Views and Mechanics Publisher's Note Editor's Note Review of African Psycho Review of The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid Film Review of "Judith Butler: Philosophical Encounters of the Third Kind" Writing Contest Results Creative Nonfiction Back Pain...Who Cares? By Michael D. Burg Knit Two Together By Jo L. Gerrard Skin Odyssey By Holly Leigh Jacobson Leaves in the Wind By Molly Molloy Hydroglyphics By Phaedra Greenwood Poetry Indiana Poem By Michael Lee Johnson Inspire Me, Ms. Muse By Tony Zurlo A Poem Forgot By Gabrielle Rabinowitz Yours By Sheila McLaughlin Sikorski Confetti By Alan Girling Correction: Drive Me Home Again By Anne Cammon Fiction Scaffold By Joseph Bathanti For the Taking By Anne Leigh Parrish The Artistic Impulse By Johanna Lipford Justifiable Brew Aside By Barbara Anton Stopping at the DQ By Susan White Cover Art Bright Red By Dee Rimbaud About the Contributors © 2007, River Walk Journal and respective authors and artists. All rights reserved. Do not use or reproduce without permission. River Walk Journal, Inc. Board of Directors Chairman - Elizabeth Ross Vice Chairman - Joseph Koch Secretary/Treasurer - Geri Stock-Ross Editorial Director - Patti Kurtz, DA Literacy Director - Vacant Policy Director - PA State Rep. Jess Stairs Advisory Board Chairman - Patti Kurtz, DA Asst. Chairman - Dan Lachenman, PhD Samuel Hazo Christopher Leland Edwin Yoder Joseph Bathanti Journal Staff Publisher - Elizabeth Ross Editor-In-Chief - Joseph Koch Senior Editor - Patti Kurtz Senior Editor - Neeldhara Misra Copyeditor - Kathy Skaggs Blog Contributing Editor - Maggie Koster Education Blog Contributing Editor - Jordan Wirfs-Brock Publicity Director (PA) - Geri Stock-Ross For information about submissions, visit http://www.riverwalkjournal.org/subs.html. Questions about promotions, subscribers' services, and advertising should be sent to publisher@riverwalkjournal.org. River Walk Journal, Inc. is a non-profit corporation run entirely by volunteers. For information about volunteer opportunities and internships, visit VolunteerMatch. |
Leaves in the Wind: Of Immigrants, Exiles, Ghosts and Spirits By Molly Molloy 2nd Place Essay Spirits A week after the President’s primetime speech on immigration reform, I find myself on South Claiborne Avenue in mid-city New Orleans. It’s an abandoned gas station. In this part of town and in most of the 80% of the city of New Orleans flooded by Hurricane Katrina, gas stations, fast food outlets, grocery stores and other businesses are still boarded up. But this corner bustles with commerce of another sort. Dozens of men, all of them Latino, mill around and approach the trucks and SUVs that come looking for workers. The work is gutting, cleanup, roofing and other construction and the men can earn from $75-$120 per day. As the early morning crowd grows, mobile food vendors pull up on a side street and unfurl aluminum windows and counters to see their wares. Loncheria Dunamis, Rica Comida Hondureña; Ruben’s Cafeteria, Stamford CT…Being a native of south Louisiana, I find such commerce peculiar on the streets of New Orleans, but New Orleans is changing fast these days, perhaps for the first time ever in its 288 years. I’m here with a photographer from Juárez, Mexico who is documenting the largest wave of immigration to the United States in recent times. He’s been to smuggling towns in the Sonoran desert, river crossings in Nuevo Laredo, bare rooms in North Carolina, childbirth clinics in northern California, and massive immigrant marches on the streets of Phoenix and Los Angeles. He’s also been to villages in Oaxaca where most of the people are gone, but where giant houses financed by money sent home sit black-eyed and empty on the misty mountain roads. Here in New Orleans, he’s documenting the undocumented workers from Mexico and Central America. They may number in the tens of thousands, but no one has counted. Most will tell you they are from Mexico, even though their looks and accents and handshakes tell you otherwise. Others tell you straight out that they come from Honduras, Guatemala, Colombia, as well as Houston, Miami, Atlanta and Chicago. They are here to cash in on the unending, hard and dirty work of cleaning up and rebuilding a destroyed American city. Destroyed? My professional friends in New Orleans don’t like this kind of talk. New Orleans is coming back. We’re here. We love our city. We must think positively about the future. OK. One old friend from college lived and worked here for 31 years, his job was not in danger, his parents retired here, his house in a desirable part of Uptown lost nothing but one roof shingle in the storm. He had not seen the destruction in Lakeview or the 9th Ward – “why would I go there and just get more depressed?” He just quit his job and moved to San Francisco. This is just one personal story, but newspapers nationwide have reported on increased depression, post-traumatic stress and other serious mental health conditions suffered by New Orleans residents and evacuees who have settled in communities around the country. One of the young men approaches me. He wants to know what the photographer is doing. A few days