I am a brown paper bag

The luminarias, more commonly known as faralitos to other New Mexicans, begin to take shape, lining up next to the wheel barrow filled with dirt. Usually two scoops of dirt from an old soda cup will do the job. The bag creased and filled with dirt is ready to find its home along the sidewalk, maybe the drive way, there is also the chance it lands around a tree. It has been my grandpas job for as long as I remember to place the stick between each bag to make sure it fits.

I don't call my grandpa, abuelito or my grandma, abuelita. I call them grandpa and grandma. What a thought to have so close to Christmas. Regardless they are a lot like my parents. I don't call faralitos, faralitos. I call them luminarias, but they both mean the same thing to my Christmas tradition.

The Navidad, reminds chicanos of the luminaria. Not the ethnic Chicano but the cultural Chicano.  Not the brown skinned Chicano but the kind hearted.  The humble symbolic lantern of light in a dark night. Isn't our life a beacon of hope for one another. Isn't it true that we are lanterns and disorient-able at the same time. I have a small burning candle in my heart. Its sheltered in my core. I am the brown paper bag. It's nestled in a bed of dirt. It lights the idea of home.

I trust the dim little amber yellow glow will be enough to guide my thoughts home. Home has become a journey, the journey. Not so much a place. The destination is no longer the priority because home is a condition more than it is a location. Not a destination that can be marked on a map, but experiences that splash the memories of those who share this life. Experiences, dusting the cosmos like a thin white jet stream left by a plane. A jet that once had a destination but now understands that its duty is to simply keep flying.

No, not like a jet stream. A little less straight, maybe more like the wake from a catamaran on a turquiose sheet of water. A catamaran leaving a carefree and curving essence of existence, gradually extending diagonaly left and right until both vectors seems to disappear. They never disappear though, it dissipates. Unless it finds an object to cause a rebound.

No, not like the wake from catamaran. A little less luxurious, maybe more like the tracks from a lonely snowshoer. A pair of snowshoes breaking through a white sparkly brilliance. Two shoes belonging to one person, crunching along, leaving a rhythm of evidence and disruption for as long as the temperature will allow. An essence that is completely dependent on the weather. My flame leaves experiences like snowshoes from a snowshoer with a pulsing flicker.

But not really like a snowshoer's tracks. Not as cold and surely an existence not so lonely. Maybe, an existence like a poem, always holding at the core the genetic and karmic nature of its author. Sometimes expressing the hurts, joys, and indifferences that reacted with other poets ideas about existing. And maybe like the hustle, shuffle, and buzz of a coffee house that lures poets. A congregation of poets, some who call themselves poets, others who are by mere intrinsic creativity considered poets. A collection of experiences like poets writing in a coffee house, my flame dances with energy.

The flame that I see in my heart is as determined as a jet stream streaking furiously through an empty atmosphere. The flame is as nonchalant as a catamaran in Caribbean sea. The flame fighting to glow can be as unaccompanied as pair of snowshoer's tracks. But usually the flame in my heart is as caring and warm as a coffee house filled with poets churning out ideas. My flame throws light against the shelter walls, animating with every flicker.

My flame flickers on this journey, the attitudes of others rustle my flame, not necessarily trying to put it out, creating conditions that bend, taunt, and tire my teardrop shape of fire. The journey is home, staying my course is my hope, and letting my little light shine is my duty. This little flame needs a cover. A cover that will let just enough light out but protect it from the gusts of discouragement.

Like the brown lunch bag that protects the luminaria's' flame from winds and the dirt nestling the candle's base, my body shields my little flame from fears, sustaining my dreams. The years get more and more trying. It feels like the lonely, cold, dark nights grow incrementally longer, perfectly challenging this weak but untiring flame of mine. Still, tonight, and even today that flame flickers giving life to the rhythms in my soul.



Dance little flame, because there is plenty of wick left.

