It’s time for us to be really honest with ourselves.  The United States is a police state.  We are sliding rapidly towards the kind of A.I driven totalitarian panopticon that eliminates pockets of dissent and freedom on the margins and off the grid. We have been stripped over my 45-year life of much of what gave the lives of Americans beauty and meaning. When beauty and meaning are stripped from you- make no mistake- your physical, mental and spiritual health withers away without their protective shade.

The severity of the situation is very stark and obvious from where I sit today in Oaxaca, Mexico. The street is lined with old trees, jacarandas and bougainvillea in bloom, and old fashioned streetlamps that probably date back 40 or 50 years.  There are no FLOCK license plate readers, A.I enabled to automatically send a 70 dollar ticket to your home address if they think you were driving 2 MPH over the speed limit.  There aren’t even traffic signals at most intersections- people just alternate driving through.  In the abundant shade of the lovely small parks dotted around the city,  mourning doves coo and sparrows twitter while old people, young people,  mothers with children, rest, chat and snooze on beautiful old ironwork benches that have no dividers to prevent unsheltered people from sleeping on them at night.  I have seen almost no sign of police or any instrument of state power since I arrived in Mexico, including in Mexico City. The only police I did see were standing around a public world cup watch party in the main Zocolo in the city,  and they were in normal old fashioned uniforms, not riot gear, basically minding their own business. They were only there to help if something dangerous happened,  not to harass and intimidate people.  I had the strange and foreign feeling that the police actually knew that their job is to protect and serve the people who pay them- not to terrorize, harm and kill them with impunity. I have seen many people driving cars in Mexico that have a smashed headlight or are missing a side mirror. I don’t see police pulling those cars over, handing the driver fines they obviously can’t pay,  screaming at them,  and maybe killing them if they have a darker shade of skin – because poverty is not treated as a crime or an opportunity to bully and rob someone when they’re vulnerable. Even the police seem to understand that here.

Here in Mexico there is an economy that allows many kinds of people to make a living based on their own skill, adaptability, ingenuity, and whatever level of capital they may have access to. There are street vendors, market vendors, craftspeople, cooks, and clowns and musicians selling and performing in the streets and parks. There are a million small businesses specializing in one thing or many things.  It is ludicrous that in the U.S so much lip service is paid to self-reliance and small business owners, and people pulling themselves up by the bootstraps, when in actuality the driving force behind the U.S economy for at least 45 years has been corporate consolidation, the expansion of bureacratic and funding hurdles that are impossible for anyone but deep-pocketed players to clear, and increasingly corporate monopolization or near-monopolization that makes the lives of Americans less prosperous, less healthy, more precarious and more expensive. Also, small businesses are far more heavily taxed and far more frequently audited and penalized for small tax infractions than large corporations, many of which pay no tax at all.

In many places in the U.S it is illegal to grow a garden in the yard of a house you OWN to FEED YOURSELF AND YOUR FAMILY.  And because we live in a police state, an armed agent of the state is probably going to show up at your door sooner or later and warn you,  then fine you money (money you probably don’t have if you’re economizing by growing your own food), and eventually stand there with a gun to supervise you while you pull the vegetables you planted out of the ground and put them in a plastic contractor bag headed for a landfill. If you refuse to do it, you might be arrested and taken to a prison which is run by a for-profit publicly traded corporation that up-charges your government every fiscal year and turns quarterly profits by taking massive amounts of the money you pay as a taxpayer for the privelege of incarcerating YOU for growing vegetables. We are literally paying our jailer to lock us up, and 9 times out of 10, we haven’t done anything that anyone in Mexico or any other civilized country would recognize as a crime. You truly can not make this shit up. These days in several states, police are being instructed to hand over trans folks they pull over in traffic stops to be disappeared into a concentration camp and tortured by ICE- « immigration and customs enforcement », which Trump has transformed into his private paramilitary force and his own concentration camp apparatus within the private prison industry.

What the FUCK does any trans U.S citizen have to do with the mission of IMMIGRATION AND CUSTOMS ENFORCEMENT?

Don’t answer that,  it’s a rhetorical question. I think we all know we’re well past the point of assuming any good will or any attempt at coherence on the part of those in power. 

So what is the point of writing this? I don’t intend this as a jeremiad or a weeping and gnashing of teeth, and I don’t intend to claim that Mexico or any other country is perfect or without faults and failings and corruption and crime.  That obviously isn’t the case.  I’m here for three weeks and then I’m going home to the only home I have or have ever had- the United States. However, I take with me a renewed clarity of vision that I want to share. 

The way we, the vast majority of regular, working class people live our lives in the United States is not normal.  It is not an accident that we live without freedom, without beauty, without connection, without rest, without peace. Our lives have been depleted, drained, confined, surveilled and extracted by design, by a small elite that benefits from us being systemically and systematically broken.

People like us all over the world do not live the way we live.

I know there is a plentiful aquifer of autonomy, joy, connection, grace, beauty, individual and collective liberation and flourishing beneath our feet in the place known as the United States of America. I know that potential, that aquifer is there- not because we Americans are exceptional or different from other people on earth (we’re not, and we were only propagandized our whole lives to believe we are in order to cut us off from our most viable path of liberation, which is connection and solidarity with our family around the world). No, we are the same, because we are human.

We must dig the wells in our own country to access and surface what is beneath us, running swiftly in the dark beneath our feet.  We must not give our active or passive consent to what is being done to ourselves, to our neighbors, or to our siblings all over the world by the rampant violence and the capitalist-imperialist modus operandi of our state. Everyone in the world deserves freedom, respect, beauty, mercy, and love-Including us.

Where to start? Create beauty and share it. Let us transform our environment wherever we are.  Let us build the oases we need in order to rest and smile. Healing requires resting and smiling, and a healed freedom fighter is stronger and a better bet in the battle ahead of us than a wounded and exhausted freedom fighter. Embody freedom in your choices small and large, regardless of surveillance and potential consequences. Say NO to what your soul rejects constantly, every day. Don’t let your conditioned anxiety about stepping out of line stop you. Manual override your training.

Practice showing respect to everyone you encounter. Show mercy, generosity, grace and love to all those you interact with. Every day, with as much humility, righteousness and courage as you can muster. I believe that if we all do this and if we all pull together, someday we may live in a free country, too.

Andalé, amigos.