las meditaciones de victoria

Downtown

My first night in Manhattan, I fall asleep to voices that never stop talking. Outside my window is a scar, and within it are images of death juxtaposed with my memories of being twenty-two and working in the city for the first time, memories like discovering Century 21, my first interview outfit, tweed trousers and a brown blazer, and the camera I bought over at J & R. I go to bed thinking about the scar I am sleeping over. I can’t stop thinking about the husbands and the wives, each and every one someone else’s child. I can’t stop thinking about the lives lost that will never know what America did, what we have done, in their name. I can’t stop thinking about Felicia. Felicia is sleeping inside, next to the big lights and the crane. I wake up angry.

It’s eight in the morning and no one is up. The scar is an opening in the sky, brand new unfamiliar light that shakes me out of my slumber and politely asks that I never forget that something better is always possible. Peace will never be won by force, if only we could remember that. Peace will come out of justice lived and done by unarmed nations in the face of odds. Gandhi said that. Remember? The daylight forces me out of bed to do my part, even if it is a Sunday morning and it’s cold outside.

Around the Starbucks one block up from the scar is a neighborhood full of residents I can’t remember seeing before. There is a building on Broadway with dust filled cracks on its side. The dust reminds me again that I am sitting in a graveyard. I am not quite sure how I got here.

I am still thinking about Felicia. I see her flying outside the window. I see where the buildings fell and watch their inward trajectory over and over in my mind. Spacing out, I choreograph her fall differently. I imagine Felicia with the good sense to have kept a parachute in her desk up on the 102^nd floor that she pulls just in time to drop safely back onto earth. I used to get dizzy riding up to the top and felt disoriented so high in the sky. After a trip to the top, I had to rest in the sanctuary I’d discovered within the solarium below. We used to think the towers were ugly. Sitting on a bench in Brooklyn Heights, I would try to imagine the skyline without this eyesore.

I feel like there are more mothers in Manhattan. More mothers not working, pushing strollers around the city. I wonder if they are widows. I wonder if this is a new life they’ve reconfigured after September 11^th. I wonder if any of the five, six, and seven year olds bundled for the cold are fatherless.

“Excuse me,” a tourist asks, subway map in hand. “Can you tell me where the Memorial Park is?”

“What memorial park?” I ask.

“You know…Ground Zero?”

 

Comfortably Numb

Last June I abandoned my blog. I needed a break from the weekly meditations and thoughts about such philosophical niceties as freedom and liberty. I had to stop thinking about torture and what it means when a democracy commits crimes. I wanted more than the corruption I see every time I read or hear news from Washington. I started to feel like a nutcase—comparable to the old guy I used to see as a child standing on a corner of Highway One with a big sign and VW Microbus and waving an American flag. I began to wonder: Is There Anybody Out There?

I saw Roger Waters at The Hollywood Bowl last night. Every song rang as politically true as it did two, three, and even four decades ago. There were many divine moments in the show. In the first set, he played Set the Controls for the Heart of the Sun, and just as the music hypnotically crept upward into the stands, the moon crested the Hollywood Hills behind the stage. It was Ali who noticed it first. It was as if the moon were tied to a string and dragged into the stars to the same steady beat as the song, like footsteps marching from the stage. Ali turned to me and said, “It’s moments like this that I believe in God.”

With each song I reflected on the time in my life when I first listened to them. The sad reality is how much things have remained the same since then. The corruption, the war, and the madness all still surround me, making the growing pains of childhood feel even more profound. I sang Another Brick in The Wall to my fifth grade class once. Mrs. Douglas had stepped out of the classroom. I’m not sure what possessed me to do it because as far as I can recall, I was a good kid. She went next door to borrow something from Mrs. George and I jumped up on my desk and asked the class to sing with me. We don’t need no education, we don’t need no thought control…I was actually surprised when I was given a time out and reprimanded during recess for my behavior.

Ali cried when the band played Shine On You Crazy Diamond to a montage of the late Syd Barret. She cried as we watched intently those deep, possessed, and tortured dark eyes disappear from the screen and into atmospheric particles and gas. Camera phones have now replaced lighters as an audience captures as many moments of the show as they can on film. Let’s only hope they do something important and fearless with it.

On The Road Again

I am on the road again, working to get The WIP ready for our September launch. The WIP is a journey that I can't quite put into words. Every stage has been facilitated by something outside of me. I feel like a footwork junkie—I just keep doing what I discover in front of me each day when I wake up, and little by little, high by high, building blocks are forming the foundation of something I believe is so important and meaningful.

