Success

I’m standing at the kitchen sink shelling shrimp for dinner and I’m thanking my lucky stars I’m not my famous (within certain political and literary circles) friend who is “terrified” (I know this because I’ve just got off the phone with her) at the thought of her reading later tonight in Santa Fe, where she will not only read to an eclectic group of unknowns but to her new boyfriend as well, who is also famous and flying in from out of town for the occasion.

I’m terrified only when I anticipate the nasty letters I might receive for the essay or newspaper article I occasionally write for a weekly Santa Fe paper that explore the political battles I deal with as a community activist. When the paper devoted an issue to the question of race and culture in northern New Mexico, where I live and work, I wrote about how the environmental movement fails to address issues of social justice. While I was careful not to call any particular enviros racist, I did identify the policies they effect as such. Surprisingly, I didn’t get any nasty letters for that article, but the one I called “A Question of Semantics”, which poked fun at these same environmentalists who co-opt language in an attempt to validate their positions (I questioned their use of the word “radical” to describe what I see as their reactionary politic) raised a lot of hackles.

However, this is merely a by-product of my by-default career, if one can call it that. With my “unmarried partner” (the box I checked for the 2000 Census) I write a community newspaper and organize around issues of environmental and social justice. If someone in high school had told me this would be a career, I would have laughed in her face. I was destined for academia, perhaps the law, at least “great things.” That I never got there is perhaps due to the fact that my concept of “there” was destroyed by the process of “getting”, which is essentially the substance of mine—or anyone’s—life. The “getting” took place in the late 60s and early 70s, when I and my fellow travelers were engaged in smashing the “there”—Vietnam, the military industrial complex, the nuclear family, etc.—as fervently as the times demanded.

But that’s only part of the story. My famous friend, who is “terrified” in Santa Fe, came of age alongside me, but obviously decided at some point in her life that she would dedicate it to writing books. And part of the dedication would mean being part of a national (i.e. “famous”) community that was writing and speaking to the same issues as she. I don’t know if people who so dedicate themselves to certain causes consciously say, to be successful in my endeavor I must be willing to promote myself, so that my voice becomes part of the larger voice that is listened to, that makes a difference.

Whether or not this is a conscious decision, the effect remains the same, be it Scott Nearing or Andy Warhol. I just finished reading a memoir by Helen Nearing of her life with Scott, who in an interesting twist of fate was first famous as an academic and political activist until he was banished from academia and became even more famous as a homesteader who repudiated academia and the public life (although he remained steadfast in his political life). Although a certain air of self-righteousness permeates this book and several of those they wrote together, it seems that Nearing genuinely believed that in order to share his private and political vision of what constitutes a good and moral life (he never would have embraced poststructuralism) he needed to lecture, write books, travel, spread the gospel, so to speak.

Warhol, on the other hand, dedicated his life to being as notorious as possible for the sake of that notoriety. Whether this was motivated by the Nietzschean “will to give expression to one’s personality” or simply the drive for “utter moral worthlessness”, like Colette’s first husband, Willy (from Secrets of the Flesh, Judith Thurman’s biography of Colette), doesn’t really matter. He procured his fame, just as Nearing and my friend did, and they all had or have to deal with what fame brings in our society: terror, unwelcome distractions, or attempted assassination (at least for Warhol).

It’s easier to stay home, both physically and mentally. In one of my feeble attempts to actually get a book published with the local university press, I remember telling the editor that I lacked the chutzpah it took to promote myself, and that if her press didn’t publish me this would be the beginning and end of that particular career (and it was, if you don’t count the children’s book I wrote that was published by a Santa Fe house that took 10 years to sell 2,000 copies). I’ve written some national magazine articles over the years that chronicled life in northern New Mexico, which people in mainstream America find fascinating, but the few attempts I’ve made to sell articles of import, where my voice could perhaps make a difference on critical issues of environmental justice, they were dismissed as too “local” or too hard to understand by an “eastern, urban readership.” Thus I learned that one has to pay dues, like my terrified friend, before one’s voice is heard.

