of least resistance that leads into imaginary constructs…that become traps. We become guided into these divisions, these paradigms, told these are the two options. We become “Pro-this” and “Anti-this,” “Democrat, “Republican,” “Left,” “Right,” etc—and that is the end of it. We fall fast upon one side or another…and there we grab tight. And we do this in so many areas. We hear a word or two or phrase from someone, imagine we have sussed out their angle on an issue, and/or know of their sex/ethnicity/background or party, and summarily slot them into the “opposite” camp. That is the end of it, and we treat them with all the consequential anger or invalidation we feel the Opposite Campers deserve. We go head-to-head as if after enough battering, one side must give way, revealing a victor. And even if we say we do not believe in this shape of contest, our actions testify otherwise.

Our capacity for empathy in public life has been diminished, and not solely because of inattention or callousness. Habit, custom, and our political and philosophical theoretical orientations have conspired to make the political sphere a colder place.

Since the Enlightenment, empathy, friendship, intimacy, and companionship have been all but exiled from the political sphere, a place ideally reserved for dispassionate and objective deliberation about brute facts. This was a radical break from classical political theories. Aristotle believed the health of the polis depended upon close bonds of friendship among citizens. But Kant believed ethical relations must be based on universal, disembodied reason. Empathetic acts might be good, but they are not legitimate cases of moral action because they are not based upon purely reasoned obligation and duties. Adam Smith, of course, believed the invisible hand of the free market could do for us what fleshly hand-holding could not do in modern society: reduce frictions among people and make for more amiable if more superficial interpersonal relations based upon commercial transactions.

Furthermore, empathetic bonds between citizens threaten loyalty to the state, or even to lesser organizations like businesses. […]

—Seeing with Tucker Carlson’s Eyes, Glenn Smith, Huff Post

Theory (at least theory I learned in one of my Soc classes) would tell you that the more social marginality someone suffers, the more empathy they have. But that is why Theory is not Truth. It is thought. Because while the social marginality = empathy formula is very often true, sometimes those who have suffered being an outsider or being stepped upon turn to making others into outsiders or doormats, as a way of compensating. But it is these very traps that truly stab at my heart; to see us perpetuating what it is we seek to escape. It is so very human, and I know that path too well. Sometimes, even for moments, we trade off the risk and pain of personal work and growth for the readymix of self-righteousness and anger. But I suppose that is, funnily enough, another false dichotomy. Maybe they are both the same thing at moments, or related in a cause and effect way, rather than an either/or.

Yet, sometimes I think we do “other” our pain onto people, and turn others into the symbol of the wrongs we feel; make them our problem. Actually, I’m sure we all do this at different moments. I assume that it is another internal path of least resistance for a human. And bound to be utterly counterproductive to all the good energy we pour into moving against the tide, working for change. Batting at others, fighting ourselves….

As far as much of our modern-day arguments, I have no idea when we decided we were all so simple, so easily bisected. It seems everything from our political party system to each and every political issue is cloven into two warring sides, arguments, paradigms. And if there is only one of two sides to fall on, what more choice does one have? Acting and thinking as if there are only two viable positions to take in any area curtails reasonable conversation, thought, and alliance. It necessitates division. Is this how it has always been? Does it really need to be that way?

We need the constant presence of a “third party”—and not just in terms of our political parties. We need a third party showing up in all our bisected ideologies; to personally install a reflex that deemphasizes or counters the “Fallacy of Bifurcation” wherever it attempts to assert itself, and in any of its aspects. How on earth do we reintroduce this kind of paradigm shift into such a well-entrenched system of reinforced dynamics that claim otherwise?

Sometimes I use the word “labels” when talking about these traps. Some say “othering,” as in when you Other someone; make them alien to you, distant from your experiences, essence, and empathy. I guess another way to say it is that this habit or approach is about reducing wonderfully unpredictable and complex human creatures and their realities into pre-conceived boxes and slots and theories and doing it to bolster one or more old arguments that we are pleased to continually reinforce. And in the interim, forgetting the interconnectedness of all of us. That is—and not to lose anyone in HippieSpeak, I mean this very literally—forgetting that if a person is allowed to speak their truth honestly, to the Whole, and without pressure to conform to anything/side, theywill bring an angle to the common reality that the larger whole very much needs; a piece to the puzzle of what is best for all.

“Every dictator and tyrant is aware of the potential threat of friendship.”

—Kurt Riezler, philosopher

Speaking for myself, I find that regardless of what I say right away in reaction to a new thought or even just the introduction of someone else’s thoughts, sometimes I still need time for everything to stew, to move on its own, to reach out and touch the other pieces of my awareness and experience base and thus find its own scale and sense. We are so quick with our conclusions and classifications. Not every statement or idea or essay needs to be immediately shaven and plucked and sized up and tossed on one or the other side of the truck. Maybe we need a little more time, or to shift down a gear.

Maybe there is no Two Sides. Maybe that is an illusion whispered into our ear over the course of many years. Maybe there is a snapshot or portrait of where we should go, an image we all paint together, every view and voice needed to create the large, multi-shaded and colored mural of our collective karma. Doesn’t it seem that way with all the varied types of people with varying views who all feel their voices are crucial? Could we all really arrange ourselves so dichotomously as to fall on opposite sides of a hundred different divisions, and yet, feel harmonious? I am just recently understanding so much of this. Again.

Maybe the shape of This vs. That—this dynamic of two armies clashing vanguards and one falling away is a socialized political shape, and that rasping bugle of reveille not a call we need to heed.

and I think in the end it’ll be the kindness that makes all the shit come crashing down, eventually.

not the theory. the kindness.

