I fit for them—

I seek the Dark

Till I am thorough fit.

The labor is a sober one

With this sufficient sweet

That abstinence of mine produce

A purer food for them, if I succeed,

If not I had

The transport of the aim—

—Emily Dickenson

A gang is a gang is a gang. But is it really? A highly politicized and weaponized term, the general re-conceptualizing of gangs over the past decades has led to some remarkably unjust laws and policies. When we think of gangs, we think “the worst of the worse.” We think tattooed faces, accented voices, hand signs, guns, drugs. Not like well-dressed mobsters, or the “crooks” running major corporations, real estate developments, banks, and other financial institutions—the ones who gain immense wealth, often illicitly, with little or no repercussions.

Gangs are the inner-city tribes that are society’s “bad boys,” the proverbial scapegoats for all that ails us. At the bottom of the social ladder, they became fodder for the largest systemic mass incarceration in the U.S. from the 1970s till today. Moreover, during the 1990s when street gangs engendered many local and national anti-gang measures, prison enhancements, and deportations.

To look at me one wouldn’t think I was a violent and criminal gang member. I’m known today for seventeen books in all genres, a Los Angeles poet laureate, an urban peace advocate, an editor and publisher, a teacher and youth mentor, and cofounder of a cultural center and bookstore in Los Angeles. I have bestsellers and have won literary and community awards.

My personal trajectory, like most so-called gang members, counters the narrative about gangs in this country, where more street gangs exist than anywhere else. In my story lost boys can be found. Trouble in life can lead to triumph in life. With adequate tools, resources, and healthy connections, almost anyone can be redeemed. Why then do the government, mass media, and general culture continue to deride gangs as incorrigible and, in some cases, “domestic terrorists.”

Let’s unpack this.

Having grown up in the poorest neighborhoods of Los Angeles County, including Watts, Mexican migrant communities of old San Gabriel Valley, and East Los Angeles in the 1960s and early 1970s, I became a gang member at age 11. A drug user, including heroin, at 12. In eight jails, including juvenile hall and two adult facilities. And homeless for three years. I’ve been shot at on six different occasions as a teen, including at point blank, although never hit. I overdosed three times and came back, including from a near-death experience when a homie revived me. I lost 25 friends and acquaintances by the time I turned 18 from violence, heroin overdoses, police killings, suicides, and more.

I shouldn’t have survived. Against great odds I left “La Vida Loca” (The Crazy Life). By age 20 I married my “high school sweetheart,” worked as a millwright in a steel mill in Southeast L.A., and expected my first child. I was a Bruce Springsteen song come alive.

This was a time when gangs weren’t in Rap songs or movies or books. They were street associations. In my day, the so-called gangs (a label others gave us) were barrios, my “hood, the people I knew and trusted. We didn’t want many others. There were levels for ages, but also to distinguish the more hard-core guys from the rest. I recall dudes being told to go away when they wanted to be in “the barrio.” To join required an initiation, usually blows by other barrio members to test someone’s mettle. Most guys didn’t want to go through this.

Gangs weren’t for everyone. Today it seems everyone is in a gang.

Just the same, for those heavily involved, the barrio associations were hardcore, no joke. I needed to be “cared straight,” not scared straight (unlike others, prison, drugs, violence didn’t scare us). Mentored by a youth worker, helped by a couple of teachers and counselors, and driven by a vision for a just, peaceful, and an embracing world, I got off the homicidal-suicidal road I’d been on. Despite missteps and setbacks, I’ve managed to stay crime-free, gang-free, and drug-free for over fifty years. I had the “transport of the aim” every step of the way.

Yet I never forgot where I came from. I began urban peace work, including gang truces and barrio peace circles. I helped mentor others out of crime, self-destruction, and addictions. To subsist, I worked in industry and construction before becoming a journalist, poet, fiction writer, and essayist in my mid-twenties till today. I also started teaching creative writing, doing poetry readings and healing circles in prisons, jails, and juvenile lockups, now for forty-five years. In 2001, I co-founded with my wife Trini a multi-arts cultural space and bookstore called Tia Chucha’s Centro Cultural & Bookstore in a Los Angeles section of the San Fernando Valley. At this center, I helped start the Trauma to Transformation Program that sends artists, poets, musicians, and theater people to prisons, juvenile facilities, and parolee housing.

Over the years I became acutely aware of the growing public animosity toward street gangs. This resulted from a “perfect storm” of three major dynamics. One, de-industrialization that started in the 1970s and picked up steam in the 1980s. This process created the Midwest “rust belt” including industrial cities like Chicago, Detroit, and Pittsburgh, but also in the largest manufacturing center of the country: Los Angeles County. President Reagan and the first President Bush presided during the roughest period. The main culprits were automation in auto, steel, and other manufacturing, as well as mechanized farms. Also contributing were “outsourcing” jobs to cheaper labor markets like Mexico, Central America, and Southeast Asia. From 1979 to 2019 the country lost close to seven million manufacturing jobs that at the end of World War II helped working-class people, overwhelmingly white, but with growing numbers of Blacks and other people of color, get mortgages, benefits, and pensions. Now these communities were devastated.

Secondly, the rise of “crack,” homemade smokable crystalized cocaine that could be sold in poorer areas like weed, heroin, and other drugs for $5, $10, or $20 unlike expensive cocaine powder. This emerged in Los Angeles in the early 1980s, then spread around the country, when the CIA carried out “anti-communist” campaigns in Central America that forced cocaine shipment routes from the Caribbean through Mexico to help fund counter-revolutionary groups. This also transformed long-time Mexican drug lords and families to cartels. I learned this firsthand as a crime-beat newspaper reporter in San Bernardino, CA where DEA and other law enforcement sources told me about the dry lakes used for planes flying over the border with kilos of cocaine for inner-city distribution. I discovered more as a freelance journalist in Mexico and Central America, including during the Contra War. In southern Honduras I got shot at by .50 caliber bullets and bombed twice, all U.S. ordnance, at a time when Congress forbade such incursions (somehow, I emerged unharmed).

Alongside this was the proliferation of firearms in the poorest urban and rural areas. Guns not just from the U.S., but Israel, Germany, Russia, and more. The country became not only the largest drug market, but outside war zones the largest gun market. I witnessed this in the late 1960s when “drive-by” shootings first hit the inner-cities. Vietnam War vets impacted from drug addiction and mental trauma returned to the barrio, some with access to guns (not all vets, but enough of them). Gun trafficking escalated. Once a drive-by happened, guns became the weapon of choice. Largely diminished were the “rumbles,” the one-on-one fights, the knifings.

And despite billions of tax dollars in anti-drug wars, other narcotics such as Crystal Meth and fentanyl made their way, contributing to mostly disorganized street gangs becoming money-rich drug gangs, and with more prisons, highly organized prison gangs. In fifty years as drug sales integrated more with the street machinations for profit and turf control, guns went with it. The inner-city became war zones.

Thirdly, and at a common level, understandably, more laws were enacted giving rise to the largest construction of juvenile and adult prisons, jails, and lockups in history, under Republican and Democratic led governments, making the United States the world’s largest “jailer.”

A community deeply impacted by all of this was Chicago’s Southeast Side. It had thriving Mexican, Black, and white communities with major jobs in places like U.S. Steel Southworks and Wisconsin Steel. In a Mexican community there, the Guadalupe Church held mass and festivals for large numbers of parishioners. Crime was relatively low, home ownership high. There was a strong sense of community. Then the economic rug got pulled from under them: Wisconsin Steel closed in 1980, US Steel in 1992. Homes lost value. People left. The Church lost worshippers. When a former steel worker drove me around in the late 1990s, the blast furnaces and forging mills were gone. Buildings in the area boarded up. The Latin Kings, Chicago’s largest Latino street gang, provided an alternative economic life through drug sales and gun violence.

Los Angeles by 1984 lost some 300 factories, mills, and plants—including the steel mill, paper mill, lead foundry, and refinery I worked at in my early 20s. This stat came from a Los Angeles Times article on the demise of Bethlehem Steel Mill, a former employer of mine. The city soon vied with Chicago as the “gang capital of the world.” From 1980 to the year 2000 more than 15,000 young people were killed in the L.A. area from drug-related gang wars, according to the late Tom Hayden, a former state legislator who helped support urban peace efforts. The Los Angeles Uprising of 1992, the worst urban unrest in the U.S. in a hundred years, was sparked by raging Black youth after the acquittal of police officers in the Rodney King beating but also involved Mexicans and Central Americans—the first major cross-cultural urban rebellion.

The country’s economic foundations were being upended and a critical number of alienated and pushed out urban youth, mostly Black and brown, turned against “the village” with disastrous results.

These conditions were not just created by wayward youth, “lost boys and girls,” or outside influences. At the heart of this was the restructuring of U.S. society at their expense. Many young people paid the price in addictions, murders, abusive policing, and years upon years in prisons. According to U.S. government statistics, by 2023 the country had 1.4 million gang members in some 33,000 gangs. Close to 50 percent were Latino. More than 30 percent Black. Thirteen percent white and seven percent Asian. These included the most renowned gangs such as the California-based Crips and Bloods; Norteños and Sureños; MS-13 and 18th Street; Hell’s Angels and Mongols biker clubs, as well as the Illinois-based Gangster Disciples, Vice Lords, Latin Kings, Two-Six Nation, and Outlaws bikers club.

A perfect storm.

How Gangs Transformed Policing

To address the growing gang violence, law enforcement amassed militarized “tools” to their arsenal. In the Los Angeles area, the LAPD and the L.A. County Sheriff’s Department had “ghetto birds,” battering rams, gang investigative units, and what would be known as “gang injunctions.” In New York City, similar measures were called “Stop & Frisk.” In Chicago, “Mob Action.”

Gang injunctions were civil court restraining orders that allowed police, among other things, to maintain curfews, restrict public gathering of alleged gang members, use indicators such as tattoos to stop and detain said persons, and the creation of a gang database.

The first gang injunction was enacted during the early 1980s in the San Gabriel Valley community of West Covina, mostly white then, as Chicano families, some involved in barrio gangs, by the mid-80s moved eastward to the Inland Empire and the deserts as gentrification pushed out poor Mexican families of East Los Angeles and the SGV.

One gang named in this injunction was “Las Lomas,” the barrio clique from unincorporated South San Gabriel that I joined in my teens.

Gang injunctions soon became the spearhead of anti-gang efforts in Los Angeles, and throughout California. The City of Los Angeles’s first gang injunction in 1982 targeted Dogtown, considered the oldest continuous street gang in the country made up of Irish, Italian, and Mexicans in the 1880s. Located in the northern industrial corridor, Dogtown became largely Chicano by the 1910s, and since the 1940s centered around the William Mead Homes federal housing projects. Also included in this injunction were Primera Flats, made up of Chicanos from the Aliso Village housing projects, as well as 62^nd East Coast Crips, a Black gang. Police sued the gangs as unincorporated criminal associations. Injunctions soon swelled like mushrooms after a rain. By 2010 California had more than 150 gang injunctions, mostly in Black and brown communities. All of L.A.’s 46 gang injunctions were against Black and brown persons.

In 1993, the City of Los Angeles went after a Chicano gang called the Blythe Street Locos. This gang grew out of working-class housing that surrounded a GM auto plant in Van Nuys. After the plant closed in 1992, the community saw boarded-up businesses and increased despair. A shopping mall named “The Plant” replaced the GM facility. The gang became the first to be targeted in the San Fernando Valley.

In the year 2000, my wife, two sons and a daughter moved from Chicago to the northeast San Fernando Valley, once known as the “Mexican side” of the Valley. Trini grew up there. At the time, my oldest son was serving a 28-year prison sentence in Illinois. Because of my son’s involvement with a Chicago gang, I worked with pioneering gang interventionists in the Puerto Rican, Mexican, and Black communities from 1992 to 2000. I helped create Youth Struggling for Survival, the Increase the Peace Network, and the Humboldt Park Teen Reach Program. After my son’s incarceration, I didn’t want to lose any more of my kids, so we returned to where Trini had a large and relatively stable family.

In Los Angeles, we first lived in the barrio of Pacoima, a rough gang-ridden area but also a strong working-class community with mostly Mexican families and remnants of a formerly large Black community. Later we moved to the two-and-a-half square mile City of San Fernando.

At the time, anti-gang sentiment was all the rage following the 1992 Los Angeles Uprising. Instead of providing estranged youth in the Black and Mexican/Central American areas with “the hammer and nails” to rebuild their communities that had burned, what a Crips-Bloods peace statement asked for, more entrenched and overreaching policing became the response. This led to greater mass incarceration. The Barry J. Nidorf Juvenile Hall in Sylmar, a mile from my house, at the time became the largest juvenile lockup in North America. The California prison system, then the country’s largest state system, had 60 percent of its population from L.A.—with an overall population of 45 percent Chicanos, 35 percent Blacks (way disproportionate to their 10 percent state population), the rest white and Asian.

What Gang Injunctions Do

In 2008, despite community opposition, the Los Angeles City Attorney’s Office imposed the largest gang injunction in the city against San Fer, a mostly Chicano street gang based in the northeast San Fernando Valley. San Fer had been the oldest gang in the Valley, going back to the 1940s. The gang injunction covered about nine-and-a-half square miles that included all of Sylmar, parts of Pacoima, and San Fernando, where I lived.

I went to the streets talking to youth, many of whom felt unduly harassed by police. I was even questioned once because of my tattoos. One 16-year-old Chicano, not in San Fer, was skateboarding when police officers detained and frisked him. They also took his photograph. The teen’s parents contacted me, and we began a process to have his name and photo removed from the gang database. This was no easy task. The L.A. Daily News published an article on this situation. Eventually the youth’s info and photo got removed from police records after officers failed to prove gang ties.

Another local youth at 18 got arrested and held under the injunction at downtown’s Men’s County Jail. A Salvadoran/Mexican, his father brought him to Tia Chucha’s Cultural Center when he was 12 so we could help him. He wasn’t into gangs. He was into Hip Hop and a relatively good kid. But once in the County Jail, he joined San Fer and became a leader of one of the cell blocks. When he got released in six months, he came to Tia Chucha’s—I almost didn’t recognize him. He had tattoos on his neck and arms and “San Fer” marked on his forehead. He initially didn’t want to join San Fer but felt he had to. Soon after a rival gang member shot him. He survived and the family removed him to another state.

If not for the gang injunction, I felt this young man wouldn’t have been caught up.

I did a couple of public debates against gang injunctions in the northeast San Fernando Valley. On the other side was Bruce Riordan, then chief of the Gang Division for L.A. City Attorney’s Office supervising the city’s gang injunctions and all criminal street gang enforcement. A debate at Sylmar High School, with a 95 percent Mexican/Central American student population, got packed with mostly older white persons, many nonresidents, to cheer on Mr. Riordan. I held my ground. My youngest son had gone to this high school when they had zero-tolerance against gangs and police conducted random dog searches of students. Trini and I helped stop the dog searches and with teachers and community members proposed mural projects and other safe-and-sane afterschool programs.

After Mr. Riordan left his position in the City Attorney’s office, he made it a point one day to tell me he largely agreed with me during the debates but had to argue the anti-gang stuff because of his job. I appreciated that moment of candor.

Various studies on the effectiveness of gang injunctions showed they reduced crime. However, studies also found that in many cases the injunctions deterred violence for a limited time. An ACLU study from 1991-1996 on the Blythe Street Gang showed violent crime tripled in the months immediately following the injunction’s issuance. Gang suppression also often led to increased gang cohesion, greater tensions between police and community, and a wide net that pulled in non-gang members. Injunctions contributed to more people entering the juvenile and adult carceral system, including those who shouldn’t be there.

In 2016, ACLU SoCal along with Urban Peace Institute and the law firm of Munger, Tolles & Olson LLP filed a class action suit on behalf of the Youth Justice Coalition, a nonprofit based in the South Los Angeles area that works with communities affected by mass incarceration and over-policing. The 2018 decision in Youth Justice Coalition v. City of Los Angeles meant the city could not enforce injunctions against persons without first proving in court they were active gang members. According to the ACLU, gang injunctions gave police a license to harass and control Black and brown communities.

Here’s a summary statement from the ACLU’s website on the lawsuit: The city’s enforcement of gang injunctions violates one of the most basic principles of fairness in the Constitution—procedural due process, which holds that the government cannot restrict person’s basic liberties without first giving them a hearing or other opportunity to be heard and proving why the restriction is justified.

Also, in federal court the City of Los Angeles agreed to a $30 million settlement on anti-curfew ties ruling that persons were unfairly punished based on their neighborhood or family ties. These court decisions led to the removal of injunctions in certain neighborhoods.