I imagine that there are millions of us out here, voices that are knowledgeable, analytic, eloquent, profound (I’m not necessarily claiming all these qualities). Just like all the painters who may have been a lost link between cubism and abstract expressionism or abstract expressionism and Andy Warhol. Or composers, like the eccentric woman who hitchhikes around Taos in her mumu and straw hat and is occasionally acknowledged for her operas that are locally performed. I once wrote a short story (which sits in my bottom drawer) about her called the “Woman as Artist” (I turned her into a painter). In my story she sits on an old car seat on her back porch with her legs stretched out onto an adjacent chair to rest her varicose veins: “I’ll never be a huge success, honey,” she sighs to the narrator. “It’s not in the cards. Or should I say, it’s not in my blood. I can’t sell myself to the highest bidder to get there, like the cold-blooded ones do. Do you have any idea how many talented people there are out there in the world—painters, musicians, composers, writers, philosophers—living in places just as obscure as this crumbling adobe in El Rancho, who will never, ever see even the modest success that I’ve had in this fucked up society that defines your worth by how much you sell yourself for? Then once you’re sold they have to keep investing in you because so much money is at stake. Doesn’t matter if you’re old, stale, hackneyed and worthless—if some investment banker on the upper West side bought you for thousands of dollars to hang on his wall, by God you better double or triple by the time he’s ready to sell you to an investment banker on the upper East side to hang on his wall. ‘All the world’s a stage and we’re only the players.’”

Maybe some of this is sour grapes. I don’t have the talent that I give my Taos character, and I often lack her equanimity. But I do share her devotion to her old car seat on her back porch where she can see the Sangre de Cristo Mountains across the fields of irrigated pasture that have defined this view for 300 years. We also share a love for our neighbors, whose ancestors have lived here for 300 years. And I appreciate their regard for the work I do to help maintain these pastures and lives. That it is a way of life, not a career, is what I mean by “de-fault.” My friend who is terrified and famous also experiences this way of life, but it is within a different context, with an edge that, at least for me, spoils the quietness, the safety, the sameness. I don’t buy the adage that only things that terrify you are worth doing.

One day my almost grown son calls to ask me what I’m doing. When I tell him I’m working on my book about environmental justice, he says, mom, why don’t you publish your stuff. Ah, hito, if you only knew. But I tell him that I’m going to get down to work and finish up my memoirs of life as a norteño activist, my second novel, and edit my book of short stories so he and his brother can read it all when I’m dead. Mom,

I’m going to publish all if them, he says. Good luck, I tell him, you have my blessing. I won’t be around to be terrified.

Health Insurance

Preface to this blog: This posting was written in 2008. In 2009 my partner Mark had an experience with the medical industrial complex, as we now refer to it, which more dramatically reveals that it is irreparably broken, with no hope of repair beyond revolution. Stay tuned for that story.

I was fifty-six when I first got health insurance. Two years later, I’m wondering if it was more of a burden than a benefit. Here’s the story.

I have arthritis: I’ve had it as long as I can remember and in as many places in my body as there are joints. Before Insurance, which I will refer to as BI, I did what I could with over the counter pain relief, an occasional shot of cortisone, slings for my arms to relieve tennis elbow, and hiking poles for the downhill stretches. When I tore my meniscus hiking the Grand Canyon (I probably already had a partial tear due to weak joints caused by disintegrated cartilage) and could barely walk down the stairs, much less squat in the garden, I shopped around for the most affordable orthopedic surgeon, who gave me a discount for cash, and under a county indigent fund got the hospitable bill paid off. The surgery was arthroscopic, and I was hiking the trails again within a few weeks.

So when I actually qualified for insurance, through a new state program that covers the under-employed and self-employed who can’t afford private insurance, I figured I was home free, at least with the stuff that Western doctors are supposed to be able to deal with. I finally had the ugly subcutaneous benign something or other removed from my upper arm, a colonoscopy (ugh!), and a few other check-ups that I was supposed to have before fifty.

