As I write this, more than a million Puerto Ricans march, dance, and sing day after day to remove their corrupt and callous governor from office. Puerto Rico has already lost thousands of people to Hurricanes Irma and Maria in 2017—mostly because the US government neglected to provide recovery assistance and supplies. It has already suffered corruption and economic “hurricanes” for decades on top of more than 120 years of US colonial domination.
As I write this, an international outcry has exploded against the forced separation of Central American children from their parents crossing the US border, as well as the deaths of children and others held in captivity in overcrowded concentration camps run by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). Despite having arrived as asylum seekers, which is legal under US and international law, my brothers and sisters from El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras—and parts of Mexico and other countries like Haiti—are being denigrated and criminalized.
In addition, people have recently taken to the streets to address our compromised present and future due to increasingly irreparable climate change. Protestors and organizations have come together to decry homelessness as well as opioids and other drugs that have led to an epidemic of deaths; gunfire that continues to kill innocent students, shoppers, churchgoers, and more; the fact that the United States has 6 percent of the world’s population but 25 percent of all prisoners; how readily police are exonerated for the killing of unarmed Blacks; and the wars without end in the Middle East.
Add to this wave of protest the growing awareness of the fact that we now live with the widest gap between the richest and poorest people ever recorded in the United States.
This moment in history is not just the fault of our current government. We’ve been going this way a long time. Just the same, fuel is now being added to a burning building. The ruling class of this country—via the White House and its Republican cronies—is working to consolidate an unbreakable base for fascism (among a small but entrenched number of Americans) while scattering the opposition and confusing or scaring off everyone else from doing anything. They’re working hard to get rid of taxes that pay for social services—including any possible quality healthcare and education for all—as well as remove regulatory restrictions to allow more corporate theft of land, production, and labor. And they are amassing the most tax dollars into the military to increase their control abroad—and into law enforcement, border militarization, and mass incarceration for control at home.
Key leaders of the “alt-right” have openly said they aimed to trigger the “looney left” with all their misrepresentations and insane policies. Instead they’ve galvanized a worldwide peaceful, organized resistance that’s gaining in strength.
Unfortunately, they’ve also unleashed a deadly reaction—not far below the surface.
A low-level “civil” war is being waged. As of this writing, since the December 14, 2012, mass shooting that killed twenty children and six adults at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, there have been 2,193 mass shootings in the United States. In one day—August 3, 2019—shooters killed twenty-two people in El Paso, Texas, and nine people in Dayton, Ohio. The Anti-Defamation League says 73.3 percent of all extremist-related fatalities in the last ten years can be linked to the political right wing, mostly committed by white males. Republicans and others blame mental illness and video games (although millions of mentally ill people and gamers are not going around killing people). There’s a pattern emerging beyond that: hate—racist, anti-gay, misogynist, or xenophobic—as the driving engine for the escalation of death in our streets.
Like millions of Americans, I’m demanding a new vision, a qualitatively different direction, for this country. One for the shared well-being of everyone. One with beauty, healing, poetry, imagination, and truth.
As a son of Mexican migrants; as a Native American spiritual practitioner; as a former steelworker; as a journalist and essayist; as the author of sixteen books in all genres; as a world traveler and speaker; as someone who helped create a transformative arts center and bookstore; as someone who has turned around the lives of prisoners, gang members, and addicts; as a man determined to have a full emotional, intellectual, and creative life, I’m compelled to speak out, like many others—not just for the short term, but for the long haul.
Moreover, I’m compelled to help us imagine and realize another world . . .