I am on the road again, this time I'm not in the desert meeting presidential candidates with my good friend James, nor in Boston trying to get along with feminist journalists. This time I came home to Carmel to crunch the numbers and tighten the plan so it runs like an American car, you know the type. A car that is easy to change the oil or fix a tire. One with a standard transmission that makes sense when you drive it. There is no mystery as to how it moves forward or what to do when it's broken. I came home to make sure that, when The WIP is up and running, I can give my dream a real shot at coming true.

I did something I never do when I come home—I stopped by the beach and took a walk. It is the same beach we used to sneak off to in the middle of the school day when we went to Carmel High. It’s the same beach we spent sunsets howling at the sleepy sun as it descended behind the sea. It’s the same beach we cruised looking for surfers to gawk at and to dream about at nights in the privacy of our own thoughts. As I walked along the water, I remembered how the sand crunched, as white and as fine as Waikiki, and the salt and seaweed, like family, kissed my skin and perfumed my nostrils.

From the edge of the water I saw a girl, no more than six, fearlessly allowing her father to push her beyond the breaking Pacific. I saw her catch a wave for just a moment, riding it on her knees until she was toppled head first into a rip curl that ate her up. I wondered why it took me this long to become that fearless. I wondered if the little girl would always be so brave. I wondered if the benefits I unknowingly possess from my mother's generation have transcended into an even greater power for the younger generations behind mine. From underneath the white foam the little girl's head popped out of the water and she danced on her tiptoes back to the surfboard floating away. By the time she got to the board, her mother had come from the shore and plucked her up out of the water and into the shelter of her arms.

The Fate of the South Central Farmers Community Garden

Yesterday the South Central Farmers Community Garden was raided and the farmers were forcibly evicted from their 14-acre plot of land—land they have cultivated for the last fourteen years. I visited the farm once and shared a blog with you about it. At five a.m. the invasion began when the farm was surrounded by the LAPD and the LAFD. I heard about it when I woke up at seven. I wondered why the eviction was being carried out when it had been reported that individuals and foundations, to pay off the developer, had raised the money, and supposedly Mayor Villaraigosa was now supporting the farmers.

I listened to the report on KPFK and tended to my job and my garden and my trees, wondering why gravity has a way of elevating the powerful and pinning down the people who could use the Yerba Buena and Manzanilla, people for whom organic isn’t a concept that originated in Whole Foods Market, but is instead a way of life.

A bulldozer came crashing thorough the chain link fence that surrounded the 360 plots of land and a saw cut down a branch of the tree on which Daryl Hannah sat. It all seemed part of the LA County Sheriffs Department’s show—a shameful performance before crops on their way to mulch—orchards, bushes and plants filled with meaning, lying in wait, a silent audience in the warm June wind. As I said in my previous blog, this is a farm that exemplifies what all cities must strive for as we overdevelop our urban centers and lose our agricultural lands. For some eyes, the South Central Farmers Community Garden is only a bit of green among the industry of South Central Los Angeles, but for me to be surrounded by banana and walnut trees and feel the warmth and inhale the smell of Central America in the midst of the most unattractive, smutty, ironic land in LA, is nothing short of a miracle. To see subsistence where earth and deep roots are unimaginable is magic.

Years ago in Brooklyn, my sister and I met Kofi. I think he was a Rastafarian, although we never talked religion. We were twenty-three and, needless to say, a little lost. He put us on a coconut water fast. It was all very Dan Millman, and definitely worth the clarity and energy I experienced from giving my digestive system its first nap in a couple of decades. Kofi mentioned several times that after this fast we ought to try a dry fast. I moved from Brooklyn to Uptown and never did try that dry fast, but what I have thought about consistently since my visit to the farm was Kofi’s reasons for why we should try it. He had predicted that in the future, a day would come when there would be no food. He had touched my heart and my sister’s and then his own, and said “We will survive.” 

The day without food has arrived for the 350 families who have subsisted on the food they have grown at the farm. The fate of the crops and the trees will be decided today. As for the farmers, it remains unknown.