My left thumb was already in trouble before I got the insurance, but the bone spur that developed at the base of the joint became increasingly painful. If I accidentally banged it against a wall I almost fainted. So I got a referral from my doctor at the rural public health clinic, which is the only place I’d ever gone to see a doctor (other than the guy who repaired my meniscus) and off I went to the hand specialist in Santa Fe (it wasn’t really “off I went” because it took almost two months to get an appointment). He sent me for specialized x-rays, and another month went by before I got his pronouncement: I had a deformed bone between my thumb and wrist and the treatment is called arthoplasty — as opposed to an arthroscopic — surgery to remove the bad bone and either replace it with a small piece of tendon from my arm, fuse the bones together, or implant an artificial “spacer” between the bones. I opted for the tendon, and he told me I’d have to wear a cast for a month, then go to a removable brace so I could start physical therapy, and be good as new (with maybe a little less strength than before) in three months.

I kept putting off the surgery because my life kept getting in the way (should I not go back east to visit our younger son who was obviously depressed as hell his first semester at the University of Pennsylvania, should I not be able to make pies for Thanksgiving and Christmas, or should I miss cross-country ski season?). But eventually I couldn’t stand the pain, and I had the surgery January 16.


It is now the end of June and these past six months have been some of the most miserable of my life. My hand has not only not healed but has triggered a chain nerve reaction in my arm, shooting pain from my hand up to a frozen shoulder and across my shoulders and even down my back. The surgeon was prepared to recast my hand—“it shouldn’t be hurting like this”— and sent me off for an MRI for my shoulder, where they shove you into this tube that is inches away from your face and tell you to be sure not to move because then you’ll have to start all over. They give you a panic button to push (and many people do panic, you can bet on that) and then the noise begins, the whirring and pounding and whining, despite the ear plugs. I closed my eyes and didn’t move, so it was over in 20 excruciating minutes. When the surgeon saw the MRI he said I had a small tear in my shoulder tendon and some abrasion, but that it really shouldn’t be causing me this much pain, so he sent me to his partner, the shoulder guy. The shoulder guy saw me for ten minutes, max, and said the same thing: these injuries shouldn’t be causing your shoulder to freeze up, which we need to unfreeze. He didn’t even want to look at my hand until I insisted: “That’s Dr. _______’s business.” But then he looked at my hand for a few minutes, asked me some questions, and said, “I’m going to go call Dr. _______. So he spoke with Dr. ________ on the phone, came back into the room and said, “I think you have Reflex Sympathetic Dystrophy.”

I, of course, had no idea what Reflex Sympathetic Dystrophy was, and he didn’t enlighten me, except to say that surgery seemed to have set off some nerve problems in my arm, that he wanted me to get a bone scan for diagnostic validation, and then he’d send me to the pain clinic on the floor below where they’d give me a shot in the neck. “What kind of a shot?” I asked. “A local anesthetic,” he said. “You may have to get it a couple of times but that should do it.” I got him to write down the name of this diagnosis before I left, and I went home.

Notice that he said “A shot in the neck.” What he didn’t tell me was that the treatment he was prescribing is a shot in the spine, that Reflex Sympathetic Dystrophy is one of those autoimmune classifications that doctors dump illnesses into when they can’t really figure out why you’re in so much pain, that there is no definitive diagnosis (not a bone scan or a blood test or anything else), and that there is no effective treatment. I learned all of this on the Internet the next morning, of course. As soon as I saw that RSD, or as it’s also called, Complex Regional Pain Syndrome, has a support group, like Sjogrens (which I already have) and fibromyalgia (which my younger sister has) and that I was consigned to a life of never ending pain and debilitation (as testimonials on the web site declared) I burst into tears.

After weeks of bitching and moaning and wishing that I’d never gotten the insurance and never had the operation, I decided to get a second opinion, which meant I had to be thankful that I could afford to do so—meaning that I had the insurance (fifty per cent of bankruptcies are triggered by medical bills). And I actually found someone who is trying to heal me. He’s a sweet Jewish doctor from New York, which immediately made me feel better, who had me in his office for two hours reading the medical records I’d brought with me from the other orthopods, listening to my story, asking me questions, looking at my whole body, recognizing me as a person with a medical history who might need some holistic treatment and gentle reassurance. He said, “Let’s not assume you have RSD, doctors don’t know everything,” and sent me back to the physical therapist, who is loosening up my arm. He also, without any request on my part, gave me a prescription for Valium, so I could sleep, and asked me if I wanted to try a new drug that might or might not work, to help relieve the pain.