A Letter to Dr. Coates

Mr. Ta-Nehisi Coates,
I find polarity towards what you have to say.  I woke up discouraged by the criticism being sent your way.  I just started tweeting, and you were the first person I looked to follow.  And then found that you shut your's down.  I wanted to throw out into the inter-verse how important it is that you antagonize the strugglers.  I ask you to keep asking our veteranos , uncles, and elders to be more clear and productive with how they'd like us to be clearer.

Dr. West's reasoning makes little sense because it seems like what he is asking of your messages is a perfectly complete discernment for all racial injustice.  His idea that your passion for demystifying White Supremacy is fetishism, is rude.  Would he describe Dr. Kings focus on civil rights as a fetish.  Would he minimize Cesar Chavez's commitment to labor laws a fetish.  This response lacks love, encouragement, and a growth mindset.  Dr. West's response is more like toxic endearment.  It is abusive to care so deeply that you want for the other something so unreachable.  The moving target of social justice will grab the perfectionist by the hair and drag them into their imperfections.  It is toxic endearment to galvanize my understanding of shared pain by inflicting a painful denial of your understanding.

I am learning that your effort to heal your pain is an insightful and inspiring to the ways I can also address my cultural pain.  The abusive kind of endearment that leads to any effort rarely being enough is a tool of White Supremacy.  And sadly we are reminded by two Black leaders how it doesn't take skin color to invoke this oppressive and tarnishing tool.  Arguing over who knows a more accurate suffering, who has authority to define the truest implications, and what constitutes a bona fide advocate is exactly what we don't need.  This arguing is the tradition that sustains White Supremacy.  I need you!

I need to know that the complex social pain within my Chicano life is not an isolated incident.  I need to have tools and strategies for improving my sensor for how my New Mexican communities' cultures are being disenfranchised, overlooked, and exploited.  You give my thoughts this improvement, by the thoughts you share and the implications you creatively explore.  The work you put into following today's pain into history's illusions have given me the courage to do that same for my Albuquerque peoples.  I ask with the upmost respect for you to remove your defenses, delete the doubt, but please put back your voice.

Dr. West might have the expertise and aptitude to assess the competency of race matters, but what he doesn't have the authority to do is to complicate you from reaching me.  He cannot define how your experiences help me resonate with my similar wounding.  The racially disenfranchised can't afford a delay in unraveling this pain.  The healing, I believe, will create this wholesome, accurate, and bona fide definition of thorough "freedom struggle".  I don't know if you left the twitter platform for larger reasons than this fiasco, but If your reasons are due to this fiasco, please return.

As Tupac Shakur sings it best, "you are appreciated"!

What shade of Race Are we - Part II

How do you see?

Part I

Race is of a toxic mindset.  It deceptively allowed Europeans a way to divide indivisible features of peoples because of an oligarchical or aristocratic desire to be less similar, more superior.  The European divider then manifested their competitive advantage.  Race is really a competitive deception.  Highlighting the falseness of an idea that an organism can be inferior.  What a sad perception, more of a reflection of a dualistic and toxic spirit's inflexion on other living beings.  We are asked to see it as a food chain, where it is more like a food system, possibly more like who feeds who versus who kills who.

A spirit cultivating a mindset that cannot value harmony, symbiosis, and quantum entanglement in favor being seen as "better", can't be the accepted mindset.  Spiritually, there is too much judgment in the idea "better".  I like to think of this need to have higher status as a defense mechanism, a form of fear.  To say I am better than something else is highlighting my limited perspective on how the "we" is the superior to the "me".  The competitive advantage in biology, adopted by psychology, and now running rampant in business and technology, has encroached on our opportunity for soul-cial democracy.