Blogging The Netroot Revolution

Today I am writing from Las Vegas after my first day at the YearlyKos Convention 2006. I had a full day that even included a little Vegas, dancing my butt off at a Big Bad Voodoo Daddy concert poolside at the Silverton Lodge & Casino. Although I could probably blog on forever today, I will keep it simple and share with you one theme that was dominant at the convention today. The theme I noted lives somewhere in between the media’s obsession for balance rather than truth and what Barbara Boxer called the Foxification and the ClearChannelization of media—netroots are growing, developing, and making a difference where media has failed.

Take Ambassador Joe Wilson, who was definitely a highlight at today’s convention. As bloggers are well aware of, we succeeded where mainstream journalists failed at all stages of this ongoing investigation. Wilson reminded us of the continuing failure of this story—as it continues to go underreported and we still don’t know who is responsible for the famous 16 word lie that somehow made it into the State of the Union address. Wilson provided a simple market analysis for blogs and their significance that echoed the mornings science panelists, such as Dr. P.Z. Myers of Pharyngula who suggested we combat the Religious Right’s science hijack at the school board level, and blogs at scienceblogs.com —blogs are competition for traditional media and have come to fill the void where the media was absent in the Wilson family’s story. Although we may still not know why we were lied to, he encouraged bloggers to keep on telling the truth and left us with a quote from George Orwell: “In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act.”

As the media landscape shifts, bloggers have filled in the empty spaces with a passion to counter spin, to hold those in power responsible, and most extraordinarily, to hold modern mainstream media accountable when they fail. Bloggers ought to keep searching for the truth and continue posting the truth in the face of lies. Like everyone that came to the conference this weekend, Barbara Boxer summed up the reason why we all traveled to the desert by saying that one day, we will look back on this time in our history and see that it was netroots that made the difference.

What’s wrong with The Black Rider?

I went to see The Black Rider last night with my sister and aunt. It was such an easy theater choice—collaboration between Tom Waits, Robert Wilson, and William S. Burroughs is pure genius. I expected nothing less than what I got: a visual trip of artistic lighting and design, lyrics that hit my core and vibrate well into the next verse, not to mention a full orchestra and then some when you add the conga and the didgeridoos, a surreal story lodged in history and reality difficult to ignore. The acting was brilliant and the post-modern dance added an element usually rare for me to connect with. It was a love story meets vaudeville, uprooted with addiction, then grounded by music, lights, and movement. The woman to my right turned to me and said, “I don’t know how to describe this...it’s like German Kabuki.” 

You can imagine how disconcerting it was to be so absorbed in this aesthetic experience when, about 20 minutes into the first act, the first couple got up from their seats, crossed in front of the stage of actors, stepping across other theatergoers to exit the theatre. Their movement out the door seemed to give permission to at least 30 or more people, some as little as five minutes before intermission, to get up and leave. During intermission, I tried to figure out what had made so many Angelinos walk out—the pact with the devil, the make up, the striking vocals that sang so beautifully in their obscurity? I wondered why these patrons couldn’t pick one thing, the orchestra, the visuals, or the characters, and just ride with it until the intermission and leave then. What made it so important for them to leave when they did, to make such ruckus? Did they attend just to re-enact what they’d read in LA Times? What did they expect from Wilson, Waits, and Burroughs anyway? I don’t know.

The good news is by the second act so many seats were vacated that everyone in back moved to the front and we all truly enjoyed the show. The second act was even more inspiring than the first as the drama intensified and the dancing and music went deeper. But then again, did we expect anything less from Wilson, Waits, and Burroughs?

Who Has More Friends on MySpace? Be sure to check before you vote!

With the primary election only a few days away, I have made all my selections for statewide office. I’ve decided to support Phil Angelides for Governor and I was hoping to share with my California readers why I chose him through this blog. Conducting some last minute research on Google, I was surprised to come across an Angelides’ website on MySpace. Now, I can’t claim to know much about MySpace, other than it is the most popular place for my middle school students to hang out with friends, and that my sister is fairly addicted and reports to me daily about new friends she’s found on the site.

On Angelides’ MySpace site there are all sorts of information, stuff like Phil’s a Gemini and proud parent and that he is interested in networking and making new friends. He has 1388 friends already and his top eight are all younger than me. His friends are exceptionally supportive, like Joey for instance, who sends messages like: “hey phil i went to your tight party at the democratic convention. I had a great time and like the greek dancers they were cool. i also had a nice talk with your oldest daughter and she is cool. she is really supportive of you in just the way she talks. i went to steve’s party too but it wasn’t as good. how can you run the great state of california and not throw a good party? you can’t. you are going to win phil you have my vote. and thank you for supporting my grandmother sharon berry for congress on the 22 district. see you later phil take care.”

