La Cholla se acuesta llena de espinas, que penetran al suelo y pican al que les interrumpa
Brotan verdes brillantes del tronco que pierde sus picos mientras se mezclan con la tierra
Los hijos ahora arraigados aspiran hasta penetrar el cielo vacío,
Su propio peso los rompe de si mismo, caen, acostados en la madre.
The Cholla lays, spikes on its front penetrate the dirt and on it's back yell "get away."
New green branches sprout from the original body whose spikes dull as it mixes with the earth
The now rooted offspring aspire up until they penetrate the empty sky
They break off from themselves under their own weight, falling down into the mother.
Thursday, August 29, 2013
Thursday, August 22, 2013
Can't we all just get along? How enforcement at the border is not only false security but also creating great harm.
The only reason it seems complex to get rid of enforcement at the border is because powerful entities are behind keeping it intact. I started innocently with the fun idea of people getting to know each other across barriers at US/Mexico border through the fence. I honestly didn't see anything activist like about it and I certainly didn't think that DHS would try to stop it in any way. It didn't seem like it would be part of their job so it didn't seem like they would have any reason to be against it since it was done in an area that was designated for this type of contact and making friends and creating trust could actually contribute to security. It may seem incredible for people who know how Border Patrol works, but that is exactly what I was thinking. When I realized that they didn't approve, it didn't hold me back. People who had been fighting border patrol abuses for years liked my work and were intrigued at my innocence. I remember having a conversation with Christian Ramiriez one time around the point where I had realized that BP was a major obstacle to making friends through the US/Mex border fence that included me saying something like if we just continue to make friends through the fence eventually their power will fall away. I still think that's true but I now believe there has to be something more done about their power simultaneously or maybe even first. I believe this because I've discovered over the years that Border Patrol is run by a policy that puts enforcement first over everything and they are in charge. I'm not against enforcement but I've come to be against it because of the lack of priority in the policy. I mean, I think enforce has it's place. I'm not, for example against having police officers. I think, in that case, there are more abuses than there should be and than that we even know about but I don't think the solution is to get rid of police officers completely. Not so with Border Patrol. I honestly believe that everyone and everything would be better off if there were no such position as a border patrol agent and there were no such thing as enforcement at the border (walls, sensors, etc.). I don't say this as a radical statement in order to gather attention to the abuses that most would agree need to be curtailed some how, I say this because I've come to this conclusion through many years of seeing things that convince me of it. At times when I wasn't even thinking about it and at times when I was completely expecting enforcement agents to react in a way that would creat safety and instead they created more violence. The conclusion I've come to is that they are present along with all enforcement measures at the border in order to maintain an image of protection as opposed actually protecting anyone. This is not to say that there aren't border patrol agents who have saved people's lives, I'm sure there are. My thesis here that seems extremely obvious to me at this point is that first the enforcement doesn't complete with it's stated purpose of protecting people from harm and second that the measures taken in order to maintain the image that they are in order to justify their existence are inhumane, killing people and ruining the evironment every day. The main real reason I think that the Border Patrol is there is to maintain an image of protection more than to protect is because I catch them lying on a regular basis about the dangers in the area that justify their presence. To give a few examples, a customs agent told when crossing the border once in 2010 that there are 120 US citizens killed a week in Tijuana. I knew this was wrong but I looked it up just for the hec of it and it turns out there were 200 US citizens killed in all of Mexico in the previous 10 years including those involved in cartels and accidents. Another example: I met the new chief of the san Diego sector border patrol in the beginning of 2011 and asked him how he liked his new job. He told me that it's a lot different than his old one in AZ because here he covers much more area, a total of 64 miles and mentioned that there are around 115 aprehensions a day. This seemed like a lot but I normally only frequent about 3 miles and most of my time is spent within the last 1/2 mile up close to the fence so I thought it acually could happen in other areas of his perview. "Wow, where are most of the aprehensions, out East?"
"No, the majoriity are right here in this area." We were standing at friendship where I had spent several days a week for hours at a time for the preivous ten years or so and seen maybe 3 aprehensions in all of that time. We broke off the conversation for to talk to someone else who had a aproached and I stood there stunned comprehending that he had just made that up. Other agents have told me (before and after that conversation) that it's a very dangerous area. When I tell them my experience has been different, they say it's because I don't come at night. I've been watering the bi-national garden there since 2007 on a regular basis and nearly always at night from the Mexican side at a variety of times between 7p and 2am and not only have i never seen any violent acitvity, about 50% of the time there are no agents present.