Money is a motivating antagonist for division, creating reactive mindsets and continuing a Race paced competitive mentality.  The competition seems to be a race for a finish-line that does not exist.  An expression of wealth that seems to grow infinitely.  It seems like the competition is a way for some to ignore how fragile life is.  It seems like the competition is to have a life's meaning that is pleasureful and sorrow-less.  Our first world human culture has graduated from discovering what is necessary to survive, to how can life be easier.  For many it also morphed into a necessity for discovering how a person can stand out.  The competitive, dualistic, Race based, and insatiable mindset has favored a disguised cooperating mindset, with a corporate one.

We have reached a new form of competitive advantage.  An Anglo-American disadvantage, less about race and more about profits. The privileged class in America is now having to deal with the marginalization of the Anglo-American.  This non race based marginalization may have always existed, but today it is becoming more difficult to believe the Anglo-American is superior, by default.  Now the Anglo-American no longer has an ideology to lean on.  No other people to dogmatically feel  superior to.

This seems to be causing the Anglo-American to grow bitter towards the supports put in place to limit the barriers to opportunity for discriminated peoples.  The marginalized Anglo-American wants to blame this intervention in the form of civil rights for their new found shrinking advantage.  It seems more accurate to look at the oligarchy, follow the money, and be curious of its economic strategies.  Some of us refuse to investigate the underlying reasons for marginalization.  It is sad that some Anglo-Americans wish to re-disable the discriminated as a way to address their shrinking advantage.

I want these marginalized Anglo-Americans to confront the greedy policies of their representatives and business leaders.  Hold them responsible for making room in learning institutions and be creative with vocations so that there are no shrinking advantaged communities.  There seems to be a lack of consideration for the historic effort put into protecting minorities over the past century.  It gets irritating when marginalized Anglo-American communities find themselves being abandoned by shrinking economies and corporate betrayal, then look to destroy these civil protections, especially of discriminated minorities, as a solution to their woes.  It is a reminder of how their loyalty is exploited by profiteers.  How do you see?

Part III

What shade of Race Are We - Part I

Race was conceived by colonial cultures to elevate their national distinction.  These colonial cultures needed a justification to objectify other humans and distort their existence.  Colonials defined these peoples as less than, mechanisms, to fuel their industries.  These colonial cultures manifested a convenient economic distinguish-er creating a mindset that allowed them to see their body as superior.  This implied inferiority wasn't fake, but surely wasn't necessarily biological or physiologic.  The enlightenment gave evidence that the European level of sophistication separated them from indigenous peoples.  Colonial's inhuman ideas of superiority seemed to depreciate their progressive cultural uniqueness.  It brings some sadness for how the concept of Race obfuscates the capacity for wonderment and gentleness in the Anglo culture. This need for Colonial or Anglo distinction has grown to be an American blemish still trying to make itself a home. The concept has become a barrier to human unity.

As much as I refuse to acknowledge the existence of Race, I have to own that I have integrated some of its toxic attributes into my own values.  It has lured me into seeing through the lens of racism.  I have to share how I size up Chicanos with the same racist lens Suburbia sees me through. I have to realize that I am the token brown friend at times, sometimes seen through my own insecurity and others times through my interpretation of clues.  I have to see how there are times when I try but can't camouflage my brownness with enough knowledge and wisdom to overcome someone's biased idea that my aptitude and capabilities can't be true.  I see how I do the same bigotry.  How do I dismantle these characteristics in my psyche?

I am challenged, distressed, and flabbergasted by recent racial topics in main stream publications, social interests, and politics.  Where is the understanding about Race's fictitious origins.  Can't we see the fiction? Can't we teach that Race is an idea not a principle?  I become anxious to watch how Race is distorting and distracting large populations from real social progress.  I get torn when I get inspired with a need to express my feelings and grievances, and do it without generalizing, implicating all Anglos , clumping together a spectrum of cultures Irish, Italian, Germanic, Greek, Briton, and various Eastern block cultures unfairly, their unique humanity cultural struggle ignored, their effort to express humanisticly, their contribution to undoing the stigmas and tension forgotten.  How do I speak to the ongoing struggle while honoring the Anglo cultures that don't explicitly contribute to the divisions of Race?