—The Strangest Alchemy

Taking firm sides and intense sparring have their places, just as internal cellular forces in our own bodies continually attack and defend as processes crucial to our healthy physical functioning, just as heat produces a diamond (well, sometimes forces more sinister than heat are involved). We will always disagree and seek to test each other’s arguments. Sometimes it’s just plain fun.

But so much is in the approach. I must remember I am always in between one thing and another. (And that so are others.) And my relationship to everything need not be fixed. What would make me hostile to someone’s thoughts or ideas but my own fear that I could have mine so easily shattered? This is a death grip. No Thing is fixed, and rarely any person truly unreachable until they have decided they won’t be reached or that they have reached their own end. And if we leave so little room for our commonality, and our humanity, what do we hope to become through these hostile and aggressive means? What will be left standing when all the dust settles?

If we treat people around us with an angry heart, people will inevitably respond with anger. We then have an environment of violence vs. violence. However, if we treat people with kindness and compassion, they will not find it so easy to remain angry with us. So we need to start from within ourselves and learn to cultivate an attitude of non-harming and non-violence. Then we will have a standpoint from which to build peace. If we have peace in our minds, then the world we experience will be at peace, even when from an objective point of view, the world is in conflict. When we are at peace in our mind and we are not generating conflict and violence, then we can truly begin to help others attain peace and eliminate conflict.”

—A Buddhist Master’s Advice to Young Leaders, Master Sheng Yeng, Shambala Sun Magazine, July 2007

If you watch over your own shoulder, you realize that when you listen or read, you do it in different ways. Sometimes you do it very openly, accepting; you feel something resonate and you open to it, let it flow through you, ring you up and down like a silver bell symphony. Sometimes you listen very carefully, guardedly, a voice in your mind almost sounding out after each statement you hear—to provide context, refutation, or doubt. Sometimes you listen with a pointed agenda, blurring anything but words or ideas that you maintain a “Search” for, as the information passes into your ears and through your filter. I’m sure we shift gears back and forth, for different reasons and purposes. But clearly there is no one way to “listen.” (Despite the fact that we speak of “listening” or “not listening,” as if there is a switch that only flips back and forth, two slots).

Sometimes a “conversation” or “debate” moves into an area and there are no more open hearts or minds. I don’t think it is always so irreversible. But then, sometimes you have to know when to walk away, as Mister Harper said. Because sometimes the “fightbuzz” takes over, and the fight forgets its reason for being. Or adopts a new one—a dull, and inertia-driven and pointless one—along the way.

I feel expansive and at peace, when I can listen to a fellow human being with a different kind of intent. Where I remember that the person in front of me may be just like me. Too often, instead of using the facelessness of online dialogue to strip away those visual and aural cues that might make someone Otherly and thus more easily identify with them, we use the anonymous, dissociated vehicle of online text to dehumanize; to strip the message of worth or heart or meaning so that we can pounce or perhaps just to rouse the negative energy buzz.

Sometimes people talk to me certain ways in threads and I say to myself Where are these people? Who are they? Because they only seem to exist online. I do not meet them in my life walking about. I have lived and grown up in a number of places, and for almost forty years and in city, country, and suburb—and I have never seen a conversation in a room progress, on a regular basis, into people rising up, shouting, leering, screaming, getting high on mob fever, dropping cruel and indiscriminate barbs. That’s jail behavior, if anything. But in everyday life and society? I do not run into people spitting invective or insult at me in our disagreements during the course of a day or in their very first statements to me being utterly and blatantly unfeeling. Nope. It does not happen. I do not instigate it, and people do not bring it on me. Not unless they are intentionally attempting violence. Or mentally ill, in which case it’s hardly personal.

So the Internet sometimes becomes surreal. Where is this place where people talk like this upon first meeting? Who are these people? Where the hell did they grow up? What are they thinking???

But what happens if you take an utterly infuriating comment someone says or writes and you imagine it as being said by your best friend? Or family member, loved one, sister or brother or child? A (possibly—) hateful, irritating cluster of words is then transformed, at worst, into a misguided view that you hope to temper with what you feel is truth, and at best, it is sentiment you don’t quite agree with, but might consider plausible. Maybe before it would make your belly knot up, but once you imagine a sibling saying it, you laugh.

What do you opt for in your life? Fear or trust? You can reason and find fear. But with understanding, you realize there is so much more beauty than I could ever fathom… .”

—Fear, or Trust?, Prem Pal Singh Rawat

What makes the difference? Whereas first it was a statement beyond understanding or tolerance, you have added love and understanding to those same words. And now they are not the same at all.

When listening, when speaking, when conceiving—I feel that the more we find those things that unite us, the stronger and larger we become. I must be larger than my habits and my comforts and my fears if I want to make something new. I am not always up to it. But I know that nothing worthwhile is made without love. Love is revolutionary and irresistable and positive change is impossible without it.

Here’s how Kurt Riezler, philosopher, pre-World War I assistant to the German chancellor, and friend of Leo Strauss, summed up authority’s dread of interpersal bonds among its subjects. His is not an extreme view. He just had the guts to say out loud what other theorists of authority disguised in less blunt language.