So I took the drug, which does help, I’m loosening up my frozen shoulder with a physical therapist who also told me, “Let’s not go there.” I’m actually managing to fall asleep without the Valium, and the pain is diminished. So while I haven’t “gone there,” to the land of chronic pain and suffering, I still have a ways to go to the place where everyone experiences a little pain and suffering.

Solution: A complete revamping of the health care system, where everyone is covered by government, single pay, comprehensive insurance but also assigned a health care advocate who follows your course of treatment, informs herself about diagnoses and what treatments are necessary, possible side effects of treatments, what alternative treatments are available, etc. This person should be the doctor, but that probably ain’t going to happen, so let’s find someone else and pay them well to do it. The system would end up saving millions of dollars in uncalled for diagnostic tests, treatments, rehabilitations, etc. And patients might feel like human beings again.

Israel

When it comes to Israel and its position in the Middle East, there are no progressives in Congress, there are only cowards. I am an American of Jewish descent who has made it my responsibility to learn the history of the dispossession of 700,000 Palestinian people and the complicity on the part of the United States in the militarization of Israel to maintain our control of the region's resources. It's all there in the history books, but starting with the Woodrow Wilson administration and culminating with George Bush the Second’s, there has been a very calculated campaign to pervert that history to keep the American people ignorant and fearful of the so-called "terrorists" who supposedly threaten the existence of Israel and our interests in the Middle East. In actuality, the U.S. has helped create those "terrorists" in every perverted move it has made, from supporting the Muslim Brotherhood against Arab nationalism to invading Lebanon in futile attempts to squelch guerilla movements like Hezbollah, which gained the support of the Lebanese people in the conflict of 2006. The U.S., along with its other western allies who have allowed us to call the shots, is largely responsible for the abysmal situation in the Middle East and for the civilian deaths and destruction suffered by the Palestinians, the Lebanese, and the Israelis.

To my knowledge, not one Democrat (except for Dennis Kucinich). has had the guts to stand up and acknowledge the lies, distortions, and propaganda that are spewed out on a daily basis by every administration, by Congress, and by the mainstream media. How many Americans know abut the refusnik Israeli military pilots who have refused to fly bombing missions that kill civilians indiscriminately, or the editor of an Israeli newspaper who has provided a point by point analysis of how we have arrived at this insane moment in history when the Israeli government is perpetrating atrocities that turn the entire world against it (and its military supplier, the U.S.) and turn poor, disenfranchised, angry young Arab men and women into jihadists? What they do is tragic and counterproductive; what we are doing is obscene. And as one of the refusniks pointed out, as he traveled around this country speaking out about what is going on in his country, what is equally obscene is that the majority of Americans are completely ignorant of the fact that there is a peace movement in Israel and in Palestine. That knowledge would not serve our purpose of controlling the Middle East.

Until Congress takes a stand against these policies, now threatening the stability of the entire world, and the media begins to do its job of giving voice to those who try to speak truth to power, the Obama administration will have a free hand to continue its control by force. Is Iran next? I saw a film clip of the 60 Minutes Mike Wallace interview of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Or really, it wasn’t an interview but an assault, the only way the arrogant octogenarian Wallace knew how to pretend to be a journalist. As Wallace asked his snide questions and acted out his grievances, Ahmadinejad, through an interpreter, actually tried to say something about the relations between his country and the U.S. in the larger context of Middle East politics, but Wallace was not about to have him appear as a statesman, with opinions based in historical context (and, unfortunately, in an Islamic fundamentalist vision of economic progress and social regression). He had to be demonized, like all the rest of the Arab leaders (except for Saudi Arabian kings and princes who cut off peoples hands as punishment but send their oil in the right direction), so that our invasions become liberations and our occupations become democratization.

How did the Jewish lobby in this country become so powerful? Why do otherwise liberal and progressive Jews sit on their hands when it comes to criticizing Israel or Zionism? Why did they allow Bush and Cheney to invoke the Holocaust at every turn in the road in their “fight against terrorism”, which has suddenly morphed into a “fight against fascism”? Why do Jews continue to let a Holocaust culture excuse Israeli and American imperialism that continues to turn the world against us and create real anti-Semitism? Before he died, Columbia University professor, author, and activist Edward Said had come to the conclusion that a two-state solution to the Palestinian/Israeli problem would never work. The only hope was for a one-state homeland to both Arabs and Jews, where an elected government could actually represent the interests of the Palestinian population.

