The rules of engagement have changed

A few years ago I was on a road in southern Honduras. I had been there one or two weeks working a case and was, finally, going to the airport, headed home, obliviously driving a convertible Mustang in one of the world's poorest countries. 

I came up on a checkpoint and was questioned by a policeman. At some point he asked for a bribe. Instead of giving him some pittance, I scolded him: He was a disgrace! A policeman! He was one of the reasons his country was sliding into the abyss.... 

I had just screwed up terribly.

There was no mistaking the evil that emanated from him. Clearly he was contemplating killing me. His face became contorted. You could see the pure evil engulf him. And for an excruciatingly long three or five seconds, I savored the prospect of a violent death.

But it wasn't my time to die, maybe because I hadn't embarrassed him in front of the other officers or maybe he just didn't have the time. 

The debate about Alex's murder now centers around the fact that he had a gun. "Why bring a gun to a protest?" is, on a loftier philosophical plane, a valid question. You can debate it back and forth and in that process the truly salient point - that he was the hapless victim of murder, that the gun is just an after-the-fact rationalization, is lost. It wasn't his exercise of his right to carry a gun that got him killed. It was the lack of respect for the first amendment.

The things we take for granted as birthright appear now more and more like ignorant fantasies. The rules of engagement have changed and we must take note of that. 

This administration sees us as something to be dominated, not governed. Alex had no way of knowing that we were playing by new rules, but now, we do. We need to stay on our toes.  Do not underestimate what they will do, how they will deny, fabricate, justify or cover up and what they will use against you. Stand tall but be wary.

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A Sobremesa

 A Sobremesa

Frustrated and depressed from the crushing world news that things are far from getting better, I took a break from Facebook this morning and went and made myself some Puerto Rican comfort food; maduros and eggs-over-easy, and buttered white bread. I shared them with the oldest child. We were having a sobremesa, that time when the meal is over and you just lollygag around sharing moments with loved ones.

"Yeah," she said, "you tell me that every time." I had told her what "maduro" meant and then launched into an etymological explanation of the word. "I know," she said. She was good natured about it, but, still, damn it, I had to explain to her why I constantly launch into tutorials about things ostensibly mundane, that it wasn't pedantry, that it was because I care; that while we live in comfort, it hasn't always been that way for me and that I appreciate the responsibility that comes with, that I would rather risk repeating myself than miss an opportunity to share something with her that may or may not be important, that the important part was the sharing. 

Every decade, I explained, I've noticed how geometrically my understanding of the universe had expanded, that ruefully I had come late in life to the meanings of things - etymological or otherwise - and that, while my mother was the sun in my universe, I couldn't help but wonder where I would be had I not had a parent hobbled by education, language proficiency, and a poverty survival mode to help me piece some of life's mysteries together. 

My kids, my partner's kids, are beneficiaries of where he and I find ourselves. Our kids have had tremendous advantages and I have seen how it has yielded the quality people that they have all become. I credit the fact they they have been presented with positive role models that take a proactive approach to their education and life choices and I try to pay it forward.

And then I told her another story about the time my mother came home to the catastrophe of the "hair cuts" I had given my brothers. She chuckled at my misadventures; my butchering their hair, trying to hide it by making everyone wear paper bag hats, my mother lining us up and forcing uncover, her over-the-top Latina reaction.  And somehow, the carnage in Minnesota - at least for these precious moments - seemed far away.

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