We Don't Go Golfing

 By now it's probable you have heard about the loss of over a hundred lives in the July 4th flooding of Texas' Guadalupe River. I'm not interested here in who's responsible for the lack of information or timely warnings. Those people will be identified and I hope they will face consequences.

What I am interested in here is the misinformation you may have heard or seen thanking Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum for having immediately dispatching rescue teams from her country to Texas to help in efforts there. This, in spite of the meanness, cruelty, and racism displayed by the trump administration's ICE efforts. But that is not true. The truth, I think, is better. 

On July 6th at 5 AM the Dirección de Protección Civil y Bomberos de Acuña, Coahuila (I could not hope to accurately write that out so it is also a link to their Facebook page), along with members of Fundacion 911, left for Kerrville to assist. This was in response to a request from Texas Equusearch, a search and rescue based in Houston. 

Direccion de Proteccion is located in Cuidad Acuna, near the Texas border and Kerrville and the Guadalupe River are 275 kilometers northeast.  Their response was not based on permission or arrangements. Both organizations are volunteer. While President Sheinbaum acknowledged them for their swift response, she did not claim to have contacted or facilitated them. 

The volunteers of Ciudad Acuna responded on their own. They did this because a call went out to a neighbor for help. As President Sheinbaum later said, "That is the people of Mexico. That is our culture." It is what we do in the Beloved Community. We don't go golfing. We put on our big boy and big girl pants and we respond. 

We will not be forgiven

 I want to focus on one paragraph in this essay: "These are desperate people who have been waiting for an opportunity to migrate for a long time, so it’s not clear whether that kind of messaging ['don't come to the US, stay and apply for asylum in the future in your home country'] actually resonates." 

When many of us voted for Joe Biden it was in the clear knowledge that, distinct from The Former Guy, he would be amenable to doing the correct, humane thing when it was pointed out his policies were harming people. I continue to believe this. At the very least, the policies mentioned in this article, Biden's sweeping aside building a wall and reuniting separated families, point at a recognition of the basic dignity of asylum seekers. 

But troubling elements remain. No matter how you phrase it, "reports of children in the facilities sleeping on gym mats with nothing but mylar blankets to keep them warm and not being permitted to go outside or take a shower for days at a time" is indefensible. We opposed it under trump. It is wrong no matter who it happens under.

I don't have a solution to what's happening on the border with Mexico. I don't know much about the region or its history, and I don't even speak Spanish. But I recognize wrong and separating families, whether it's done by our government, another government, even by desperate people hoping the sight of a lone child on a bus or with other kids will give that child a better chance at being accepted, is wrong. People in desperation to leave a place where they and their children are at risk will do desperate things. They can be forgiven their desparation. We can't allow their desperation to allow us to do wrong so we look like we are doing something. We will not be forgiven.

Death of an(other) environmentalist

While we fretted over our inability to hold the trump administration to account, and that was indeed a problem, small murders like this were happening elsewhere. And while it is unlikely trump had a hand in it, it smacked too neatly of the rationale behind many of his offenses: Do it because you can get away with it.

ENVIRONMENT
FEBRUARY 1, 2020 / 7:48 PM / 2 DAYS AGO
At famed Mexican butterfly reserve, second worker found dead
Alan Ortega

URUAPAN, Mexico (Reuters) - Mexican authorities said on Saturday they are investigating the possible murder of a tour guide working at a famous butterfly reserve in the western state of Michoacan, just two days after its former environmental activist was buried.

Raul Hernandez’s body was found in the area in the early hours of Saturday, with different parts beaten, and a head injury possibly caused by a sharp object, the state attorney general said.

Earlier this week, Mexicans in El Rosario mourned the death of activist Homero Gomez, who had fought for a decade to protect the monarch butterflies until his mysterious death. It is unclear whether the two cases are connected.

The sudden disappearance of such a high-profile campaigner had sparked an outcry in Mexico, an increasingly violent country where activists are routinely threatened, harmed or even killed as a result of their work.

Millions of the orange and black insects make a 2,000-mile (3,220-km) journey each year from Canada to winter in central Mexico’s warmer weather. However, they are facing new challenges linked to extreme weather and changing habitat.

Michoacan state is not only home to the country’s largest monarch butterfly reserve, a World Heritage Site, but also rival drug gangs who battle to control smuggling routes through often-arid terrain to the Pacific and the interior of the country.

We won't leave

There aren't too many people, at least not that I know of or have heard of, who are seriously considering leaving the country because of trump and his policies, but I speculate about it sometimes. In a time when humanitarian advances in voting rights, women's rights, abortion rights, immigrant rights, gay rights, trans~ rights, worker rights, minority religious rights, and the rights of nearly anyone who isn't white and wealthy and self-described Christian are under fire when not in downright retrograde, it's an exercise in both pleasant self-deception and potential self-defense to daydream about it. 

But I won't. I don't think many will. Most of us, I suspect, will take our cue from this drawing. Many Americans may follow a bully, some Americans may be bullies. But most Americans hate bullying and know the proper response to a bully is protecting the bullied. It's what the angels of our better nature demand. 

258 candles-days 127-29

On this, the day after Elie Wiesel's death, this is an important quote to meditate on. Because while he wrote it concerning fascism and the death of Jews and others in Germany, it can also be justly said by those of us who believe that the arguments for apologies to be made on behalf of white people to others--notably black and brown people, red people, even other white people in some instances--are correct and that the apologies must be made. (Even those of us, like me, who believe that reparations are also necessary.) Because it is not that the children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren of slave owners, or drafters of Indian reservations or hangers of "No Mexicans" or "No Jews" or any number of other signs against someone else, are guilty of the transgressions of our parents. In all, there were relatively few of them (for instance, in the 1860 census of the 31M people in the US, only 394,000, a little over 1%, were slaveholders); however, that small number, due to public agreement with their values, had an incredible influence over laws and behavior. As a result, we are the beneficiaries of their values, just as if they had left us money or land. Because we benefit from their behavior, we are responsible for correcting the inequities of their behavior, just as we would be if they owed taxes on that money or land. We were not tax scofflaws or slave owners, but we received the gains, and we have to make their errors right.