Gang Enhancements

Because of my reputation, I became a gang expert witness on a couple of California cases. One involved a robbery defendant who faced a “gang enhancement” (adding more years to his sentence) due to having tattoos with Aztec iconography. Prosecutors claimed only gang members tattoo these images. I testified this was not necessarily so, that Aztec or other Indigenous tribal images were widespread among the populace. This young man, of Mexican descent, wanted to connect to his Indigenous roots. Some white persons may tattoo Celtic or Viking images. Blacks may have African symbols or faces. This does not mean they are in gangs, although gang members may also sport such images.

Since I can also “read” gang-related tattoos, I testified the defendant didn’t have any of these. Tattoos can be gang-related if they are of known gang names, symbols such as the numbers 13 or 14 (for Sur 13 gangs or Norte 14 gangs in California prisons and streets), or in the Chicago area, tridents (upright or upside down), five- or six-point crowns. My main testimony, however, was that tattoos should not be used as “evidence” for gang involvement. Some non-gang youth try to blend in by tattooing gang words or symbols. Gangs don’t sanction this, but that’s another issue. Prosecutors were visibly upset with me, but the young man in that case did not receive the added years because of any supposed gang affiliation.

From Local to Transnational Gangs

From 1993 to 2013, I visited El Salvador, including ten prisons and a juvenile facility, to work with gangs. I’ve also gone to Guatemala three times, entering two prisons. My wife and I spent a month in Honduras in 2009 teaching poetry to abandoned girls and students at a bilingual school. In 2010 I entered a cartel prison in Mexico and a juvenile hall in the border state of Chihuahua when this area had the highest murder rates in the world. From 2022 to the present, I’ve been to Mexico City and Guadalajara to interact with deported Chicanos, including barrio gang youth. In 2009, Tia Chucha’s Centro Cultural also brought in the first official lowrider car and bike show to the Guadalajara Bookfair, the largest book festival in the Western Hemisphere, with the assistance of Dr. Denise Sandoval, a leading scholar on lowriding culture. In addition, in 2024, I participated in a Chicano Fest that included 200 lowrider car and bike clubs going through the city’s main drag.

We’d come a long way.

Because of this work, I also served as a gang expert witness for around a hundred asylum cases involving persons from Mexico and Central America. Many were denied asylum due to allegedly being in a gang. In immigration court, I tried to show that solely being in a gang is not a crime and should not be used to deny entry or to deport.

These were extremely hard to win.

US immigration authorities began targeting Los Angeles-based gangs with majority numbers of undocumented members. This included almost all major Chicano gangs but really hit hard the L.A.-based mostly Salvadoran Mara Salvatrucha (MS) and the Mexican/Central American 18th Street gangs. The Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1988 made any alien, legal or unauthorized, deportable convicted of aggravated felonies such as murder, drug trafficking, and illicit firearm trafficking. The Immigration Act of 1990, the Immigration and Nationality Technical Corrections Act of 1994, and Anti-terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996 increased the types of offenses considered aggravated felonies.

In 1996, President Clinton signed the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act (IIRAIRA), which significantly changed the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952. Overly punitive it also militarized the border region. Now any alien convicted of an aggravated felony, including any crime with a penalty of one year or longer, could be denied most forms of relief, including asylum, from deportation and from being readmitted to the U.S. in the future. A “presumption of deportability” for aliens convicted of aggravated felonies, which with IIRAIRA could now be applied retroactively.

Between 1998 and 2014, US immigration authorities deported some 300,000 immigrants with criminal records, including large numbers of gang members. This spread U.S. gangs throughout Mexico but also the so-called Northern Triangle countries: El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras.

Let’s delve deeper into one of the government’s bogeymen: MS-13.

This gang began in the Pico-Union community west of downtown Los Angeles in the early 1980s. A largely Chicano neighborhood for decades, Pico-Union became the main landing ground for Central American refugees as well as Mexicans, particularly from Oaxaca. Chicano gangs such as 18^th Street and others recruited Central American youth during this time. Animosity between Chicanos and newly arrived Mexicans and Central Americans also led to the creation of Mara Salvatrucha for protection. MS started as a “stoner” group into heavy metal. After many arrests, their members became more like their Chicano brethren, including adding the number “13” in the early 1990s when MS joined the Sur Trece gang alliance—an alliance that involves hundreds of mostly Chicano gangs, including my former barrio also known as Lomas 13. The tattooed skinned, cholo-attire wearing, and lowriding street culture spoke to these refugee youth more than any other U.S. subculture (like the impact of Hip Hop).

The trauma of Central American civil wars met the trauma of Los Angeles inner-city life.

In time, MS-13 spread to other parts of L.A. including South Central and the northeast San Fernando Valley. In forty-five years, they are in over thirty states, including Texas, the Washington D.C. area, and around New York state. They are a serious street organization, not to be taken lightly.

The main government narrative (one the Trump Administration continues to push) is that MS-13 “invaded” the United States. Again, this gang is not “foreign.” It arose after more than a million refugees fled El Salvador from 1980 to 1992 when 75,000 people were killed, and upwards of 200,000 were killed or disappeared in Guatemala, mostly Mayans, from 1960 to 1996. Also included were those from Nicaragua and Honduras during the Contra War of the 1980s I briefly covered.

All wars the U.S. government had roles in creating and/or escalating.

Because of U.S. policies, MS-13 became a “transnational gang” with deportations to El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, and parts of Mexico, countries too poor to integrate them into their struggling economies. MS-13 and 18th Street overwhelmed many local bandas and maras in El Salvador, establishing extortion systems learned from L.A.’s streets and California prisons. Unfortunately, they also brought barrio gang warfare, creating the worst violence in the area since the civil wars.

In time, local Salvadoran youth outnumbered the Los Angeles-based deportees in MS as well as in 18th Street. These were youth steeped in their country’s history, including civil war. Like in Mexico and other parts of Central America, they were involved in violent acts on another level from the violence carried out in the United States. Many of them over the years have made their way to the U.S., fueling the idea they are a “foreign” threat.

Now to destroy another lie: The vast majority of Central Americans in the U.S. are not gang members. They work hard, pay taxes, and are law-abiding. Like their Mexican counterparts, they can be found in textile industries, small factories, service jobs, in construction, as well as street vendor proprietors. A great number of their sons and daughters are in colleges and universities, some becoming lawyers, doctors, engineers. Many recognized poets and writers in the U.S. are Central Americans.

By 2012, almost unbelievably, MS-13 and Barrio 18 (as they were now called) initiated a gang peace process in El Salvador. I’ve participated in similar peace efforts with Chicano gangs in the 1970s; Bloods and Crips around the 1992 Los Angeles uprising; Chicago gangs in the 1990s; and other local and national efforts. Because of this work, I was asked to join a small group of U.S. urban peace leaders and researchers to assess and assist the Salvadoran gang peace effort. The gangs turned in hundreds of firearms. I introduced “Peace and Security Zones” to twelve communities where rival gang members worked on gardens, painted murals, and learned viable trades, a concept I picked up from my work with Chicago gangs. El Salvador saw violence decrease, in some cases 70 percent. I met with peace leaders in a variety of prisons. This worked—without death squads (which had been kidnapping and murdering deported gang youth), without extra-judicial police actions.

Still, the United States pressured the Salvadoran government against the peace. I remember going to San Salvador in 2013 to speak at an Organization of American States (OAS) gathering. Officials told me not to bring up the Salvadoran gang peace, or the U.S. would pull millions of dollars from OAS funding. I did visit one Peace & Security Zone where we gave certificates at a ceremony to honor the peacemakers. But when we left, Salvadoran security forces invaded the community, arresting many people. Mano Dura (Iron Fist) policies became the main way to address pushed out and marginalized young people.

By January of 2022, Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele built the largest and most inhumane prison in the Western Hemisphere called Centro de Confinamiento del Terrorismo (CECOT)—the Terrorism Confinement Center. The country is now under martial law. Bukele has reportedly arrested around 85,000 people, the majority without due process. He eventually closed arts and cultural centers—the very things I suggested could help curtail violence.

Last year during the recent Trump Administration, some $6 millions of U.S. tax dollars were sent to El Salvador to house deported migrants including 238 Venezuelans and Salvadorans in CECOT (the Venezuelans have since been shipped to Venezuela). It’s always been about the imprisonment “industry,” which profits from the misery linked to social and economic unraveling. Money is made by the number of people in CECOT, which models itself on U.S. super maxes—although much worse. If we don’t do this more meaningful work of actual peace as well as personal and social transformation, it looks like CECOT will house people born or naturalized here through questionable roundups, less than precise gang affiliations, and apparently no “day in court.”

Where We Go from Here

Gang injunctions, martial law, and incarceration can lower the homicide and crime rates. But at what costs? I contend we can do this for far fewer funds with imagination and justice. In California it costs taxpayers around $133,000 a year to house one person in prison—it would be a lot less per person to rehabilitate, provide mental and healthcare treatment, and give them jobs.

From 2006 to 2008, I participated with around forty gang interventionists, urban peace experts, and researchers on creating the Effective Community-Based Gang Intervention: What is Gang Intervention and How Do You Measure its Effectiveness, under the auspices former U.S. Congressman Tony Cardenas, who at the time was a L.A City Councilmember. Important organizations like Homeboy Industries, founded by Father Greg Boyle; Homies Unidos, directed by former MS-13 leader and now peace warrior, Alex Sanchez; Maximum Force Enterprises, led by the late Aquil Basheer; Unity One Collaborative, led by the late Bo Taylor; Toberman Settlement House with Kenny Green; Youth Justice Coalition, and many others including faith-based organizations and arts/culture transformative organizations like Tia Chucha’s Centro Cultural. Over time I took this plan to Chicago, England, El Salvador, Guatemala, and Ciudad Juarez, Mexico, where I lived when I was born in El Paso, Texas.

The Los Angeles City Council approved this guide in 2008. Even though they curtailed its scope, what came out of this was the Gang Reduction and Youth Development (GRYD) program and Summer Night Lights, among other actions. While L.A. had 1,092 homicides in 1992, by 2025, with a greater population, it marked 284 homicides. I contend this was not due to more policing—even if law enforcement had a role. It was mostly because of significantly increased gang intervention and urban peace efforts.

Chicago in 1992 had 940 homicides, the highest in its history. While the city continued to have high murder rates, recent homicides have been mightily reduced. In 2025, the city recorded 416 homicides. I also know many of the urban peace and gang intervention programs there, some of which I worked with over the years, such as BUILD (Broader Urban Involvement and Leadership Development), which rivals L.A.’s Homeboy Industries in services and outreach. My son Ramiro, a former Chicago gang member, who ended up doing a thirteen-and-a-half prison stretch of a 28-year prison sentence, now works for BUILD doing on-the-street and in-the-schools work with the most troubled youth.

Believe me when I say, we can have peace and neighborhood safety with dignity by creating fully funded multi-pronged home-and-street-level community-based personal and social healing efforts in the United States and around the globe.

Cared straight not “scared straight.”

And to the buffalos who once ruled the plain

Like the vulture circling beneath the dark clouds

Looking for the rain

Looking for the rain

Just like the cities staggered on the coastline

In a nation that just can’t stand much more

Like the forest buried beneath the highway

Never had a chance to grow

Never had a chance to grow

And now it’s winter

It’s winter in America

Yes, and all of the healers have been killed

Or sent away, yeah

But the people know, the people know

It’s winter

Winter in America

And ain’t nobody fighting

‘Cause nobody knows what to save

Save your soul, Lord knows

From winter in America

–Gil Scott-Heron, “Winter in America”

It’s been a long cold winter in this country. That poem/song by the late great Gil Scott-Heron (including powerful music by Brian Jackson) came out in 1975 not long after President Nixon’s resignation. Nixon was part of the right-wing’s war against civil rights, peace at home and abroad, and for a clean and healthy planet, while committing crimes along the way. This backlash has continued till this day, yes mostly with Republicans but also many Democrats.

I’m 72 years old. I lived through that period and the cold policies that have frozen our overall assets, healthcare, education, housing, and labor needs. My oldest son Ramiro was born in 1975, fifty-one years ago. I married a year before my “high school” sweetheart (who was only two months out of high school). In two years, my daughter Andrea arrived.

In 1975, I worked at the Bethlehem Steel in Southeast Los Angeles. Prior to this, I’d been a troubled youth, in a gang, in and out of jails, homeless for three years, and a drug addict. I gathered myself. I quit the crazy life. I found love and family. Life consisted of 16-hour work days (double shifts they called it), and rotating work schedules (one week days; the next week afternoons; the following week nights–the “graveyard shift”). I didn’t mind. It was better than the street life I came out of. I endured the long sweaty hours, the aluminum foil on the windows so I could sleep, the back-breaking labor while also helping take care of my babies. I worked hard. The steel mill helped me begin to raise a family.

By 1984 that mill was gone. As were the auto, rubber, defense, refinery, garment, and other jobs of the largest manufacturing center of the country: the Los Angeles area. This massive deindustrialization created the “rust belt” cities of Chicago, Detroit, Cleveland, and Pittsburgh. By then, my young family had fallen apart. Reagan became president and the greatest loss of manufacturing jobs began. By the end of Reagan’s and the first Bush’s presidential terms, the U.S. began the “Wal-Marting of America.”

While I could have gone back to crime and jails, and often been tempted to do so, I didn’t. I pivoted to become a journalist (going to school at night, then a summer program to train minority journalists, working first in weekly newspapers then in a daily newspaper, and later news radio). I eventually became a multi-genre writer, working for myself with bestsellers, fellowships, speaking and teaching gigs (including 45 years in prisons, juvenile lockups, and jails). I gained notoriety as a poet, and a publisher of poets. I’ve now traveled throughout the U.S., Canada, Latin America, Europe, and Japan.

I also remarried, had two more sons, and now have grandkids and great-grandkids. Life goes on, with many setbacks and missteps, rages and sorrows, as well as blessings, along the way.

Just the same, I’ve seen recessions, inflation, and other economic crises. I’ve seen long gas lines and people fighting over sugar and toilet paper. Yes, the economy picked up here and there, and then fell down. I barely made it through the 2008 financial crisis, the Covid-19 pandemic, through the recent ICE raids, and many wars, but unlike others I survived. With Trump things have worsened. But it may only point to the fact that worse things are yet to come. Fascism is not just a “man” but a system of rule when old ways of “ruling” no longer suffice for the most powerful and wealthy capitalists and financiers.

Now with AI, a smaller number of people own much of the social wealth–the top 1 percent own 30 percent of the country’s wealth, a total net worth of $43 Trillion. We’ve now had our first trillionaire, even as people are driven from jobs, homes, and ability to feed their families.

We’re still in the winter of America.

As Gil Scott-Heron said, the healers “have been killed… or sent away.” Today, I also have seen “healers” arise from the trauma of poverty, of violence, and neglect. Twenty-five years ago, with my wife Trini, I helped create a bookstore/cultural space in a working class, mostly Mexican/Central American community, in the northeast San Fernando Valley called Tia Chucha’s Cultural Center & Bookstore. New books about healing, personally and collectively, are on our selves, mostly using Indigenous spiritual practices. I’ve seen books addressing directly the racial-class-and-gender disparities. Despite the distraction and lies in politics, and the disconnects in mass media, people are also having their eyes and hearts opened.

For decades, we’ve been pushed out of the arenas of healing and transformations, but that hasn’t stopped more and more people from tapping into their “ancestral intelligence” (not “artificial intelligence”) to prepare the ground for a new way of thinking, of organizing, of reimagining and renewing the social compacts for shared well-being.

I dedicate myself to that thawing of the season that has held us back for generations. We need to prepare for the spring of new life, new governance, new relationships based on the embracing abundance in nature, mother earth, and our own creative capacities.

We need healers more than ever before. Healing not as “glossing over” but as integration of body, mind, and soul on personal levels, but also the aligning of our vast resources on earth and in people to meet all our fundamental needs to be whole, healthy, and in peace.

It’s time to end this season of coldness and detachment, to enter a spring of healing and giving and growth. We are at the cusp. It won’t happen by itself. We need to help make this happen. We just need the right pivot, a powerful shift, to realize the best and most enduring of our values and principles. Join with me–for healing is a revolutionary act.

None of which, even for citizens, deserves the “death penalty.”

What has been missing in all this talk about migrants from Mexico and Central America is that we have roots in this land as deep as anyone’s. Not just because Texas used to be part of Mexico. But because most Mexicans are Indigenous to this continent… before borders, before migrations from Europe, before “America First.”

We simply can’t be immigrants to our own lands.

For a generation or more, Indigenous peoples like the Mexica, Maya (including from Mexico and Guatemala), Zapoteco, Mixteco, Purepecha, Raramuri, Pipil, and many more have migrated to the United States. Estimates are that there are four or five million tribal peoples from Mexico and Central America (not to mention the Indigenous people from South America or the Caribbean). This is on top of the six million U.S. Indigenous people: Dine, Lakota, Paiute, Shoshone, Hopi, Pueblo, and so many more. To complicate things more, the de-tribalized Indigenous peoples of Mexico, who have lost ties to original languages or customs due to conquest, colonization, and acculturation, make up most of the over 40 million people of Mexican descent in the U.S.