‘Whichever way friendship is defined in a given society, whether it is considered a private concern or a public matter, it always is a political phenomenon…friendship can easily become the basis of conspiracy. Every dictator and tyrant is aware of the potential threat of friendship. Dictators know that friendship often provides a bond more enduring than other social bonds and hence can become a power base from which their power can be assailed. In political persecutions and proscriptions of all manner, inquisitors have always included the friends of their primary enemies in their attack. History has numerous examples to support this point.‘”

—Seeing with Tucker Carlson’s Eyes, Glenn Smith, Huff Post

We are so many people, with many different interests. With different ideas of where to go and how to get there. With different needs and different hurts and different backgrounds and different histories. We can focus at every moment on all these differences, and this keeps us splintered in myriad miniscule ways. Note, this is not the common mainstream line out to knock “Identity Politics” or “Special Interests” or “Feminism” or any other group not in the mainstream of power that feels the need to address differences. To my mind, those are crucial agendas and needed areas of thought and action. I am saying something very different, although I know the “O, you’re splintering our unity” argument is made against these groups.

But the splinters do not lie in varying experiences being joined, or varying approaches to life, the political arena, and public dialogue coming together. The splinters lie in batting away people who—upon first blush—do not think or look or sound or talk in the manner that you do. The splinters lie in our tight grip upon the conceptual bat that we too often use to whack down that which immediately seems at odds or strange—or resembles closely a thing we already dislike, or to prop up a scarecrow in the fields of our own imagination.

So, many differences, but there are also a few basic feelings common to all of us. And a few basic rights that we feel all people, all humans, should have. A few things that no person should suffer. A certain dignity and kindness that all of desire shown to us. I’m sure that rather than getting mired in the myriad of variances between all our positions, we can agree on these basic things as guiding forces in finding our way to higher ground.

Imperfect, foolish, zealous, passionate—we are what we are, we make our way there. I just want to remember to keep my sight on the horizon, not on the guardrail. I tend to steer toward my eyeline.

—Crossposted at The Unapologetic Mexican

THERE IS A CONTEXT AND A BACKGROUND and a larger picture to many of today’s events that those in power would not have us access. They forcefeed us fistfuls of pseudo-truth shards and a flurry of information-flakes; just enough to fetch the fear and loathing to the surface of our minds but not enough for us to see the larger pieces come together. While we are focusing on Keeping the Alienz Out, there is great unjustice to the South, and a great unrest growing. The people in Mexico are acutely in touch with the same shapes of injustice we know here in the U.S.A., except in many cases they are engaging them in a very direct manner. Those corrupt forces they wage a very righteous war with are in league with many that have power over us, as well. Those who misuse that power. And none of these forces want us to understand the interplay, nor to slow down long enough to speak to each other, collect our information, or remember the power of so very many people, undivided.

This post is lengthy, and contains a lot of links and background, though it is not complete (There is so much more context that should really be added to this: NAFTA, GMO corn, the privitazation of ejidos, the EZLN, but it can’t be a book!). Understandably, you may not have time or energy or focus for all of it at once. And I hope you find it interesting enough to hold on to and take time later, if need be.

More and more news of Mexico will come to us here in the States, but as it gets through, it is inevitably well stripped and spun and anti-contextualized. I have taken this time not only to pass along the knowledge of recent explosions (sabotage) of some of Mexico’s gas lines, but have surrounded the event with some context, as I know that the regular readers of Feministe may not focus as heavily on Mexico as I do, and have less background as it is than my regular readership. I also present related information in order to empower a reader to think on it on their own, if they care to. Because “background” doesn’t mean “definite answers.” I don’t know exactly what the next move is going to be, nor what the last one meant. But what is happening is surely riveting, and clearly important.

THE LAST TIME EXPLOSIONS ROCKED MEXICO, they were, with little doubt, a tactic used against the Mexican people. The bombings, oddly arranged so as to minimize damage, were blamed on the Oaxacan Peoples Popular Assembly (APPO), and were aimed at eroding their momentum and support in resisting the police occupation of Oaxaca. It was a terribly cynical and violent (and transparent) way to steal back the news cycle, which would otherwise have been filled with news of megamarches in support the ouster of the corrupt Ulises Ortiz Ruiz.

Now, there is more violence. Five explosions in gas pipelines central Mexico have been reported by PEMEX, Mexico’s oil monopoly, in the last week. PEMEX originally (as recently as yesterday) claimed that three of the blasts were due to “a reduction of the pipeline pressure that caused an implosion.”

Mexico, Jul 10 (Prensa Latina) The Mexican Oil Enterprise (PEMEX) reported a gas pipeline explosion today in the central American state of Queretaro, forcing authorities to evacuate hundreds of families from two neighbouring communities. […]

This is the fifth incident of this type in less than a week and PEMEX has shut down gas supply while several teams of the public sector were trying to control the flames over 100 meters high.

—Prensa Latina, English Version, July 10, 2007

That was PEMEX, yesterday. Today, the Mexican government is reporting that the blasts are, and have been, acts of sabotage by groups acting for the very same reasons that the Oaxaca megamarches took place.

The group that has (allegedly) claimed responsibility for (all five of) the blasts is El Ejército Popular Revolucionario, or the Popular Revolutionary Army (EPR), and according to their released statement (via XP), they will not stop their “surgical harassment actions” until Mexican President Felipe Calderon (FeCal) and the governor of the state of Oaxaca, Ulises Ortiz Ruiz, release two “political prisoners” being held by the government since their May 2006 arrests.