Ok, so it's not ok that the US government out and out lies about what they are doing at the border in order to maintain an image of keeping us safer from bad guys, but what's worse is that the measures that they take in order to maintain this image are literally killing people, ruining our environment, and separating people from their families and from strangers who they could learn from, make friends with, and enrich their lives with new perspectives. I should clarify that I don't mean that Border Patrol agents are going out everyday and shooting people for no reason, although that has happened and probably more than we know, the major offender is what they call "Border infrastructure" ie, border walls. The most obvious example of this inhumane murderous policy in somewhat recent history is Operation Gate Keeper which was implemented in 1994. Before it's implementation, no more than a dozen people were dying every year crossing the border, after, while crossings dropped around 92% in the SD/TJ area, overall crossings have stayed the same or fluctuated in same way according to the economy as before and the number of deaths shot up to between 200 and 400 every year. I would be remiss if I didn't mention that the walls themselves aren't the root of the problem, but rather multinational commerce that forces people to migrate. If we want people to stop leaving their homes to come to El Norte to feed their families, than these all powerful multi-national corporations who control both the US and Mexican governments need to be stopped from exploiting people and natural resources wherever convenient. The walls created after operation gatekeeper, which were implemented as a supposed strategy of stopping people from crossing, were installed just after NAFTA which ironically opened doors and tore down walls for multi-national corporations, namely the agricultural industry, to do move into areas in Southern Mexico that forced millions of farmers and indigenous people off their lands. The walls were a measure, possibly an honest one, to try to stop the anticipated flow of people coming North. This is sinister no matter how you look at it. Even if the walls would have worked to stop people from crossing and no one dared to go East into the desert so no one died trying to cross, they would have been forced to stay home and starve. What, really, were these people supposed to do? What would you do? There were uprisings that were mostly crushed by mexican military trained by the US although the Zapatista movement had some limited success in keeping some of their land in Chiapas. So the real long term solution, for which there is a shift toward in the immigrate rights movement, is the "right to stay" in which people are not forced off their through invasion and through government subsidies. That way people could make a living at home and have the choice of where they wanted that home to be. When/if this happens, one of the pretexts given for walls (to stop people from coming into the US and taking US jobs) would disappear. But there are more pretexts given, and since 9-11 this reason has now been combined with one of national security in order to keep people in the US safe from criminals, terrorists, and, since around 2008, from violent drug cartels. Going back to my first point, none of these walls and other enforcement measures, have stopped terrorists or criminals from crossing the border and, even if they did, how would it be better for humanity if these criminals were made to stay in Mexico? So the walls and enforcement aren't working to do what they say they do but back to my second point that not only is this the case but they are causing tremendous damage. Besides the immediate crisis that has been immediate since 1994 but little has been done to change the policy, and resulted in officially as of 2009 over 5,600 people who have died trying to cross the US/Mexico border, there is the long term degradation of our environment which will result in the end of us all in the long term if not mitigated and has already resulted in the loss of valuable habitat to the sustainability of border regions. In 2004, there was a bill that passed the house and senate that ceded authority to the Department of Homeland Security to override "Any and all laws" in order to build border infrastructure in the Western most 3.5 miles of the US/Mex border. I heard about this and with help form an environmentalist friend, staged a protest to try to stop it and there were other efforts to try to stop the bill from passing by the Environmental Health Coalition and American Friends Service Committee. The bill still managed to go through as a tag on to a bill to approve money for Tsunami victims. In mid 2007, then Chair of DHS, Michael Chertoff, used his waiver authority to override 30 something laws that were protecting these last 3 miles from further infrastructure, including the Clean Air Act, The Clean Water Act, and The Endangered Species Act. I was living right by there in San Ysidro and would go out and film the contruction that actually started at the end of 2006 little by little by the Army Corps of engineers and then accelerated ten fold just before the waiver was signed when they contracted Kiewit construction company. I still wish I would have had the gumption to stand in front of the bulldozers to gather more attention to the issue. It really seemed like no one was paying attention and DHS would talk to no one and my blog and youtube videos weren't working. But the accelaration of the pace did manage to gather attention and a group formed that made a valient effort to try to stop the wall. The group was eventually called Friends of Friendship Park. This park is a bi-national space at the furthest Southwest part of US meets the furthest North West part of Mexico and it is where I started doing the Border meetups back in 2004. Friends of Friendship Park is still together and has had some success in regaining access to the bi-national area since access was cut off in the beginning of 2009. What motivated me to join and help form Friends of Friendship Park was my original goal of creating friendship across cultural barriers. This was my priority and the activism that came about in trying to keep the park open seemed like a necessary short term step in order to get back to being able to make friends across barriers. I've become ever more aware of all the forces that are creating the walls including the most powerful industry on earth, the defense industry. I feel now that my priorities have shifted in the area of Friendship Park from one of events to one of structure. Creating a space that defies and overcomes the walls. I think that if something similar to James Brown's design for a bi-national park were implemented and the model of the bi-national friendship garden of native plants were adapted as a priority over enforcement at our border, than the space they create would allow the friendship and collaboratation needed to happen naturally. I see signs of this with Jame's Brown unshakin dedication to making this park, with how the garden is becoming considered more and more as part of local policy for Border Patrol and how there is more of air of bi-nationality in the mainstream than ever before with a Mayor of San Diego who preaches it as his central focus, and with environmental groups of the region forming bi-national coalitions to improve the water shed and working together to clean and improve the region more and more.
