Climbing out or pulled into who's bucket?

 There is fable out there that most less fortunate communities use to describe "making it out".  I am describing this story we teach each other in the streets, the story reinforcing the analogy seen with crabs in a bucket.  I get to write my own version. Who taught you that you are in a bucket?

When I look at who my grandparents were, and for a few remaining, are, I realize the analogy should reflect how who they are coming out of their 1930's-ish New Mexican and South Texas cultures is respectable. I can picture how the bucket came to us.  The industrial revolution, came radioactively.  The bucket arrived infected with Tuberculosis.  The crabs came from the American East bringing this mentality of caste.  I think the crabs that escaped their mediocrity bucket, felt a strong need replicate their bucket mentality here.  

Now we are being labeled as subversive because many of still aren't fully on board with this form of capitalistic or individualistic mindset.  They often call us communist because it is a lazy way of dismissing how important our faith requires us to be communal.  The bucket is so much more like a container we were seduced to see ourselves in.  It makes me think, one consequence of the great American expansion was to persuade our modest ways of sustenance to be undesirable, and how it ought to transition into a more ambitious competition for prosperity.  Did we get pulled into a bucket?

The atomic weapon brought America to New Mexico.  And New Mexico's high desert air seduced the Tuberculosis refugee.  The same Spanish individualism thought that this part of world now know as New Mexico was gold garden.  I am learning and seeing through a different lens that informs me of how fortunate I am to be nestled in this liminal place where we are boring enough to not be desirable, perceived to be inadequate enough to be overlooked, and yet still not subservient enough to be accepted.  As a consequence to this fable we rebel by sabotaging ourselves with delinquencies.
  

We can't be racist

 I learned in my late 20's that race was a construct and not a biological marker.  This expanded my perplexed attitude towards my perception of dominant cultures and my own identifications.  I have to admit that it created a disappointment in me that inspired many life changing principles.  A hatred for my own contributions to the systematic bigotries.  The changes were disorienting.  I had new information that highlighted how I didn't belong to a race, how I have privilege despite having embraced a victim's mentality for so long, and how I learned how tainted my origin story is.  

I was socially indoctrinated to function believing that somehow I was socially ordered into an ethnic layer tied to the color of my skin.  And I had around 3 unspoken layers beneath me, a few complex layers around me and one championship layer above me.  And this system of layers was more about human capital than it was ever about superiority. I now find it impossible to participate in life the same way knowing these layers are dysfunctional.  

Today it seems like the world is coming to these same realization or maybe resistance to seeing it change.  Seems like these layers are being stirred by the complexities of our nations shortcuts, abuses, rule breaking, rule bending, and for sure rule escaping.  The Black Lives Matter movement, the Boogaloo movement, the Federalist Society, ANTIFA, Blue Lives Matter and the QAnon folks are all adjusting to the lower layers being informed and the new voices demanding participation where their views historically could be ignored when rule making.  We may not have equality but that is not suppressing assertion. 

I am as aware as ever of the emotions I still have when thinking about where I land in the eyes of my fellow citizens.  I find it challenging and hard to know that I have this information and the systems or eco-systems I live in are still functioning on the legacy caste like mentalities.  I find the pain that creates anger in me isn't as overwhelming.  I can still feel the injustice while also celebrating the change.  I still feel discriminated and I smile when I can't recognize if it is bigotry or because of me .  

At times I think some dominant cultures conceal their bigotry far easier now that we have a more ambiguous linguistics for prejudice.  I see the opportunities where I might have written off barriers to entry as racist, where earlier in my life I would have felt it wasn't my shortcomings but theirs.  I now take more responsibility for making it harder for the systems to exclude me, sometimes by assertion, more often by trusting the process, and when I fall short I let it motivate me to find a different route.  The system is going to make space, but not until I let it know I want it to make room. 

I am not as surprised or devastated when the Anglo world sees me through fear oriented lenses.  I accept the sadness that my culture has such delinquent parts.  I still get frustrated with how it seems at times I am catching up to all the other layers of people, whether it be in knowledge, lifestyle, or effectiveness.  I am grieving the ways I am not sufficient and can't close the gaps.  I seem to be between layers.  And I am grateful for the anger and tension because it might mean I am not the only one who has to begin the process of revisiting this looming concept called Race and how it has antagonized the darkest parts of our character.

I am proud of my Chicano heritage, my Spanish origins, Mexican adaptation, and New Mexican simplicity.  I am a complicated member of a brave experiment that at times didn't want to include me, found a way to, and is now providing a way to contribute that is safer than other peoples around the world can.  I will slowly eliminate my regard for race or speak to the invalidity of Race as a human trait. I will continue to let it draw out emotions working to orient them in way that helps me be more Christ-like and a spreader of dignity

.  All of this while hoping that I might create safety that rarely creates danger for the other layers.  

Guata....Hell!

    

The right wing mentality is a challenging mentality to tolerate, and I find that left extremity to be frustratingly soft to the point of ineffectual.  As I learn more about important world dilemmas I wonder how we can remedy any of them when there seems to be such a gap between the two polarities.  

