Emigrants, painted by Knut Ekwall, uploaded to Wikimedia by Mahahahaneapneap

USA is a nation of immigrants. And it seems that those newly arriving, legally and illegally, get the least amount of respect from those already here. But they pick our food, clean our toilets, build our homes, and defend our nation. A Republican congressman has been trying to extend some respect to the children of illegals who serve in our military, by offering an amendment to the current defense bill. But the leadership of his party won’t allow it even to be discussed!

Yet maybe your member of congress will listen to you. This seems a very fair gesture to those who are willing to die to become fellow citizens. This morning I wrote to my congressman urging him to support this amendment. We won’t break the deadlock in Washington merely by complaining to each other! They need to hear from us. You can do that by emailing them, and here’s a door to learn how. Simply enter your zip code beneath the map. Then click on the name that pops up to be transported to that member’s website, where you can make contact by email, by phone, or by letter. Urge them to support the ENLIST Act. (HR 2377; either/or Mr Denham’s amendment to the defense spending authorization on this matter.)

Mexican shorts, 1970, Museum of Modern Art, NYC

Art is such fun. It touches our lives everywhere. And in the item above, it touches our skin with the skin of another creature. While I’m not a fan of wearing leather, especially in the heat of Yucatan where shorts have become part of my uniform of the day, these shorts could be sexy on the right figure. I found them at the newly released collection of images from MoMA, which can be browsed online. Browsing by category, I noticed their collection of Mexican art. Click for a virtual visit to Mexico. Then come see for yourself!

As a student of design, I enjoyed the art of packaging. One of my professors had students design furniture with corrugated cardboard flats, making some very strong, lightweight, fashionable items. Here’s a revision of the classic egg box which is rather elegant, and perhaps about to replace the earlier approach at your local grocery. The story of this design student’s homework is told and illustrated by BBC.

Egg box, revised by a design student, as homework

Photo by DvortyGirl, Wikimedia

There’s a pest on the horizon which could spoil your breakfast, called Asian Citrus Psyllid (ACP). It has devastated the citrus industry in Florida, and has now been spotted in California. Surely Yucatan growers are watching carefully. (But it might be appropriate to relish that orange juice and fruit while we have it!) The result of this infestation is something called greening, which causes fruit to drop early, before it’s ripe, rendering it useless. Florida is experimenting with gene splicing, which could entail replanting the entire population of orange trees there. California is trying to contain the pest using tiny Asian wasps which feed on it, as reported by National Public Radio.

Photo by Mike Lewis, Center for Invasive Species Research, UC Riverside

Orange groves, photo by Javier Martín, Wikimedia

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Cave opening, photo by reibrown, via Photobucket

Hey, I know nothing about this topic, but . . . Yucatan is in the swim, according to this article from Smithsonian Magazine.  Apparently a very important 12,000-year old skeletal find turned up in a cave near a cenote (sinkhole), which is helping rewrite the history of ancient peoples in the hemisphere. Here’s a photo from that article, which is pressing the question, who were the first Native Americans?

The skull of Naia on the floor of Hoyo Negro, as it appeared in December 2011, having rolled into a near-upright position. (Photo by Roberto Chavez Arce)

Photo by Lindsey-25, Photobucket

BOOK REVIEW.  THE DIVIDE: American Injustice in the Age of the Wealth Gap. Finally, I get it!  I’m something of a news junkie, choosing carefully and reading deeply. So it has been perplexing to watch unprosecuted criminality committed by the financial community over the past decade go unpunished. The excuses coming from our top cop, Attorney General Eric Holder, have been timid. A close look at the facts shows that these excuses are also lame.

But now, thanks to excellent research and storytelling by journalist Matt Taibbi, I finally am able to grasp what has happened. He makes a clear and compelling case that America now has two classes of justice: for the rich; and for the rest of us. No, I’m not charging class warfare! Instead, it appears to be a case of willful moral blindness. This is why a welfare mom who works a side job goes to jail for defrauding the government; but individual bank employees who lie to courts and steal from taxpayers don’t even get charged. Yeah, maybe the bank pays a fine, but no bank employee ever does a perp walk. Yet there are plenty of victims, and the suffering of private citizens and the dollar volume – are both huge. It is more than coincidence that thousands of illegal acts were done by nobody.

This book will open your eyes if you genuinely want to see how and where America has failed. But if not, go back to sleep; the revolution won’t be televised. Someday the nation will simply be gone. Justice is not the advantage of the stronger, as discussed in chapter two of Plato’s REPUBLIC. Equal protection (justice) before the law is our foundation. To return there, we need to look around, re-awaken, and acknowledge what is simply wrong and unacceptable. (Note: crude language abounds.)  † end of my review †

FROM DUST JACKET, INSIDE FLAP: Over the last two decades, America has been falling deeper and deeper into a statistical mystery:
 
Poverty goes up. Crime goes down. The prison population doubles.
Fraud by the rich wipes out 40 percent of the world’s wealth. The rich get massively richer. No one goes to jail.
 
In search of a solution, journalist Matt Taibbi discovered the Divide, the seam in American life where our two most troubling trends—growing wealth inequality and mass incarceration—come together, driven by a dramatic shift in American citizenship: Our basic rights are now determined by our wealth or poverty. The Divide is what allows massively destructive fraud by the hyperwealthy to go unpunished, while turning poverty itself into a crime—but it’s impossible to see until you look at these two alarming trends side by side.
 