The challenge for me is trying to hold the understanding for how Race is entangled with profiling, vocation, religion and perception.

Part II

Not Racist...rather an Ethnicist

It seems surprising that we still use Race as a categorical demographic despite the word having no truth, being fabricated, and its toxicity.  And this is not to suggest that Racism is equally fake.  It saddens me to accept that Racism is a diagnosis for a form of hatred.  Racism, is articulated elegantly by Rev. William J. Barber as, "a strategic hate that has an agenda" (Barber, W.J (2017). Public Speech at Poor Peoples Campaign, August 15, 2017) .  We all are capable of hate.  And racism is a schism between those needing to tighten down a decorated shroud of hateful fallacies that promoted their industrial economic agenda and a reality that we are an integration of evolved bio mechanisms that are uniquely identifiable through genetics, yet our foundation, anatomy, and physiology functions indistinguishably, all worthy of wellness.  It's unfortunate that we camouflage the ethnic hatred with this schism by validating a fictitious word, Race.

I want Racism to be identified by its real source, Ethnic Hate.  We validate the meaning of Race by perpetuating its usage. We still use the concept to describe and acknowledge the ignorance of people still stubborn enough to believe we are differentiated by the illusion of Race.  It seems ignorant to spend time on this schism rooted in the word "Race" when we have the real ethnic, cultural, bigoted, prejudice, economic, social, and ideological schisms stressing this adolescent American nation.   The use of Race as the root word for the concept of racism, shields the propagation of underlying malice, going undetected in our social systems because Race itself is undetectable.  There are not any indicators for someone who is racist because there are not any indicators for Race.  There are indicators for someone who is phobic, prejudice, or discriminant because their statements and policies make it indicative.

The real concept under attack from imperial ideologies is ethnicity and culture.  Ethnicity aligns more with the real human distinguishers. My study of race, my encounter with my "racism", and the unfolding of the intelligence on the subject has allowed me to differentiate between the fiction, ideology, rationality, economics, bigotry, xenophobia and atrocity.  I can also be sad for how it has continued to be used for 600 years (Smedley,  A., 1997).  I hope to share more perspective on the covert and micro absurdities of Race, the concept, still lurking and giving traction to our unfair and unbalanced social constructs.  Race might be cultural sect-ism, inspired by prosperity, more likely rapacity, and corroded by hate, but it is still illusionary.

It would help shift the narrative around our human nature, to call racism what it really is... Ethnicism.

eth ·nic ·ism

/eTH 'ni' sizem /
noun

1. prejudice, discrimination, or antagonism directed against someone of a different ethnicity based on the belief that one's own ethnicity is superior.
2. the belief that all members of each ethinicity possess characteristics or abilities specific to that ethnicity, especially so as to distinguish it as inferior or superior to another ethnicity or ethnicities.
3. a form of neurotic hatred treatable with love, cultural immersion, and humility.

References:

Smedley,  A., (1997). Origin Of The Idea Of Race. Public Broadcasting Service. http://www.pbs.org/race/000_About/002_04-background-02-09.htm

Father's Day Crudo

The work I need to accomplish in order to show up in society, doing what I've been placed here to do, should be shared.  It gets cliche for me to think I was born with a destiny.  I've been lazily able to embrace the whole God has a plan for me.  I've done the whole I'll leave it in God's hands routine.  But in order for the rubber to meet the road, I have to get up, get still, get the messages, read the signs, and make the choices.  I have to do the work.  What kind of work?