    I would describe right wing as the "convenient" way to work with these complexities. The mentality seems to be highly adolescent.  It allows a person to rationalize most inconveniences into a category of threatening or wrong, while also labeling most gratifications as liberties, especially when it comes to profits.  It might be describable with the synopsis such as saying regulations are an injustice to my prosperity and freedom until I find that the scenerio results in pain to those "I" find important, then of course those regulations are needed.  

    Or better yet, when a brown democratic country like Guatemala is reported to be in collaboration with Russians, it conveniently looks threatening.   What it looks like when a brown country puts its country first.  It is surely deviant or threatening, from a right wing perspective.  It is so deviant that we need to remove their democratically elected leader.  And when Michael Flynn wants to collaborate with Russian entities it is a liberty and conveniently in our National Interests.  

    I find that Left Wings extremities function the same way, like regulations are necessary until we have so many that I can't do anything without taking into consideration the inconvenience.  Left wingers will gradually only want to follow the regulations that ensure the safeties that reinforce the safety that seem safe enough for them.  Because when the shoe is on the other foot we get similar results.  Left wingers equally champion the subtle ways of using convenience as a tool for power.  When Bill Clinton appears to get help from a foreign country the same predators appear.  The same privileges are afforded left elites.  Again when a non-anglo country leans into unifying modalities like communism, Anglo America feels inconvenienced.  Just like Guatemala, Vietnam endured a long period of governmental angst that was adolescently approached by America.  United States of America ignored its responsibility to be principled to liberty.  Again when a non-anglo country like Vietnam puts itself first, or tries to "make itself great again", America sees it differently.

Nationalists who often times align with a stereo typical conservative ideology fit the label of "Right Wing", and it becomes more irritating how this ethnocentric bigotry is disguised as patriotism.  Fuck Flynn not because he might have talked with the Russians, but Fuck Flynn for having the privilege of being able to see communist Russia as safe.

Brown angst during COVID

I am struggling to sit in the discomfort around how dis-empowered I feel learning about different policies, decisions, platforms, and attitudes in the American arena.  I think what hit home the hardest was reading an article about how prepared the senate was to fill a supreme court vacancy that has the potential of being vacated because Ruth Bader-Ginsburg was admitted into the hospital.  This access to malevolently driven aggression is not something I am familiar with.  I get quickly worked up over how hypocritical these Republican government officials demonstrate convenient ideals.  Then I listen to how armed Anglo citizens forced their way into government buildings to protest their state's orders to stay home.  I wonder how different it would be if Chicano armed men or Black armed men attempted the same patriotic display.  If that isn't enough I read more about the former National Security Advisor and how his once guilty plea was somehow undone.  All this privilege, looking a lot like Anglo privilege, sinks in and festers in my psyche.  

Then I find myself gripping the anger, looking at a picture of Mitch McConnel, wanting to participate in the adolescences of mocking his interesting appearance.  I let myself ruminate over the apparent prejudice, blatant hypocrisy, and certain impediments to economic justice.  I fortunately haven't stayed in this condition long.  I remind myself that McConnel sees some American value in his seemingly bigoted, and if not bigoted, then surely ethnocentric, vision for America.  And despite not having any immediate or direct control over this person's views, I do have authority to minimize his effect on my joy.  I will likely never know how harmless Michael Flynn's encounters with Russian diplomats are.  And yet my desire to see justice found isn't as important as understanding how to ensure that my greed never masquerades as my principle.  My anger towards a man named Mitch that I've never met, can't be more important than my cultural requirement to understand that Mitch is valuable and precious in some way, and it is my duty to seek it out.  So I have learned to watch the American experiment with humble eyes, a moderated anger, and hopeful sadness.

My Snow Globe Has Chemtrails

I have found a newer sense of love.  My role as a father is shrinking, shifting, and at the same time I know it will never go away or the concern lessen.  And even on the other spectrum of love I find romance also feels more fluid.  I find myself having to spend less and less time with the loves that seem to linger.  It is more like cherishing what remains of those experiences,despite knowing I can't touch them today.  Hopefully, I'm cherishing these apparent memories, tattooed, and hopefully not scarred.  I am appreciative of this reminiscence because it reinforces that when you fully understand loves nature, love tells us that it isn't lost or gone.  Lost lovers are actually gone, friends can leave, people can die, but the love they shared with me is still embedded in my psychology.  Relationships die, perplexingly leaving me without a cadaver to mourn.  We as a culture tend to focus on what is lost mistaking those things for love itself.  What a disservice to think love can die.  Love is! Love is not the plane dusting a blank blue sky.  Love is the chemical reaction waiting, preparing, combusting, cooling, dissipating, and redistributing all the molecules in way that they can love again.  My little snow globe has chemtrails and they very well can be vapor too.

Self Isolating in solitude

Hello World!

As a programmer this used be the beginning of a new lesson in a language I was introduced to.  It may be equally valid today.  I am learning a language called social distancing.  We are in a pandemic.  There is a virus that is highly transmittable, fatal for the vulnerable, and incurable at the time I'm writing this.  And because of the uncertainty of how this can incapacitate a medical system, the world, my city, and my community are practicing social distancing. 