Why does this matter?

I wrote a book of essays called “From Our Land to Our Land” (Seven Stories Press). It came out in 2020 just as the Covid-19 surge began. Although it became a Los Angeles​​ Times Book of the Month selection, and had favorable reviews, the Pandemic hurt its sales. C’est la vie! Others lost lives so I understand this is a terribly minor issue. Nonetheless it’s one of my most important books. The main essay describes how my mother walked over an international bridge from Ciudad Juarez, Mexico to El Paso, Texas to have me born. This makes me an “anchor baby” although this is a misnomer. My mother had roots with the Raramuri peoples of the Sierra Tarahumara, Chihuahua, Mexico. They have lived in the area, like many other original peoples, for tens of thousands of years. Or as they say, “forever.” When I was born, the U.S./Mexico border had only been there for 106 years. My mother wasn’t entering a “foreign” place. She was going from our land to our land.

My being born a U.S. citizen was an accident of history. That “history” included an invasion by the U.S. against Mexico from 1846-48 when the U.S. had 20 million people, with a highly organized army, and Mexico had 7 million people and a makeshift armed defense (including boys defending the Castle of Chapultepec in Mexico City when U.S. troops attacked). Many Indigenous peoples on both sides of the border of the time had little or no allegiance to either side. Both countries trampled on their land.

To reiterate, regardless of borders made up by others, my mother and I were already “home” when we crossed that summer of 1954. Our family has bones buried there that go back, in some cases for original peoples, up to 35,000 years. Just the same, growing up in Los Angeles, I was called a stranger, a “wetback,” and told to “go back to where you came from.”

To reiterate, I am “home.”

Borders are made up things. Millions of human beings across history have died for fabricated lines through living communities. “Nations” in general are supposed to consist of common cultures, histories, languages, ethnicity, and territory. But as we know, many “nations” were carved out from distinctly different peoples. Even the U.S. border has tribes like the To’hono O’odham in Arizona/Sonora and the Kumeyaay of California/Baja California who have international fences through their ancestral lands. Similar to the Mohawk Nation of Akwesaswe in the U.S./Canada border.

The United States recognizes 575 Native American tribal nations within its parameters. All this adds to the complexity of our so-called nationhood, especially when people from around the world have come here over the past 250 years ago. As much as white supremacists want to declare the United States a one race/ethnic/religious country that others must assimilate into, the realities are much more complex and diverse. Presently, this country is made up of all races, ethnicities, nations, and religions. It’s not “white replacement,” but a human gathering ground, a key meeting place, from which we can be even more human, more relational, more in kinship.

Still, doing Trump’s fascist regime’s bidding, ICE has been largely targeting Indigenous-looking people from Mexico and Central America (I’m aware those detained include Dominicans, Venezuelans, Haitians, Somalis, other Africans, Asians, and even Europeans). Because of this, ICE has even stopped and detained U.S. Native Americans. They can’t tell us apart! Go to any ICE detention center, of which there are some 1,460 around the country holding approximately 60,000 people: Indigenous people everywhere.

So Lorenzo Salgado Araujo should not have been killed, let alone pulled over. May you rest in peace, Lorenzo, while we on this planet do all we can for the justice you and your family deserve. As the people say: No human being is “illegal”! We didn’t cross the border, the border crossed! us! Abolish ICE!

Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, presente!

My father and mother sacrificed so much to come here. I don’t doubt they did this to better our lives.

I love my family, most of whom have left California for many reasons, including the high cost of living here, a ridiculous place to rent and buy a home. My siblings and many of my nieces and nephews (and their kids) are mostly working class, faithful Christians, and good Americans. They will tell you they love this country.

Unfortunately, I’ve now lost four of my siblings, including that one who passed as a child. When my father was married to his first wife, the girl happened upon my father’s basket of chicharrones (Mexican-style pork rinds) he used to sell down the street. She ate one and ended up with diarrhea, which was then a death sentence for babies in Mexico. I understand he was blamed for her death, even losing his wife and ostracized from the family.

That’s another story.

All my three brothers are now gone: one from cancer, one from Alzheimer’s, and the last one from issues related to dementia. May they rest in peace. My three sisters are wonderful and good-hearted people. But we are not close. Much of this is because of the divisive politics in this country, perpetrated mostly by Trump, his administration, and many within the MAGA movement. They are at war with other Americans, including me.

I can’t speak for my remaining family, again whom I love no matter what. I can only speak for myself. On this 4th of July, I’m angry at the state of this country and this government. I have been since I was a teenager.

At age thirteen, barely becoming conscious of the social justice struggles of the time, I walked out of my middle-school as part of the larger East Los Angeles student walkouts in 1968, then known as the “Blow Outs.” School districts were failing Chicano students, who were being tracked into “industrial” classes and mostly blocked from higher education; East L.A. also had some of the highest dropout rates in the country. Two years later, I took part in the largest anti-war protest in a community of color at the time: The Chicano Moratorium Against the Vietnam War. Chicanos were some six percent of the population but 22 percent of the war’s casualties. In the police attack on peaceful demonstrators and supporters that ensued, I was beaten and arrested (“disappeared” for several days and nights until activists and family finally found me).

I joined the ongoing American Revolution at that time. I’ve been a revolutionary ever since.

I recall having arguments with my dad about being a member of the working class, a Chicano, and taking part in marches and demonstrations. By then Alfonso had totally bought into the illusions of the so-called American Dream. He became a Republican, loved Nixon, and supported the wasteful Vietnam War. Entitled to his views, nonetheless Dad was wrong: Nixon was a crook and the Vietnam War was a waste of lives and tax dollars.

The United States declared its independence from England at a time when it maintained chattel slavery of Africans and thrived on the monumental theft and genocide of Indigenous peoples. Yet the words “liberty and justice for all” from the U.S. Pledge of Allegiance did not initially include women, Indigenous people, Blacks, or migrants, particularly those of color like Chinese, Mexicans, and others (the final version of that pledge appeared in a magazine promoting the World’s Colombian Exposition for the 400th Anniversary of Christopher Columbus’ grievous “discovery of the Americas”).

The U.S. has undergone many battles, strikes, marches, court decisions, and even a civil war to extend these sentiments to more and more people. That’s why I’m still arguing with my father, although he passed more thirty-four years ago, Why I’m still taking on MAGA and those who continue to perpetuate lies and Christian Nationalist ideologies that unleash ICE raids and other injustices at home while pushing wars like in Iran and the genocide of peoples like in Gaza.

Sorry, Dad. They are wrong like you were wrong. I’m still fighting that “good fight.”

Today, 250 years after the adoption of the Declaration of Independence, we are still in a revolution. As I wrote this, white supremacist Patriot Front members marched in Washington D.C. with U.S. and Confederate flags, emboldened by the Trump Administration’s anti-migrant, anti-Black, anti-Indigenous, anti-women, and anti-Queer/Trans positions. These “patriots” have again raised their ugly heads, once hooded now with face coverings and red hats. This kind is also in the government with the likes of Stephen Miller and others in the Trump Cabinet.

Crooks and crazies are running things, without impunity.

No sense seeing the past as a static and unmoving thing. We continue to wage an ongoing American revolution. We are still in the throes of making the sentiments in the Declaration of Independence belong to everyone… not just the wealthiest, the most powerful, or the most racist, misogynist, and homophobic.

We aren’t just commemorating history but making history.

I don’t celebrate the 4th of July like others. I’m still in the struggle I began at age thirteen. It ain’t over till it’s over: when we are all free, healthy, safe, and fully human in accord with nature and our own individual natures.

Someone may say I don’t love the country. This is not true. The reason I keep writing, speaking, and organizing, even if it blocks me from positions and spaces to be heard, is because I love the country. I love the people, all the people. It’s because I love the land, the many languages, and the legacies of freedom warriors from Thomas Paine, to Frederick Douglass, to Crazy Horse, to Martin Luther King, Jr., to Dolores Huerta. And those yet to be named with even greater imaginations and strategically realizable aims. I do this for Renee Good and Alex Pretti. I do this for the thousands behind bars in ICE detention camps, in mass incarceration institutions, in exploitative workplaces, in unhoused encampments, or dying spiritually inside classrooms or darkened bedrooms of gated communities.

Join me in this revolution. Let’s make history together. We have nothing to lose but our chains.

Aren’t things supposed to become bigger and better?

Evolution in nature is real; it’s the science of natural development. It results in greater diversity and complexity. This doesn’t necessarily mean things are “better.” Some relatively important species have been driven to extinction. What we have now is what has survived, based on natural selection, what is often called “survival of the fittest.” The fittest being what has been able to adjust and adapt to changing conditions. Not “better” or “stronger” in the conventional sense. But what has been able to meet the challenges of ever-evolving circumstances. Evolution in the environment forces all life to evolve or die; as this happens, the environment must also change or die.

In societal terms, we have ever-evolving advances in tools. Humanity started with basic tools made from hands, where the word “manufacturing” comes from, more or less “hand maker” from the Latin root. The first hand tools were discovered in Africa some 3.3 million years ago. Fire became harnessed from 1.5 to 1 million years ago. Use of clay for pottery and bricks, woven fabrics into clothes, and the wheel evolved 15,000 to 20,000 years ago. Irrigation began around 8,000-9,000 years ago laying the foundations of agriculture. Sailing ships appeared about 5,000 years ago. Iron production around 2,200 years ago. Jump through many other developments such as gunpowder, windmills, compasses, and clocks to the year 1455 CE when printing was invented. Civilizations from Africa, Asia, Middle East, so-called Americas, as well as other oceanic land masses, contributed to all this, not just Europe. Harnessing of steam, which occurred in the Arab world, ended up happening in 1765 in Europe, the innovation most responsible for the industrial revolution. Railways and steamboats became key. Photography, telegraph, telephone, electric light, and internal combustion engine developed through the 1800s. In the 20th Century came radio, airplanes, rocketry, television. Also in the 1930s, the first computers arrived. Nuclear power in the 1940s. The transistor and spaceflight became reality in the late 40s and 50s. In the 70s, we had the personal computer and the Internet—vital to the information age. We had “robot” hands in manufacturing. In the 2000s came smart phones, gene splicing, and artificial intelligence.

All this time, the human mind made leaps. Consciousness grew exponentially. The more we developed material means to adjust and adapt in the environment, the more our consciousness impacted and changed that environment. Our “hands” became smarter; our minds helped architect the world around us.

According to computer scientist, inventor, and author Ray Kurzweil, machine/computer intelligence is supposed to surpass human intelligence by around 2045, what’s called Singularity. The way things are going, this may happen sooner. With the accelerated and transformative innovations, we are at the precipice of redefining human existence.

But is this better?

With all this growth and possibilities, why are we still struggling with basic issues of hunger, disease, ignorance, war? Instead of making life abundant, I mean in the collective sense, for all humanity, we see erosion of the earth and environment while a small number of wealthy and powerful people benefit.

We have the means to end misery, want, and disorder, but not the mode.

That’s because the economy, politics, and even science are held back by what humanity has had to contend with during all this growth: power dynamics, greed, corruption. The few over the many. The social relations are incongruent to the forces of production, life, and mind.

Presently, the largest public offering for capital investment is dominated by three companies: OpenAI and Anthropic are in artificial intelligence; the other, SpaceX, is in rockets. Generally such large offerings are diverse: pharmaceuticals, energy, manufacturing, technology. Not this time.

The dominant system of global production, infrastructure, and governance, what’s known as the capitalist social order founded on conquests, slavery, and colonialism, and built on the exploitation of generations of laboring masses, is holding all the potential of this technology in a stranglehold.

Either capitalism gives, or humanity does. Singularity means an immense shift in society. But it can also open the door to a human-made path of destruction.

It’s not enough to oppose capitalism. A new way has to emerge beyond private property (the means of production owned by capitalists). Sure there’s socialism and communism. But look around you–even these have become stuck. All of this has to be re-imagined. Yes, like everything else. We need a bigger imagination beyond the old forms. Forms must change to liberate the content.

A guide is the original instructions from the ancestors, the Indigenous cosmovision of shared well-being, interdependence, and fuller and proper relationships to nature, our own natures, the nature of “others” (respectful and meaningful connections between humans and nonhumans), and whatever provides us the morality and ethos to keep all this going.

More truth (science), more beauty (art), more goodness (morals).

The present drive for maximum profits is also why our current sense of ethics, empathy, and caring is also being eroded. There are now many “christianities,” including those who think Jesus’s message of love, forgiveness, and peace is too “woke.”

Just the same, the ancient wise teachings can be brought to bear in modern times. This includes the principle that technology should be in accord with nature, not against it. That we must align our vast resources, intelligence, and technology to the healthy material, mental, and spiritual development of humanity and Earth.

These teachings help us understand that the means can find the right mode for a truly abundant and integrated world.

No more dominant power relations. No more class divisions or other divides based on race, gender, sexual orientation, abled versus differently abled… all the splits that have impeded our growth these thousands of years. No more haves and have-nots. Everyone counts. Everyone matters.

We are at the end of doing things that stop working, and at the beginning of drawing on and encompassing massive possibilities. It’s time to remove the societal shackles. It’s time to take off the ”corpses” society carries around, burdening our forward motion.

This should be the most important conversation we can have as AI data centers are being built alongside concentration camps. As mansions rise up while unhoused encampments grow. As jobs diminish while the stock portfolios of a small number of billionaires (and now a possible trillionaire) keep rising. As wars and genocides continue with AI and drone warfare.

Who needs to go to Mars when we can re-green and re-nourish this planet?

If we are so advanced, show this by the betterment of the whole world, not just parts of it. We need a true index of liberty and happiness for all, not indexes of GDP or stock markets.

If human “advancement” isn’t about this, who needs it. It’s about aligning the technical/intelligence capacity we have to meet the full needs of people and the planet.

For some two years in the early 2000s, I visited a number of times with John Trudell, a former chair of the American Indian Movement (AIM) and spokesperson for the United Indians of All Tribes takeover of Alcatraz Island from 1969 to 1971. That occupation was around the time of my own radicalization as a teenager: I took part in the 1968 East Los Angeles “Blowouts,” the largest student walkouts in the U.S. up till then, and also the 1970 Chicano Moratorium Against the Vietnam War, the largest anti-war protest in a community of color at the time. In that last incident, I was beaten and jailed… I experienced social injustices from the inside out.

I emerged from these and other acts grasping on to the lifeline of collective peace, justice, and dignity. For me it was a lifeline: I was a drug addict, homeless for three years, a gang member involved in crime and violence. The radical wing of the Chicano Movement, tied to the Black Power Movement, the Red Power Movement, for peace at home and abroad, pulled me from the madness. It provided me a new imagination away from the suicide-homicide road I was on. The movement gave me a cause, bigger than my personal and relatively petty concerns, confusions, and fears. By age 20, I had returned to high school, obtained a diploma, painted murals, took photographs, and wrote my first expressive pieces. I had organized my own walkouts and took part in other marches and actions. I also began a life of study: Marx, Engels, Lenin, Che, Mao, Fanon, but also poetry, speculative fiction, and books about class struggle and power dynamics under capitalism.

I was becoming a revolutionary thinker, organizer, and writer.

During that time, I first sought my Indigenous roots. I hung out with AIM activists and also began Mexica (Aztec) danza and learned about my own ways from Chihuahua, Mexico among the Raramuri people (my mothers’s tribal roots). I came across Trudell’s contributions. Then in 1979, a suspicious arson fire killed John’s family: his wife Tina, an unborn baby, three other children, and his mother-in-law. This happened at their home on the Paiute-Shoshone Duck Valley Reservation in Nevada, a day after John had burned an American flag at an American Indian protest in Washington D.C. When I talked to John, he said goon squads working with federal agents played a role in his family’s murder.

This devastation could have destroyed any person. It took a while, after much mourning, but John became a poet and performer. He said he wasn’t writing poetry but hanging on to lines that Tina gave him after her death. She was the poet, John explained, not him.

John and I met because I was asked to write his biography. I interviewed John for hours. I learned a lot about his life but also his philosophy. He invited me to recordings of his CD called “Bone Days” with the band Bad Dog. I attended concerts he did at the renowned Whisky A Go Go in West Hollywood. I met Angelina Jolie and her mother Marcheline Bertrand, who was John’s girlfriend until her death in 2007. I finished the book and handed it over to John.

This book never appeared. The people who paid me to do this, which included Marcheline, blamed me. But John told me it wasn’t my fault. He decided he didn’t want the book to come out. He had his reasons, which he didn’t share. It was his decision and I accepted this.