Not everyone is convinced of the EPR’s culpability or of the validity of the claims posted on a website that “serves as a clearinghouse for bulletins from armed groups” [abc news]; a group the New York Times classifies as “long dormant,” and abc news as “a tiny group that has largely been inactive in recent years.” An editorial in El Universal.com.mx, Aquí no cabe la violencia (Here, the Violence Does Not Fit) advises keeping an open mind and investigation until the truth can be ascertained:

Tampoco podemos ser ingenuos ni descartar a priori otras líneas de investigación, desde el sabotaje interno hasta quienes desde el exterior desearían afectar el suministro de energéticos a Estados Unidos. Es correcta, entonces, la posición inicial de las autoridades competentes de mantener abierto el expediente, a pesar del comunicado del EPR.”

Neither can we be naive, nor discard a priori other lines of investigation into the internal sabotage until [we know] who from the outside would wish to affect the supply of energy to the USA. It is correct, then, the initial position taken by the competent authorities, to keep the files open, despite the statement [of responsibility] offered by the EPR. ” [Nezua translation]

—Aquí no cabe la violencia eluniversal.com/mx, 11 de Julio, 2007

Wait until you see where those lines of thought are leading. But maybe you’ve already guessed. I’ll come back to this.

So, all claims of pressure-loss and implosions forgotten, the Mexican government and the statement allegedly released by the EPR frame these explosions as retaliation by the APPO for the violence visited upon the striking teachers during the 2006 Oaxaca police and Federal crackdowns, which came in response to Oaxaqueños rising up and rejecting the corrupt rule of Ulises Ruiz Ortiz.

The New York Times intends to further erase any lingering doubt about the origin of the three blasts that had originally been announced by PEMEX as accidents, and imply—by means of paragraph juxtaposition—that the explositions were, in fact, a result of Mexican citizens protesting the recent decision by Mexico to allow foreign interests to invest in Mexico’s petroleum resources:

Last week, Mr. López Obrador called for mass protests if Congress approves Mr. Calderón’s bill to allow some private investment in the state oil monopoly for the purposes of exploration.

The oil monopoly, Pemex, said there had been three large explosions at natural gas pipelines in Guanajuato recently, one Tuesday morning and two along a second pipeline last Thursday. No one was injured in either explosion, though they caused large fires and forced the evacuation of thousands of people from nearby villages.

—Mexico Increases Pipeline Security After Recent Rebel Bomb Attacks nytimes.com, July 11, 2007

ABC also connects these explosions to the APPO and the striking teachers in Oaxaca, but goes one further, and smoothly connects them to “guerilla groups in Columbia”:

The rebel statement said ‘three combined squads of urban and rural units … have carried out surgical harassment actions by placing eight explosive packs on the Pemex pipelines.’ Posted on a Web site that serves as a clearinghouse for bulletins from armed groups, the statement demanded the release of two men detained in southern Oaxaca state in May, and others it identified as ‘political prisoners.’

The city was seized by leftist groups for five months in 2006 before federal police broke up barricades and protest camps in October and arrested dozens.

While guerrilla groups in Colombia have regularly attacked energy facilities, the tactic hasn’t been used much in Mexico until now.”

—Mexico Confirms Attacks on Pipelines abcnews.com, July 11, 2007

Time for some needed contextualization.

“The city was seized by leftist groups.” See how artfully the U.S.A. “News” outlets spin the very concept of Power to the People—striking teachers (Teachers Union Section 22—mostly women—who were fighting for better working conditions and wages!) facing off armed police and Federal Forces (who had tear gas and helicopters and riot gear) with sticks and crude barricades and vast stores of corazón (a resistance that is not yet to fade away so easily). How easily the “Fourth Estate” of this democratic republic turns teachers bravely facing corruption and violence into some type of violent takeover by guerrilla groups. The APPO? The APPO were formed in reaction to the police intrusion and abuse of the peaceful protestors. And why did they terrify the State so much? Why do our own “News” outlets reduce them to “leftist groups”?

Because they are dangerous.

In the light of [the corrupt governor situation and raid on striking teachers], and the impression that the state government was repressive and had become effectively powerless in governing, the APPO was created and convened for the first time on June 17, 2006. It declared itself the de facto governing body of Oaxaca. […] It encouraged all Oaxacans to organize popular assemblies at every level: neighborhoods, street blocks, unions, and towns. The APPO took the slogan that it was a “movement of the bases, not of leaders” and asserted the need for common civilians to organize and work beyond the scope of elected officials.

—Wikipedia

Dangerous to a certain power structure. Or a certain dynamic of power.

Union busting? Undercounting protest numbers? Attaching the notion of “filthy invaders” to massive May Day parade numbers too large to undercount? Keeping a wall of ignorance and hate up between large masses of citizens, or different races of people? Anti-net-neutrality? All these things are about control of truth. They are specific anti-democracy, anti-knowledge, anti-Power to the People, anti-freedom devices.

The New York Times discusses, in their writeup of the explosions, the “backdrop” amid which this violence occurs. If you follow Mexican politics regularly, and through U.S.A. news outlets, you’ll see that word a lot. It’s a way of saying “unrelated related.” It’s a way of avoiding commenting on the obvious connections.

The Times mentions President Calderón’s (FeCal’s) support for the corrupt Ulises early in his own presidency, calling the move that solidified suspicions of FeCal’s presidency as installation-rather-than-election, a “crackdown on protestors”:

Mr. Calderón’s crackdown on left-wing protesters in Oaxaca last fall also contributed to the alienation of those on the far left of the political spectrum. Several of the protest leaders were jailed pending trials and have not been released.”