 I've heard it called men's work.  It seems more appropriate to call it boy's work because it takes effort while in the child's mind, transcending the security of a mother's comforting blanket.  In order to overcome the convenience of boyhood, I had to find a compassion in my psyche for the boy.  I had most often destroyed the boy within, bullied the boy inside, wore it down.  I've had to learn to love the boy in me.  Not just one but many different facades that expressed with a boy's energy.  The boy is an archetype, symbolizing the aspects of my psychology that have not yet been galvanized by the existential crises of living.  With each archetype encountered, I find myself having to do "men's work".  I have to say good bye to the way I nestle up to the mother.  As long as there is a feminine energy to roll up to, hunker down in, and rest by, I will need to taste the vicious pull of discomfort.  This is a part of men's work.

Father Richard Rhor, through his knowledge and literature, guided me through a rights of passage.  It was my first lesson in the humble journey a man likely will take, must take, to approach a True Self.  I was shown in ritual 5 promises.  The rights of passage was a gathering with other men, taking us into an experiential process for feeling these promises.  It was something challenging to explain.  The best or only hint at what it was like is to call it a stimulation of True-ness.  The gathering was a collection of events and rituals, like prayers performed.  Each was brutally real, deep, and rich.   Each promise was a promise of work.  Each promise, if it could be describe by a direction, pointed down.  I learned a way to be dignified and emotionally responsible.

I found out that I wasn't the only man that had a distorted idea for what it meant to be a "man".  I find myself revisiting, these principles when I encounter my anxiety.  The promises remind me that the journey is hard, my duty is to see it through, to do not for me but to benefit all, that I belong to something grater than myself, and with grace I will die.  So how do you hand this across to a boy, even the archetype of a boy.  That is the motivation for this piece.

I can't teach the boy in me to be a man.  I can't coach the boy in me to be man.  It feels like I can only nurse a suffering boy ravaged by the insecurity of the wild, through the pangs of survival, reaching a condition of matured.  I find myself digging through my understanding of being a man and acknowledge that being a "man" might be more about restoring the boyish aspects of myself.  As if joining the mother need with an internal father.  A father that isn't drunk.  A father that isn't abusive or brash.  A father that is present and initiated with these prestige promises.  A father that understands how to cry enough through the pain while still working.  A nurturing father that will guide me through the panic, because the internal father trusts the 5 promises serve the soul.

Men's work must start with a nurturing male to place an understanding for what a gentle father can look like.  The boy must be given a living example to initiate the internal father.  The external father must nurture the boy, leaving behind the nurturing father to replicate for all other boyish aspects needing to repair the gap a mother can't fill.

Cosmic Citizenship

I'm a scared vulnerable morsel, on a planet just far enough away from an incinerator, hoping to keep my existence going.  I have been given this innate instinct to eat, sleep, and procreate.  For some strange reason there are entities around me trying to do the same, and consequentially have instilled and activated a competitiveness in me.  I am born into a labyrinth of intermolecular forces that construct an existence that I seem to think is so important.  I'm attacked by other living things.  I'm tormented by thoughts of perceived danger.  I'm antagonized by the desire for acceptance.  And still, I wake up, worrying about what shirt to wear, if my parking spot will be available, or if my ex-girlfriend is lying with someone new.  This is the human self interested experience.  

It isn't my concern to philosophize about my existence.  I am not trying to add to the pool of historic reason.  I'm just acknowledging how I wonder about what is my responsibility.  How do I contribute my unique flicker of moments, altering everything, even if only slightly.  This appears to be cosmic thought.  I am excited that I've reached this level of understanding.  I am interested in this idea that I am a simple collection of molecules, they make up me, Ron.  Where were these molecules before they combine to create me?  What had they been part of before?  Which molecules are autochthonous to me?  What have those that have passed on, cycled on, and shed away become part of? 