After I called my sister to tell her she absolutely had to ask Phil to be her friend, I couldn’t resist looking to see if Steve Westly had a MySpace website, too. Sure enough, he does. Westly has fewer friends than Angelides, (only 198) and also shares the basics like he is married, a proud parent, and a Virgo, as well as relevant information for voters like he’s straight. Westly’s top eight friends are also young and supportive. I was surprised to find Jon Garamendi, our Insurance Commissioner who is running for Lieutenant Governor. Even though I am voting for State Senator Jackie Speier for Lieutenant Governor, I couldn’t resist a peek to see who Garamendi’s friends are. Like Westly, he shares that he is straight and of his 64 friends, he includes Barak Obama, Nancy Pelosi, and Jon Stewart. This is what I call MySpace good! 

I had to stop and sing when Nancy Pelosi’s MySpace website greeted me with Scott McKenzie singing San Francisco (Be Sure to Wear Flowers in Your Hair.) Beside a lineup of big name friends, including Russ Feingold and Hilary Clinton, she had messages from fans like David, from Lake Forest, Washington, who tells her she’s the only one with balls in Washington. (Poor David must have slept through her performance last month on Meet the Press. Not only does Nancy not have real cajones, she is without metaphorical ones too!)

It was no surprise to discover that Senator Barak Obama, who is clearly the most popular friend on all the websites I’ve visited, has a whopping 4883 friends and, unlike Westly, Garamendi, or Pelosi, he doesn’t include any of them in his top eight. Instead, he has friends like Maya, a Harvard student sporting a bare midriff and a white baby tee that says “John Edwards is hot” across her chest. His top eight also includes a 14 year-old named Erin whose tag line says, “I’m awesome, tell your friends.”

So, I guess you are on your own next Tuesday when deciding who to vote for. My words of advice—ignore the negative campaigning and stick to the candidate’s record. Most importantly, forget everything I’ve just told you about and pray that the Democrats have something better up their sleeve than getting popular on MySpace!

On Being Biased and Opinionated, the Immigration Debate, and George Lakoff's Frames

I had an unsuccessful weekend in Northern California working on a documentary I began last month with friends. For me the gist of our project had been simple: immigrants are a vital part of our economy. Undocumented immigrants are not terrorists and shouldn’t be equated with them. They clean our houses, weed our gardens, grow and harvest our fruits and vegetables, and cook the food we eat in restaurants. They are essential members of our economy and the elemental role they play is completely unrecognized in the national debate on immigration. Well, to my surprise, my two childhood friends have adopted different frames of this issue and they are both concerned that I may be too opinionated and biased to accurately document this story. Meet BC and PBAH:

In his recent analysis, George Lakoff clarifies the complexity of the immigration issue and how framing the debate as an “immigration problem” has excluded the broader social and economic concerns that define the issue. In the paper, Lakoff puts my two friends in two separate frames. One friend he calls “The Bean Counter.” The Bean Counter’s opinion is: We can’t afford to have illegal immigrants using our tax dollars on health, education, and other services. BC has children in local public schools and is concerned that immigrants not paying taxes are destroying his children’s education and bringing down the quality of care at local hospitals. My other friend is what Lakoff calls “Progressivism Begins at Home.” His perspective is: The immigrants are taking the jobs of American workers and we have to protect our workers. PBAH works in construction and feels threatened by undocumented workers who work for half his pay (“That is when they get paid,” PBAH admits!). Both BC and PBAH draw on the invasion frame popularized by the Minutemen and right-wing bloggers, a frame that employs images of mass people crossing our borders and destroying America. 

That evening I had to restrain myself from calling PBAH and sharing another of my opinions, that the BA he earned in college might be better used in a job that requires a degree the unskilled worker seeking construction jobs doesn’t have. Once it registered for me what BC and PBAH thought about immigration, I couldn’t help but feel that George Bush and his call for “comprehensive immigration reform” had won the immigration debate. How could my two friends overlook the billions our president has cut from education since he’s been in office? And how could they miss the economic reality that low-skilled, low pay workers are what make the American economy go round, and that if we want to change that, we’d better start getting used to paying a lot more for the cheap products and services we enjoy? The number of low-wage workers who have been coming to America for so many years so that Business can flourish has no place in the frame that BC and PBAH and the American public have so credulously adopted. This proves, yet again, the brilliance and effectiveness of frames and the cunning ingenuity of those who continue to develop and take advantage of them.