That will probably never happen in our lifetime. Palestinian political disorganization and lack of leadership are no match for the Zionist and Israeli guiding principle, aided and abetted by the U.S. Santa Fe author and activist Kathleen Christison, in her book Perceptions of Palestine, quotes Said complaining about the Palestinians’ “historical inability as a people to focus on a set of national goals, and single-mindedly to pursue them with methods and principles that are adequate to these goals.” And no American president and no American Congress, Republican or Democrat, will ever see Palestine as anything but an impediment to Israel. When as brilliant an advocate as Said becomes filled with such despair over any hope of solving the Palestinian/Israeli conflict, it makes us cynical as well. But I mourn the loss of his constant attention and passion to the situation. Without it, we are even further removed from a solution.

A Not Very Hopeful Solution: Create a one-state homeland to both Arabs and Jews, where an Arab majority will have to find the political will to create a democratic and just society.

Invoking God

Mark and I always manage to have a Seder at Passover with whoever happens to be around and interested in attending: non-Jewish neighbors, Jewish friends from Santa Fe, family from New York, etc. One year, our friend Lisa, a Jew from Washington D.C., who was at the time living in a small Hispano village across the Rio Grande from us, decided to have a Seder and invite all her Catholic neighbors. We downloaded a liberation Haggadah from the Internet and went over to Servilleta Plaza to celebrate Passover in Lisa’s run down adobe house. Besides being the only Jews there except for Lisa and her mother, who was visiting from D.C., we were the only gringos as well. Everyone crowded into the large kitchen while we went through the ceremony and took turns reading the passages from the Haggadah before digging into a scrumptious meal of lamb, matzo ball soup, and frijoles. When it got dark we lit a bonfire outside, told stories and danced.

Mark and I also attend Catholic mass in El Valle, on Christmas and special occasions, and at funerals (or rosaries, where the penitentes sing on their knees in front of the alter). I’m not sure anyone in the village even knows we’re Jews, but they don’t care what we are as long as we come to show our neighborliness and respect for their religion and culture.

That being said, I truly hate organized religion. I hate the fact that certain friends find it necessary to “rediscover” their “spiritual” life (particularly after they become parents) that gets all tangled up in some form of religion, usually the one they grew up in, or sometimes, one they find more “liberating.” Religion is not liberating: it is suffocating. It is about taking on faith certain precepts that have nothing to do with liberation or freedom or goodness. It is about believing stories that were devised to control people by keeping them ignorant and disenfranchised. And it is about fomenting hate and intolerance. According to Voltaire: “Papist fanatics, Calvinist fanatics, all are moulded from the same sh . . . , and soaked in corrupted blood.”

This is the promo for a new video game:

Imagine: you are a foot soldier in a paramilitary group whose purpose is to
remake America as a Christian theocracy, and establish its worldly vision of
the dominion of Christ over all aspects of life. You are issued high-tech
military weaponry, and instructed to engage the infidel on the streets of
New York City. You are on a mission – both a religious mission and a
military mission – to convert or kill Catholics, Jews, Muslims, Buddhists,
gays, and anyone who advocates the separation of church and state –
especially moderate, mainstream Christians. Your mission is "to conduct
physical and spiritual warfare"; all who resist must be taken out with
extreme prejudice. You have never felt so powerful, so driven by a purpose:
you are 13 years old. You are playing a real-time strategy video game whose
creators are linked to the empire of mega-church pastor Rick Warren, best-selling author of The Purpose Driven Life.