—Mexico Increases Pipeline Security After Recent Rebel Bomb Attacks nytimes.com, July 11, 2007

For clarity’s sake, let’s briefly recall a few details of a life that has been touched by this so-called “alienation”:

A second woman, fuming because her car has been blocked by an illegally parked Nissan, screams at a speeding motorcycle cop to rescue her but the officer only laughs and zooms off to ferret out APPO subversion. ‘Pinche policias!’ she snarls, ‘they only work for the killer Ulisis.’ The irate compañera explains that a cousin disappeared last June 14 when the governor dispatched hundreds of police to push the striking teachers out of the plaza and concussion grenades rained down on the demonstrators from low-flying helicopters.

‘He never came home. He’s dead. I just want his bones now’ she mourns.

—Counter punch, via Aztlán Electronic News

Ah yes. Alienation and Crackdown. Such dance-y words for State Violence, Oppression, Murder, and Corruption.

The New York Times also mentions the unrest that still throbs like a wounded heart just under the skin of Mexico’s movement, due to the way in which FeCal gained his power—the same way one of his heros, George W Bush, did, incidentally. It’s getting popular these days. It’s called Theft and Obfuscation and Using the wheels of bureacracy and people’s fear of instability to steal elections.

The attacks come against a backdrop of acute political polarization in Mexico stemming from last year’s presidential elections. Election officials say Mr. Calderón narrowly won that race, but his leftist opponent, Andrés Manuel López Obrador [AMLO], has never conceded defeat.”

—Mexico Increases Pipeline Security After Recent Rebel Bomb Attacks nytimes.com, July 11, 2007

There’s the word! All the violence occurs amidst a “backdrop” of corruption—of “alleged” corruption, that is. Kidnappings occur in relation to a “backdrop” of “cries of Fraude.” Torture and murder occurs against a “backdrop” of teachers and their familias refusing to back down to corrupt government. Yes all just a “backdrop” of various crooked plots and oppressive actions by the State…but no connectedness, no cause and effect. No Big Picture. You don’t need a Big Picture when you can just drape a bloody backdrop over everything.

Amigo Richard at the Mex Files is not quite ready to go along with the official story.

[G]iven that there have been manufactured “terrorist” acts in the past to justify police crackdowns on dissent (last year’s bombing of the PRI headquarters in Mexico City, a dubious bank bombing — carefully designed to minimize damage — in Tlanapantla, Morelos following a stolen municipal election in 2005 — and an earlier bombing blamed on the Zapatistas — this one blowing up a trash can in front of a bank at 3 in the morning — again in Mexico City), I’d want more information before I draw any conclusions.

—PEMEX, AMLO and ERP… it’s a blast, The Mex Files

Of course, some voices are already working in the ubiquitous and all-powerful Al Qaeda angle. You didn’t think it would take long, did you?

Pudiera, asimismo, tratarse de un problema que trascienda nuestras fronteras. En febrero pasado, La voz de la Guerra Santa, un sitio en internet de Al-Qaeda, hizo un llamado para “atacar intereses petroleros en todas las regiones que sirven a EU, no sólo en Medio Oriente”, y se refirió en específico a México..”

This could also be a problem that goes beyond our own borders. Last February, The Voice of the Holy War, an Al Qaeda websitemade a call for “attacking the petroleum interests in all the regions that serve the EU, not only the Middle East.” [Nezua translation]

—Aquí no cabe la violencia eluniversal.com/mx, 11 de Julio, 2007

That’s the “line of thought” I mentioned earlier—that Al Qaeda is erecting its explosive caliphate of Holy IED from Mexico to the UK to Iraq, just like certain judicially-installed nonelected officials always dreamed. Blowing up Mexican natural gas lines and writing passionate (Spanish) statements demanding the release of APPO members. And…unable to make it across the border to the USA. Don’t be surprised if this little fearnugget gets caught between the chattering teeth of the Bush cultists, however ludicrous it might be. We know, sadly, that there is a faction of deranged US citizens who long, finally, to lump Iraqis and Mexicans together and just get it over with already so the Hate ‘N Fear can all be rolled into one, nice, fat cigar that can be smoked and stoked and thrown on the smoldering remains of Bush’s imploding quagmire bonfire Freedum pyre.

Others, like Blogotitlan, wonder if it’s simply a coincidence that these explosions happen so closely after Mexico’s decision to open Mexican petroleum assets to foreign investment.

As amigo XP puts it:

What makes EPR[’s] statement interesting, they said the bombings were the signal of the beginning of its campaign against the interests of “the oligarchy and of this illegitimate government.” The word “illegitimate” echoes presidential contender Andres Manuel López Obrador [AMLO], who lost the 2006 election to Calderon by less than 0.6 percentage point, and uses the same term for the current administration. After leading two months of post-election street protests culminating in a self- inauguration, López Obrador continues his claim to be the rightful head of state.

Earlier this month, more than 300,000 people filled the giant Zocalo plaza in downtown Mexico City for the third National Democratic Convention (CND) called by López Obrador.

—The Natives Are Getting Restless Down In Mexico, xicanopwr.com

And what did AMLO (Mexico’s “Al Gore,” in essence) tell the mass of hundreds of thousands of gente who were gathered to hear his message?

‘Zero negotiation. I repeat, zero negotiation with those who carry out policies against the people,’ said López Obrador. He said he will mobilize the masses should Calderón attempt to privatize the oil industry or open it to foreign investment.”

—Hundreds of thousands rally in Mexico City - Keeping the struggle in the streets, Party for Socialism and Liberation

So, who knows exactly what is going on? A lot of backdrop out there. And a lot of spin in between. No single news source can be trusted, a network of sources one can use to compare reveals some of the basest moves immediately. Again, I go to the “overlap”, that fractal-icious shape that reoccurs and reconfigures itself over so many behaviors/processes. The portable Venn Diagram. Like when I ask for directions and ask two or three people the same thing to compare!