I am a man from New Mexico.  I grew, starting out as a little Chicano kid from Los Duranes USA.  Only a human moment, yet comprised of immortal like components that have an unknown birth date.  A kid who had a curiosity for my surroundings that was ignited by boredom.  I was bound to a family.  I followed rules adopted by a culture.  I formalized ideas rooted in a region.  I navigated a society being limited by hierarchies and authorities, sometimes in my favor and other times repressive.  Most importantly is this innate compass that inspires me to desire a loving and all knowing chaperon, a omnipotent power.  And as a result I was taught to pray.  I was taught to be grateful.  I was taught to plug into the concept of benevolence, and when I failed to engage a remorse.  And I learned fast that this religious process was in direct contradiction to my first instinct to survive.

Personal survival is to forgo the needs of others in order to win the war for power to sustain.  It is interesting what constitutes my survival.  Based on the youthful constructs of self, family, culture, country, and species, I have several systems to keep alive and keep powering.  Keeping these systems alive seems to convince me that I'll be safe.  If my country is thriving then my existence is okay.  If my species is at the top of the food chain then I will be okay.  If my family owns resources then I will be okay.  If my religion is pointing to the best God, then I will be okay.  I recognize how these schema have led to the complexities that make simply surviving a labyrinth.  It seems like my personal survival has come at the expense of cosmic responsibility.  It appears to be a paradox to survive benevolently in my human systems, while I'm cosmically destined to be reabsorbed, by something.

What is cosmic responsibility, is there a cosmic benevolence?

Rejecting Collective Fiction

It isn't so important for an idea to be true, as it is better for it to be accepted.  Maybe not better, but surely authorized.  The idea might not even be competent, but only needs a collection of believers.  It seems as though people appreciate a popular idea more than they work to critically think through a radical one.  When you apply this to our most important strategies like healthcare, climate change, gun control,  multicultural lifestyle, nutrition, economics, or legislation this deceptive governing appears to reveal itself.

There doesn't appear to be an algorithm for emotional truth that excludes reasonable or unreasonable doubt.  This is propagandistic.  I look at the polarization especially around faith, heritage, or patriotism.  These are great examples of creating fiction that cannot be proven true or untrue, tending to thrive only in human emotion, feeding off of our primal needs to belong.  It seems like it is enough to think a collective fiction true.  When all else fails, God can validate these weakly factual perceptions.  Our modern religious leaders appear to give this Divine authority, making anything challenging or counter popular believable through faith.  This convinces me that there can be a toxic morality.  This is worrisome.  It seem possible that faith can make anything true, even perceiving injustice as Divine will.  We see it consistently in war, industry, and economics.  For the bible tells me so.  Maybe it might be more fitting to say, "For my interpretation suggest so".

I say that with sensitivity my own necessity for faith.  I observe how living in a 2nd world city, part of  a first world nation, I see people unwilling or incapable of discovering the principles of complex systems in favor of gorging on dogma and hear say.  It is challenging, inconvenient, or boring to unwrap the entangled business processes that have encroached on civic responsibility.  It shows me that people appear unwilling to analyze, evaluate, or investigate.  Is this a problem?

I think for the first half of my life it was something I made a problem.  I perceived myself on the suffering end of the upper crust's truths.  My social perceptions showed me a world that was unfair to mine and I needed to correct this.  I needed to destroy racism.  I needed to empower the poor while awakening the rich.  I needed more people to look out for my race, my gente, my well being, and my interests.  This is where truth and fairness collided because the race battle was trying to play itself off as a species battle.  I was fixing a problem that was a collective fiction.

The powerful created an obstacle course of injustice to provide distractions for me get caught up in.  I realize there is no race war with those who see race as a collective fiction.  There is no gun-control for those who know death has many tools and will find more.  There is an abundance of health care in nature and in harmonious attitudes.  There isn't a financial crisis for those who truly believe in only needing "our daily bread" and a warm place to rest.  There isn't a need to advocate for God for those who have faith that God is expansive enough to be interpreted through many mythologies.