Actually, they’ve got it wrong when they target “moderate, mainstream Christians” because they’re just as insidious. This is author Sam Harris in his book The End of Religion, who is unafraid to state the obvious (although a certain political naiveté shortchanges the impact of the book):
“The problem that religious moderation poses for all of us is that it does not permit anything very critical to be said about religious literalism. . . . Religious moderation is the product of secular knowledge and scriptural ignorance—and it has no bona fides, in religious terms, to put it on a par with fundamentalism. The test themselves are unequivocal: they are perfect in all their parts. By their light, religious moderation appears to be nothing more than an unwillingness to submit to God’s law. By failing to live by the letter of the texts, while tolerating the irrationality of those who do, religious moderates betray faith and reason equally. . . . Religious moderation, insofar as it represents an attempt to hold on to what is still serviceable in orthodox religion, closes the door to more sophisticated approaches to spirituality, ethics, and the building of strong communities. . . . Moderates do not want to kill anybody in the name of God, but they want us to keep using the word “God” as though we knew what we were talking about.”

My son Jakob, who worked in Evansville, Indiana as a photojournalism intern, told us about the church on every corner and even attended some of them to get a feel for what Midwest culture is really like. At the last one he went to, a middle-class mainstream Christian denomination that houses thousands of worshipers every Sunday, the minister’s sermon was singing a dirge for the church’s younger generation, who were not attending services with their parents and apparently showed little inclination in becoming members. So there is still hope, that the next generation, which already embraces a much more culturally inclusive lifestyle that bends gender and class rules, will eschew the trappings of organized religion and celebrate their spiritual lives through their acceptance and celebration of all human diversity.

Solution: Give all churches to their respective communities to be run as halfway houses, homeless shelters and training centers, domestic violence retreats, and dancehalls.

Some Things are Relative

When George Bush became president of the United States for the second time I remember lying on the floor in front of the TV sobbing uncontrollably. The wave of despair and misery that washed over me was palpable, even though I knew my life would go on, at least externally, in pretty much the same fashion as before. I would continue to live on my 10 acres in El Valle and irrigate my garden, orchard, and fields. I would continue to publish and edit La Jicarita News with my partner Mark, where we could pretty much print anything we wanted. Our kids would continue to attend public school and the college of their choice and pretty much say anything they wanted. When Mahmoud Ahmadinejad became president of Iran, I read a profile of a young Iranian writer who described sitting in his room in despair, holding his head in his hands. His life, already in a state of precariousness, would certainly not go on as before. If he continued to write what he wanted to write, he would probably end up in jail. If he continued to associate with those who believed in a secular, democratic Iran, he would probably end up in jail. And if his girlfriend continued to refuse to wear a jihib, she might be whipped or end up in jail.

His suffering is more profound. My suffering is complicated by my privilege. It is only because of where I live that I have the leisure and capacity to be writing this attempt to deal with what makes me suffer, the dichotomy of the tomato in the global society. While I struggle to reconcile my faith in the Marxist analysis of capitalism with a more postmodern, unhistorical exploration of how cultural conditions figure into the equation, the student in Iran is still very much aware of a systematic, historical process that controls and dominates his life, leaving not much room for worrying about how to appreciate the tomato.

Those of us who live in privileged American society, which is responsible for much of the oppression in places like Iran, seem incapable of figuring out how to smash the power elite after losing the will of the sixties and early seventies, when the political system seemed vulnerable, at least momentarily. Michel Foucault gave up the barricades for the San Francisco bathhouses and Abbie Hoffman killed himself. A young friend of mine, who is in her late twenties and graduated from Antioch, where I also went to college, doesn’t like to hear my stories of the sixties. My best one, about the time in Berkeley the cops surrounded our house with a swat team, looking for a fellow Antioch student who was on the run after being arrested in Cambridge at an anti-war demonstration and tying up the sheriff on Telegraph Hill when he tried to arrest him, bores her silly. She bristles when we complain about the lack of young people out in the streets protesting the invasion of Iraq or the prison at Guantanamo Bay. She says demonstrations are useless, that the mainstream media subverts the intent by refusing to cover them.

But then, after a month of student and worker riots in the streets of France the government capitulates and rescinds the law that caused the riots in the first place (a labor law that would allow employers to fire workers younger than 25 without cause). It took ten years of demonstrating in the streets of the U.S. before this country pulled out of Vietnam (and it’s debatable how much of our withdrawal was due to political unrest at home, see the Civil Disobedience blog) and millions of demonstrators in the streets of all the major cities didn’t deter George Bush from invading Iraq. Why did the French government respond so quickly to its student uprising? In France labor unions remain strong and viable and a force to be reckoned with, while here in the states the unions have largely been emasculated, through a calculated campaign by the power elite and because of internecine fighting and corruption in the unions themselves. So not only are we ignored in the streets, we have no organizations with any political clout that can actually threaten the status quo of the government. Our privilege extends only as far as the marketplace: We have the power to consume but lack the power to change anything. I can write and speak out about whatever I want but my words effect nothing. Internet blogs can appear on our computer screens in a blink of an eye but we can’t stop the bombing in Iraq and we can’t make sure no person goes to bed hungry.