Nonetheless my time with John proved invaluable. I found out he had a grandmother named Ricarda who was also Raramuri. John’s grandfather, a Santee Sioux, met Ricarda when tribal people frequently crossed the then largely porous U.S./Mexico border.

The story of my Raramuri great-grandmother and grandmother, related by my mother, was that they left their homelands in the Sierra Tarahumara during the Mexican Revolution. They were literally starving. They ended up in Chihuahua City. However, the Catholic Church kidnapped them: The church gave them food, clothes, new names, but wouldn’t let them go. We don’t know their Raramuri names; my great-grandmother and grandmother were given the names of Manuela and Ana. It was there in the Indigenous ghetto called La Tarahumara where my mother was born in 1925.

So, John had Mexican Indian roots as well. He felt that us coming together to talk, to share, with or without a book, was meant to be. This happened because of our grandmothers in the ancestral realm.

John once spoke at Tia Chucha’s Centro Cultural & Bookstore, the cultural arts and literacy center co-founded by my wife Trini and I in 2001. He packed the place. The audience included Chicanos, Central Americans, as well as U.S. Natives and others, including Mexica ritual practitioners. It impacted us deeply. Trini and I created an Indigenous philosophical statement as a foundation for all we do at Tia Chucha’s. Again, I learned many things from my elders among Indigenous people in the U.S., Mexico, Central and South America (including from Peru). John Trudell was one of my most meaningful teachers.

I learned many things from John, but two things stand out. That the European colonial powers, be they from Spain, Portugal, France, or England, from over 500 years ago, “mined” the minds of Indigenous people like they mined the land for silver, gold, and other minerals. They excavated “souls” and replaced them with Christianity as a method of control. The fact Indigenous people, African slaves, and others have used any messages of freedom from the Bible for their own liberation is another important story. But for the most part, the Church placed chains on our minds and spirits.

This is an undisputed fact.

John also taught about “genetic memory,” now a topic delved into by many teachers on social media, books, and youtube. It’s an old idea that we carry our ancestors with us. They don’t die; they are in the ancestral realm that is accessible wherever we go. John says this is something we can tap into, like drawing water from a well, if we open up to this possibility, often through ceremony, rituals, dance, art, and song.

And, of course, poetry.

John felt Tina continued to speak to him. But also others who have “passed” to the other world, including his grandmother Ricarda.

This is a power we are losing generation by generation. The new technology, especially in smart phones and other media, has put barriers to our abilities to reach back and move forward. Most worrisome is AI. We don’t need artificial means. Humans possess the natural gifts and properties to supersede any AI data centers and satellites. In fact, nature–the ground, the trees, mountains, the animals, birds, rivers, the air–are the most powerful environment for any human to activate their own innate capabilities. Our brains, hearts, and other organs are superior to any AI mode or machine.

Recent studies have shown that until Gen Z (persons born between 1997 and 2012), every generation surpassed previous generations in standardized tests. By 2010, corresponding cognitive measures in the U.S. have shown a decline in areas such as attention, memory, literacy, and numeracy. It’s not the schools, which haven’t changed much, or our biology, which is largely the same (although much impacted by artificial foods, chemicals, and environmental changes). It’s the growth of new technology in our schools replacing nature, teachers, books, and other means that previously engaged and elevated our own thinking and intuitive powers.

While AI can be a useful tool, in the hands of a small handful of billionaires and companies, which only care about AI as a profit-generating medium, we have become more detached from what’s in our bones, our blood, our cells.

Our minds have been mined. Our genetic memory has been blocked.

LIke others before me, I’m putting out a warning. We must extend and deepen what “God” or whatever you call the spiritual energies that has allowed us to be fully human, complete and free, in the material world. The internal systems aligned with the external ones. The more we move away from this, we become controlled by the tools (or rather the tool manufacturers), not the other way around.

It’s time for real AI: Ancestral intelligence, not artificial intelligence.

Trini and I also took part in healing circles at Tia Chucha’s Centro Cultural & Bookstore this past Sunday for women, for men, and one with women and men. In addition, I’ve been writing a piece I’d like to see published in a major U.S. publication. This may or may not happen, but I’m one of those who can reach such outlets.

The Chicano/Latino community is having its reckoning, like we’ve faced so many times before. But this must also extend to the rest of so-called “America,” now run by racists, misogynists, pedophiles, murderers, liars… and a slew of enablers. The MAGA base accepts this madness. Nobody from these millions of Trump followers are holding him and this administration, or the elite and wealthy they represent, fully accountable. The reckoning here is not just for Chicanos/Latinos, but for everyone.

Chavez will not be left off the hook. Neither should Trump and the ruling class.

Having said that, Chavez’s betrayal cuts deep. I’m heartened, however, to see many people stepping up for Dolores, for Ana Murguia and Debra Rojas, and anyone else, known and unknown, who suffered at the hands of this so-called icon. As others are saying, it’s high time community centered and uplifted the women and children.

One of the gatherings I attended involved the men just listening to the women, not reacting, just sitting and hearing the power of their words, their sentiments. Their anger. While the pain was palpable, and difficult to hear at times, the women were also blessing us, gifting us, despite what they’ve endured from men in their families, their jobs, and in the movement. More men should go through this.

This is one reason I’ve not written yet. I’ve had to listen. But there is also a time to speak, to add our hearts to the other hearts. I plan to be part of the needed healing work required in the face of these and other revelations of abuse, betrayal, and abandonment.

These revelations are not new, of course, but every such wounding can be an opening to renew our commitment for safe and liberating spaces for women and children, for Queer and Trans people, for everyone. The women want us to go deeper, to uproot what needs to be uprooted, and to keep intact what needs to be intact.

There are many men today speaking for the community, voicing our stories and struggles, helping lead battles whether it be against ICE raids, erasure of our history, and other ongoing attacks. Poets, artists, musicians, organizers, spiritual practitioners, even in a few cases, politicians. We need them.

What we don’t need are so-called representatives, even in revolutionary organizations, even in ceremony, who live two lives: one full of great words, acts, and charisma, but in the dark, filled with the darkest of secrets. We don’t need those men who have a public life that looks like one thing, but a “private” life in which our women, children, including girls and boys, are being hurt, controlled, or subjugated to the worst acts imaginable.

Let’s deal with this head on, with the medicine we all carry, with as much grace as possible, with all the dignity we can muster. Even anger. Anger is also medicine. While righteous rage can be harsh, a consequence of these traumas, the thing is to stay with the anger that still has “eyes,” to see the source of the anger and where it’s going. That way we can adequately get to the root, not just rage blindly, destroying everything in its path. No matter what happens, we must maintain the capacity to renew, create and build.

Accountability, yes. I’ve had my own accountability, my own reckoning, to face many times (I’ve written memoirs, poems, and essays on this over the years). What we don’t need is the shaming, punishing, and constant hurting that the colonialist and capitalist world does in circumstances such as these. That’s one side of that coin. The other side is to keep the perpetrators going and strong, as we’re seeing in the government today.

This is a time to reflect on and consider what we do, not just for the short run, but for the long haul. We don’t want to be like a rubber band that stretches as far as it can until the tension forces it back to what it was before. We should learn to sit in the “fire,” the sacred transformative fire, and move forward on a basis of real love, real liberation, real healthy and mature deliverance.

There’s more I can say about this. Other angles. But for now, I want to go with the internal and external regeneration our community is demanding. Healing is some of the most difficult processes we can do, personally and as a community.

It’s also one of the most revolutionary.

Failures created by those who run things (often to the ground). People die for distractions.

These wars, despite being the costliest part of our national budget, are not necessary. They’ve been used to create a massive military industrial complex, with defense and tech industries profiting while the rest of us struggle with work, housing, healthcare, clean energy, safe streets. The US defense department hires more people in the world from public funding (while Wal-Mart is the world’s largest private employer). Think about this and you’ll find a connection. If most public funds are for war, and most private capital goes to low-paying jobs in cheap stores, this tells us a lot about our “amazing” economy.

It’s an economy built on death and poverty.

War, of course, also comes home. The growth of the police state, mass incarceration, especially now with ICE and so-called border security, which has led to the recent shootings and murders of US citizens as well as undocumented persons in concentration camps. Today many sections of the country have been militarized with an “army” not beholden to the Constitution, international law, or common decency, but to one man: Trump.

The Trump Administration and Israel’s bombing strikes against Iran at the end of February not only took out the Ayatollah Khamenei (an unhealthy 86-year-old man), but killed around 800 persons, including 100, mostly children, in a girl’s school, as well as six U.S. military personnel. And for what? Those children dying are simply not worth it. Just like the millions of noncombatants who died in Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan. This is a disaster for the Middle East as well as the United States.

MAGA ideologist Steve Bannon came up with a strategy called “muzzle velocity” to overwhelm news outlets with multiple simultaneous information and actions. It’s an apt metaphor. It comes from the speed of a bullet or shell from when it leaves the barrel of a firearm. You can see how this relates to mass shootings in schools, churches, and shopping malls–the bullets come out fast and furious. Most mass shootings are from right-wing gunmen (or propensities in that direction). The Trump Administration does this with ongoing executive orders and national and international acts. This year alone these included several military attacks around the world, including in Syria, Nigeria, and in extracting Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro and his wife. It also included murders at home like those of Renee Good and Alex Pretti in Minneapolis.

MAGA is at war on many fronts–including with America.

As for me, even in the throes of barrio warfare, getting shot at and shooting back, I eventually turned against all such wars. This happened most decisively when at sixteen years old I did a life-changing thing, which stays with me still, an act of defiance, of resistance, even if my maturity level couldn’t comprehend the extent of it, although my heart did. I stood up during a police riot at Salazar Park in East Los Angeles on August 29, 1970 in the largest anti-war protest in a community of color at the time: The Chicano Moratorium Against the Vietnam War.

I had been a Chicano gang member, drug user, in and out of jails, and homeless. But something in me couldn’t run away from the sheriff’s deputies and LAPD officers in riot gear, with tear gas and batons, as they attacked a peaceful crowd of around 20,000 people. This was a non-gangster thing for me to do. A rage rose up in me stemming from the overt and covert discrimination and dismissals of Mexican migrants, some newly arrived, many here for generations, that existed in the streets, in schools, in churches, and behind bars.

After Black people, Mexicans had more people lynched during the 20th Century. None of our stories were told in the mass media, in movies, or in books. We were pushed into the lowest rungs of society–the farmworkers, housecleaners, and industrial laborers. Segregation and restrictive covenants forced Mexicans to live with other poor people or our own teeming barrios because we couldn’t access housing in most parts of the country. During the Vietnam War, when people of Mexican descent made up less than 6 percent of the U.S. population, we were 22 percent of the war’s casualties–along with disproportionate numbers of casualties among Blacks, U.S. Indigenous peoples, Puerto Ricans, and poor white workers.

The Chicano Moratorium woke me up from a kind of slumber. A spark that lit a life-long fire. I refused to run away as law enforcement officers rushed through the Moratorium participants, striking left and right. I ran towards them, rage-thinking (not really thinking). Soon enough, I got struck on the back of the head by a baton and fell to the ground that now had blood, not just mine but from others. Deputies took me to the nearby East L.A. Sheriff’s Substation jail, then juvenile hall, finally to the Murderer’s Row of the old Hall of Justice jail. While hundreds were arrested and let go in an hour or so, I “disappeared” for several days and nights along with four other “Cholo” gang members. Deputies wanted to charge us for the people killed in the so-called East L.A. Riot. I won’t go more into this now except to say the deputies had to let me go when community members finally found me. No charges filed because, in fact, the police had killed those people, including Chicano journalist Ruben Salazar.

It took another two to three years, but I eventually left the gang, the crime, the heroin. After the Moratorium I hung around the militant Brown Berets and other Chicano activists. I attended radical study circles. I went to other marches, rallies, and talks. I connected with Black radicals and white union leaders in Watts and the Harbor area. I remember how many of the activists didn’t trust me for a while–it wasn’t easy to leave the drugs, and I had two more major arrests after the Moratorium (one in which I got convicted, served in the Men’s County Jail).

I went one step forward, two steps back, but somehow the Moratorium set me on a new trajectory of conscious revolutionary study, writing, and organizing.

I didn’t transform through religion, as others might have, which is valid nonetheless. For me it was the revolutionary anti-capitalist circles that helped me become gang-free, crime-free, and drug free. By age twenty, I got married, began work in a steel mill, and expected my first of four children. I was moreover working class: my parents worked, from picking cotton in South Texas when my mom was nine years old to garment industry sweatshops, and my dad, although highly educated in Mexico, laboring in factories, construction, retiring as a custodian. My work in industry, which also included a lead foundry, a papermill, in construction, as a truck driver and carpenter, stabilized my life. I made another significant turn when in 1980, like Ruben Salazar, I became a journalist, working over the years in daily and weekly newspapers, for magazines, and in news radio. I also turned to poetry and fiction writing. I now have seventeen books in all genres.

Once as a freelance reporter, I had machine guns pushed against my head by Mexican soldiers when I covered uprisings of Indigenous people and campesinos in the old country in the 1980s. In those years, I also reported on the Contra War in Nicaragua and Honduras, even getting shot at by .50 caliber bullets and bombed twice.

I’ve been in wars. And I lived through the US wars of empire. This is why I now stand for peace at home and in the world. The American people should understand how we are being pulled away from peace and our own interests by war mongering. Why Trump’s reasons for attacking Iran are not meaningful since they are mostly lies (he’s not the first, and won’t be the last).

Presently it’s anybody’s guess about what will happen with Iran. Or what’s happened to Venezuela. Or to Minneapolis and other US cities with Trump’s troops. It’s the politics of chaos. Instability to keep us off balance.

Muzzle velocity.

Remember this.

The only reason Cuba is targeted, and lied about, is because it’s not part of the ideological or sociological sphere of the United States. And for that, for 65 years, the US has blockaded and squeezed Cuba for daring to be its own country. Now with the Trump Administration’s military blockade of oil, Cuba is becoming the US’s Gaza. Ironically, the only global ally in the US’s decades’s long blockade has been Israel, the perpetrator of Gaza’s destruction.

People can blame the Cuban communist government for many things. Much of it well deserved. But what ails the country most is not the government, which has endured the strangling pressures to stop governing. Hundreds of attempts on the late Fidel Castro’s life. The failed Bay of Pigs invasion. Even the murder of 32 Cuban guards when the US kidnapped Nicolas Maduro and his wife out of Venezuela in early January. Yes, it’s withstood just about everything.

I’ve visited Cuba three times since 2019–from before the Pandemic to last October. It’s a country I love. I love the people, the land, the spirit. But I saw upfront and personal the effects of the blockade–long food and gas lines; power outages; housing in disarray. Trash not picked up on many Havana corners.

But let me just add: For all that Cuba is suffering, it’s also one of the best countries in the hemisphere. Yes, in all the Americas. As Bad Bunny clarified at the Super Bowl Half Time Show this month, ”America” is many countries, many languages, many cultures, many voices. Many flags.

The so-called Monroe Doctrine is a 1823 foreign policy that warned European powers that any interference in the affairs of the Western Hemisphere would be a threat to US interests. Trump tried to reinvent this as the Donroe Doctrine in his grab for Greenland and the unlawful Maduro removal. However, the Monroe Doctrine is not law. Congress never approved it. It’s a policy position that helped make the US the dominant power in the hemisphere–whether anyone wanted this or not.

Even with the fomented dissensions among about 30 to 40 percent of the Cuban population, most aren’t inviting the US to destroy them or invade. It’s still their Motherland.

In Havana I witnessed poverty and pain. But I also saw how most of the people carried themselves with dignity, with pride. People kept flowers growing amidst the disaster. Music in most venues. Food and culture still thriving. Schools everywhere, including hearing students playing musical instruments out of windows. The old cars, mostly from the 1950s, are kept running and clean. Many are used as taxis. No commercial billboards. Art on walls. One time with my wife Trini, we drove almost an hour outside Havana to visit an amazing organic farm, run by local farmers and their families. They had regenerative plants, animals, packing sheds, as well as a buzzing bee hive.

Havana in my view is one of the best cities in the Americas. I’ve seen worse poverty in Honduras, Guatemala, Mexico, El Salvador, Peru… in fact, in the United States. I saw in Havana a few prostitutes, a couple of drunkards, a street thief or two. There are no drug addicts. Hardly any assaults or robberies. No gun violence. I could walk late at night. All day long. Mostly safe.

Even in Los Angeles, there are sections more maddeningly poor than in Havana. Encampments of the unhoused. Fentanyl and other drugs everywhere. I’ve seen thirteen year old girls selling themselves in the poorest streets. In some areas of L.A. the murder rates are as high as in the cartel-controlled parts of Mexico or the gang-ridden sections of Central America (the most violent places in the world outside of war zones). Including the US, these countries have some of the widest gaps between rich and poor.

By the way, those are capitalist countries.

