By Carlos Acuña / Calexico Chronicle / November 27 –November 29, 2024
Psst. Want to know something? I hate political writing, despite all the schadenfreude and subliminal and not so subliminal virtue-signaling that weighs down each ponderous sentence much like the angst-inducing coal in Tennessee Ernie Ford’s “16 Tons.”
But the coming holidays lead my mind to funny places, to ask less than funny questions.
We’re supposed to live in a Constitutional republic, a democracy. For the better part of my adult life it sure hasn’t felt like it. In a democracy, the People rule. Period.
Where does the Constitution give the 1 percent of the population the entitlement to the distribution of resources over the remaining 99 percent? Where in this sacrosanct document does one read that unless one complies and submits to the arbitrariness of silly, insecure managers and supervisors, one must find one’s way to the exit door and starve, go homeless, penniless, deprived of the minimal decent healthcare and even clean water?
Heck, try to mobilize union membership and the next thing you know you’re fired! Does the boss ask where you’re going to get money to pay your rent? Your credit card? For medical insurance to cover your family’s health needs and meds? Where are you going to get grocery money to feed your kids or cash to pay utilities or your car payments? Or, money so that the kids don’t go without shoes or a decent winter jacket? Nope, all the boss says is, “clean out your desk. Leave.”
Democracy? You tell me …
That said, air remains free. If you can call that eye-and-nasal drying, micro-particle bearing, asthma-inducing gas we breathe “free.” Even breathing relatively pollution-free air arrives with a serious price tag. Not too many Californians can afford seaside or coastal living.
The smarter among the homeless, if not entire displaced families, park their cars at night along the crowded curb sides of Ocean Beach and other similar-situated communities, from San Diego to Los Angeles to Santa Barbara, or so a client once informed me, not to mention my observations, reminiscent of the sad prose I read as an undergrad in the pages of “Crime and Punishment.”
So please, forget to tap on my shoulder to remind me for the nth time of Thomas Jefferson’s line, “that all men are created equal.” The entire class had to memorize the second clause of the Preamble to the Declaration of Independence to pass Civics and in order to bid farewell to the eighth grade. Is Civics even taught any more?
Fine words from a man who owned people, slaves. Apparently his words tended to apply to English-speaking, Western European property-owning males; in a word, his “peers.” Not to females, not to the landless, not to natives of the continent, much less his slaves. The Venn diagram for the fine concept, “equal,” excluded more than it included back in the 18th century.
Recall that four of the first five presidents hailed from Virginia, a sovereign, slave-owning state. In his droll novel, “Burr,” historian novelist Gore Vidal referred to these entitled-to-the-Presidency office holders as the Virginia cabal.
Cabals come and go. Some of their behaviors lead us to bad places. The Great Depression comes to mind. And armies of people without the means to take care of their basic needs become desperate.
It’s a sad trope that FDR tried for nearly four terms to eliminate, nearly succeeding with the aid of a World War but completely reversed by the likes of Ronnie the Saint, his neoliberal handlers and unreconstructed Confederates who’ve delivered us to the wreckage of a new Gilded Age.
In such torment-clouded moments one concedes that honest Abe should have let the dark ages medieval South secede and evolve in God’s good time rather than force it to remain in the Union and double down on its hopelessly hierarchical-theological weltanschauung where it remains stranded, due in the main, to ancestral resentments. Who knew?
Not pleasant thoughts to have around the holidays including Thanksgiving, an occasion when our great American cosmology reminds us that generous indigenous folk who believed in equality saved the colonists, fellow humans, from starvation, taught the newcomers how to live off, and with, the local flora and fauna. But that’s all the stream-of-consciousness I have for the moment.
But this feeling will pass, as feelings always do. Just as tides rise and fall with the moon, so do feelings. This knowledge provides balance, a sanity space to embrace this piece of wisdom. Happy holidays.
Carlos Acuña of El Centro is an attorney.
