Immigration

                                                   Immigration

When the Law is to harsh, it must bend, to avoid cruel punishment.  Thus when taking into account the present spectacle of Mexico writhing behind the activities of anarchist gangs, powered by the wealth of plunder, influencing many politicians in Mexico and the US.  Capitalizing on the Drug policy of the US.  A Delicate balance to be sure, however, inconveniently there is the stream of workers bound for the US who are plundered, kidnapped, made to serve as required constantly pulled into this tragedy.  Not to mention corruption throughout the web of banking and commerce linked to the Drug Trade.

When the US has the highest incarceration rate in the world also statistically loaded with drug related crimes, the costs will eventually overcome any reasoning about the merits.  A more effective approach, considering drug use a “medical issue” could create a huge savings and eliminate epidemic violent crime.

The approximately 13 million Latinos who work in the US already pay taxes, and have formed communities, families and consumer links in US business.  The idea of returning all illegal immigrants to their country of origin would definitely leave large scars and what purpose would be served?

1.Employers of undocumented workers punished or out of business

2.Families displaced, women and children thrown into the uncertainty of crossing    through the dangerous border areas.

3.Loss of taxes paid by undocumented workers.

If those are the results, what’s the point, what benefit is served? Less people for the health care system in the US to deal with? 

Occupy This!!

.Occupy Movement, Banks and “The System”  

The Occupy movement has appeared spontaneously across the world.  As a crowd forms seemingly of diverse middle class folks.  Maybe they have lost their job or the unemployment is worn off, can’t pay rent, parents are dead or not available, maybe they just don’t know what else to do.  But when they gather to signal their dilemma and manifest their solidarity the appearance of the group does not resemble the photos in Golf Magazines.  The message coming from their body language is that politics and law enforcement are broken.  Congress is a Charlie Macarthy dummy run by strings of money from large pools of the 1% paying what it takes to increase the influence over the lives of the 99%.  The 99% can’t take it anymore. Not because of any moral principle, just have no life.  If that fact interferes with Business As Usual, well, that’s the point. 

It’s One World.  Without considering genocide or intentional abandonment there seems to be a responsibility given by the existence of the living as the sentient human mass which includes the the gamut of power to powerless.  Does the successful strain intentionally cannibalize the powerless.  Is it really that simple?  The occupy movement wants the following:

Attorney Generals of all states file lawsuits to force return of the Real Estate Equity stolen by a slight of hand.  Say take the value in 2005 and return the asset to that leverage.  The difference should be made up by the players who orchestrated a loaning frenzy, created fraudulent securities and profited by betting on their failure.

Berkeley Years -Summer of Love

Berkeley  (Freshman 1961)

 Berkeley in 1960 was a quiet academic place.  The biggest uproar was the fraternity party life.  The Leftist politics were low key.  It was a perfect eye of the hurricane for the  60’s Revolution to erupt.  Children raised during the 50’s were spawned in the suburban bliss known as the conforming years.  Jobs were for life with a stable retirement plan.  The heroes of the 2^nd World War were not kidding around about the values of life.  Their parents, witnesses of the Depression, had buckled down to a serious effort at creating financial results, buying houses, getting educated on GI benefits, there was a consensus of the mutual welfare, an innocence of the spirit.  The prevailing atmosphere was so…serious.  The brink of nuclear war loomed.  This climate bred the dropout hippies of the 60’s.  Getting a good education, a good job and retirement appeared so Bourgeois and a status copout.  Being born into a life of ineveitable patterned certainty was kneejerk and not a sane response to the absurdities of status politics. Dropping out happened.  The Back to the Earth Movement happened.  Draft eligible persons went to Canada and attempted to re-enter the Agrarian Age.  Of course most did not have appropriate mental apparatus to function this way.

The drugs of the 60’s helped create the Psychedelic Revolution, a picket line of dispersed articulate educated persons abandoning the opportunistic status of their life as a student or job structure to re-enter society as transformed characters invented by introspection and the company they kept.  There were thousands of mini social nets composed of Astrologers, Commune freaks, Tarot Readers, Weed Growers, Gaia Believers, actual collections of people serious about discovering the secret of life and the Mind of God, following rumors with nothing better to do than camp out, backpack, hitchhike, converse and be high on Life.  Many souls were released from the Yoke of Materialism and never returned to a normal life.  History does not honor these folks who gave up their traditional identities and re-entered life because there is no record kept (No question line on the US Census that asks “did you become disillusioned with the materialism in your life and drop out of the Social Contract you were born into?”.