Let’s compare some key stats. Life expectancy is 76.33 in Cuba compared to the US of 73.68. Cuba’s unemployment is 1.5 percent compared to the US’s 4.3 percent. Homelessness population in the US is estimated at 650,000; in Cuba near zero. Literacy is 99 percent in Cuba; 88 percent in the US. The US has life debt for healthcare and education; Cuba has free healthcare and education. The child mortality rate in the US is 5.61; Cuba’s is 3.94. The homicide rate in the US is 6.8 per 100,000 people; Cuba’s is 5 per 100,000 people. The US has 924 billionaires; Cuba has none.

Cuba has never invaded any country. The US has engaged in some 400 military interventions from 1776 to 2026. Half of these occurred since 1950 and over 25 percent occurred since the post-Cold War period.

The real center of terror and military engagements in the hemisphere is not Cuba or Venezuela, but the United States. The real center of the world’s drug trade (the largest drug market and worst gun violence) is the United States.

We have no moral or lawful standing to push Cuba, or any country, to the brink. Trump wants Greenland then we should be like Greenland: Free healthcare, free education, almost zero violence. Same with Cuba. Instead any destruction of Cuba’s government and infrastructure will bring it on par to other countries in the hemisphere.

Yes, Cuba is another country. Like Gaza. But it’s not really another world. It’s on this planet. Just as we must continue to stand with Gaza, we must stand with Cuba. You don’t have to like Hamas to demand no genocide in Gaza. You don’t have to like how Cuba is run to demand no destruction of its people. Our humanity must demand no more suffering anywhere at our hands. Because of our policies. Due to our sanctions.

It’s fine to love your country. It’s important to also love the world. That’s not my idea. Others have said this before. I got this idea from reading an essay from the renowned Rock Critic Dave Marsh, also a friend of mine. The earth’s best interests and our country’s best interests should align. Pitting the US against the rest of the world, as we’ve done for generations, only makes things precarious and dangerous for the world as well as the United States.

My issues with the US government notwithstanding, I will fight for its people and safeguard whatever freedoms we may still have left. Loving the United States is not about defending Trump or the administration’s policies. It’s about uplifting the foundations of a land from the original peoples all the way through striving, as generations before us, to make true its Constitution and the ideals of “liberty and justice for all.”

To keep the world safe and healthy for all, we need to make sure our own country is safe and healthy. At the same time, to ensure peace and well being in the United States, we must make sure there’s peace and well-being on earth.

Hands off Cuba!

When poet and mother Renee Nicole Macklin Good was killed in Minneapolis by ICE agents on January 7, she was 37 years old. When ICE agents killed VA nurse Alex Jeffrey Pretti in the same city just two-and-a-half weeks later, he was 37.

37-years-old.

A good age. Most of us become qualitatively matured by then. And there’s still much life to look forward to. Now Good and Pretti’s parents, other family members, friends, and millions of outraged Americans are shocked and in mourning.

I honor Renee Good and Alex Pretti. Despite the Administration’s lies and “justifications,” they were killed maliciously and unjustly by a fascist “army” unleashed to deport undocumented persons. Supposedly the “worst of the worst,” but mostly hardworking people on the job or on their way to work, street peddlers, asylum seekers, children, grandparents, and more. In Los Angeles a man left unsold flowers to avoid being detected by ICE. Others picked up the flowers and sold them, then sought the man so they could turn over the money.

Flowers, whistles, and cameras. They’ve become reasons to fear the government, reasons that may get you killed.

The Trump Administration aims to deport as many people as possible; Stephen Miller says it should be 3,000 people a day. But it’s always been about more than that. It’s about full authoritarian control of the government, our streets, our homes. ICE and other federal agencies have become Trump’s vendetta troops. All this while Trump and family enrich themselves and their social class at the same time: Trump has already amassed a minimum of $1.4 billion since his re-election. From using high-tech companies like Palantir, which “operationalizes data” to track Americans, to the cruel rise in violence by federal agents, Trump and his cabinet can’t and won’t back down. No matter how wrong they are! Remember Hitler and his top Third Reich officials such as Goebbels, Himmler, and Goering. They committed suicide rather then face the music (Goebbels had his wife and six children “suicided” as well).

Doubling and tripling down is the fascist way.

Killing U.S. citizens is also part of the plan. It always has been. You cannot institute the ultra-conservative Project 2025 power grab without force and violence. It can’t be done. Even with millions of people in the street, highly disciplined and largely peaceful, against the collapse of whatever we may hold dear, the government must escalate. It must take this to other levels. Fascism needs this. It’s built on the chaos they create.

In just over a year, Trump has dismantled whatever facades of Democracy remained in the U.S. I say “facades” because it’s been a charade for much of this country’s existence. Trump, if anything, has revealed how lame and fragile our so-called democracy has been.

Whatever democracy and freedom we did have in this country has taken 250 years of countless protests, strikes, takeovers, court cases, armed battles, and even a Civil War. It has taken much blood, sweat, and tears to try and extend what The Constitution had done for a rich white male elite, among them our so-called Founding Fathers. It was a flawed document, but generations now have sacrificed to try and make it work for everybody. Even as others in this country have done all they could to block this.

My heart is broken with the loss of these brave Americans. I think of my own son. I’m thinking of the countless sons and daughters out there protesting as loudly and heartily as they can against a “lawfully” constituted force breaking all manner of laws, so far without any real repercussions.

We’re presently living in a heated cauldron that used to be just disagreements and animosities over politics and economics. Now it’s war. We can’t go back: there is no great time in our past we can emulate. But we can move forward toward a real, effective and enveloping democracy.

The other choice is what’s happening now–to continue with authoritarian rule by one man and his enablers and cronies in the White House, Congress, Supreme Court, and among the richest CEOs.

I’m going with Good and Pretti. They’ve quickened our steps on the rocky road ahead. We can’t stop now! We can’t concede the arena of ideas or lose any city. We can’t give up one bit of political, economic, and cultural ground to the MAGA fascists. While Los Angeles, Chicago, Portland, New York City, Washington D.C., Raleigh/Durham, and others have stood firm against ICE, many still carrying out protests, election wins, and rapid deployment teams, Minneapolis has taken all this to a new level.

Minneapolis is standing up for all of us.

I’m posting this blog on January 30, a day declared as a General Strike against the Trump regime in solidarity with Minneapolis. People were to refrain from work, school, and shopping. To do what they can from participating in the U.S. economy.

I’m using this time to write and speak out. We all are caught in a massive web of the capitalist system. We work for companies or for others just to survive. If we work for ourselves it’s generally connected to meeting some service or need of the system. If it’s just to feed our families, we still pay taxes, buy groceries and other items, pay rent or maintain a mortgage. Just about anything we do is part of this financial, consumerist, and working web. We are connected, which is why when this web is disrupted like with Trump, we feel deeper every provocation. This web under capitalism, however, is not “silken” but of steel chains. We are connected but without our consent, under duress. So a General Strike is a disruption from the rest of us. If we can continue to find more and greater means of not participating within the confines of this political/economic cage-web, we can force the crucial changes vastly needed.

A General Strike is not the end all, be all. It is, just the same, a powerful tool in our vast array of solidarity and rebellion tools to draw from, including history, our families, other countries, and our inventive minds.

Good and Pretti must not have died in vain. We too must escalate. Peacefully, strategically, and creatively, for the short and long haul. We must use every arena and institution at our disposal: Churches, schools, neighborhoods, homes, books, social and other media. We must mobilize at all levels, including elections, if need be, undergirded by organized study of social and historical development. For we are not just feet and voices, but minds and spirits.

We don’t have to be ugly and harsh in return. Fighting “fire with fire” doesn’t mean using the same fires. Our fires are passion, but also compassion. Love and healing with unbending devotion and drive. Poignant humor. Serious satire. Music, dance, poetry, theater, and speech. What we do has to benefit everyone and their progeny. Remember seven generations (three generations from the past, the present one, and three in the future). Our fires can include best-practice good-old fashion organizing. But also things nobody has done before. Imagine and reimagine.

The social transformations are practical and step-by-step, but there’s also an art to them. Feminine energy and masculine energy, properly aligned.

The fascists win when the people stop, become fractured, or lose sight of the overall vision and aims. Not just a few changes here and there, but a total and complete revolution for “justice and liberty for all,” again to make this real, not just for appearances.

As messy, energy draining, and heartbreaking as all this is, this is what history looks like. We should study history not just to pass tests or spout dates and names, but so we can learn how to make our own history. In my short life-time (almost 72 years), I’ve witnessed and taken part in a number of history-making events and moments. It’s not pretty. It’s exhausting. But I know when I’m in it. We must never give up!

Let’s make peace. Let’s make justice. Let’s make democracy. Let’s make history.

Renee Good and Alex Pretti–presente!

The Department of Homeland Security and Republicans claim Ms. Good was among “rioters” who “weaponized” her car against an ICE officer defending himself. Various videos by bystanders, however, including a video analysis by the New York Times, showed there were no rioters, and that the officer who shot her was not in front of the vehicle, but to the side, as Ms. Good tried to pull away. He shot her without apparent warning or legal rationale.

For Trump and MAGA, these facts don’t matter. They live in a black-and-white world, neatly packaged, like in cartoons.

But reality is not so easily categorized or boxed.

A convicted felon is president, the same man who tried to lead an insurrection, who is all over the Jeffrey Epstein files, who lies every time he speaks. A man who doesn’t go to church or knows what it is to go to bed hungry. Who never fought in a war (although he’s Commander in Chief). Yet for MAGA and Christian Nationalists, Trump is their man, their hero, their cult leader. As I’ve written before, “America First” is really “Trump First.”

Good’s murder occurred a few days after the Trump Administration invaded Venezuela, kidnapped its president Nicolas Maduro and his wife Cicilia Flores, killed “dozens” of security people and civilians, including over thirty Cuban guards, all without Congressional approval and outside of international laws and protocols. Many analysts have tried to tie all this to a larger strategic plan: This was about control of the world’s largest oil reserves; this was to remove BRICS countries from bringing Venezuela into the fold (and undermining petrodollars as the oil currency of the world); this was about enforcing greater U.S. control of the Western Hemisphere.

All true, all worth looking at.

But this maddening action is also the result of an erratic, impulsive, and narcissistic president, surrounded by similarly disordered cabinet members and White House flunkies like Marco Rubio, Pete Hegseth, and Stephen Miller. Far from strategic thinking, it’s also the actions of an outlaw presidency.

Trump said in his first public appearance after the January 3 military extraction that those persons mentioned above would be “running” the Venezuelan government. Now they’re backtracking on this, and others have lost a coherent argument for why this actually happened. One that came across social media, like so much nonsense, is that Trump was mad that Maduro mocked his “Trump” dance during a recent speech he made.

This is as good an excuse as any.

Maduro and Lopez are being charged with narco-terrorism in New York state. While drugs may be coming through Venezuela, they are a blip in the tons of drugs being smuggled into the United States. Venezuela has nothing to do with fentanyl or meth, the leading killers of drug users in the U.S. And apparently whatever cocaine comes through that country mostly ends up in Europe. None of which proves Maduro or Lopez’s involvement.

By this measure, why aren’t U.S. government officials considered narcoterrorists? More drugs enter and get used in the U.S. than any other country in the world. We are the world’s largest drug market. Fentanyl and meth and crack began here. There are news accounts of how the CIA worked with drug lords in Colombia, Mexico, and Afghanistan to “get rid of communism” in Central America and the Mideast.

The truth is the U.S. government has its hands dirty in the decades old, multi-billion dollar drug wars.

Another MAGA talking point is that Maduro rigged the 2024 presidential elections and is not the legitimate president. This despite the election being one of the most monitored, with so many hurdles to jump through for anyone to vote (including no mail-in ballots, ID requirements, ballots checked more than once, and other guardrails, which Republicans claim would make for better elections here).

Yet even if this was the most fraudulent election on earth, what do you call a foreign country coming in and removing the nominal head of state and threatening to run the country from Washington D.C. as well as take over the oil reserves of a sovereign country?

Nobody elected Trump in Venezuela! This makes claims of electoral fraud a joke. Trump is now the dictator of Venezuela by force of arms. Whatever Maduro did, Trump has done worse!

Most of the anti-Maduro forces in Venezuela are elated about Trump’s action. They’re fine with a foreign power coming in and pressuring any remaining government in Venezuela to do its bidding–or else! That’s what many of the Venezuelan opposition consists of—traitors to their own country, not patriots.

I visited Venezuela during the Hugo Chavez years (1999 to 2013). Chavez pulled most of the oil reserves and production back into the country. He didn’t deny foreign corporations the drilling or refining–he wanted them to pay a more equitable price against the measly percentage they were paying to do so. The World Bank even claimed that under Chavez, Venezuela’s economy grew consistently, achieving its highest GDP of $482.35 billion in 2014. Poverty rates fell from almost 50 percent in 1999 to around 23 percent in 2012. Chavez created a literacy campaign. He electrified the slums around Caracas. He also brought in free healthcare and free education. Yes, Cuba helped. I visited clinics in the poorest “ranchitos” (what are called “colonias” in Mexico or “favelas” in Brazil). Cuban doctors provided this healthcare without question. Even me, a U.S. citizen, could get help if I needed it. They didn’t care if you were Venezuelan or not. If you had a pulse, if you were human, and got sick, they’d take care of you at no cost.

I was in Caracas three times–during a World Social Forum, during a conference on revolution in the hemisphere (for which I wrote a paper), and during a poetry festival. I met wonderful revolutionary people. I met people glad to be alive with Chavez as president. I walked in the slum areas and talked with residents who felt they were finally able to get a leg up. Society was beginning to center them, uplift them.

I once sat in front row seats with other honored guests when Chavez spoke for over two hours to 100,000 people in a sports stadium. Without notes, he quoted the Bible, Marx, statistics, and told stories. Not a dull moment. During the Caracas Poetry Festival, I also toured the countryside, including Indigenous communities around Rio Orinoco. People appeared stronger and hopeful. Even though Chavez still had a hybrid economy (it was not totally socialist), the changes were palpable. Art and literature were alive. I saw children reciting poems in makeshift tents. I saw murals on walls. Farms coming alive.

The U.S. media never told that side of the story.

I also met disgruntled people. Mostly business people. Before Chavez became president, there were well-off neighborhoods. Here resided rich and largely “white” Venezuelans, many tied to U.S. industries. Most of the base for the anti-Chavistas came from there. However, with U.S. sanctions, lowered oil prices, and the inability to refine Venezuelan “sour” crude oil, Venezuela began losing ground. Inflation became outrageous. There were “black” markets of currency and goods. After Chavez’s death, the economy under Maduro worsened. Venezuelan funds in U.S. banks got confiscated. Some three million Venezuelans left the country during Maduro’s presidency, including “sanction” refugees. I saw many of them in Chicago in recent years, including in encampments around police stations.

Not all of them are with Trump’s takeover of Venezuela. They are anti-Maduro but still Venezuelan. Did Maduro make mistakes? Undoubtedly, but most of this chaos was due to U.S. economic and military pressures.

After Maduro’s removal, U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio indicated that Cuba should “be worried.” He’s made underhanded threats that the U.S. may consider Cuba ripe for the taking. For decades Cuba has been under a massive economic blockade—the longest trade embargo in modern history. They’ve been driven to the bare minimum.

I’ve visited Cuba three times, most recently last October. The country is suffering. There’s poverty in Havana. There are blackouts and long lines for gas and goods. People follow around tourists for hand outs. But there’s so much more–people working together with very little. They share. There’s music and a rich cultural life. Yes, prostitution exists. I’ve seen one or two alcoholics on the street. But it’s not the most paramount thing. Havana is overall a wonderful place. I’ve walked the Malecon seawall and the main boulevards. Lovers sneak kisses. Parents play with their children. The people are kind and embracing.

Cuba has paid a terrible price to be independent of the United States. The alternative is death as a sovereign and self-ruling country.

By the way, I’ve seen much worse in Mexico and Central America, the countries still capitalist and tied to larger U.S. economic and political interests. The poverty in those countries is strangling. Yes, the people there are also amazing. Resilient and creative. But the intensity of what they’re struggling with is on another level. I’ve been to poor-ass areas in San Salvador, San Pedro Sula, Mexico City, Guadalajara, Guatemala City, and Ciudad Juarez. I’ve been to extremely rough neighborhoods, including where dead bodies lay on the street. I’ve worked among the “garbage dump” people in Mexico and Guatemala. I’ve been inside the worst prisons in the world in those places. Cuba has problems, but not like that.

I’ll also tell you what’s worse than Havana. I’ve been to homeless encampments in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Chicago, and New York City. I’ve seen 13-year-old girls prostituting themselves in Watts. Or women on “crack” in brick-laden Chicago apartment buildings. I’ve been to Kensington in Philadelphia where fentanyl and other drugs have created the “walking dead.” I’ve seen worse in the Bible Belt or trailer-park communities. From the Deep South to the “meth” capital of the world in California’s Central Valley to Walmart-only towns in the Midwest.