I haven’t been following Mexican politics all that long. Less than a year, though close. Maybe a year. I’m no expert by any means. Just starting to get a feel for things. But it is dramatic and sometimes scary. And yet, very hopeful. Of course, I feel tied to Mexico for (I hope) very obvious reasons. But I think following the story of Mexico’s situation is important for us for a few reasons.

In the place we call “Mexico” is right now gripped with much turbulence and oppression and beautiful resistance (I italicized “hundreds of thousands of people” for a reason), and all so close to us. This chaotic map below intends to show—over and over again, via arrowmania—the short distance between these explosions/massive Federal invasions and police presences/major historical events, and a major city in the U.S.A.

From San Antonio, TX to Oaxaca is about the distance between Miami and New York. From San Antonio, TX to Querétaro is about the same distance between Portland, OR and San Francisco, CA. This isn’t a country around the world. It’s right next to us. We even go to the land of Alienz on vacation. That yellow line on the map above doesn’t even exist. Yet, most US citizens remain unaware of most, if not all, of what is happening in Mexico. And how very closely it is related to us and our fate. How integral. Like a partner dancing in the shadow, reacting and acting in concert or in conflict with our moves.

The USA papers and “News” sources like to remind us of violence in Mexico at every turn. Violence, gangs, drugs. Old story. And like the ubiquity of the black and latino male visage ala “WANTED” mugshot appearing eternally in city newspapers near you, this barrage of factoids telling of violence and crime and contextless danger is preached to us, of course, for very specific reasons.

Is the drive against the Spanish language larger than just elements of White America fearing a cultural makeover? Is it on some level in place to prevent communication between Them and U.S.? I say it is, in part. I say that the towering wall of ignorance erected between us and our close neighbor (and really, we overlap, when you consider familias and lineage on both sides, hello!) has been built as symbotic to many U.S.A. desires and agendas. But we need to compare notes, us and Mexican citizens. Even with the limited amount I can pay attention to both “worlds,” it is clear that the crooks in both cases greatly benefit from our not comparing notes. Greatly. And this is true, of all nations and ourselves. Whereas we normally have lived on the notes our own media has handed us, that day is over. We’ve seen evidence of this in the Photoshop™ wars spawned from the Israel/Palestinian conflict recently, the psyops and psyops accusations that stirred as much fever as the news of the falling bombs themselves did.

The boundaries are falling. Around the world, information and means of communication and media are springing up. The wall of ignorance is crumbling. The divisions are falling, and those who would contain us to live off of our negative emtions and fuel and coin feed us fear and propaganda to make us afraid of the falling boundaries, as well. THEY want it both ways. THEY want to knock down boundaries between money and any place in the world and themselves, but to keep the walls up around information and truth and knowledge of various peoples. They want us to be enemies with other populations. They want us to OTHER them. This division grows increasingly clear: this line between those who would exploit, use, fear and harm those without power, and those without (apparent) power.

But we do have power. Power to read our news sources utterly skeptically, and to test them against other sources, and to report our own. Power to speak to each other to determine truth. Power to say your oppression does not exactly look like mine, but we are both being used. And we are both being lied to. And the lies are just the same. And I want to be part of your freedom.

And, not least in importance, we have the power in numbers. Oh, in great numbers. I say this because I feel that this is a needed reminder at times. I feel those people with the most power concentrated in the smallest amounts do not tell us the truth, and they do not mean us well.

Around the world, the violence rages on. Our weapons and protections now are knowledge, truth, each other.

Crossposted at The Unapologetic Mexican

Look, it’s ridiculous to call this an industry. This is not. This is rat eat rat, dog eat dog. I’ll kill ‘em, and I’m going to kill ‘em before they kill me. You’re talking about the American way of survival of the fittest.’”

—Ray Kroc, creator of the McDonald’s Empire, 1972

Not satisfied with marketing to children through playgrounds, tys, cartoons, sweepstakes, games, and clubs, via television, radio, magazines, and the Internet, fast food chains are now gaining access to the last advertising-free outposts of American life. In 1993 District 11 in Colorado Springs started a nationwide trend, becoming the first public school district in the United States to place ads for Burger King in its hallways and on the sides of school buses. […]

District 11’s marketing efforts were soon imitated by other school districts in Colorado, by districts in Pueblo, Fort Collins, Denver, and Cherry Creek. […] Hundreds of public school districts across the United States are now adopting or considering similar arrangements. Children spend about seven hours a day, one hundred and fifty days a year, in school. Those hours have in the past been largely free of advertising, promotion, and market research—a source of frustration to many companies. Today the nation’s fast food chains are marketing their products in public schools through conventional ad campaigns, classroom teaching materials, and lunchroom franchises, as well as a number of unorthodox means.

—Fast Food Nation, Eric Schlosser, pp 51, 52

The spiraling cost of textbooks has led thousands of American school districts to use corporate-sponsored teaching materials. A 1998 study of these teaching materials by the Consumer’s Union found that 80 percent were biased, providing students with incomplete or slanted information that favored the sponsor’s product and views.

—Fast Food Nation, Eric Schlosser, p 55

For years, some of the most questionable ground beef in the United States was purchased by the USDA—and then distributed to school cafeterias throughout the country. Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, the USDA chose meat suppliers for its National School Lunch Program on the basis of the lowest price, without imposing additional food safety requirements. The cheapest ground beef was not only the most likely to be contaminated by pathogens, but also the most likely to contain pieces of spinal cord, bone, and gristle left behind by the Automated Meat Recovery Systems (contraptions that squeeze the last shreds of meat off bones).

