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.
Some suggestions – often by implication – shed light on thoughtful far-reaching concepts requiring long-term commitments to effectively attain significant remedies. Several of these already are being addressed by individuals or small, quietly productive groups.
Foreign visitors and, especially, full-time residents in Mexico must keep in mind not only the trieñio changes in local government, but the longer term of the state governor, as well as the rapid turnover of all officials, especially at the local level. As one security meeting participant noted, it was too bad that the Chapala Ministerio Publico was not represented. That frequently over-worked office is a lynch-pin in prosecuting malefactors of every type. It can become – as switches in personnel occur – either a god-send to those whose rights are being violated under Mexican law, or a place of torment and abuse, a home of timidity and corruption. (Foreigners should be acquainted with this condition, for the local, state and federal governments often tend to nourish such failings.)
This means if you want a semi-sanely administered municipality, you can’t have merely a short spate of vigorous meetings, and once things seem to have improved, stop paying attention to what federal, state and local government is up to. It is true that one can have the most influence – at least sometimes – locally. But, actually, if a large number of like-minded people decide on a common community-nourishing goal and then begin pushing it hard at the state level you can gain some traction. But this implies a knowledge of Spanish and of how Mexico and Mexican government works – or doesn’t work, depending on one’s point of view.
It takes patience, persistence and stubborn optimism. And in creating a common view of somewhat like-mind people, a keen sense of reasonable compromise – a trait that seems unpopular now.
It’s most rewarding to know what your short-term goals are, and what the longer – often more difficult to achieve – goals need to be.
Such advice can seem to be easy Dr. Phil-like stuff. And the “You only get what you pay for!” maxim can apply. But such advice comes from more than four decades of watching, organizing, leading and participating in more meetings, public and private, with “authorities” than one cares to count. Some worked, several were hugely successful. A great many either did not work, or were successes merely superficially, or for such short terms that they were, in sum, negligible — mere scams by politicos or well-connected individuals who had no real interest in the well-being of their constituents, clients, or fellow citizens. Many such folks did not lack charm or social skills – in fact they had too many. What they lacked, of course, was honesty, any sense of responsibility, intellectually or morally.This newspaper, and this space, has devoted thousands of words to public and private security over the last three decades. One has to both possess and demonstrate stubborn optimism. That attitude was touched upon, though not explicitly, by Jorge “Churro” Campos at last week’s public security meeting (as cited in the Reporter, December 10, by Dayle Hoyt Palfery, pg. 19) and in an article “Polishing One’s English,” by John Pint. Both Campo and Pint make their points clearly enough for readers to extrapolate how they can contribute time and possibly resources (not specifically money) to helping turn young people away from an enticing life of drugs and crime. (Public schools are often nidos (nests) of mota commerce. In one local prepa girls are enticingly turning on young, especially male, classmates to marijuana).
To more specifically make the case: A young mountain-reared muchacho of 14, while doing better in prepa than his family thought he’d do, — obviously, absent a bold stroke of fate — will never become an academic student. He has a sure touch with animal husbandry. He has his own horse, and an assorted menagerie. In the seventh grade, he is being taught what older gringos called “shop” when they were in junior high (now known ambiguously as “middle school”). For some reason, astonishing to his parents, he’s captivated by the rudiments of basic electrical repair. And as “well-educated” Mexicans and foreigners here demonstrate daily, anyone with the “rocket-science” knowledge to screw in a light bulb, can make a good living in this “technological age.” To make this case more explicitly, I was reared on ranches and farms. I own a good supply of hard-used hand tools (someone just gave me a large early 20th-century German pocket knife for Christmas), while at the same time pawing through a library of perhaps a thousand-plus books.
So the first job is to teach Leno the value of a tool. (Then teach him that books also are tools). Poor and country folks sometimes do not value the instruments they depend on, even if they come very “dear.” For, even though Leno doesn’t realize it, he’s about to become much more self-reliant, have a closer, more active, less passive and befuddling relationship with his and his family’s “stuff.”
I would be happier, in some ways, if we were talking about Mexican history, which is both exciting and dramatic – as well as being baffling and melancholy – for teenagers. Mexican history is about as well taught here as religion was taught to me in high school – meaning with slews of twisted “facts” and censored realities.
Instead. I will discuss with Leno the “spiritedness called forth when we take things in hand for ourselves, whether to fix them or make them.” The unfashionable, but indispensable, art of hand work is becoming more valuable everyday as various economies implode, sowing distress everywhere. The phrase, “it’s too expensive to fix,” will have become nearly obsolete by the time this decade is out. And Leno, quite possibly, will be able to ride that change to a life of versatility, of manual work that many of his elders and contemporaries will be unable to perform. As their incompetence grows, his “labor” – despite his aversion to the education modern government blindly wishes to press upon him – will become more prized. He will become – with luck and desire – true to his nature as Homo faber.