by Ernest Morrell

Flight

The alarm. The battle against time and dispensation. Heavy steps and traffic jams and crowded lines and passport conversations. Pulling back from the gate and the release from obligation. Travel is transformation. The watered eyes, the resolute gaze, the wheels leave ground. The sons still covered in blankets and the secrecy of dawn. To Mexico then, toward the skies and what is home but a dot from an airplane’s window?

Day 1

I went to Southern Mexico City today to visit the famous Casa Azul, which was Frida’s home as a child, the hiding place for Trotsky, and Frida’s getaway from Diego. It is also the place that she moved back to before she died. Coyoacan is an amazing small colonial neighborhood where Frida grew up. I walked its plazas and gardens and listened to the gringo music emanating from its shallowed ceiling cafes. I also went to San Angel and visited the homes of Diego and Frida. They really are two separate dwelling places with a bridge between them. Both homes are so simple and modest and breathtaking architecturally. I understand the city from North to South and how the Central Historico heads southward to Coyoacan and San Angel. The City University (UNAM) is also down there. It is home to 250,000 students. Wow. I would love to get a visiting professorship there one day. I also bought a couple of books, Diego’s autobiography and a collection of Frida’s writings. She was quite the prolific writer of essays, letters, and even poems. Letter writing was an art form back then. In one letter she wrote to Diego while she was in Paris, it was at least 15 pages long handwritten and she mostly talked about art and politics. Their lives were very streamlined about art, social engagements, and political action. I actually saw the handwritten letters in her museum.

It only makes sense to live. It only makes sense to write. It only makes sense to act. What else is there in this life? There is so much to do; I want a bookshelf of words that are contributions to the world of ideas. I see novels and plays and head shaking antics, emptied bank accounts and travels and guest lectureships and world leaders, philosophy books, empirical research, universities and art houses and foundations and film and media and oceans and wine and tequila and smiles and sunsets and years. There is no other option really. Time to focus on production; time to streamline; time to get it into gear; time to step up and join the party of the world.

That night at the Plaza Garibaldi surrounded by Mariachis and the homeless toothless reposado in plastic cups and the belligerent Ruben with his one and a half arms in Spansih English slurred fusion the sun set and the eyes of judgment. Then a cab down to the Zocalo at dusk and the square and the people walking circles around the heart of Mexico and churros rellenos.

Near the end and I knew I would dream in Spanish and wake to the fourteenth floor view of the sprawl, looking through puffs of white plumes through to the azul cielo, the plantas, the sounds of industry, the hills, the monuments, the streets of revolution and insurgency, the smells of coffee and the bustle of civilization.

Day 2

My eyes are swollen with exhaustion from the spring that lasted until August. My feet are cracked and my heart jabs against the ribs, making my shoulder numb. My joints are old and my mind is filled with empty things. The pangs of commerce, the will to philosophize; the dichotomy of art and the search for reglas, for familia, for change. I have taught from the podium, I have walked the hallways looking at the photos of soothsayers in robes of black. I have listened to the testimony of the jovenes, read the poemas about Watts and gunshots, the auto-ethnographies of the cultures of the American streets. My children sang before the senators, who clapped against their blue and yellow suits and promised universes and sands. The negro bars and colleges across the bridge and mist. Jail is more likely for the suns of Africa I saw the numbers and I heard the cries of the mothers; the Spiderman lunchpails left on the schoolyards, ghetto testimony sprawled across the concrete canvass. Platitudes of hatred.

Who among us is strong enough to climb the steps? Who can hear through the headphones of the suburbs? The television spits in fragments, the songs have all been edited and the choruses are whispered. I remember 1967 and Jefferson Airplane and the Velvet Underground. I remember the Afros and the panthers. I hear the hooves of horses galloping down the Avenue Insurgences. I see the flags waving from the balconies. A boat sails toward an island in the sea and children lay in streets in the wake of tanks. Tired legs and a battle of the bus. Colonies rebel, the ballots are recounted, the bras burned, the books read from the soapboxes of urban plazas. They shot Trotsky here. Montezuma still cries beneath the shadows and the lights.

The Zocalo is the second largest public square in the world, only behind the Red Square of Moscow. I’ve never been. And half of the nations population lives in one percent of its space, atop the plateau, halfway between the planet and the gods. The sprawl echoes for miles. The winds of change juxtaposed against the narratives of tribes and gold and saints and art and revolutions. The city of five names and twelve histories and an army of men…Cuahtemoc, Cortes, Benito, Emiliano, Suarez Orozco, Paz, and the travelers through.

The city of the district and the party and the Americas.

Am I ready now for what I must do? Contemplation breeds desire. I need money and the pulpit. I need an army of love I need the sacred arms of friendship I need the courage of the rock I need forgiveness I need the candle and the sword I need another world I need the promises of time I need the permission I need the bones and organs to heal I need a lifetime I need to change the world. I need a cause. I need to listen to the rantings of a restless soul. I need the crossroads. I need the discourse. I need the comrades. I need the chaos and the calm. Two routes out of the firestorm. My needs are simple and, I swear, my heart is pure.