I love it.  I have noticed how the simplicity that isolation, self quarantine, or what I might reframe as gifted solitude, liberates me from the obligations that modern living teases me with.  My introvert is nurtured.  I am respectful of the anxiety of being alone can create.  I am around plenty of loved ones to feel fulfilled.  I get plenty of fresh air to feel replenished.  I have plenty of funds and resources to feel sustained.  I rarely leaned into luxuries and not even my coffee skills help me feel like I haven't even lost my gourmet caffeine addiction.  I feel blessed amid this tragedy.  

I walked into my daughter's rooms and straddled the thresholds to their entrances and asked them to recall the book we read together at bedtime about Anne Frank.  I invited them to put into perspective the  juxtaposition with what we are living and what she might have had to.  I asked them to consider how much more extreme her conditions where.  I asked them because I recognize how far worse the plague of human ignorance can be.  I respect the cosmic existence of this virus.  I take time to visit the through segments reported on the realities of this virus' bite.

I try and sympathize with the sadness that COVID-19 brings to families.  I work really hard to transcend the politics around health care, the economy, and partisanship.  I am glad I feel encouraged to write in these times.  I want the World to know that quarantine can be a gift of solitude, and paradoxically I respect how antagonizing being forced to turn off your human connections can be.  I am grateful to my ex-wife for loving so deep at one point in my life, it forced me to suffer the loneliness that I feel gives me to fortitude to appreciate the isolation I am asked to practice now.  I am reminded of my grandmother, reminiscing on how she would tell me that she was happiest in her home.

My grandma, I am beginning to understand how home is joy, and isolation is not so much a restriction but a gift of solitude.

Traditions that Misbehave - Part 2

As a forming adolescent, I built up my identity through a process, taking my cultural loyalty, bathing it in popular trends, and measuring it against the Anglo experience.  Unaware, of how often I was comparing myself, I took my class, my deficits, and especially my talents, measured them to peers.  I began to realize how my behavior shaped my actions.  This shaped my identities and attitudes.  I compared without accounting for the limited exposure I had to social advancements.  I'm arriving at the understanding that measuring doesn't need to happen.  I somberly feel the grief from prejudice and limits created by gaps revealed through measuring.  Comparing is futile. My little splash in the world cannot compare to the evolution of the accomplished colonial and metropolitan cultures.  My local New Mexico grown modest upbringing has to be its own experience, not a juxtaposition rather synthesis with progression.  Policy has to nourish this orientation, and policy appears to be driving it further into competition.

I feel more complemented by Anglo encounters than I do dejected.  The dejection is the result of the comparison.  I am not naively ignoring moments of prejudice, ethnic slants, or bigotry.  I think the realization that I don't have to be acceptable, qualified, or valid to some idealistic American identity, allows me to be more accepting, appreciative, and honored to have the modesty and simplicity of my barrio life.  A life that was often defenseless to the symptoms of poverty.  These symptoms usually are assigned as misbehaviors.  Some are disparaging, like burglary, drug dealing, violence, and delinquency.  Others are overlooked.  These are the most painful. These include the embedded self-doubt, academic aversion, and perceptions of cultural inferiority.  With these I can be an agency for change, then there are those that I cannot.

Between these less malicious byproducts of ethnic integration are the more aggressive misbehaviors.  I think my fear and pain balloon and accentuate the hurt from the more prominent consequences of Anglo migration.  The partiality of rules and laws that hide prejudice and bigotry are the most itchy.  The artful usage of political policy in ways that create enough ambiguity to conceal the ethnic convenience that favor the historic oppression that came with European colonialism.  Some policies that have a vague but in my opinion certain quality of prejudice are voting districts, law enforcement, welfare as promoted as handouts and hypocritically welfare disguised as subsidies, the commodification of education and health care, and taxation.  Each of these policies are expressed with a language that allows for interpretation that the privileged culture can evade a definite label or quality of discrimination.  These malicious strategies confuse the synthesis of cultures, because aspiration seems often too one directional, and that direction is intended to keep a power dynamic teetering towards the Anglo way.

I no longer aspire to be as functional as the Anglo culture can be perceived or might expect.  I see today that this direction and process lures me to see my traditions as misbehaving.  My traditions need to evolve and be refactored, so they become effective again.  My traditions no longer seem to shape and energize my culture.  Chicano traditions are not meant to be religious and repetitive experiences that symbolize an idea, but an exercise that cause me to experience the idea.  Traditional misbehavior is when I lose the responsibility for the idea and allow myself to focus on the ceremony of a tradition, knowing better, knowing the ceremony is ephemeral.  I see what a disservice it is to rely on traditions as way to deal with the grief of not being valued.  This traditional misbehavior results in too many spectators and the atrophy of investors.  The performance of the ceremony then replaces the effect of the tradition.

My lifestyle's culture is part tradition, morality, inferiority, tragedy, principle, faith, and love.  In society, community, nations, or other formal groups of people we have moralities that differ, and competing is a trend I hope to break in favor of collaboration.