ago, someone was here taking pictures and shortly after, the migra came and took some guys away. I assured him that my friend was not working for any government or law enforcement and that the pictures would not get anybody in trouble. Then he told me that the men would feel better if the photographer were not taking picture of their backs as they rushed to the vehicles of potential employers. They would rather be photographed face to face. Then he shook my hand and told me that he was from Honduras. Ruben’s Cafeteria, Stamford, CT, is a small red pick-up, outfitted with pop-out sides and a tailgate with hot water spigots and all manner of moveable food. The proprietor is a thin man in constant motion, dressed in white shorts, t-shirt, a red cap and sandals, cell phone to his ear, a wad of dollar bills in one hand. He’s not talking Spanish or English, so I wonder what to say. Ends up he is from Brazil so writes it himself in my notebook: Robson Pinto. He is 63 years old, but he moves and talks and smiles like a man so enjoying life, he has no need to count such things. He speaks with his whole body in motion – this of Puck in “A Midsummer Night’s Dream.” As he answers my questions his arms and hands flow like a dancer’s and he grabs my shoulders to be sure that I get what he is trying to tell me. It will be two years in June since he immigrated to Connecticut. He was surrounded by Brazilians and Portuguese there and didn’t have to learn English, but he came to New Orleans on December 6, 2005 and now he is studying. He is a retired lawyer from Rio. His three sons are grown and he counts them on his fingers: “One is a commercial pilot, one is an engineer, and one is a thieving politician.” We ask him about this corner, about the men seeking work, about the situation. When he first came here, everything was going down, down, down. White working people, black, Mexicans, they could all only pay with nickels and dimes. He shows us the Styrofoam cups he uses to sort his change. Was he ever robbed? No, he hasn’t had that problem. When he first come to town, he would drive around in poor black neighborhoods (he waves his arms back in the downtown direction toward what had been projects) and he would give the kids candy and ice cream. Their mothers thought he was rich. He says he clears about $300/day, but that there is a lot of competition. He points to four or five other vendors that we can see from this spot. All the while he talks to us, customers come around and themselves to instant soups, coffee, sodas and packaged snacks. The sandwiches, bowls of pasta, rice and chicken, and other homemade dishes seem a bit too expensive for them right now. Mr. Pinto prepares the food in his small rented house on Melpomene Avenue that was damaged in the flood and he waves his arm in that direction. I don’t see him prepare it, he doesn’t stop talking or making change for his customers, but suddenly in my hand appears a tall steaming cup of instant coffee, laced with milk and Brazilian chocolate. He says things are getting even worse now. There are so many vendors competing that nobody is making any money and the whole city is just going down, down, down. Why? “Insurance!” he says. “The insurers are not paying up. No one is getting the money they need to rebuild.” And so, the laborers can’t get enough work either. Back in December, the workers here would earn $125/day, but now they only get $60-$75. But they keep coming. So I ask, well where are you gonna go now, since things have gotten so bad? Both arms fly into the air and come down on my shoulders. “NO! I will NEVER leave this city! This is the most BEAUTIFUL city in the world. The most beautiful SPIRIT is in this city. Here I have my house and I have music and wine and women. I go to jazz clubs and piano bars. This place is beautiful.” I realize that to understand Mr. Pinto, I need to think like an ecologist. He’s found a new niche in a new environment – a city whose surfaces have been scoured by storms churned up in a changing ocean world where the temperatures that generate the storms keep rising. He patrols the streets in neighborhoods where the usual food services no longer exist, serving a new population that has come to fill other niches in this new ecology – cleaning and rebuilding a wounded American city. They come because the physical environments in their home countries have been struck by even worse storms and their economies ravaged by more slow-moving disasters: overpopulation, and the unintended consequences of trade agreements negotiated between grossly unequal parties that lead to the collapse of local and subsistence economies. “Look,” he tells me leaning close with his nose about two inches from mine, “in the crypt, in the graveyard, there are many drawers, but there is no drawer for money.” [No hay gaveta para el dinero]. Immigrants A whole lot of money is on the table right now if President Bush or the Congress actually manage to pass some kind of immigration reform. The Republican Senate’s bill calls for billions for high-tech fences, a “guest worker” program and something called “path to citizenship” that supporters say is not amnesty and that the opposition (Republicans mostly) says is amnesty and that it won’t stand. Somehow this “comprehensive” plan must get reconciled with the hard-core “make ‘em-all-felons-fence ‘em-out-stop-terrorists” bill passed by the other House, also dominated by Republicans. And the President is sending National Guard troops to the border and borrowing money from the Iraq war to train thousands more border patrol agents. The Department of Homeland Security has let out a bunch of multi-billion dollar contracts for bid – part of the Secure Border Initiative – with the idea of putting up a virtual fence, “smart-border” technologies that will discern every movement on the line, and to build bigger and tougher and privately run (read: profitable) immigration prisons all along the border, and we should be feeling much safer now. None of it addresses the magnitude of the exodus from Mexico and Central America, much less the forces driving people to migrate. A few days before the President’s speech, a woman and her 3-year-old son from the southern Mexican state of Veracruz cross the border near Sells, Arizona with a group led by a smuggler. The boy gets sick and she is left behind when she cannot keep pace with the group. She stays with the boy until he dies of the heat. The Border Patrol finds her a day or so later, wandering lost and silent until facing return to Mexico without her dead son. They fax an impression of her shoe print to agents close to the scene who follow her tracks back to the boy’s body, lying under a mesquite tree, his arms folded over his small chest. The mother may be prosecuted for child endangerment in Arizona. Her husband works in Kentucky. And I think, yes, a fence would be a good thing. More border patrol is a good thing too, because they are the best trackers and lifesavers we’ve got. Anything that could save another baby from such a fate would be good thing. But then, for a mother so desperate, what good is any deterrent we can think of? And what punishment could the State of Arizona dish out that could be any worse than what she must carry in her own heart? Two days before massive and peaceful April marches brought more than a million immigrants to the streets and TV screens of America, I went to the border near Sasabe, Arizona. The Minutemen had mobilized their new recruits on private land nearby and were talking – serious and cheerful – to anyone with a notebook and a camera. No one can say these folks are not experts at media relations. They were pleased as punch at the anti-Mexican flag backlash from the LA marches the week before. Congress now debated what a year before had only circulated on websites, talk radio and Fox News, but now, border stories lean on CNN and on every gray front page in the country. Minuteman recruit, Kyle, a big guy from Phoenix who finds it hard to smile, told me they would be there on the border making their statement and maybe eventually, “those Congress critters will figure it out. There’s gonna be some deportations cause there are a lot of people who just shouldn’t be here. You can’t minimize 30 million lawbreakers.” Estimates of the illegal immigrant population tossed around in Congress and think tanks hover between 10-12 million. What certainly true is that no one knows for sure. Kyle owns a cleaning business in Phoenix; most of his employees are immigrants and he is pretty sure they will take off work on Monday to march. As other Minutemen (and women) wander by on their way on or off patrol, Kyle makes sure that all have sunscreen. Driving on down Hwy 286, I glimpse two kids squatting in the morning shadow of the Buenos Aires Wildlife Refuge sign, a few feet from two empty Border Patrol trucks. We don’t stop but turn down a dirt road from which tiny paths fishbone off toward the line and the other direction into the refuge where they meet more roads used by the smugglers who meet the walkers – the lucky ones. I’ve been here in summer when it’s much hotter, but in early April, the mesquite has yet to leaf out. The land looks burnt, brown and trodden. We hop out a dozen time in an hour to toss garbage into the truck – water and soda bottles (some still half full), gallon jugs hand-stitched into remnants of blue jeans to keep the liquid cool for a spell, shirts and jackets bleached pale by the sun, a bright blue acrylic shawl dropped too recently to have faded, another shawl draped gracefully in the scrub – smooth rayon threads woven in a tight herringbone-like pattern red, black and white loosening into an elegant fringe that feels like cool water on the skin. The fabric is cheap and bright and Mayan ladies in Yucatan drape them around their heads, for modesty and protection from the tropical sun. In my closet at home is an identical one in blue that I bought at a Merida market in 1982. We circle back through the refuge to the highway entrance and the kids are still sitting there, moving to stay in the waning shadow as the sun climbs. I get out to talk to them, a brother and sister from Oaxaca. The girl is 22 and does most of the talking. Her brother is 16 and he seems a little shell-shocked. Both are slight and dark with smooth skin and straight black hair. I ask if they