Columns

The New Year’s first days – and weeks – traditionally pique the challenging urge to create a list of well-intentioned resolutions. For many people this is a briefly uplifting but ultimately doomed effort. It seems natural for humans to pine for ambitious, scribbled columns of what turn out to be miracles.

Feliz año, and best wishes for running into at least a few revelatory, unintentional encounters as this new year gets underway. Experientially edifying moments. Some people talk about experiences because they were fun. It makes them happy, and that’s good. But often unforeseen experiences change our lives, teaching us things that change us, sometimes in large ways, sometimes in small.

Christian colonists in the New World were often hostile to celebrating Christ’s birth. In North America and in Nueva España – Spain’s Latin American conquests – some didn’t like the idea at all. There were divisions in their own ranks. Sometimes it was a rejection of established Christian dogma, sometimes of widely accepted Christian practices. Sometimes liturgical history.

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.