A 1983 investigation by NBC News said that the Cattle King Packing Company—at the time, the USDAs largest supplier of ground beef for school lunches and a supplier to Wendy’s—routinely processed cattle that were already dead before arriving at its plant, hid diseased cattle from inspectors, and mixed rotten meat that had been returned by customers into packages of hamburger meat.

—Fast Food Nation, Eric Schlosser, p 218

Children under the age of five, the elderly, and people with impaired immune systems are the most likely to suffer from illnesses caused by E. coli 0157:H7. The pathogen is now the leading cause of kidney failure among children in the United States. Nancy Donley, the president of Safe Tables Our Priority (STOP), an organization devoted to food safety, says it is hard to convey the suffering that E. coli 0157:H7 causes children. Her six-year old son, Alex, was infected with the bug in July of 1993 after eating a tainted hamburger. His illness began with abdominal cramps that seemed as severe as labor pains. It progressed to diarrhea that filled a hospital toilet with blood. Doctors frantically tried to save Alex’s life, drilling holes in his skull to relieve pressure, inserting tubes in his chest to keep him breathing as the Shiga toxins destroyed internal organs. […] He became ill on a Tuesday night, the night after his mother’s birthday, and was dead by Sunday afternoon. Toward the end, Alex suffered hallucinations and dementia, no longer recognizing his mother or father. Portions of his brain had been liquified.

—Fast Food Nation, Eric Schlosser, p 200

Look, it’s ridiculous to call this an industry. This is not. This is rat eat rat, dog eat dog. I’ll kill ‘em, and I’m going to kill ‘em before they kill me. You’re talking about the American way of survival of the fittest.’”

—Ray Kroc, creator of the McDonald’s Empire, 1972

THERE ARE MANY THOUGHTS one could take away from this collection of information. I recommend the entire book Fast Food Nation. This is just the tiniest sampling, and a better picture can be had by reading the full narrative with its relentless onslought of gruesome revelation (yet with an organic Hope center!). All laid out in a narrative voice rather factual, and actually tastefully bereft of the emotional color that could have (rightfully) been employed. To my mind, this gives the book or tone therein a haunted, sad quality; the restrained, quiet voice reflects aurally, a certain (moral) emptiness it textually navigates.

The thread sketched in this post by my choices do not necessarily reflect the arc of narrative in the book. I chose a few quotes that had to do with children and the system we call “school,” and the uses that the fast food industry has had for this system, as well as the compromises that can arise out of this unsettling alliance. Some of the first grouping of facts in this book that began to boggle my mind…but in a way that wasn’t terribly shocking to my general views. Only sadly confirming.

From here, one could take the discussion a few ways. It probably depends a lot on our own beliefs and feelings about many things. We could talk about trusting companies or intermediaries on the mass-scale, who handle our food. We could talk about industrialization. Or packaging. We could talk about how many hands are between us and the neat, jazzy little box of munchie-munch we flip a buck or two for. We could talk about the speed of justice and the timeline of truth and possible consequences to relying on distant investigatory boards that hand down self-imposed inspections to massive corporations that exist outside our personal realm of understanding or control.

We could talk about trusting agencies to feed our children. We ought to at least admit there is no way the average person can ascertain any level of safety at all in such environs, that we don’t know a damn thing about what is in the school kitchen or how it is made, and that we are trusting a thousand people we do not know to keep our child healthy—when, as good as those people may be at heart, they cannot possibly control all variables that aid that agency. We could talk about other choices. Are there any?

We could talk about eating meat at all. Or we could talk about the way meat is being handled far too often. Just for the hell of it, let me underline that “meat” means “carcass.” It means “flesh,” it means “body.” So we could talk about the inferior, and yes, STUPID, way animals (alive and dead) are being treated, handled, and then fed into a mass-grinder that we have not cleaned, sterilized, nor even seen. We could talk about processed and mass-distributed food, and the philosophies that encourage and sustain such ideas. We could talk about a view on nature, and on animals vs. “human, not of animal descent.”

We could talk about fast food, for sure. That’s right up front. I don’t eat the stuff anymore. My (vegetarian and hippie-consciousness) upbringing, and then job at McDonald’s (at 16) cured me of 99% of that. This book took care of that last 1% with energy to spare.

We could talk about children, the last group of people yet to be fully considered as equal beings in this world, the small, weak human beings with tiny vocabularies and trusting minds. Every ounce of energy and cost should be being expended to keep them safe and smart and well-fed, no corner ought to be cut, no consideration too small, no excuses made for preying upon them in the ways this book divulges, or that we all know of just turning on the TV or looking around us. We are a foolish, ignorant, and self-destructive people to disregard and play stupid with our most precious available commodity and potential for change.

We could talk, again, about trusting school systems to even teach our children. How many parents would have approved the ways in which the school lessons were being shaped by corporate interests as described in this book? How many knew about this? How could they have? In what ways are even today’s school lessons being influenced in a way that will not be revealed until tomorrow’s new Fast Food Nation? And thus, we could talk about ignorant (not in the emotional sense, but the strict definition of not knowing) parents and good teachers deceived and reliant upon a system that cannot be assumed, at every turn, to be concerned with truth and good information….and even assuming most of the institution’s influential members are, if a parent’s definitions of those concepts—truth, good information—jibe! We can look at how the corporate forces are invading even the centers of learning for our children to make hypnotized zombies out of them, we could talk about this educational system that began as a means of preparing humans to be good factory workers, that began by objectifying them in this cold economic fashion, and in a few ways, clearly, has not changed too much. We could talk about the mutagenic growth cycle and aggressive territoriality of the advertising beast.