are Zapotec or Mixtec, they say Zapotec, but that they are from the capital city of Oaxaca. They explain that they are Mexicans, not Indians, because they come from the city, not from a traditional pueblo. I ask if we can help and without hesitation they ask us to take them back to Mexico. They say that they have spent 4 nights walking in the refuge, they are lost, out of water and have only had a little chocolate to eat. They’ve waited here all morning by the Border Patrol trucks, but no one stopped for them till we happened by. They have traveled for about 15 days, first a bus from Oaxaca and then they paid about $800 to get from Nogales to Sasabe where they crossed with a smuggler. Their destination is Madera, California where they have friends and jobs waiting. I ask if they have family in California, but they tell me no, just friends. I don’t believe that, but I understand why they say so. I tell them that they are about 60 miles from the nearest bus station in Tucson, but we can’t take them there because with so many migra checkpoints along the road we would certainly get arrested. My friend gives the girl $40, we tell her to hide it well. It will do for food, drink and a phone call to Madera. We apologize for the garbage in the back of the pick-up and though we warn them not to, the boy opens up a half-full bottle of something and drinks. They perch on the wheel wells for the six-mile drive back to the crossing. The U.S. guard watches as the kids hop out. I give the girl a hug and shake hands with boy. Their skin is dry, dusty, and has a smoky smell, but not so bad for being lost in the desert for 4 days. Maybe it wasn’t as long as they say. Maybe it’s none of my business. We turn around and drive back through the checkpoint. The guard asks my friend what we were up to. “You could be arrested for transporting illegal aliens. You should have called the Border Patrol.” “They were waiting for the Border Patrol, they needed food and water; they asked us to take them back to Mexico.” “Were those people working for you sir?” “No.” They will find their smuggler in Sasabe and cross again as soon as they get some money sent from their people in Madera. I think that immigration reform bills are like the medicine show bag-of-tricks in the Wizard of Oz. There is nothing in that bag for them: no path to citizenship, no guest worker permit, and nothing for them to go back to in Oaxaca. And that day and each day before and since, perhaps a thousand (or 2000 or 3000, nobody knows) have crossed the border to get to jobs they know are waiting for them. Exiles and Ghosts I fly into New Orleans two hours behind schedule on the day of the recent mayoral election, nearly nine months after the hurricane had flooded the city. A friend who came to meet me had to leave and come back because there wasn’t even a place open in the terminal to get a drink on a Saturday night. According to the New Orleans Aviation Board, arrivals at New Orleans International Airport are down by nearly 250,000 since July 2005. Only 21% of the city’s schools are open and not a single new residential housing permit has been issued in the Orleans Parish since the storm. Every few weeks, the newspapers run stories of another body found in a ruined house, the latest from a shotgun double in Mid-City. On the bright side, the Louisiana Family Assistance Center reports that the number of those still counted as missing is down to less than 300. Driving along Williams Boulevard from the airport, a pick-up ahead of us bears the bumper-sticker: Nueva Orleans “Con orgullo vivimos aqui/Proud to call it home.” The latest (January 2006) Rapid Population Estimate compiled by the Emergency Operations Center of the City of New Orleans did not include race or ethnicity information in their survey and so far, none of the official data collection efforts have attempted to track the numbers of Latino workers in the area. Some researchers estimate that 10,000-20,000 Latino workers are in the region. One study concluded that nearly half of the rebuilding workforce in New Orleans is Latino and that 54% of that group is undocumented. Most of these workers were living in the United States prior to Katrina, but moved to the New Orleans area after the storm for the cleanup jobs and many lack workplace protections provided to those with documentation. New Orleans has historically had a small Latino population, mainly from Central American countries, especially Honduras and Nicaragua. A small number of Central Americans immigrated to the city and its suburbs during the civil wars of the 1980s; many more who were able fled the physical and economic devastation of Hurricane Mitch that killed more than 15,000 people in Nicaragua and Honduras in October 1998, and more arrived after Hurricane Stan in November 2005, being drawn in part by those already here and by the prospect of rebuilding work. Beginning in December 2005 as cleanup and some rebuilding got underway, Mexican and Central American workers took on some of the dirtiest and most dangerous jobs – gutting mold-infested buildings, demolition, debris-hauling and roofing. The manager at the Shoney’s Motel in Metairie tells us that