Now I accept that the power hungry only need to make believers out of enough.  Possibly because they need conflict, disagreement, fanaticism, fundamentalism, or bipartisan-ism in order to have an audience willing to entertain a collective fiction.   This makes room for people to believe what they want to believe.  The truth is in the eye of the beholder, right?  As long as they can teeter the totter with enough of their truth, then doubt can keep authority in their realm.  But if they suddenly become wrong then it might mean so is their power.  Observing this dynamic helps me no longer see injustice as intense of a struggle.  It has grown more as an observation.  The observation that winning is not an indicator of truth as it is a confirmation of belief.

Truth is not a moral trait, and being honest isn't either.  Truth may better be described as a convenient condition when reflection the human condition.  When I have some form of the truth, it feeds my feeling of being genuine, providing a condition that encourages my generosity, morality, and worth.  When I am wrong, it is unpleasing.  I feel ignored or marginalized. If I own little truth, I don't feel prone to accepting the truths of others.  I think this makes sense that my scarcity of truth will feed my attitudes that inflame my inadequacies.  Maybe now I need to create my truth until I can be pleasured again.  I think this is where the short sided pleasure seeking becomes a characteristic afforded 1st world cultures.  My need for pleasure from being powerfully truthful becomes an exponential condition that I have not learned to go without and can be led to be propagandic in order to be convincing.  Seeing this in my government and communities, I must recognize it in my self.  I am trying to hold on to truth despite being pressured by doubting and pleasure seeking to avoid participation in a collective fiction.

The moral trait I aspire to harden might be better labeled Accurate.  As I criticize the idea of collective fiction and toxic morality, I stand firm that faith is necessary.  The discernment process is not something I was taught thoroughly, the scientific method was my best chance, but I long for a culture that teaches me to vet the pleasurable with enough wisdom to find an accurate utility.

Neither Or

No Allegiance but to ...

The use of my identities within community are frequently overlapping, competing, and contradicting.  This makes who I am to others unmanageably variable, despite the importance being accurately identified is for being understood.  In this context identity is how I want and need others to acknowledge me.  I use several identities to navigate community.  I am a counselor, a programmer, and an artist.  I am also in pain.  The list goes on.  I have studied the nature of healing for years now.  I have studied the roots of civil wellness.  I have taken the time to research what it takes to be a healthy citizen.  I transcended the barriers to paradoxical beliefs.  My spiritual exercises have taught me to minimize my dualistic mindset, allowing me to see how most significant concepts are rarely black or white.  This affords me the opportunities and potentials to benefit from perceptions and choices that can be informed with a complex both and view.  I learned this from my earliest days, Christ is both and, God and human, here and crucified.  I wonder like most people who are invested in some human growth, what about the opposite.  What about the neither or?

If "both and" is seeing paradox then I need to also find a way to see God in the "neither or".  There are a good amount of New Mexicans who hang on to the Spanish identity.   My guess is that it might be a hope for being seen as civilized, prestigious, or proper.  There was, likely is, a prejudice for Mexicanos in my New Mexican communities, despite sharing origins.  These same dividing and distinguishing peoples have grown or transferred their loyalty to the new American empire.  It surprises me when I think how the Anglo often lumps, us, the descendants from a collapsed Spanish colonization, into one Hispanic bucket, often excluding us from having to own our ancestral brutality.  Or maybe the brutality is continued in the space or safe haven found in aligning with the next winning, conquering, team.

I find this desperate attachment to a historical identity crisis, riddled with dysfunction, futile.  This clinging to historic grandiosity is a distraction from the fact that in the moment we are "Neither Or". This helps me see that the divisions between people doesn't end with heritage, ethnicity, or locality, it seems to permeate in the imperialism or fanaticism of being on the winning side, convenient side, comfortable side, popular side, or the right side.  So for me it helps my confusion to consider that "neither or" is useful when believing there is a complicated side, a paradoxical side, a responsible side, or defeated side.  I am not Spanish, New Mexican, American or any other identity, for the first time in my existence I see how futile it is to identify, and still this divides me. 