Politics and Poetry

My desk is overflowing with family and dinner and dogs, with lovers in San Francisco that send notes and blow kisses, all delivered by the moon in bouquets of sweet words that I’ve erased and emphasized and categorized since December.

The sunrays dance in my backyard and I can hear the children and the relatives knocking—tap, tap, tap, yak, yak, yak—pining to play, shop, run, or sigh. I am not too stubborn to ask “What is the meaning of all this?” or too self-righteous to wonder if I’m on track and living in God’s will or maybe in that of my Grandmother Renate, the first one to have shown me that something large, empathetic, bountiful, and forgiving does exist, even alongside tyrants, murderers, and genocidal maniacs. It was under a willow in the neighbor’s yard, the kind that wept strong branches grown to cradle a sick child left all alone in the dirt, where I began to understand life. It was under that tree, where the sun never reached and the earth was always cold, that caterpillars verified its cycle.

I went back to that tree recently. My dog had wandered off and I was searching for her along the periphery of my mother’s property. The tree’s branches had been cut short and the earth beneath was exposed and dry. Although her trunk looked naked, it was still inviting me to curl my body around and find comfort in the stillness and the sweetness of the sun baking on clean wood. I was struck by the memory of a world before cable and computers, a world even before death, when war was history and we were busy recovering, piece by piece, year by year, from our past. It reminded me of a time before I was aware of racism and bigotry. My only religion was the Constitution my father taught me. I also learned that sometimes good people did bad things, too.

My family celebrated American holidays simply because we were American. When bad memories ached from deep inside, we released the foul air slowly by pretending with spoons that we were the Pointer Sisters and by playing Ravel’s Boléro with chopsticks and spatulas. There was no sadness that “Here Comes the Sun” on the record player couldn’t fix—lying on my stomach behind the couch, ear pressed up against the speaker, my head inevitably filled with secret playground kisses that could heal any suffering.

I sat down to blog about democracy and language today, but when the tick, tick, tick of a poem rattles, there’s nothing to do but let it out. Like a branch that breaks off of a willow tree, death begets life, old becomes new, and from its memories I know I will to survive.

The Blessing and The Curse

I like to pretend that writing is my chance to exhale the world and the war, the death of media and democracy’s downfall, pretend that I can overlook the LA smog and the sadness and what tries to grab my attention on the street. When I’m writing my goal is to somehow dip sweetly into a little downtime where I can ignore the couple eating dinner at the 7/11—two greasy hot dogs that had been turning on the electric toaster grill all day—and ignore the short man in the blue jacket and the black baseball cap dropped off by the coyote he’s indebted to, even as he sits there on the corner of Reseda, not sure what town he’s in, with nowhere to go and nothing to do but sell mangos and strawberries and large sacks of oranges until his master returns and the $7,000 dollars he owes for the trip across the border is paid off. I try to take my mind far away from Washington D.C. because, after all, I really am far away from the scandal and the blood that is dripping from the hands of each and every one of those men and women who are not representing Democracy or America’s citizens. I like to think writing is my meditation, a time I can clear my mind of most everything.

Then, as I begin to write about love or nature, voices like the one of Eduardo Galeano break through somehow and I begin digressing from this meditation to the tail end of the interview I caught on Democracy Now!. On the program Eduardo Galeano wanted us to imagine what it would be like if half a million Americans, most of them women and children had been killed by foreign invaders. It would take “millenniums,” he said to forget what occurred. Well, in Iraq, we have killed nearly half a million people. Women and children. Yet here in the U.S., we routinely read the numbers of the dead and move on to the Metro section. Galeano ended the program answering a question about the role of the American people in the world today. “What should be their role, as distinct from the government’s?” he was asked. Galeano responded, “It would help to understand that the world is much more than the U.S. I mean, this is a very important country, indeed. But we are all important. We are all able to say something that deserves to be heard.”

And then I realize that this is why I write. No matter how hard I try, I can’t seem to forget the couple at the 7/11, or the indentured human being on the corner selling oranges. And I can’t ignore the smog in Los Angeles or the scandals and lies coming from Washington. I cherish the meaningful debate that once made up this Democracy and allowed for outrage and tough questions both in times of war and peace. So for now, I have to just keep doing what it is I seem to be unable to stop doing. Does anyone have any other suggestions for meditation?