How to get at the root? What connects these things?

Ultimately, as a philosophical sort of LCD (Lowest Common Denominator, I’m getting mathosophical on you), I see greed, yet again. In a past post I had a few words on greed, and I have before, and I will again, and that’s because it’s clear to see that this sense of eating everything that strikes our whim, shitting where we sleep, tearing through each hull without even cleaning off the old ones, tossing our bones in our drinking supply, chewing with our eyes closed—this sleephuntgathering, this distorted tapeworm-thirst baked brain dyslogic that informs so much of our so-called “progress,” this EXTRA 40% FOR HALFPRICE 25 HOURS A DAY SHIPPED FREE TO YOU!, this doing it in half the time, this devouring as much as possible and at the same time trying to expend as little care/energy/concern/cost as possible, this attempt to cheat a balance for a bigger horded stash….it is what is eating away at our human existence and our peace of mind. Behind every decision disruptive and destructive to the good of humankind is a decision to try and cheat that balance, to get more for less, to profit off of other beings, to control things to your own benefit at costs that don’t concern you. I return to this, because it informs all the other complaints here for me. So many wrongs spring from a simple lack of acceptance of a few basic principles. One is that For Every Shortcut, There is an Unseen Cost.

M. Scott Peck, in The Road Less Traveled, spoke of something in a nearby neighborhood. He posited, in the first chapter, that we just don’t accept the delaying of gratification. We’d rather procrastinate all day about an hour of work than do that work at the beginning of the day and have the rest of the day carefree. That we will eat our ice cream first and then fret forever over the broccoli. He rests people’s dissatisfactions, complaints, angers and much emotional and mental immaturity to a habit of denial of the truth that you just have to suffer sometimes for a little while to get where and what you want. And I agree… I frame it differently, but it is the same point.

When thinking, it helps to overlap symbols/shapes/ideas. To just slide them around, turn them inside out, lay them over each other, remove tags and just run through the closet of ideas and try on whatever might fit. Maybe it’s the Language closet mostly. Or the Symbol closet. I don’t know. I don’t spend much time in the Definition closet. but I’ve sort of amalgamated lessons from Science with my own philosophical wandering (like the “Philosophical LCD” above, which uses a touch of math to make its point). And when I was learning (this is as basic as high school bio) that energy can neither be created nor destroyed but only converted or otherwise carried along albeit in a new form, this made sense to me, it stuck with me, and it got tossed around with other intellectual garments and made its way into some of my favorite outfits. I have learned from living, the same lesson about energy. Not in a physically or empirically demonstrable fashion as the law described above, but along the same metaphorical lines. That energy is never thrown away. That it never has no effect. That where you invest it, it will return. Words begin to fail, when describing these things. And I think writing all out here that I’ve thought on this will sidetrack me. But I spend years thinking on certain ideas (not always actively) and very gradually give them shape as I test them and retry and superimpose and prod them…sometimes discard, sometimes rethink. I feel the truth of them all the while—that is what gives me the original impulse and direction—and it grows truer as I check back on it, as I sculpt away the inessential and inaccurate or limiting.

In our false paradigm of worshipping efficiency and profit, we are ignoring some axioms that cannot be so easily discounted. They come to collect the balance of which we try to cheat them, and they leave a receipt of (not unseen) harm, disease, violence, blanched fate.

Parents sometimes begin the first lesson of convenience by refusing to risk the child’s anger or unhappiness, and giving them all that they want or cry for. This is convenient for the adult, but begins to ruin the child. Why will they not, with this treatment as well as so much of USA culture, always seek the shortcut? The easier way? The convenient method? It is a dangerous focus.

It simply must be taught to children from the start that there is joy in investing energy and time and work has a great value. They must learn, in quite clear and direct terms, the danger in the reflex to shortcut, that the idea itself is already compromise of a sort that will affect the outcome, that energy and time invested into a Thing insure the conversion of that energy, not the loss; attention and focus and care as some disease of process that must be remedied by a trick? No. We must incorporate into our teachings that the translation of time and energy we take on making a thing will manifest into matter and a quality and an aura that lives on and radiates and affects everything else around it and that interacts with that thing. We must teach that spending more time doing a job means a job is done better. (There are always exceptions, their existence does not disprove this rule). It must be inculcated into our culture that Faster is not inherently Better, that Less is not More, that Cheaper is not Valuable, and that being in a rush is pointless and a way to destroy your peace of mind in the Now, sustain injuries, and waste energy conversion through lack of focus. How to shift the American (USA) culture in a diametrically opposed alignment to where it currently points? Good question. Feel it out. Let me know. I figure I’ll start with me. Thinking, speaking, living. (Not necessarily in that order.)

I have to admit, there is a line to be determined. Should we all hoe our own gardens? Is it wrong to attach a yoke to an animal and have them plow it? Is any “shortcut” at all bad? I cannot answer a broad question as this. I cannot say yes to that. I do not think any “shortcut” is bad. But I think a reflex to always find one is bad, causes harm, feeds decisions such as are made when feeding cattle other bits of rotted cattle, feeds kids rotted cattle, lies to the public. These are all greed-based shortcuts. If you feed that animal right, treat it right, give it care and good food and yoke it so that you can harness its larger, stron