Berkeley went from sedate to insane.  It was then called Berserkeley.  The student rebellion with Mario Savio came down.  Malcom X spoke on campus.  Ronald Reagan ordered teargas attacks on students from Helicopters.  US Marshals tackled 18 year old co-eds.  San Francisco State became a riot zone.  The Simbianese Liberation Army formed on delusionary chutspa, kidnapped Patty Hearst and dominated the News until slaughtered by a swat team in Los Angeles.  Their “communications” were played over the radio with a Jazz Crusader tune in the background and always ended with “Save the Children”.  The general dispersal of LSD to a wide population caused a rippling panic among authority persons.   There were marches, clashes, arrests, incarcerations, inter family schisms and national terror over the possibility of Nuclear Annihilation.  The Vietnam War was generating a sharp division in the population making the distinction between the government trusting conformists of the 50’s and the horrible fears of the anti-war crowd.  Government positions seemed uninformed, expensive, and karma-wise, risky.  During this period the “Counter Culture” sprang forth, meaning freedom vs. the inevitable servitude to The Man, living for people instead of things, being excited about the beauty of life rather than protecting national prerogatives, being witness to the miracle of the present.  The Green Movement was born as the collision between the endless expansion of the technology and machinery of The Man (namely the Industrial Revolution) in the proscenium of Nature, ignoring the continuity of it all being One, but as if Man and Nature could compete.  The psychedelic experiences of various cultures had been discussed in anthropological texts, and in the theme which Carlos Castaneda popularized in his Don Juan series.  The Hippies were living this dream without a supporting culture, so they invented one.

Like electrons in a magnetic field, new Counter Culture initiates came to San Francisco from many places East like New York, Boston, New England and either stayed or returned East.  When the flow reached high volume, flumes of long-haired travelers were cast North in California up Highway 1 and Highway 101 following Neal Cassidy to experience “it”.  Colonies formed in Laytonville, Trinidad, Eureka, Arcata, Navarro, Albion, Whitethorn, Guerneville, Monte Rio, Sebastopol and Occidental and everywhere else in Northern California.  The previously sparsely populated areas were open to people stimulated to think of the Earth as a finite blessing deserving respect and even awe.  The “New Age” layer of humanity teaching Yoga, Meditation, Vegetarianism, Peace, Protestant middle class culture waged an unconscious search for the truth about how to live in spiritual and metabolic harmony with the Earth.

Books like “The Whole Earth Catalog”, and “Other Homes and Garbage” addressed implements, practices and resources for the Back to the Earth people who felt like our culture makes an adversary out of Nature.   The machinery, weapons and exclusionary paranoia of National Identity seemed like a death wish in action.  Reacting to momentum toward Babylon, nuclear destruction and what seemed like a forming police state, a philosophy of non-violence began to appear.  The wave of hippies spread in a strong vibration of hope and possibility dropping out of the System and going to the Country much like a flower and met the real world.   California would never be the same again.

Living in Berkeley I began daydreaming about the cities in Sonoma and Humboldt County.  I would read the names on a map and try to visualize the towns.  We took a trip to the Russian River in Sonoma County when our first baby was an infant.  The countryside was covered by apple orchards, prunes, Redwoods and grassy rolling hillsides.  In many places the trees grew over the streets and lanes like arbors.  The towns were very lightly populated.

On another occasion we drove our 54 Ford station wagon up to Eureka.  Manila Beach is a large area across the bay from Eureka.  At the time there were mounds of driftwood literally miles long and 40 to 50 feet high.  Burls were common to the piles.  Interesting pieces of ocean and wind formed wood were piled in the thousands.  It was overwhelming, we filled our car with all sizes and kinds of miraculous pieces, drove back to Berkeley, bought copper wire and artistic ornaments and made mobiles in the attic of our loft.

Southern California

Los Angeles

The journey across the United States by car involved stopping in the many states along the way, with my brother and sister in the back seat the plains of Texas passed and passed.  Lightning splintered the sky like tree roots and rain washed dry clay and sage.  Green trees and lakes and finally mountains made the family in the car cry without any words to explain it.

We arrived in Pasadena and moved into a house located by my Mother’s sister near the Arroyo, a water course coming from the San Gabriel Mountains passing close by our neighborhood.  It was a natural area and I immediately developed the habit of getting up at dawn and walking a familiar course into the canyon, the small forests and grasses made a complete world to be in for daydreaming and playing with the kids that magically appeared from the subdivisions of the City. 