rooms are scarce this weekend since a lot of evacuated city residents have come in to cast their votes. By Sunday afternoon, Shoney’s has a couple of rooms available and as the sun starts to set, the place feels like a Mexican village as the close of the long work week, except there are no women and thus, no homemade tortillas. Dozens of guys gather around grills set up on the balconies and the aroma of carne asada hangs in the humid air. The parking lot is filled with trucks and the men perch on folding chairs and beer coolers lined up along the motel breezeways drinking Corona and Bud. The music is Tropical and Norteña, no blues or Dixieland ‘round here. We spend Sunday on a disaster tour. I had been in New Orleans last December and wanted to retrace my steps, see recovery underway. We head east into the city; thousands of flood-ruined cars coated with milky white dust still lie piled under every interstate overpass. We turn north on Marconi Drive through City Park to Lake Pontchartrain. The gospel tent villages in the park bustle with offers of food and medical care; people stand in line for lunch at one tent. East across the lagoon, we see the truck camps of workers who still live in the park. Port-a-Potties adorn grassy medians along many streets. The fabled City Park live oaks have weathered lots of storms and their wounds appear to have healed, but the rides, concessions and other amusements in the park stand empty. Lakeview lies just west of the park and took the full force of flooding through the breach in the 17th Street Canal levee. On Sunday afternoon, an assortment of cranes and pile drivers are hard at work pounding corrugated metal reinforcements into the ground. A large brick two-story house abutting the levee construction zone is missing several walls that seem to have been pushed outward by the force of water. A white banner over the garage proclaims: HOLD THE CORPS ACCOUNTABLE! WWW.LEVEES.ORG. Another banner on this block says: ALLSTATE PAID $10,113.34 ON THIS HOUSE FOR STORM DAMAGE. The house looks like it could have been worth about $300,000; its brick walls stand, but the interior of the structure is completely gone. An empty bottle of Sloe Gin sits in shards of glass in the front window. A small, gutted brick house with bright green shutters sports a large red FOR SALE sign and a carefully hand-lettered message on two pieces of brown cardboard: Looking For Solid White Cat (Shocker) Grayish Blue Tabby (Blue Boy) 460-4697 An open bag of cat food and a plastic bowl of water are set out on the carport alongside an empty cat carrier. A stone bunny and a motley choir of painted angels stand watch. I kneel in the tall weeds to take a picture and figure that it’s mostly rats and snakes living large in this neighborhood. Other than levee work, the only activity to see in Lakeview is a Crescent City Demolition crane gobbling up a three-story house and spitting out the dust. We head back east through Gentilly, unchanged since December except for a few more FEMA trailers and very tall weeds. I saw not a single worker, immigrant or otherwise, except for the guy driving the demolition crane. He could have been Mexican. In the French Quarter, tourists stroll the sidewalks, but nothing feels like a crowd. There’s no place to park on the streets and the paid lots are filling up even though they charge six bucks for an hour. The aquarium is scheduled to open in a few days. The river runs low and sluggish as Louisiana has been in a drought for most of the time that has passed since the storm. Several Mexican families, men and women and babies, stroll the Riverfront park and my friend from Juárez photographs a guy in a Virgin of Guadalupe t-shirt, posed near New Orleans’ “Monument to the Immigrant.” The names carved on the monument are mostly Italian and a few German and Irish. Amplified live music blares too loud from the numerous shops and cafés in the French Market, more cacophony than atmosphere. We turn down a residential street to get away from the noise and stop to free a man nattering away in conversation with himself, his wheelchair stuck in a crack in the decrepit sidewalk. I want to take my friends to the Napoleon House Bar, the first place I ever felt like a grownup but I haven’t been there in 10 years and can’t remember where it is. The proprietor of a used bookstore with the bulbous nose of a man who knows drink tells us we are only 3 blocks away. Built in 1797, the building was owned by Nicholas Girod, mayor of New Orleans from 1812-1815. He offered it as a home-in-exile to Napoleon, but the emperor died before he could accept the Louisiana hospitality. The current business has been run by the same Italian family since 1914. The “limited menu” comes on one rumpled sheet of white paper. We take a table on the dark patio, drink dark beer and eat shrimp remoulade and red beans and rice. The Napoleon House only plays classical music and on this afternoon, it is guitar. The waiter says he doesn’t know the artist; the CD sleeve is lost. The song playing as we sit down is Canción Mixteca; my Mexican friend knows all the words: Que lejos estoy del suelo donde he nacido! inmensa nostalgia invade mi