This last week has been a roller coaster for me. I’ve had flashbacks of September 12th, 2001. My birthday and a day of grief and loss that to us were unimaginable on September 10th. The anti-immigrant rhetoric we thought we had overcome from the Reagan years was back with a vengeance. The Patriot Act was articulated and passed. A raging unjustified war with Iraq was constructed supposedly to avenge the events of September 11th, 2001. 

Latin@s and immigrants continue to pay a disproportionate price for the events visited upon this country by criminal elements operating under the disguise of social justice warriors. And yet we remain steadfast in our commitment to peace, mutual care, and positive contributions to our communities and to this country. We remain so to this day. I am proud of us for that. 

Central American gangs were not as developed or militarized back then. Their militarization and sophistication emerges as a direct result of harsh deportation practices accompanied by US influenced harsh policies in our home countries that basically declared wars on these newly arrived deportees, most of whom did not grow up there and/or who had fled the region as a result of war. Many of the young people I knew and loved were killed quickly upon arrival after deportation. Since then, the conditions of life they were pushed into first through the US prisons, then the US streets, and then the Central American realities, have gradually dehumanized them and continue to do so. 

Facing a war against them, these gangs sought out relationships with cartels so they could fight with weapons and in exchange began to partake more directly and viciously in human, organ, weapons, and drug trafficking there. Today, that legacy creates a situation in Honduras where one woman is killed violently every day. The cartel activities span all of Central America and Mexico now. People go missing every day. Governments collude. And the US market for these “goods” does not abate. 

When will we take responsibility for creating this type of marketplace? A marketplace that trades in humans once more? 

This is a harsh reality that is intertwined in the most insidious ways with our culture; a culture that would make a rapist President. A culture that seeks to erase social movements that attempted to create pathways to healthy participation in the economy for everyone, secure the rights of women to have a say over their bodies, and to accept science as adding an understanding of the world based on what actually happens in our bodies and on the Earth.  

To accept a complexity of experience that renders our world and its wonders through a process of observation and connection. Although Western science does not entirely capture the true nature of this place we live in, it is nice to know that the Earth is a sphere and that it gravitates around the sun. It is good to have information that can help us sustain the intersystemic reality from which we spring forth as a species so we can conserve it for our own living into the future. 

It is nice to know that there are multiple ways to understand something. And that observation can happen differently depending on the world view that shapes us. The vast diversity of experience and perception that we actually live in enriches us and makes us stronger, better, and more sensible as a species. It is beauty in action and it enthralls the senses, uplifts one’s spirit, and inspires curiosity. It generates excitement in our lives that leads to the creation of ideas and the making of things beautiful, useful, and transformative. 

If we look at history, we quickly discern that we are on a pendulum swing towards its extreme edge, and not yet in the most extreme position. In other words, we have not seen the worst yet. And yet, what is sure to happen is that it will swing the other way and that at some point in the future, we will be back to a place where the public dialogue and political rhetoric will most closely resemble what our people actually think, feel and believe. We are far from there right now, but not too far. The country is not the same it was in 2001, 2008, 2016, or 2020. We are experiencing exponential changes and at the same time, these changes trend in a direction that is full of hope and possibility. 

We are at the edge of a cliff that we need to abandon for the future. We need to jump into an ocean of uncertainty where I believe we will create life rafts upon which we will define the future. It is clear that the social movement lineage that has dominated our assessment of our realties must give way to more dynamic human centered and experience based concepts and tools. These concepts and tools need to help us analyze, envision, connect, and mobilize in new and creative ways to achieve three major outcomes: 1) build the base; 2) evolve its consciousness; and 3) develop its leadership. And all of it to rebuild communities across difference, lead systems change work, and retool this democracy. 

We need to engage this next phase of our resistance from our hearts. And we need to take on these tasks centering the engagement and participation of all of us, not just the people we agree with or that we may think at face value are like us. We must, for the sake of the world, embrace our monsters and make them our kin.  

Our greatest hope and salvation is our own species condition that sets us up to love and care for one another. We are wired for love and well being as social beings. We are still able to universally connect with babies, to fall in love, to tend to each other and to grieve an dream together. Ironically our human condition, that creates the disarray we live in and infect the Earth with, is also what can ensure our ability to recreate our world. 

There used to be a world without corn. We made a world with corn in it. That is the power that we hold. We can and do create all of what we live in. I pray that the love in me transforms my life and that it gives me the capacity to participate in the recreation of our world. I commit to comatriate, to love each other and reroot on this Earth to ensure our future lives. May we return to the ways of corn. To the ways of happiness and well being. To ourselves and each other in the tenderness that we come from and are for.  

As we are battered with the enactment of a long ago defunct understanding of our world, may we hold steady in that love that we are. As we are re-traumatized and traumatized for the first time by the actions of this administration, may we turn inward and then to each other and find solace, rest, unity, vision, and a deep responsibility with and for those we love; those we serve; and those we are building for. 

May we be a force in these rehumanizing movements that seek to invite us to be in our full faculties and to recreate the world in the image of love, which is our original condition and instruction. I pray that we forge a path ahead towards our own self discovery as a species meant to steward and encourage the evolution of this world we are a part of and that we belong to. 

In the meantime, please support refugees and immigrants. Support the communities these mass deportations actually will impact disproportionately in Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador, and other places. And among them, support these movimientos deslumbrantes that are already working to construct a light filled abundant and loving future for all of us. And if you can, please donate to the Loving Future Solidarity Fund. 

Thank you in advance for your support and your commitment to build a loving future.