In The Divide, Matt Taibbi takes readers on a galvanizing journey through both sides of our new system of justice—the fun-house-mirror worlds of the untouchably wealthy and the criminalized poor. He uncovers the startling looting that preceded the financial collapse; a wild conspiracy of billionaire hedge fund managers to destroy a company through dirty tricks; and the story of a whistleblower who gets in the way of the largest banks in America, only to find herself in the crosshairs. On the other side of the Divide, Taibbi takes us to the front lines of the immigrant dragnet; into the newly punitive welfare system which treats its beneficiaries as thieves; and deep inside the stop-and-frisk world, where standing in front of your own home has become an arrestable offense. As he narrates these incredible stories, he draws out and analyzes their common source: a perverse new standard of justice, based on a radical, disturbing new vision of civil rights.
 
Through astonishing—and enraging—accounts of the high-stakes capers of the wealthy and nightmare stories of regular people caught in the Divide’s punishing logic, Taibbi lays bare one of the greatest challenges we face in contemporary American life: surviving a system that devours the lives of the poor, turns a blind eye to the destructive crimes of the wealthy, and implicates us all.  [end paste of dust jacket quote]

Masks for sale at Chichen Itzá

There is a festival in January in Chiapas state where masks depicting Spanish conquerors are worn by the locals. These masks feature blue-eyed faces with dark beards. For me, the concept prompts that famous question who is my neighbor? (v29). This morning I bumped against the flip side of that question, in the form of a hard saying: Love your enemies (v43). My encounter appears in a powerful novel I’m reading, titled LIAR’S GOSPEL (my review of May 9 is titled FLAWED, BUT CENTRAL). Here’s the dialog which arrested me from reading further, and brought me to making this blog entry – (from p.98):

[He] imagined what would happen if these words would travel from mouth to mouth, from mind to mind, from one city to the next to the next if this simple message – love your enemy – were the accepted creed of all the world. He did not see how it could happen. ¶ “If one man were against it,” he said at last, “the whole thing would be broken. In a world of peace, a world of soft people with no knives, one man could destroy everything.”  ¶ “Then we cannot rest until every man has heard it. Think,” said Yehoshuah softly, “what shall we use up our lives for?  More war, like our fathers and their fathers, more of that? Or shall we use ourselves for better purpose? Is this not worth your life?” ¶ And Iehuda saw it, just for a moment. In this instant, the whole world was new to him.

†     In Yucatan the Maya say I am another you. Before we can grasp that, we need to remove the masks which we’ve allowed to conceal the face of the other.

Parachico mask from Chiapas, with plastic false-face addition

Photo by Snaily, Wikimedia

RELAX

Relax. Let God do my seeing, my knowing

              of what crosses my path. And such crosses there are, or could be!

Relax. Surrender my right and my need to be right (or wrong) –

              of doing things my way, fretting, for such paths are long.

Relax. Just be, and see – thru God’s eyes, no longer my own.

Behold God’s creating – sensing God’s peace.

Relax. Lay down the burden of self-invention, -maintenance, –defense.

Peace will surround, be found, descend, when we come to the end

              of writing our own stolen stories, contrived to impress – who? –

              and give back God’s pen! 

Banana blossoms, and green bananas, basking in the light of our backyard, in Merida.

We’re missing the light of Yucatan! (Of course, we’re missing our friends and neighbors there, too.) But light is so easily taken for granted – and so helpful for a bright outlook. Einstein spent his career questing to understand more about the nature of light, and changed the world thereby, making the 20th century the century of physics. Our modern technology is a direct result of his deep curiosity. The 21st century will be the century of biology, as we tinker with the blueprints of life. (We’ll see how that goes; but it could come to resemble Vonnegut’s Ice-nine.)

Curiosity is a decidedly spiritual quality. Moses had it: I will now turn aside, and see this great sight, why the bush is not burnt. (v.3).  Actually, each of us has it, as it comes pre-installed, although some of us rarely explore this vital aspect of our being, beyond childhood.  One who urged that we become children again(v.3), also said: The light of the body is the eye: if therefore thine eye be single, thy whole body shall be full of light. (Jesus, v.22) He also observed: I am the light of the world – AND – You are the light of the world – AND – Let your light so shine before men, that they may see your good works, and glorify your Father which is in heaven. 

But what is that singleness (oneness) of outlook? Could it be that only good is real, and that all that occurs is ours to learn from, by asking (and sometimes wrestling) with the question, what is the spiritual lesson of this experience? (You might say, along with John Lennon, that I’m a dreamer, or simply naive; but I’m not the only one.)  Ultimately, everything comes down to translation, interpretation. Perhaps this oneness could be an unrestrainable lust to understand, questing after we-know-not-what. Maybe this is what drove Einstein. St John hints at this near the end of his life with his highly concentrated summary of the career of Jesus, notable especially in v.5 (but please start from v.1).

Whether our hunger is intellectual or spiritual, it can feed our spirit. (But, from where does this nourishment emanate?) Without such an appetite, we mostly are asleep, in danger of Thoreau‘s cautionary observation: I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. (I just love the link to his page, and the energies of community and technology which have brought his quotes into focus.) There is another site which does this for me almost daily: nonduality.com which rolls out uplifting observations with a singleness perspective, landing on my desktop as nonduality highlights newsletter.  

While 256 shades of gray can be lovely, I do miss Merida’s blue sky. 

Glass-block skylights illuminate the interior of our home in Merida. (Those are two old hammock hooks on the walls, in the spotlight.)

And that’s the view from what has become our summer house, today.