A lot of us spend a lot of energy trying to figure out how this has happened and what we can do about it. That doesn’t stop us from continuing our own struggles that manifest in a million different ways, but it’s obviously not enough and periodically it results in the malaise that I am now struggling with. But, as the Mexican immigrants who took to the streets during the last election to agitate for immigration reform, like to remind us, “Si se puede”—if only fleetingly, if only temporarily, if only in the alleviation of the suffering of a few at the hands of many.

Solution: Hasta siempre liberación.

Higher Education

When my younger son called to tell me he’d just found out, via the Internet, of course, that he’d been rejected by Princeton, Yale, Harvard, Cornell, and Stanford, was on the waiting list at Columbia and Brown, and was accepted at Dartmouth and the University of Pennsylvania, my immediate reaction was, “What does it take to get into these fucking schools?”

Silly question, really. It obviously doesn’t take overachieving by a white kid who attends a public high school in Santa Fe: a 4.60 GPA, between 750 and 800 on all his SATs, captain of his chess and tennis teams, an internship with the ACLU, a stint with Amigos de las Americas, fluency in Spanish, a writer for the teen section of the city newspaper, and on and on and on.

Neither does it take that special something that makes him stand out from other overachieving white kids. He was raised in El Valle, an Hispano village of 20 families in northern New Mexico by a couple of parents who dropped out of mainstream culture a long time ago to try to get real. He lived on 10 acres with a horse, burro, chickens, cats and dogs, vegetable garden, orchard, and hay fields. His neighbors were descendents of settlers from Mexico and indigenous Pueblo Indians. He helped clean the acequias—irrigation ditches—every spring and gathered wood in the fall.

That wasn’t the path he wanted, however. By ninth grade he’d rejected everything rural, had picked one of the few sports that required proximity to concrete—tennis—and made it clear that if he wasn’t more challenged in school he was going to quit and do it on his own.

Se we moved him to the big (1,800 students) public high school in Santa Fe. For the first two years he lived with his dad’s parents, who we’d just moved out from Buffalo. When that became untenable because of his grandfather’s Alzheimer’s and his grandmother’s inability to deal with a teenager, his dad (Mark) and I rented a house in Tesuque, a Santa Fe suburb (we totally lucked out through a friend of a friend with a cheap rent), and took turns living with him: we split the week between Tesuque and El Valle, where one of us had to be to take care of the animals.

Mark and I, of course, never wanted him to go to Harvard or Yale. We don’t want him going to school with elitist rich kids—or what he aspires to be. Are there so many of these kids applying to these schools that there’s no room at the inn? What about all the public school kids like our son who are their class valedictorians and captains of their cross-country and swim teams who deserve to go to these schools if that’s what they want? And why are they convinced that they have to go to Cornell or Princeton to get a good education? Why are their parents spending thousands of dollars to hire tutors to raise their SAT scores to 800? Why are these kids applying to 10 or 14 schools, screwing up the admissions process and driving their parents crazy with admission and financial aid forms?

Seems like a vicious cycle to me. The Ivy League schools reflect the increasing disparity in our society between the haves and have-nots: prep school kids with money and connections and minority kids enrolled to fill quotas. The two kids from our son’s high school who were accepted at Harvard are an Hispana and the daughter of an alumnus. The co-valedictorian, who got accepted at MIT, is Asian. For the prep school kids, it will be a validation of their privilege. For the minority kids, it will be a struggle, and many of them won’t make it.

Our son will go to U Penn or New York University (where he got accepted in the Scholar’s Program) or Oberlin or somewhere perfectly reasonable and he will have to figure out what to do with his life, just like the rest of us. This was his first real taste of how badly the system sucks; I hope that helps him make a life-affirming choice rather than a cynical one.