In the moment I am best described as a burst of organized energy that is simply expending a strategic amount of energy to grow and survive.  I am in a mindset of electronegativity versus cultural allegiance.  I pay more attention to how I am impulsively coerced by my fears to promote self serving thoughts and actions.  I am learning to recognize how I am drawn to convenience and comfort.   I am disappointed by how freely I donate my resources to allegiances by defaults like ethnicity, locale, or stereotype.  Allegiances I can only see as toxic remnants from a pedagogy of purposeless competition.  I have been inveigled into being on some team.  The people that surround me in the Albuquerque community invite me to be on their Burque team,  patriotic people guilt me into being on an American team, and the orthodox people entice me into dogmatic loyalty usually to promote their agenda.  So this is why I find it important to be "Neither Or" at times, and while also being "Both And".

Learning to re-dream

As a result of failed dreaming, I might have developed a radical patience, but Dr. King, I'm still practicing.  Carrying the torch for peaceful change might be a way of honoring Dr King's vision.  As for now, I can only say that I am discovering how to be a dreamer again, after being worn down by the strain of clashing with so many obstructing realities.  I've accepted that my dreams and reality no longer mirror Martin Luther King Jr.'s.  The principles are equal, but the circumstances and dramatics are not.  My dream needs to evolve, because different times call for different dreams.  Racism, prejudice, discrimination and hate got sophisticated over the decades.

These human hateful traits can no longer be on public display as they once walked arrogantly down main street polished, ironed, and primped.  The new and illusive racism, prejudice, or hatred doesn't wear the same uniforms.  The uniform is a quantum garment that resembles an attitude.  A micro garment with the durability that can withstand most acts of social activism.  It looks like a hatred that no longer propagates itself through formal decrees, but oozes through dysfunctional moral creeds.  Dr King's dream, really a struggle, a veces mi lucha, and now transcending into a radical patience, has helped me to consider that prejudice folk had dreams too.

Even In a suit!

Racism went under ground, stopped revealing itself in blatant laws, now permeating smells of gorilla tactics, and their revolution learned to dream radical dreams too, surviving alongside mine.  The bigot has gone rebel too.

I was introduced to my social and lifestyle disparity in this newly adapted gorilla prejudice.  A prejudice once gloating under the banner of racism, best iconified by a confederate flag.  The tactical and stealth prejudice that insists it doesn't exist, like Delta Force, is reaping havoc in the territories still addicted to the idealized Christian prosperity, liberty, and happiness.  A force that no longer fights under an American flag, but several axis of force, like capitalism, patriotism, conservatism, elitism, and ethnocentrism.  I had to learn about Dr. King's dream, by recognizing how my dream drifted further into a misty misery of suspect authorities that create limitations calling them precautions, stereotypes, slippery ladders leading to cinder blocked class systems, and moving targets of success.  While pale skinned authorities preached to me how accessible prosperity should be.

So I dreamed and pursued being qualified, capable, or accredited.  What was camouflaged was how their paths of assisted progress and lessened resistance provided an advantage I could never understand, and they could always deny.  I went into my adulthood courageous and hopeful, now humbled and insightful, I can visualize their malleable and manipulate-able frameworks they put in place over the centuries, ensuring their position of power. These frameworks allow for traits that remove obstacles for a select and deserving elite, like the fraternity, inheritance, endowment, the represented, and supreme, have put on camouflage.  The obstacles to prosperity of the active duty prejudice are different than mine.

I thought I needed to get a degree, but then I realized this webbing of accreditation, seems added to our culture to delay the participation of the undesirable.  Yes this is cynical to think.   I reflect how education allowed for their establishment to keep authority without revealing their prejudice.   License and accreditation became a way of titrating people into their adaptive, creative, resilient, and prosperity filled lifestyles.  Titrating at rate that allowed them to keep pace of maintaining their stronghold of authority.

Well I no longer dream like King, it's more like a hopeful patience.