pensamiento; y al ver me tan solo y triste cual hoja al viento, quisiera llorar, quisiera morir de sentimiento. How faraway I am from the land where I was born Such sad longing fills my thoughts Alone and sad, a leaf blown by the wind, I long to cry, I long to die from the feeling… After lunch, we head east on Claiborne Avenue and wait a long while for a barge to pass before we can cross the Industrial Canal drawbridge into the 9th Ward. It’s the same as I saw it in December. Houses and buildings sit as they collapsed when the water went down in mid-September. The people from Common Ground have posted handmade street signs and near the corner of Forstall and Law, we park and duck into the shattered glass door of the Greater St. Rose Baptist Church, intruding like sleepwalkers, dazed by the murky disorder. The pedals of a baby grand piano thrown upside down in the choir loft wave in the moldy air like naked legs. The brown water line rings the sheetrock walls to a level of about 14 feet, and light fixtures hanging from the ceiling above that shine crystal clean. A small table is tossed atop a speaker near the ceiling, an American flag hangs in mud-coated dignity from its tall pole anchored to the floor. The top of the piano must have floated for awhile and then came to rest on top of the pews in the middle of the sanctuary. Caked mud inches thick coats the floor, the seats and even the rounded tops of the pews. When the mud dried slowly, it shattered into fractal patterns that I remember from a book I read about chaos. The mathematics of chaos can describe such patterns, but cannot predict them. My friend explains, “Things shatter in an orderly way; you just can’t tell how they will shatter.” The brick veneer is peeling from the exterior walls, but the marble plaque that dedicated the church in 1996 is perfectly sound, perhaps to be chiseled off and carried into exile, wherever its ghost congregation might be. A couple of blocks away, the white brick Greater Mt. Carmel Baptist Church stands gutted, clean and bare. The door hangs open but a marble plaque guards the entrance and provides this chronicle: Damaged by water 1965 Renovated 1966 Damaged by fire 1968 Renovated 1969 Stone laid by Fusion Lodge No. 23 James Bell 33° W.M. August 31, 1969 It was Hurricane Betsy that flooded the 9th Ward in 1965. A new wooden placard stands on an easel in the weedy yard, proclaiming RESTORATION in the words of Ezequiel 37: CAN THESE BONES LIVE? O YE DRY BONES HEAR THE WORD OF THE LORD! I look up the passage when I get home and realize that after all these hurricanes and fires, the people of Mt. Carmel have chosen the long view. Not only does God restore flesh and sinews to the dry bones that rise up from the burying ground, Ezequiel Chapter 37, Verse 9 reads: Prophesy, Son of Man, and say to the Wind, Come from the four winds, O Breath, and breathe upon these slain, that they may live! A couple of days later, dazed from the heat and desert glare along the I-10 somewhere near Ft. Stockton, Texas, I wander into a truck stop restroom. Perhaps a dozen girls and women are in there, crowding around the two sinks, laughing, washing, primping and changing clothes. When I come out of the bathroom, one of the girls moves to make room for me to wash my hands. The door opens and a middle-aged blond woman stops in shock and then backs away from the crowded scene. Outside, I notice a line of men at the other restroom door and parked by one of the diesel pumps, a big Mexican tour bus. Lucky ones. Perhaps they came over the river, or walked across some desert. Perhaps this bus has special dispensation – legal or bought – to get through the migra checkpoints. I can’t even imagine asking. Summer comes and new storms churn in the oceans that get warmer day-by-day. Congress has decided to hold hearings rather than pass immigration reform. Minutemen are building fences and National Guard troops are coming to the border and to the streets of New Orleans to quell growing violence in abandoned parts of the city as drug dealers and teenaged gangsters return from exile to reclaim their turf. Trade deals continue to be struck between the most powerful economies in the world and the ruling elites of poor countries. Somehow, we convince ourselves that these are honest, win-win deals with something good for everybody, that somehow as the rich get richer, economies will modernize and the vast majority of the people who are poor will rise with the tide of progress. But, is there any such thing as real negotiation between the powerful and the powerless? The rising tide leaves many stranded in backwaters more real than metaphorical. People are blown about like leaves in the wind. They sing sad songs of lands that can no longer feed them. They come to where the new work is. They cook and eat and drink and cleanup and build, finding niches to fill as climates and economies shift along new fault lines. Dead mothers and children haunt the newspapers of Tucson, El Paso, Chula Vista and Las Cruces. Call it the Breath of God or call it the power of nature or call it spirit or call it chaos: this destruction and restoration must certainly come from the same source. |