The U.S. has no moral standing to consider they are the “good” guys in these circumstances. We can’t take care of our own people, and now we’re going to “run” Venezuela! Perhaps also Cuba. Even Mexico or Colombia. Maybe Greenland?

MAGA is okay with this, even as our own country gets harder and harder to live in for the poor and working class.

It’s time for us to stop all this cartoonish fantasizing of who’s good or bad. For one thing, we should stop the economic blockade of Cuba now–let Cuba move in its own way, its own direction, in its own manner. Right or wrong, at least it’s their country.

The U.S. will trample any sovereignty, as it did with Indigenous nations as well as places like Mexico when it stole half of the country in 1848, and later the Philippines and Puerto Rico in the late 1800s. In my lifetime, I’ve witnessed the U.S. try to run Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan–and fail miserably. When the CIA helped get rid of duly elected presidents like Mohammad Mosaddegh in Iran in 1953, Jacobo Arbenz of Guatemala in 1954, and Salvador Allende in Chile in 1973, those countries went through hell: murders, imprisonments, and disappearances.

In the real world, not a made-up one, the good guys are too often the bad ones.

Justice for Renee Nicole Good!

As Lincoln is credited with saying, “You can fool all of the people some of the time and some of the people all of the time, but you cannot fool all of the people all the time.” Exactly, although Lincoln didn’t say this. One statement by him that comes close: “In this age, in this country, public sentiment is everything. With it, nothing can fail; against it, nothing can succeed.”

What people in a collective sense believe is important. Even if this includes awful ideas or outright lies. That’s why manipulating public sentiment is big business. Commercial ads and mass media are about twisting and dominating the “ideas” of civic society. The CIA once called this owning “hearts and minds.” It’s also called “controlling the narrative.” Political parties and major corporations spend billions to win people over to their narrative lines. Capitalism, being a continuously destructive and failing system, nonetheless depends mightily on keeping people blind about this. “Manufacturing consent” is to make people think capitalism is who they are, that capitalism works for them, and is as natural as air and water.

I know this intimately. I’ve worked in journalism for many years starting in 1980: Weekly newspapers in East Los Angeles and the San Francisco Bay Area; a daily newspaper in San Bernardino, CA; monthly publications as well as a news radio writer for CNN, NBC, and Westinghouse in Chicago; and as a freelancer. I’ve covered crime/murders, car fatalities, police abuse, the homeless, mass incarceration, major labor battles, as well as Indigenous and campesino uprisings in Mexico, the Contra War in Nicaragua and Honduras, and gang violence throughout the U.S. as well as in El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras.

In this work I’ve been in the line of fire–seeing more dead bodies than any person should ever see in a lifetime and getting shot at during SWAT raids. I was also shot at by .50 caliber bullets and bombed twice in 1982 when the CIA allowed Colombian cocaine to enter through Central America and Mexico (helping create the Crack epidemic) to fund the counterrevolutionary war against the Sandinistas.

Despite working with courageous editors and journalists, I learned how corporate media can turn facts into fiction. How advertisers have undue influence on what gets printed, spoken, or seen. And how many good reporters are pushed out, and in too many cases killed.

A Republican editor even blacklisted me from working in Southern California daily newspapers in the early 1980s when I tried to expose the police murder of a homeless man by chokehood, by then an outlawed practice in various police jurisdictions.

So believe me when I say: The media also distorts the truth about large phenomena like capitalism, an historically evolved system arising from definable social conditions. While this system has long become parasitic, exploitative, and oppressive, aged and unwelcomed, it’s mostly sustained by elaborate devices and intrigues.

Today everything is in crisis: financial institutions, religious institutions, educational institutions, political institutions. Even the “freedom” ideals of capitalism’s birth are hollow (free from other social systems like slavery or feudalism; free to exploit in a complex but more lucrative mode and manner).

Few research and reports delve deep into the nature of this crisis arising from the economic and political web we’re caught in.

Meanwhile, apologists for the system, including politicians, use what’s called the art of deception.

Trump, Bannon, Miller, and other architects of the MAGA movement in the United States know there are gaps in the public’s knowledge. But they’ve added another layer. They simply don’t care. There’s hardly any “art’” in what they do. Just bold-face dissimulation.

With the government in their hands, and undue sway in major media and social media outlets, they’ve fooled enough Americans about their BS. The right-wing don’t need to have keys to a brighter, better future. They look to a make-believe past–when capitalism was supposed to be the best social engine for wealth and innovation. But MAGA’s existence proves how fragile all this is. Instead of unity and forward motion, they act like wrenches in the works, using chaos as a weapon of mass destruction. They push a hierarchical by-gone, mostly fantasized, concept of what the world should be, one run by powerful wealthy, mostly white, men who have a “God” in their image–mean, detached, narrow-minded. Trump and cronies are willing to do anything, legal or not, for their greed and powerlust, even if this means winning ugly.

The Trump Administration’s hijacking of Venezuelan oil tankers and the bombing of around 100 so-called “narco-terrorists” on boats in the Caribbean is a case in point. The tankers or boats are not directly endangering U.S. military personnel or civilians nor are the “boat people” behind the scourge of fentanyl in our country. What keeps this going are lies, lies, and more lies. The government has always lied. Now such fabrications are normalized, hardly challenged, and given a wide berth–even for piracy and murder.

We simply can’t “believe the hype.” But how do we navigate all this? For one, use your God-given brains and other senses. You don’t need the Internet or AI (unless you use them wisely). Master critical thinking skills. Read and study (there are still powerful sources to draw from). Learn the discernment required to know what’s real, what’s not; what’s distorted, what’s the full-blown truth.

My journalism experience and personal study has helped me tremendously. I’m not super-smart. I’m average. Like most people. But being so-called average is quite a magnificent thing. You can do so much with having a healthy average capacity. Books, intuition, and experience make for great teachers. These are your tools.

Let’s not fall into the system’s traps. Polls show increasing numbers of Americans are somewhat waking up. We can still nurture a higher-level BS meter. If you can’t rely on the legacy media, schools, or the cacophony of social media, you can still get to the bottom of things. Think, study, experience, learn, and think again. Society wants us to believe we’re all “dumb.” Again, our greatest weapon is what’s already within us: our brains, a mature range of feelings, and other wondrous senses.

I say the “World First” because if the world is safe, clean, and abundant for all, that includes this country. It’s like on a plane when people pray for themselves to land safely and in one piece. I, on the other hand, pray for everyone because that includes me!

“America First” at the expense of humanity only makes things precarious and unstable for everyone.

Let’s break this down.

“America First” is a slogan that in recent years drove Trump’s presidential campaigns and the MAGA movement. It’s anti-global and xenophobic, two concepts that when combined have split the country and made us a pariah among other nations.

While in its narrow sense, “America First” is about isolation, it’s also about dominance. Interesting how the country with the world’s most powerful military and economic market, one that has played the largest role in shaping the planet for most of the 20th century up till today, now wants further estrangement.

It’s as if the spider that wove the global capitalist world order eats its own web.

During the beginnings of World War I, “America First” became a popular slogan. Why should this country get involved in matters involving Europe? But it became evident that what happened in Europe affected much more. U.S. banks were heavily invested in the Entente powers (the allies). The U.S. officially joined the fighting in 1917 after reports of German atrocities, the sinking of the British passenger ship RMS Lusitania, with 1,193 killed, including more than 100 Americans, but also as revolution began to grip Russia and other countries. A revolutionary tide that would turn the world upside down.

The racist Ku Klux Klan picked up the “American First!” slogan in the 1920s to curtail immigration, leading to acts like the Johnson-Reed Act in 1924 that restricted Eastern and Southern European migrations as well as from non-white peoples. In the 1940s, the “America First Committee” tried to keep the U.S. out of World War II (it disbanded after the attack on Pearl Harbor).

Hitler during his rise in the 1930s used “Germany First” to put forward his fascist program and party. But such an idea had to start with “Hitler First.” A whole nation had to venerate its leader that promised the country would rise (in the end, instead, Germany crumpled to its knees because of one man’s powerlust and greed).

In the United States today “America First” starts with “Trump First,” which he made clear throughout his last campaign–it was about retribution for what others did to him. Recently he declared death to Democrats on social media who said the military should not carry out “illegal orders” from the president (which is constitutionally correct).

In the short time of his second presidency, Trump went to war with the country, including against Democrats, legitimate protestors, and U.S. migrants (not just undocumented, but legal residents and asylum seekers). His followers knew he’d do this. In Germany as well as the United States, an authoritarian state requires authoritarian leaders. The MAGA base supported Trump instead of lower grocery and housing costs, instead of more jobs, instead of better healthcare. Again, in “America First” it’s Trump that comes first. Kidnapping and assaulting mostly good hard-working people, or “owning the libs,” is okay because this is what Trump wants.

“America First” is not about a better and free America. It’s about a more restricted and controlled America.

So when Trump fails, as he’s doing now with tariffs and the economy, the chaotic and costly ICE raids, and other mishaps such as the ongoing battle to release the Jeffrey Epstein files, so will his self-centered policies.

“America First” crumbles as Trump crumbles. Just like “Germany First” did when Hitler did.

The racism and misogyny of the current presidency is founded on a hierarchy of people and values that have existed since the first invaders and colonizers from Europe. Well off white males have been centered in the history books and most narratives of the country. Trump has centered himself over the U.S. Constitution, due process, or longstanding values of fair play and protections for the people.

The rich and powerful, which Trump is amongst, are centered in tax breaks, power deals, and government privilege. His pardons of some of the most vile criminals is based solely on who supports him (including the January 6 insurrectionists).

Now there’s another way to look at “America First.” This country should stand out among nations, but not in the sense the current administration is doing. This country should be first, but in these terms: First in clean and regenerative land, air, and water. First in healthcare and housing. First in making sure all share in the country’s “wealth,” not just the few who own the major technological, manufacturing, and financial institutions.

The U.S. should be first in peace, locally and internationally. In putting massive resources into schools as well as wholesome mental and body development. First in making sure our food, our water, the land, and air are poison free. First in ensuring everyone has a roof over their head.

Why can’t the most powerful country in the world do this? Why can’t it be about what’s right and decent? Why can’t it be the most equitable and caring country in the world? At least as an example to others.

Because the country’s intent was never about this. It was always about power and enrichment for the few over the many. Trump is just “unveiling” what we have always known. If this is about the “Apocalypse,” Trump and MAGA are carrying out the prophecy. Apocalypse is an old Greek word for “revelations.” We are in it–revealing the underpinnings of this upside down system. It’s the naked and stark truth of one powerful capitalist class over every other who must work to get what they need to live.

The revelation is the class nature of how capitalism is at home and in the world. Class warfare waged by the ruling class itself.

To be a patriot is to be for the “fatherland.” Patriot comes from patrias, which comes from the word “father.” Any nation or people should align the patrias with Mother Earth. Fatherland and Mother Earth should be in sync. Not one against the other.

I say then let’s fight for the whole planet. Let’s ensure we are all free of wars, of hunger, of want. Free of desperation and fear. Free of fabricated hierarchies and false values. Free of social class dominance against the laboring masses–the ones who really hold everything up.

For such a world will include us.

This is why we need a complete and thorough study of history, economics, science, and politics–what the Trump Administration has been working on removing or undermining in our schools.

Vance’s statement is an outrageous lie. It falsely claims the moral superiority of Christian/Judeo values. Now I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with these values, especially if they’re yours. But anytime someone places their beliefs over other beliefs, it becomes something else. In the context of our common historical heritage, it becomes racist.

Here’s why. There was no widespread child sacrifice in the area now known as the United States among Indigenous peoples. What was found among the archaeological record is some suspected child sacrifice in Peru and parts of MesoAmerica (Mexico and Central America). But it was not widespread. And it was found to have stopped way before the Spanish arrived as conquerors. In other words, whatever ritual sacrifices existed, things evolved among those peoples to end or modify such practices. And still the vast majority of Indigenous people never had “child” or any other human sacrifice.

Yet this lie helped perpetuate a deliberate and systemic genocide against Indigenous peoples.

Alleged “human sacrifice” became a major justification for the Spanish to allow disease to run rampant among Indigenous people, to the slaughter of men, women, and children, including the forced conversion into Christianity that included inquisitions, burnings at the stake, maimings, slavery, and death. But they didn’t need any justification. For example, Spanish conqueror Hernan Cortez in 1519 massacred 10,000 to 30,000 people in Cholula when he accused them of plotting against him. The next year, his second in command Pedro de Alvarado massacred up to 1,000 unarmed Mexicas (so-called Aztecs) during the celebration of the Feast of Toxcatl to obtain the gold they brought to the ceremony.

In the United States, military excursions into Indigenous lands up to the late 1800s led to many massacres, such as the Wounded Knee slaughter of some 300 men, women, and children in 1890. In California during the 1849 “Gold Rush” and beyond, laws and bounties were enacted to kill as many Indigneous peoples as possible, leading to the greatest genocide of native peoples in U.S. history.

All these were perpetrated by “Christians.”

The overall toll of the Spanish and other Europeans conquests and colonization led to the greatest “human sacrifice” in history–whereby in most areas 90 to 95 percent of major Indigenous populations were gone within fifty years of European’s arrival. Most under the cloak of “saving souls.”

In the United States and Canada, Indigenous eradication policies by both governments pushed original peoples into reservations or reserves. After various wars, and incidents like the “Trail of Tears” involving the “five civilized tribes” and the Dine/Navajo “Long Walk,” the population dwindled significantly. Then the forcing of children into boarding schools, run by Christian societies or the government, led to more erasure of culture, language, and lives. In the U.S. alone, 3,000 children are believed to have died in these boarding schools. Mass graves were found in many of the schools’ grounds.

Talk about “child sacrifice.”

In my lifetime, millions of men, women, and children were killed by the U.S. military in Vietnam and Cambodia from the 1960s to the mid-1970s. Then millions more in Iraq and Afghanistan under false pretexts during the first twenty years of the 21st century. Even today with U.S miliary support of Israel in their genocide against Palestinians, including the murder of 80,000 people in Gaza in two years, a place where close to 50 percent of the population are children.

This is not even including the horrific destruction of men, women, and children during the African TransAtlantic slave trade, and the chattel slavery in the U.S. Or the 5,000 or more lynchings of Blacks from the end of Reconstruction to the 1950s. Again, all justified by self-professed Christians.

And in more recent times, the big churches, such as the Roman Catholic Church and the Southern Baptist Convention, have been rocked with pedophile and other child abuse scandals.

I’m aware there are Catholics and other Christians who have fought against this, who have brought many changes in their churches. I know there are decent priests, nuns, pastors, and other church officials who are remedying centuries-long abuses. I admire the efforts and teachings of the late Pope Francis and the current Pope Leo. I know many Christians taking on the bigotry and hypocrisy of their own institutions. I’m also aware that other religions also have had their own struggles to reform and refine their practices.

Just the same, JD Vance’s statements were inane and erroneous. He even made a case that his wife Usha, who was raised Hindu, should convert to Christianity. Now that’s a personal issue between them. But he made it public to keep pressing the “superiority” of his faith.

I call things as I see them. This is racist.

The fact is Indigenous people have had, and continue to have, complicated, sophisticated, and powerful spiritual practices, way before Christianity became a thing. They were quite fine and moral in their own cosmovision and teachings. Now if they wanted to convert to Christianity, okay. But they didn’t need to. This is important to understand: nobody needed to be “saved.”

Indigenous peoples in the so-called Americas, including the Mexicas, Mayas, and Inca traditions, had customs and understandings different than the European ones brought to their shores. These were aligned to nature and what they understood of the cosmos (for example, that “God’s” blueprint is readily accessible inside and outside of human beings, not in “books”). They were connected to all life, all beings, and to celestial bodies.

Yes, there are no perfect peoples or cultures. But from my own relations to elders among the Dine (Navajo), Lakota, Mexica (in the U.S. and Mexico), Maya (from Mexico and Guatemala), Raramuri (of Mexico), Pipil (of El Salvador), and Quechua (of Peru) over the past thirty years, as well as my own readings and study, I’ve learned Indigenous peoples in the Western Hemisphere didn’t carry on the devastating wars, plunders, and disseminations of people that Europe had for hundred of years before coming here.

Indigenous peoples didn’t have developed weapons like the Spanish and Portuguese (and later English, Dutch, and French) because that wasn’t their emphasis. They did have highly developed irrigation systems, agricultural systems, as well as architectural marvels. They had deep knowledge of stars and planetary systems. While Egypt had hundreds of pyramids, temples, and other structures, in Mesoamerica there were thousands. The Mayan and Mexica calendar systems were the most developed of any calendar system.