My father developed an interest in surfing so we would spend the weekends traveling the freeways (the Pasadena Freeway was one of the first roads to carry the name “Freeway”) to the beach areas of Newport, Coronado, Laguna Beach, San Clemente, Santa Barbara and San Diego.  The hillsides above the Pacific Ocean were natural, Oak Trees, sage grasses and native flowers abounded.  On the plains connecting to the shores with breaking waves were lettuce ranches and passed the hills of the coast inland were miles and miles of orange groves.  Before politics was invented in its current styles, Orange County was about oranges.

During the fifth grade I remember spending a lot of time in the Pasadena Library reading most of the books on the shelves.  It was just so much fun to be able to take any book home and have it to read.  I read the “Lensmen” series by Doc Smith, the time and space adventures of Heinlein, Asimov, Brown, The Hardy Boys, Freddy the Pig books.  One time I had a cold (being ill let me read 16 hours a day with no interruptions) and read a book about flying saucers and sightings of UFO’s (George Adamski)  This led to reading the Vedas and Upanishads which have many references to flying ships and what I took to be tractor beams, laser weapons and beings from other Planets, Solar Systems and Dimensions.  I was struck by the tiny spectrum of the Human Senses, a small band of vibration in an infinite cosmos of Time and Space.  I wrote a term paper with footnotes citing Journals of Science and Literature describing the atmospheres of the 9 known planets, and possibilities of advanced technology and beings existing in our Solar System, the types of Magnetic Propulsion possible by a ship with a powerful magnetic Pole (schematically depicted in Adamski’s recounting) at its center to ride the waves of gravity present in the Universe. 

My school years in Pasadena were too idle seeming to my parents, though my grades were

B+ ish, they chose to enroll me in a prep school with very unusual features.  Verde Valley School in Sedona Arizona was located in the red rock plains of the birth ground of the Hopi People who are reputed to have originated from a chasm in Cathedral Rock,  an amazing red rock formation several hundred feet in diameter featured in countless Western Movies of the John Wayne era.  When I was a student there, the school was made up of a cluster of bucolic white plaster buildings facing some of the most picturesque scenery in the world.  The Indians of what became Arizona and New Mexico held the area to be Sacred because of its beauty and abundance, no homes were established there.  Navajoes were accustomed to running 20 or 30 miles from their dwellings to tend small plots of beans or corn hidden in the canyons or on ridges.  Many natural water courses crossed through the bluffs, mesas and rocks carrying fish and attracting wildlife.  A place to visit, hunt and fish and leave as found.

Verde Valley School was founded and directed by an idealistic intellectual man named Hamilton Warren grounded in Anthropology and dedicated to passing on the lesson of a common heritage to all races and peoples, not doctrinaire, but practiced.  The absolute majesty of the experience was left in me as an indelible component, but my experience was influenced by a resistance that was somehow stamped on my being.  A feeling that the world is not just, the rich exploit the poor, the strong the meek and so on, and somehow missing that I was rebelling against being born into privilege. 

The entire School took trips to Mexico where the students were placed in the houses of Mexican families to experience life in Taxco, or Juarez, Oahaca or Patzcuaro.  Large Ford trucks were outfitted with box-beds to ride in and slots and crannies for camping gear to set up for nights on the road. I remember the teachers having to make hour long phone calls trying to borrow money to complete the trip as the school, populated by scantly paid idealists, operated on a wish and a prayer.

Another annual sojourn was in the homes of Navahos and Hopis where we stayed and were student-teachers in the Reservation schools. The habit of taking long walks at dawn resulted in hiking over some mesas where I found a human skull.  I took it back to my room not realizing that I had been crossing a sacred burial ground.  When a 6 year old child from the school came to my room I showed it to him and he went white with fear. Such was my ignorance. 

The students at Verde Valley, generally between 15 and18, were allowed to smoke cigarettes in prescribed areas (no one had heard of marijuana in those days, the 1950’s), and went to a multi-cultural church on the hill. 

Upon returning to Pasadena I had bitter arguments with my father about Oil Companies

being tainted with profit motive and entirely material concerns.  Mining a natural resource, owned by each human as a birth-right, and sold in a market place populated by lobbyists and speculators.  Needless to say my attitude has tempered since then, current trends are interesting on this note.