Solution: Make all higher education free, which will quickly pay for itself.

Civil Disobedience

“All men recognize the right of revolution; that is, the right to refuse allegiance to, and to resist, the government, when tyranny or inefficiency are great and unendurable . . . In other words when a sixth of the population of a nation which has undertaken to be the refuge of liberty are slaves, and a whole country is unjustly overrun and conquered by a foreign army, and subjected to military law, I think it is not too soon for honest men to rebel and revolutionize. What makes this duty the more urgent is the fact that the country so overrun is not our own, but ours is the invading army.”

Henry David Thoreau was of course referring to the Mexican American War, but his words hold true for any number of our military incursions, either overt or covert, via the CIA, into the Philippines, Yugoslavia, Panama, Cuba, Chile, Sudan, and today, Iraq.

What form could Thoreau’s exhortation to commit civil disobedience take today to actually be effective? The way I see it, every American soldier would have to refuse to serve in Iraq or Afghanistan. Bush and the neocons went to war despite the millions worldwide who took to the streets to express their vehement opposition to the invasion. They’re certainly not going to end the war even if people are enraged enough to continue to stay in the streets or smash windows like they did in Seattle. During the Vietnam War we managed to stay in the streets, largely, I guess, because of a sustained youth movement fomenting on college campuses, the emerging of identity politics with Black Power and the Brown Berets, and the thousands of body bags that were brought home that touched thousands of other lives.

But what really ended the Vietnam War was when the soldiers there started to mutiny, refusing to fight the people the U.S. government told them were the enemy, and deciding the real enemies were their commanding officers. And oftentimes they were, literally as well as figuratively. For the past few years I’ve arranged for a group of Veterans for Peace from Santa Fe to come to the high school in Peñasco to make a presentation on Full Disclosure Recruiting. The Vets, who served in Korea, the Vietnam War, and the first Gulf War, try to provide the kids the kinds of information they need to make an informed choice, when deciding to join the military. It’s always disheartening when the first thing they ask is how many of the students have family or friends who are currently serving in the military, and 75 percent of them raise their hands. Military recruitment in northern New Mexico is extensive, and many of the kids have a long family history of military service.

One of the Vets who came was a woman named Joan Guffy. She served as an Air Force nurse in the Vietnam War, where she was exposed to Agent Orange and was twice raped by American military officers. She suffered from ovarian cancer and Post Traumatic Stress Disorder: “The military is a macho system where women are demeaned. I had to be afraid of my own soldiers.” Joan died in 2007.

The soldiers who served in Vietnam were drafted, of course, and were there by default: their families weren’t rich enough and they weren’t educated enough or life-experienced enough (most of them were taken right out of high school) to be able to avoid the draft. The dehumanizing conditions fueled already existing feelings of futility and hopelessness, and their training to be killing machines backfired: there are stories of soldiers throwing grenades into their commanding officers tents and mutinying in the middle of battles, leaving the officers to make it on their own. Today, the men and women in Iraq and Afghanistan are military volunteers, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t from the same families and communities that supplied the Vietnam War. What will it take to raise their consciousness as to the futility of both their personal and societal positions, to “rebel and revolutionize” against their commanders and refuse to fight?

Maybe the straw that breaks the camel’s back will be the gut wrenching returns to duty of those who thought they were only signing on for one tour—or the older, National Guard men and women who have families, jobs, and lives that are devastated by two or three tours. There just aren’t enough of these volunteers, or guardsmen, to maintain a force that even the Bush administration begrudgingly admitted wasn’t enough to “liberate” Iraq. There’s even a movie about it playing right now, called Stop-loss, which all the critics say no one is going to go to because no one wants the war to be any closer than reading another article on the inside pages of the local newspaper.

In an interview we did with Ike DeVargas for La Jicarita News in the late 1990s, he told us how he had come to his activism. “Most of us went there [Vietnam] believing what the government told us, that what they were doing over there was good and necessary, and most of us came back knowing that if they were lying to us over there they were lying to us here, too.” It took Ike only one tour to make the connection, and it led to a lifetime of civil disobedience. If only all the other soldiers would refuse to take up their weapons, just one time, all together, we could end these obscene wars.