And Indigenous peoples had no prisons, no homelessness, no marginalized peoples (“two-spirited” people were welcomed and considered special). They had ritualized means to resolve tensions, disagreements, and conflicts.

This is why Trump and his minions want to erase our real history—to remove anything that disproves “whites,” or “Christians” or heterosexual males are “God’s” children. Indigenous peoples understand we are all sacred. We all belong regardless of borders, skin color, sex, or sexual orientation.

If you’re Christian, please stand up and fight for Christ’s true teachings. If not, remember that any “God” worthy of our humanity should never “judge” or condemn you for what you believe. Being Hindi, Muslim, Buddhist, a Indigenous spiritual practitioner, or atheist are all valid and personal to each person.

And I will add, regardless of your spiritual practices, or lack thereof, everyone should be about how you walk and talk in this world–with truth, beauty, decency, and grace.

No religion, including Christianity, has a monopoly on any of this.

–Antonio Machado

The current U.S. president has used a wrecking ball to destroy the East Wing of the White House, a place he does not own, provided to him at the people’s behest, that he was to respect and take care of. Instead Trump acts as if this temporary residence is an extension of Mar-A-Lago. He’s trying to build a 90,000 square foot ballroom at a cost of $300 million and counting, by “selling” its construction to powerfully rich donors, which means there’s no government oversight, donors whom Trump will have to owe, perhaps by providing more ways to enrich them at the people’s expense.

Trump’s doing this at a time when government employees are unable to work or get paid, when our health care premiums are increasing, when the cost of living is mounting, when ICE and other federal agents continue to terrorize many of our neighborhoods, when the military has amassed ships and troops in the Caribbean against Venezuela, a country that has not threatened the U.S. nor has the wherewithal to fight back against its overbloated military machine.

A wrecking ball is not just a real thing here. It’s a hell of a metaphor for how Trump has handled the economy, the immigration system, the judicial system, the healthcare system, the educational system, the federal administrative state, and the Constitution.

He was given a “garden”--the presidency–and like an actual White House garden, the Rose Garden, he’s trampled over everything.

The third branch of government has become a tool for Trump’s vanity and petty vengeance. It’s become his plaything. Where he can do anything he wants because the spineless Republican Party in Congress won’t do anything to stop him, and the opposition Democratic Party is too fragmented and out of touch to fully challenge him.

Even major players in the mass media, major universities, and big high-tech corporations have caved in to this wanna-be dictator/king.

Nonetheless, most Americans aren’t bending at the knee.

You can see this in the seven million or so who took part in the “No Kings” protests of October 18 across the country, in the disciplined and creative community resistance to ICE raids and kidnappings, in how many are standing up, speaking out, and fighting back. You can see this in the polls that show Trump with the worst negative numbers since his first presidency, which was the worst of any president since Nixon.

This is the irresponsibility that entitled white men with power tend to exhibit. I’m talking about those people who actually believe that “white” is a race to be dominant over others, that men are superior to women, that heterosexuality is the only state of being human, that the nation-state is above the world. Those scared, “small,” and empty men, and the women who go along with them, when they amass power tend to be what Trump has become–a “wrecking ball.”

To expand on this, there are many “gardens” all of us have been entrusted with. What have we done with these?

The Creator spirit, whatever you call it, the spirit that is all life and our life, has provided us with all we need. Yes, individually many are brought into the world with ailments, disabilities, and other calamities. But for the most part, human beings have been given this magical, multiflorous, and marvelous planet. It’s our home, a place we should cherish and take care of. But under capitalism, colonialism and empire, we’ve trampled underfoot as much as we can. For over 500 years, and perhaps as long as 5,000 years since so-called civilization emerged, we’ve poisoned much of the soil and air. Extraction of minerals, but especially fossil fuels, has turned upside down the intrinsic balance of our mother.

What have we done with each other? Wars and more wars. We’re still in a culture of war. You know this when the largest budget of this country is for the military, instead of our health, our housing, our wellbeing. In this country, firearms are the leading cause of death for young people ages one to seventeen. War abroad and war within.

What have we done with our bodies? In a hundred years, with processed foods, manufactured sugars, and sedentary but stressed lives, we are at the unhealthiest point in most developed countries. And this in a world that still has famines, malnutrition, and starvation, where at least a quarter of the human population has high levels of acute food insecurity.

What about our families? Domestic violence and abuse plaques at least 10 million people in the United States: 24 people per minute today become victims. Families are falling apart. The degrading economy is the main culprit, not cultural shifts. What have we done with the families in our care?

What about our psyches? Our potential for purpose and meaning? Our individual gifts, talents, and attributes each one of us are born with? Where are the elders, the initiation rites, the ceremonies marking development for each child, adolescent, and adult? Where are the tools, resources, and connections needed to raise a solid, well-rounded, and initiated next generation?

If all our religions and moral precepts have any meaning, why have we abandoned so much of the planet, the people, and the peace?

Shame, punishment, and throwing people away won’t solve any of this. We need to give people what they need, including an expansive and extensive educational base, to take care of all our gardens. This is the one thing our teachings, faiths, and moral upbringing should have instilled in all of us: Be responsible for what we’ve been given.

If this country is to blossom, we have to stop the wrecking balls. Time to reconnect, to re-establish our relationships with dignity and compassion. It’s time to flower, not wreck or trample over. Time to be fully involved and active in regenerating all the gardens provided us to tend to and to grow.

–Antonio Machado

The crisis in the United States is not all about Trump.

First, all crises are about something “dying” while something else is trying to be born. Birthing children is a great example of this. So is the birth of new societies. Trump is a tool in making sure the present overarching and overwhelming economic, political, and social crisis keeps what is trying to die alive by “going back” in the guise of going forward.

The crisis is really about the rotting of the capitalist system. The very system that is not in the Constitution but has been touted as “sacred.” Capitalism is in the acute final stages of existence. Society then is divided between those who want to “return” to an earlier period of the capitalist system and those who want to envision and establish a new social system of relationships.

Yes, Trump and MAGA are at war with migrants, people of color, Queer/Trans, “the left and woke.” This is mostly subterfuge. The real war is about a new world trying to be born within the ruinous folds of the old that won’t let go.

That’s why today all institutions are in crisis: political parties, religions, ideologies, governments, and basic relationships. Everything is being thrown up in the air, which feels destabilizing and uncertain.

The architects of the MAGA movement have a plan for a “final solution.” They are waging “Cultural Wars” around major issues in their drive for total control of the government and society. One is to bring back and prop up the patriarchy. You see this in the rise of the “manosphere” on the Internet and other media outlets. It’s women’s subjugation, including control of their bodies, but it’s also tied to anti-Queer/Trans issues. Next is white supremacy where white people (or certain white people) remain in control, including stopping their “replacement” by non-white people forced to migrate and populate former colonial powers in Europe and in the United States. But they also don’t care for white people who don’t buy into this. Then there’s the overemphasis of the nation state–”America First”--keeping different nations and peoples separate enough to continue wars (from trade wars to military wars).

War by any means is most profitable.

Finally, they are about going back to an earlier time when capitalism was the most powerful engine for production (especially wealth production) through the early stages of industrial manufacturing (what some call “laissaz-faire”) without regulation or guardrails.

Laissez-faire in this context means having commercial enterprises unburdened by government, people, or even moral integrity. The main law is maximizing profits, no matter the costs.

The apologists for this, including Steve Bannon in a recent interview with The Economist magazine, are using “divine providence” and a distorted Christianity to back them up. This is so they can claim the ultimate authority is on their side: God. This also charges them with immense energy because “God is behind me; I can’t lose,” despite no evidence for any of this. It’s a fantasy made flesh. A lie made to be the overriding truth of the movement.

They don’t need facts, evidence, or even history. They just need authoritarian and highly determined “leaders” to demolish their way through. And a mythology to frame the whole endeavor. Follow the leaders (in Germany, this word is “fuhrer”). God has “chosen them” to do His bidding.” They don’t need the Bible or a Constitution. These are just paper they use or discard when it serves their purposes. You just have to “believe,” which is how con men manipulate their victims. Belief is pliable and controllable. Belief has the word “lie” in it. This is what’s now causing more mistrust and hate in the world: Beliefs and borders.

Both of which are made-up and fetishized.

To add to this, Trump’s “crises” are largely manufactured. Within the parameters of U.S. indicators, there was no big immigration crisis, or health crisis, or trade crisis, etc. until Trump came along. Yes, there were huge problems with all of these. His “solutions” have made them worse.

Only destruction in his wake.

Trump’s destroyed the East Wing of the White House like he’s bombed unarmed boats in the Caribbean or invaded “Blue” cities with federal agents and military equipment. Nothing good is being added, just taken away (including the so-called administrative state).

It’s time for another vision.

Any new society has its roots in the very crisis. The message is in the pain. Whatever capitalism has destroyed or distorted is what needs to be freed. It’s not commercial/financial enterprises that must be liberated, but the whole planet. If capitalism is contrived scarcity, with losers and winners, and dominance of one sex, class, or “race,” then the new world should be about the opposite: shared abundance, everyone safe and healthy, no dominant classes, races, nations, sexes, etc.

Capitalism primarily benefits a wealthy and powerful social class the rest of us become beholden to. Yet it’s the working class that makes the world go around, produces the surplus value behind all profits, and that holds the key to unchain everything for everybody.

We live in a society that can’t feed, house, or keep everyone autonomous. Most have to suffer so a few can prosper. Capitalism is the greatest wealth producing social system, but it has immense gaps because of who owns the producing and mineral-rich land, means of manufacturing, and major social institutions. Ownership that should never be theirs to begin with.

A person’s value is then judged by superficial aspects, including how much of a consumer you can be molded into. It’s not based on worth just for being born and having a pulse.

Your “value” therefore is determined by what capitalism needs, not on what you need.

A new society is trying to free itself from the current social constraints into one that makes sure you are thriving from birth to death. Where there’s a better world for us now as well as our progeny.

No matter how you slice it, capitalism can never do this. Instead it forces us to have illusions to make up for its empties.

This is when we should free our imaginations. Our minds/hearts (what we see and feel) reflect the social conditions. Our imaginations can therefore see what the new birth is and where it must go.

We need a full imagination and then a full realization, not illusions.

This is why we should also go back, but further back than the beginnings of capitalism. Go back to the original thinkers, teachers, artists, and storytellers of this land. Go back to the original instructions: Take care of this earth and it will take care of you.

Teachings that demonstrate nature and people are one. That spirit and us are one. Everywhere. Accessible. That all is sacred so what we do, say, and create is in accord with this understanding. It’s hard to call this “society” or even a means of “governing.” It’s really about the most important thing human beings must procure and nurture: Relationships.

So to free ourselves as persons, as the species of human beings, as nature, we must have a society aligned to these instructions and teachings. Where medicine is everywhere even in poison times, even in times of crisis. Where mythology is not to frame the wrong narrative but to hold the multiplicity of narratives that address all possibilities (stories as “storehouse” of knowledge and wisdom). Quantum truths. Not lies masked as truths.

Remember the gardens (earth, families, the gifts in every person) we were entrusted with. What did we do with these?

The so-called War Department’s major charge from the “Commander in Theft” to 800 military leaders in Quantico, VA this past September 30, 2025 was to fight “the enemy within.”

Days prior, Trump issued an executive order designating “Antifa” as a domestic terrorist organization. Antifa is alleged to be behind violence and terrorism, including armed standoffs with law enforcement, organized riots, violent assaults on ICE agents, and threats against political figures and activists. Then on September 25, Trump in a Presidential Memorandum connected disparate incidents like the attempted assassination of US Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh, the two assasination attempts on Trump, the 2024 murder of a senior healthcare executive, and so-called riots in Los Angeles and Portland, to claim this was organized political violence from the Left–even though research shows around 80 percent of political violence in the past twenty-five years came from right-wing organizations and persons.

Not only that, but the memorandum claims “common threads” animate “Antifa” such as “anti-Americanism, anti-capitalism, and anti-Christianity,” and hostility toward “traditional American views on family, religion, and morality.”

Let’s get into this.

Antifa means antifascist. There is no such organization called “Antifa.” No structure, no meetings, no bank accounts. Antifa is a red herring. A total distraction. All made up.

Being antifascist would include millions of people in the country, like the progeny of the over 16 million people who served during World War II to stop fascism in Europe and Asia (those who served included 500,000 Spanish-surnamed with the majority of Mexican descent). Democrats, Republicans, independents, third party members–and I’d venture to say some MAGA people–are anti-fascist. From conservatives to communists.

Antifascism is in our blood.

Fascism is the rule of the few for the few instead of a government of the many for the many. It is by nature authoritarian and tyrannical. The ruling few in the United States are the 1 percent that control about 31 percent of the total wealth in the U.S., some $52 trillion. They use both the Democrat and Republican parties. This is not to disparage voters in any party. We have been pushed into a two-party system for generations, which keeps the wealthy in power. Most Republicans, however, have now become part of the cult of Trump, a billionaire who has done more for billionaires than any other president.

This ruling class is united around two key aspects. One, to maintain maximum profits in big commerce and finances at all cost, while stealing from the public coffers as much as possible. Second, to fragment and scatter the working class (those forced to work for them to survive) by pitting races, ethnicities, sexes, genders or gender-nonconforming, documented or undocumented, against each other.

This is capitalism.

Which brings me to the next point: To even say anti-capitalism as an indicator of “domestic terrorism” is nonsensical. Fascism arises from capitalism: Cyclical economic crises, wealth gaps, corporate power. Look how it arose in Italy and Germany. Capitalism is the birthplace of any and all fascism.

Saying anti-Christian is an indicator is also ridiculous. Of course, nobody should target Christians based on their faith–or any other religion, or anyone with no religion. But Christians, like anyone else, should be challenged when need be, not with violence but full and clarifying discourse.

Now let’s be real: It’s Trump and the MAGA movement that’s driving Christians against other Christians. They are generally for Christian Nationalism, a contradiction in terms as far as Christ is concerned. Jesus Christ moved away from the “chosen people” or preferred nations, or “races” for that matter, to the idea that all people can be saved.

The nationalism part is not just dividing Americans against Americans, but Christians against Christians. Between “Red” and “Blue” Christians; documented or undocumented Christians; white Christians over Christians of color. It derides Christians who believe in caring for the poor and the despised, and instead pushes fabricated stuff such as going against abortion and Queer/Trans people. Those are issues Christ never touched upon. Christ, according to the Gospels, railed against the rich and powerful more than anything else. His two commandments, which summarized all previous commandments, had to do with loving God above all else and loving your neighbor as yourself. They are about love, not hate.

Trump and MAGA also push Christians against everyone else. Trump (a lousy Christian if ever there was one) and Christian Nationalism are in fact aberrations.

I also want to break down the concept of “anti-American.” First, the term America is for the whole Western Hemisphere, divided between North, Central, and South America. The United States of America is only part of this. But I will use this term to point out that in this country there are many “Americas.”

For example, there’s an “America” that pushes authoritarianism to keep the system of the wealthy getting wealthier and the poor poorer. And there’s an “America” that is inherently anti-fascist, that is for freedom of thought, speech, and actions (without hurting others). For freedom from fear and want. For freedom from a poisoned environment as well as deteriorating economic and political realities. An America that includes full and decent healthcare for all, quality education, and the chance to thrive, not just survive.

That’s the “America” I’m fighting for.

It’s not enough then to be antifascist. We have to be pro-people, pro-planet, pro-creativity & arts, pro-peace. This is the highest morality and one that is pro-family, pro-community, and pro-individual liberties. I’m for an America that keeps our dignities intact, that aligns resources to needs, that says we all deserve decent and healthy lives whether we can afford this or not.

An “America” that can be part and parcel of the U.S. Constitution.

Let me explain. In my 2020 book, “From Our Land to Our Land” (Seven Stories Press), in one of the essays I said that for Indigenous people (and I’m Indigenous through my Raramuri and Nahua roots from Chihuahua and Guerrero, Mexico) the Constitution was at best a limited warranty. The original peoples of the land (this is before borders so that includes my ancestral lineage) did not need a document to give them rights and responsibilities. Before the conquests and colonialism, they had complex sophisticated systems on how to live and regenerate. They understood they were related to everything and everyone. They protected and expanded on nature, their own unique personal natures, others and all life, and the Divine.

The Constitution was created under certain historical conditions: A powerful section of landholders in the late 1700s broke the bonds with the British Monarchy. The document established how the new country would be governed. To summarize, the mode was democracy, the means a republic with three equal but separate branches of government. The so-called founding fathers relied on Greek/Roman traditions, English and other European jurisprudence, and even the “Great Law of Peace” of the Iroquois Confederacy (the Haudenosaunee). Some say the Constitution is “sacred.” It’s not. It has flaws. Many of those who pulled it together and/or voted for it were slaveholders and for Indigenous genocide. White men of property were the initial benefactors. This stained their efforts.

