Columns

This busy past week at Lake Chapala offered numerous proposals to help tackle currently-noted local dilemmas, meaning, the well-attended public security meeting at Ajijic’s Hotel Real December 7, and the community-centered conversation it has stimulated. Hopefully, the most effective, not merely the most dramatic, of these proposals can become permanent community-wide behavior and thought.

Alabama in Mexico? More Mexicans than you’d expect are aware of the fallout of Alabama’s radical new immigration law. They have family members or friends working there, or fleeing work there. The severe immigration law copied the law drafted by former Arizona state Senator Russell Pearce, who was recalled November 8. Pearce was a favorite of the Tea Party. Both were aimed, said supporters in both states, to make life so uncomfortable for illegal immigrants that they would leave. Alabama’s new law appears to be wreaking more economic havoc than its extremist conservative leaders expected.

“We spend our workdays behind desks or counters, exercising our minds and fine (if limited) motor skills,” writes Barbara Dafoe Whitehead, of the Institute for American Values. But what’s forgotten, she notes, is that America was built on muscle-stretching, back-wrenching, physical work crossed with alert survival instincts. If you didn’t have both, you died, or failed and turned back.

Mexico, 1910-1929. Days of a “good” Revolution, boast governments that have come afterwards, all saying it ended in 1921. That’s reassuring fakery. There was the nearly successful 1923 rebellion coordinated by commandantes (governors) of Jalisco, Oaxaca, Veracruz and other states; the “uprising of the generals” in 1929, lead by General Gonzalo Escobar, put down only with the aid of the United States.

Summer, early 1950s. Three companies of bootcamp draftees are on a firing range to live-fire for the first time an Army Colt .45 caliber pistol. Instructors patrol their charges, giving instructions as a bullhorn in a tower snaps commands. Everything is done “by the numbers”: each step clearly defined to be exactly performed. After hours of sighting, aiming and dry-firing, young men aim their weapons at targets that seem far away. As the noncoms repeat the tower’s commands, they aim the heavy pistols. Precisely on command, they fire their first .45 round down range. All except one who, also precisely on command, shoots himself in the temple, spattering two recruits on his left with blood, barely missing them with the bullet. The Korean War is raging. Some of the training cadre are back from seeing hastily called-up reservists get slaughtered because they’re out of shape, poorly trained. New draftees find hard Korea-era basic training dismaying.

“Even now, the easiest way to get into an argument at a VFW (or an American Legion) bar is to mention Vietnam. Seared into all who fought it – and many who merely lived through it – that conflict remains a bitter stew of second-guessing and recriminations”

– Time magazine’s Mark Thompson talking with author Lewis Sorley