"No, the majoriity are right here in this area." We were standing at friendship where I had spent several days a week for hours at a time for the preivous ten years or so and seen maybe 3 aprehensions in all of that time. We broke off the conversation for to talk to someone else who had a aproached and I stood there stunned comprehending that he had just made that up. Other agents have told me (before and after that conversation) that it's a very dangerous area. When I tell them my experience has been different, they say it's because I don't come at night. I've been watering the bi-national garden there since 2007 on a regular basis and nearly always at night from the Mexican side at a variety of times between 7p and 2am and not only have i never seen any violent acitvity, about 50% of the time there are no agents present.
Ok, so it's not ok that the US government out and out lies about what they are doing at the border in order to maintain an image of keeping us safer from bad guys, but what's worse is that the measures that they take in order to maintain this image are literally killing people, ruining our environment, and separating people from their families and from strangers who they could learn from, make friends with, and enrich their lives with new perspectives. I should clarify that I don't mean that Border Patrol agents are going out everyday and shooting people for no reason, although that has happened and probably more than we know, the major offender is what they call "Border infrastructure" ie, border walls. The most obvious example of this inhumane murderous policy in somewhat recent history is Operation Gate Keeper which was implemented in 1994. Before it's implementation, no more than a dozen people were dying every year crossing the border, after, while crossings dropped around 92% in the SD/TJ area, overall crossings have stayed the same or fluctuated in same way according to the economy as before and the number of deaths shot up to between 200 and 400 every year. I would be remiss if I didn't mention that the walls themselves aren't the root of the problem, but rather multinational commerce that forces people to migrate. If we want people to stop leaving their homes to come to El Norte to feed their families, than these all powerful multi-national corporations who control both the US and Mexican governments need to be stopped from exploiting people and natural resources wherever convenient. The walls created after operation gatekeeper, which were implemented as a supposed strategy of stopping people from crossing, were installed just after NAFTA which ironically opened doors and tore down walls for multi-national corporations, namely the agricultural industry, to do move into areas in Southern Mexico that forced millions of farmers and indigenous people off their lands. The walls were a measure, possibly an honest one, to try to stop the anticipated flow of people coming North. This is sinister no matter how you look at it. Even if the walls would have worked to stop people from crossing and no one dared to go East into the desert so no one died trying to cross, they would have been forced to stay home and starve. What, really, were these people supposed to do? What would you do? There were uprisings that were mostly crushed by mexican military trained by the US although the Zapatista movement had some limited success in keeping some of their land in Chiapas. So the real long term solution, for which there is a shift toward in the immigrate rights movement, is the "right to stay" in which people are not forced off their through invasion and through government subsidies. That way people could make a living at home and have the choice of where they wanted that home to be. When/if this happens, one of the pretexts given for walls (to stop people from coming into the US and taking US jobs) would disappear. But there are more pretexts given, and since 9-11 this reason has now been combined with one of national security in order to keep people in the US safe from criminals, terrorists, and, since around 2008, from violent drug cartels. Going back to my first point, none of these walls and other enforcement measures, have stopped terrorists or criminals from crossing the border and, even if they did, how would it be better for humanity if these criminals were made to stay in Mexico? So the walls and enforcement aren't working to do what they say they do but back to my second point that not only is this the case but they are causing tremendous damage. Besides the immediate crisis that has been immediate since 1994 but little has been done to change the policy, and resulted in officially as of 2009 over 5,600 people who have died trying to cross the US/Mexico border, there is the long term degradation of our environment which will result in the end of us all in the long term if not mitigated and has already resulted in the loss of valuable habitat to the sustainability of border regions. In 2004, there was a bill that passed the house and senate that ceded authority to the Department of Homeland Security to override "Any and all laws" in order to build border infrastructure in the Western most 3.5 miles of the US/Mex border. I heard about this and with help form an environmentalist friend, staged a protest to try to stop it and there were other efforts to try to stop the bill from passing by the Environmental Health Coalition and American Friends Service Committee. The