Nonetheless, the Constitution has some powerful ideas.

Such as “We the People of the United States, in order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity.” Great concepts. The document also allows for amendments to be added or removed, implying it’s a living document not encased in stone from other times or circumstances.

Take Amendment IX: “The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.” In other words, the people had rights not spelled out and the document could not override such rights.

It’s clear to me the current administration, the majority in the Supreme Court, and their lackeys in Congress, are going against the spirit and letter of the “law of the land.”

I therefore ask: Who’s “un-American”? I say it’s Trump and his cronies!

I remain unapologetically antifascist, like millions in this country and the world. And I’m not for violence or terrorist acts. We must also reimagine and renew what “America” must be. One in which the wealth of the land as well as the mental and manual labor of the people benefit the land and the people. One that holds everyone, all humans, animals, and the natural order, the way Mother Earth holds us without borders, belief-systems, or human-made narrow boundaries.

This is the “America” we should all be fighting for. Not with firearms, but with poetry, art, song, dance, theater, and the greatest imaginative protest movement against fascism the world has ever seen.

Mostly, it’s about “Right” and “Left.” Red and Blue (like gang colors). White and Black (and all shades of brown). I can go on and on. Yes, these are divides we can recognize. But they are the wrong divides.

The worst aspect is that Trump and his administration, much of Congress, and the ideological echo chambers on social media and the Internet keep the flames going. Talk about “hate speech”! The worse hate speech is being issued by Trump himself. Cronies in mass media have gotten Steven Colbert and Jimmy Kimmel pulled off the air (or about to be). Even Elon Musk, who uses X (formerly Twitter) as his personal pressure cooker, is adding fuel to the fire.

Reacting to this is understandable. Often justified. It’s also pulling us into false dichotomies.

Let’s unpack this. I live in a culturally and politically diverse working-class section of the San Fernando Valley in Los Angeles known as the Northeast Valley. It’s an area born of U.S. history, politics, laws, struggles, migrations, industry, and more.

“The good, bad, and ugly.”

Some half-a-million people live here, similar in size to the City of Miami. It is around 80 percent Mexican and Central American. There’s a significant Black population, almost 10 percent, with the rest consisting of Asians, Whites, and Native Americans (many “nations” but mostly Tataviam). The Northeast Valley includes L.A. city communities like Pacoima, Sylmar, Panorama City, Van Nuys, North Hollywood and one separate city: San Fernando.

While most of this area is modest and clean, it also has poverty, including with housing projects, street gangs, and homelessness. There are homeless encampments in ravines, gulleys, and streets; there are roads lined with RV’s and cars where people live. One elementary school in Pacoima has more unhoused students, over 25 percent, than any other elementary school in the Los Angeles Unified School District.

It's important to note there used to be a GM auto plant (now it’s a shopping mall called “The Plant”), a brass foundry, garment shops, and aerospace manufacturing in the Northeast Valley. The big factories, mines, and mills disappeared with the massive deindustrialization the country underwent in the 1970s to the 1990s. Once relatively stable communities became unstable, resulting in high crime rates. For a time, the Northeast Valley had the highest number of homicides in the whole San Fernando Valley.

Nonetheless, things have improved over the years. Crime has drastically decreased. There has been gang intervention, urban peace efforts, resources for youth and families. Various nonprofits assisted, including El Nido (The Nest), Champions in Service, Pacoima Beautiful, Pueblo y Salud (People and Health), as well as collective learning & action groups like Alliance United. Tia Chucha’s Centro Cultural & Bookstore in Sylmar, the cultural arts center my wife Trini and I created in 2001, also played a key role. Our center now has the only art gallery, performance space, arts/music/theater/writing workshop center, movie space, and bookstore in the area. We also hold the only annual outdoor arts & literacy festival called “Celebrating Words” with book giveaways, poetry, music, community and service vendors, workshops, and more. Some 3,000 to 5,000 people attended our most recent festivals (this year we celebrated twenty years of “Celebrating Words”) without friction or violence.

They’re antidotes to the times we’re in.

The Northeast Valley today is relatively safe and peaceful. Many of the residents are undocumented, which results in lower crime rates. They work hard, pay taxes (without obtaining government benefits), and contribute to the betterment of all.

I’ve resided in the Northeast Valley for twenty-five years. I love it here. It’s as “American” as burritos, teriyaki, kimchi, chitlins, and apple pie.

While Northeast Valley is a unique and special place, it’s also like many U.S. communities: It’s trying to survive in a postindustrial capitalist world based on maximum profits for major corporations and financial institutions while driving increasingly more people out of the economy. There has been a growing informal economy of street peddlers, landscapers, and even in the drug trade (weed, heroin, meth, fentanyl, Trang… you name it). I’ve seen communities like this in Chicago, Detroit, New York, New Jersey, Appalachia, the Deep South, the Northeast, and the Southwest. In both Red and Blue states.

My community consists of U.S. born and naturalized citizens, differently registered migrants, and the undocumented. They are our neighbors and our family. They all belong. We have heterosexuals, cisgendered, gender non-conforming, Queer, and Trans. They are our neighbors, our family. They belong. Even troubled youth. We provide guidance and healthy means to any of them whenever possible.

During COVID, there was a gang war that took the form of Blacks versus Mexicans. Within a few weeks, five young people were killed. With others in the community, Tia Chucha’s helped create a weekly food giveaway near the largest housing projects (an area with the most Black and brown residents). It was called “Breaking Bread.” This and other efforts stemmed the violence. Tia Chucha’s also has a Trauma to Transformation Program that sends artists, poets, and theater people to prisons, juvenile lockups, and parolee housing, including to Nidorf Juvenile Hall, five minutes from our space, once the largest juvenile lockup in North America.

Because of this work we are not being “terrorized” by gangs or crime. However, since Trump returned to office, he’s declared war against other “Americans”—even using National Guard troops and, in the case of Los Angeles, Marines.

We never asked for any of this. Now we’re being terrorized by federal agents and encroaching Christian Nationalist ideology with ICE raids and anti-Trans politics. Again, what a distraction these divides are from the real issues!

As working-class people, regardless of immigrant status or ethnicity, we have more in common with MAGA people (and anyone else across the ideological spectrum) who suffer the same calamities. This is not about politics but reality—we all endure inflation and jobs loss. The economy, like a natural disaster, doesn’t distinguish between what party you belong to or what news source you listen to. When the economy goes down, it takes most of us down with it.

On the material side, we need shared well-being. I don’t care what “side of the aisle” you relate to—we should all be taken care of as the real divide widens between those who have and those who don’t. That’s what government should do—it’s not “entitlements”—instead of catering to the wealthier and more powerful as it does now regardless of who’s in office (this includes Democrats and Republicans).

Government should free up abundance, instead of manufacturing scarcity.

On the spiritual side, human beings should never be divided into warring factions. Mature spirituality understands that God, Creator, or the Great Mystery, whatever you call the Divine, doesn’t care what color your skin is, or if you’re “Right” or “Left,” or what border you crossed. Earth still holds us; the Sun still shines. Spirit doesn’t care about sex, gender, or who you love (only certain humans do). National identities or party affiliations don’t hold sway. Spirit is not loyal to any nation or any flag. To be clear: It doesn’t care what religion you abide by—do you really think spirit cares who you pray to, how you pray, or what ritual you follow?

That may be good for you and perhaps your faith community. But mature spirituality cares about truth, beauty (art, song, dance, poetry, etc.), and decency. In the latter, are you good to your neighbors, the poor, the stranger? To those most in need. Just like Christ taught in the Gospels! Ultimately, we are all sacred, and even if you have no religion, the Divine, which is everywhere, holds us.

The earth, oceans, and sky are there for everyone (although there are real dangers of climate change). We all breathe the same air. We all walk the same ground. Only certain humans, under certain conditions, have declared some places and people are better or more worthy than others. If anyone claims a religion for this, they are enshrining their own shallowness and arrogance.

Nature has limitations and laws; society has chains.

Yes, have your faith. They’re valid to anyone adhering to a belief-system. But like borders, they are not universal for everyone. Don’t make “faith” a dividing line that forces us to hate and hurt one another.

We must stop falling for the divides that don’t matter. This requires growth in body, mind, and spirit beyond where our government, institutions, and too often our families have taken us. In that spirit, with that kind of governance (they don’t have to be in contradiction), we should declare: It’s time for shared well-being because everyone is sacred.

—Adrienne Rich

The issue of “reality” or “not reality” has become a battleground political one with the rise of MAGA fascism in the United States. It’s now a radical idea (and “dangerous” to boot) to want reality in schools, museums, libraries, and social institutions of our land.

What’s behind Trump trying to remove anything real about slavery, oppression, genocide, invasions, and unwarranted wars in U.S. history from our federally funded museums? Basically, it’s this: If anything upsets “Christian Nationalist” sensibilities when such-inclined people visit a bookstore or national park, it should be removed. The fragility of “racists” is now a concern of Trump’s government—and the Republicans locked-stepped behind him.

The Heritage Foundation, which wrote the “Project 2025” plan that Trump essentially adopted although he denied having anything to do with it, and organizations like Prager University (also known as PragerU) have been pushing a fantasized history of the so-called founding fathers, of Columbus’ “discovery” of America, of the “glory” of white settler culture and manifest destiny. Fantasies pushed on us for generations in history books, mass media, and institutions have been brought back. PragerU now has access to public schools in eight states although it’s not a “university”—it has no degrees or higher-ed credits. It’s meant to promote pro-capitalist and “America First” lies.

Starting in the 1970s after Civil Rights became the “law” of the land, curriculums began to tell the “other side” of the story. Not made-up history, but the actual calamities wrought by the class-and-race foundations of the United States (study and study—it’s all documented). This history included the struggles and triumphs against ideas, policies, and actions that are anti-Black, anti-Indigenous, anti-migrant, anti-labor, anti-women, and anti-Queer/trans.

It's all our “heritage.”

Today, the truths of this legacy are attacked as “critical race theory” or “DEI” (diversity, equity, and inclusion) or “woke.” Such works are being targeted in our teaching institutions as well as the depositories of our combined knowledge such as the Library of Congress.

Racist, misogynist, xenophobic, and homophobic small minds are now running the “asylum.”

When my bestselling memoir “Always Running, La Vida Loca, Gang Days in L.A.” first appeared in 1993, right-wing school board members wanted to ban it from reading lists and school libraries. My book joined others like “Why the Caged Bird Sings” or “To Kill a Mockingbird” or “The Bluest Eye.”

Why? Because the memoir brought “reality” into the classroom. Yes, “Always Running” is a graphic and stark literary work. It told the true-account of a Chicano gang member in the 60s and 70s, including the systemic race-class dynamic of Los Angeles County of the time. The book focused also on the discriminatory practices of the L.A.P.D. and L.A. County Sheriff’s Department. Bad policing led to the 1965 Watts Rebellion, the 1970s so-called East Los Angeles riots, and the 1992 Los Angeles Uprising. Deputy “gangs” that fueled street warfare and misapplied their authority got exposed in the early 1990s, although they had been active before and during the period covered in “Always Running.”

I took a risk in writing this memoir, unveiling the dark shroud that lay over our system of state control. Besides efforts to get rid of my book, I was attacked in some media circles and targeted by a few police officers (while other media and officers upheld what I wrote). In the end “Always Running” became popular among youth, students, and academics. It has sold over 650,000 copies. It’s considered one of the most stolen books in schools and libraries. It opened the door to gang memoirs of the time and those that followed. My book neither glorified gangs nor demonized them. The reality is more complex.

“Always Running,” and other books I’ve written since like “It Calls You Back,” “Hearts and Hands,” and “From Our Land to Our Land,” are part of my ongoing work as a leading gang interventionist and peace advocate. My experiences have mostly been in Los Angeles and Chicago, but also in countries like Mexico, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Peru, Argentina, England, Germany, and Italy. They’ve helped me continue facilitating writing workshops, poetry readings, and healing circles in prisons, jails, and juvenile lockups. Work I also do in Indigenous Reservations, Black and brown communities, and poor white areas. It also led to invitations to Paris, London, Sarajevo, Puerto Rico, and Tokyo, among others.

We need a full and complete account, not cherry-picked stuff that only show the “good things” this country supposedly did. Yes, there are many important things to say about the United States, especially the struggles that continue to make it more encompassing, embracing, and free (it’s got a long way to go, but I, for one, am committed to this fight).

Let’s tell the whole story.

This means addressing the hidden parts, the shadow side of our collective history, the systemic nature of class and race politics in the U.S., the empire created as well as the overthrow of other governments. If we don’t, we’ll keep pumping new blood into the false or distorted narratives.

Healing—personal, familial, and communal—is a key aspect of my work and message. But healing also includes the body politic. Healing shouldn’t exclude government or a different politics based on shared well-being. There are layers to all this. Micro and macro. Separate and all at once.

We need to reimagine and renew the whole system. We can start with being “real,” locally and globally, learning from all our history as well as the diversity of voices and lives: the good, the bad, the ugly, and beautiful. We can start with healing of the individual all the way up. Heal yourself but also heal the world. Currently our economy and politics are fragmented and unequitable. Even in chaos the strategically wise can find patterns. One important pattern is that something is dying as something is trying to be born. Let’s be clear on what these are… let’s become the midwives, as the Zapatistas say, of a new world holding many worlds.

I wasn’t born in Palestine. I don’t have direct lineage to the people who’ve lived there for thousands of years. I’m Palestinian because I’m human. Their ancestors are my ancestors as “mine” are theirs. During the Holocaust, I was Jewish. I wasn’t born during the Nazi genocide of Jews (I was born some ten years after the end of the Third Reich). But when they were being exterminated it impacted me tremendously.

I’m human. We have the same ancestors in the great human lineage of all ancestors.

When Africans were stolen from their homes as part of the Transatlantic slave trade, I never saw the inside of a slave ship or lived on the terrible plantations where they lost everything to help build this so-called country called “America.” But I was one of them.

I was Irish during the English colonialization and the famine. I was Lakota, Haudenosaunee (Mohawk), Laguna, Diné, and Chumash when their lands and livelihoods were taken away by European powers.

They are all my people.

How can I say this? Borders, nations, languages, belief systems—they came later. They were created under distinct historical circumstances, but what’s common about us is greater than what distinguishes us. Everyone has their stories, values, histories, expressions. Unique and valid. They are all human. Like me.

If you must know my genealogy, from at least 1,000 years, I’m Indigenous with roots in original Mexican peoples such as the Rarámuri, Chichimecas, and Nahuas (different peoples, different idioms, different myths). But we are all one.

I also have Iberian, other European, and African DNA. It’s all good and important to know. But I wasn’t born “fractured” or “mixed,” with “this blood and that blood.” My blood is human. I’m not “mestizo” (part of the Spanish casta system). I was whole and complete the day I was born.

While some in the U.S. have called me “foreigner,” “alien,” and “stranger” (and worse things than that); while a teacher slapped my face at six years old for speaking Spanish (another colonial language like English) in a Watts public school; while police harassed me in my barrio neighborhood in the San Gabriel Valley of Los Angeles County in the 1960s and early 1970s when Mexican migrant barrios were as poor as the Deep South, Appalachia, or any Indigenous Reservation (most of area is now “gentrified”)—and I lost four friends to police violence—my roots run deep.

I belong here and everywhere.

Am I bitter? No. I’m beyond “victimhood.” I embody a spirit of resistance, a revolutionary, who will fight for the liberation of the planet and its people—to remove all chains of social class, race, ethnicity, gender, sex, and whatever other oppressions have held us down for centuries.

I’m human above all else. I’m an Earth being. I’m for the whole integrated earth and sky systems. People-made systems are only any good if they align with these other natural and truly long-lasting systems. When they don’t, I will fight back—think, study, write, and organize.

I have agency. I’m human.

Israel and the United States are made up entities, no matter what Zionists or Christian Nationalists/MAGA may claim. Neither “God” or “manifest destiny” created them. They were founded on genocide. Israel against Palestine. United States against the original peoples of the land. Although I’m a U.S. citizen, I also have my own mind and heart: I’m critical of those entanglements that draw from and celebrate this history, this genocide.

Any genocide. All genocide.

Countries come and go. Humans continue. Parties and allegiances serve minimal and narrow things. Any religion does the same—except for the expansive and embracing believers, it’s their “god,” “their” rituals, “their” laws. Good for them, but not for everyone.

So as a human, beyond borders, country, or party, I say along with most of the world: We must stop the Genocide in Palestine. In any part of this planet. We are human first. Remember that. Not “America” first. Or this or that religion “first.” Or this piece of real estate “first.” We are one as human beings. Like the Yucatan Mayans say: “In Lak'ech, Ala K'in”—You are the other me; I’m the other you.

I’m Palestinian. Stop the Genocide now!