bill still managed to go through as a tag on to a bill to approve money for Tsunami victims. In mid 2007, then Chair of DHS, Michael Chertoff, used his waiver authority to override 30 something laws that were protecting these last 3 miles from further infrastructure, including the Clean Air Act, The Clean Water Act, and The Endangered Species Act. I was living right by there in San Ysidro and would go out and film the contruction that actually started at the end of 2006 little by little by the Army Corps of engineers and then accelerated ten fold just before the waiver was signed when they contracted Kiewit construction company. I still wish I would have had the gumption to stand in front of the bulldozers to gather more attention to the issue. It really seemed like no one was paying attention and DHS would talk to no one and my blog and youtube videos weren't working. But the accelaration of the pace did manage to gather attention and a group formed that made a valient effort to try to stop the wall. The group was eventually called Friends of Friendship Park. This park is a bi-national space at the furthest Southwest part of US meets the furthest North West part of Mexico and it is where I started doing the Border meetups back in 2004. Friends of Friendship Park is still together and has had some success in regaining access to the bi-national area since access was cut off in the beginning of 2009. What motivated me to join and help form Friends of Friendship Park was my original goal of creating friendship across cultural barriers. This was my priority and the activism that came about in trying to keep the park open seemed like a necessary short term step in order to get back to being able to make friends across barriers. I've become ever more aware of all the forces that are creating the walls including the most powerful industry on earth, the defense industry. I feel now that my priorities have shifted in the area of Friendship Park from one of events to one of structure. Creating a space that defies and overcomes the walls. I think that if something similar to James Brown's design for a bi-national park were implemented and the model of the bi-national friendship garden of native plants were adapted as a priority over enforcement at our border, than the space they create would allow the friendship and collaboratation needed to happen naturally. I see signs of this with Jame's Brown unshakin dedication to making this park, with how the garden is becoming considered more and more as part of local policy for Border Patrol and how there is more of air of bi-nationality in the mainstream than ever before with a Mayor of San Diego who preaches it as his central focus, and with environmental groups of the region forming bi-national coalitions to improve the water shed and working together to clean and improve the region more and more.
Thursday, August 8, 2013
Snowden could further save the day, if he were gay.
The two top headlines in the news about Putin right now are his approval of a law that forbids saying anything positive about being gay and giving Edward Snowden temporary political asylum. Meanwhile, in the US, two of the biggest headlines about President Obama are that he has expressed very strong support for gay rights and his fierce condemning of Edward Snowden's whistle blowing. Putin's exact opposite stances makes me wonder if he really is homophobic and if he really does believe that Snowden deserves asylum or if he's just doing it cause he wants to snub Obama.
Could it be that Putin's main priority is really to do things to spite the US? If so, what would he do if Snowden came out as gay or bi-sexual or even just said something in support of gay rigths or something good about being gay? If he lets Snowden keep his Asylum status in this case, he's supporting a gay rights' stance and if he terminates the asylum status he's saying he doesn't approve of Snowden's whistle blowing. Either way he'd be agreeing with the US and might have to retract that middle finger sticking up into the Star Spangled Ether. He would be forced to answer the question, are you ok with Snowden even though he's gay? His answer would force the issue of gay rights in Russia and force him to either come out as a full-fledged homophope that doesn't care about saving Snowden and the fact that the US wants to set another example of what happens when you undermine their tyranny (ie Bradley Manning, Juian Assange), or break his own law in support of a gay person and US law in order to defend the right of dissent exercised to save the people from their government. For political reasons, if not humane reasons or both, I like to think he would choose the latter. This would create a situation where Russia would right their wrong on homosexuality in addition to bolstering the current possibile results of Snowden's actions of a full disclosure of the sinisterness of the weapon's industry in the US that could create a sort of rehab for US addiction to war. If Snowden did this, both countries would have to bury any hatchets starting to rise and they'd end up be on the side of compassion and understanding and be able to work together in the name of human rights and a peaceful future. I wonder if Snowden or Glen Greenwald has thought of this.
Foot note - update/correction: This was written before Chelsea Manning publicly came out and changed her name from Bradley.
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