Tequila with coffee
Tequila with sunrise
Tequila with breakfast
Tequila with sad eyes

A return to the Zocalo in daylight amongs the hordes of citizens and touristas paying homage to the gothic towering buildings that surround that vast open space, that lone pole, that towering flag, that symbol of Mexicanidad. Then after the tequila breakfast a stumble into the Palacio Nacionale where a tet a tet with the murals of Diego, close enough to touch, to smell, to taste the passion and the anger and the visions of past, present,and future of the master. His political art across walls, from the balcony, up the stairs and down hallways. Indigenous tribespeople at one with the land, hands en la tierra, the coming of industry, the workers in solidarity, the Huelga, the visions of empowered proletariat, the connections to the indios of the past. The precision of industry, the generativity of the soul. Diego is Mexico; his murals are the spirit of a nation.

And then the mercados and everything from prescription glasses to Nike shorts twenty pesos, ten pesos, and it is even too croweded to do anything but shuffle forward toward an open space. Food cooked right out on the streets. Tacos con carne, ninas with ice cream, the music and the sunlight. Life. People, bodies in proximity, a city heartbeat with blanketas spread across the calle.

UNAM. Modern towers, students on bicicletas and playing futbol in the courtyards, the massive spaces, the murals, the lounging conversations on the grassy spaces. The confidence of youth, the quest for knowledge, the urge for justicia; liberty and land atop a building mural, hands fashioning science and art, and solving the equations of life; the global citizen, the protests and the riots enscribed into the flesh of passing buildings. Here they marched and died and the world was watching and France and the streets and schools in the North in Berkeley and such. The university is life and aesthetic; the university is the artery that pumps the blood into the veins of a republic; the university is food for thought and a call to action; the university is substance and conscience; its youth are loud and armed with words and wills. They cannot be silenced having read and studied so much and still believing in freedom more than wealth; and looming across the quad is El Stadio Olympico. Its solar panels arched toward the heavens.

The revolution stretches across six domains. First for me is teaching. Who will I teach and what do I have to say the foolishness of thinking that we learn it all by ourselves of course we need legitimate participation, but only as we practice near those who have some skill. Teaching is showing, we teach with our lives, with our words, we teach with our hands and our hearts. I teach at the lecturn, in the kitchen and on long drives through canyons and Oceansides. I teach in the schools and neighborhoods with teams of youth researchers as we document evidences of inequity and hope. I teach in books and chapters and poems and articles and the second dimension is research. To provide important information that will help people to live better lives. That is our task and whether it is ethical philosophy, literary theory, mathematical formulas, chemistry, or pedagogy the goal is the same; knowledge for personal growth and global citizenship. The third is writing and the words are maps and mirrors, the texts are testaments; to write is to expose and to reveal; to enter into dialogue with the world and the reader. The dialectic yields to progress the vision widens and deepens and the fourth is action. To join or create a structure for transformation. Collective actions require participatory structures; committees and foundations, schools and parties, centers, institutes, congresses, and unions and even armies, but peaceful ones. With whom will I march, Who shall I house? To whom do I hold alliegance? Under what principles do I stand. We all stand for something even if only a quiet cheer for the status quo. Nothing is something when the cities burn and children die in multiples of ten. I watched a man burn to death, but it was only on television and what could I do but sip my coffee in silence and in shame? The fifth is giving and the de-accumulation of wealth how do we balance the scales and share in the treasures of the planet? Giving takes preparation and courage. Giving is time and capital and what kind of world if we all gave until the scars were visible? And last is living we are a revolution in our actions in our values in our life in what we show as possible in where our feet are pointed in who and how we love and dream in who sits at our tables. The body is text and life; well life is a talking poem.

Day 3

In the spirit of Che and Neruda and all of the others who have come to these streets in search of revolution and poetry. What have I witnessed? What have I learned? The words come like angels with daggers, they caress like a jagged hammer. I am instructed and jolted into a course of action that was in place all along, only with greater speed and determination I suppose and just how long is the world supposed to wait for us to become ourselves. Upon my return I have publishers and editors and public speeches. I have centers and institutes. I have soccer and Agoura Hills, I have loose ends and media and a five-month hiatus from the grind. I walked the Botanical garden in Chapultepec and inhaled with extra oxygen the aromas of a city in transition but then again it has always been from the Teotihuacan to the Aztecs and colonial empires indepence and of course the revolutions and I saw the museum of anthropology and the story of the natives of this place we call America bonded civilizations and smart apartment living even among the ancients and as Diego said, maybe we will come full circle.

Diego also said that art is the release of emotion and I spent most of the day impacting the supply of tequila to the city staring at the shot glass out of the 10th floor window of the Marco Polo hotel out at my life and the journey thus far, those who doubted, my own doubts, those who have died along the way, grandparents and students and I stared at my resolute will, my lifelong friends, and the challenges that confont us in our struggle for justice and art. I was overwhelmed and humbled. Filled with more fear and more resolve, more humility and even more ambition, the worlds hurled at me in two languages, the smell of smog and rain and hope. I do not know what lurks around the corner of time, but god yes, I will be running anyways. I have no choice and even with the spicy tacos rumbling in my stomach and thoughts of mi diario (yes, that is what you are; I have figured you out, you are my thoughts affixed to time with the stamp of language) running through my raging mind and the vino tinto and the mariachis and the journey inward to the Macchu Pichu of my existence. And do I like the view? What I see will take a lifetime to describe; a fucking lifetime whether I fall down from the steps and crack my skull of last into the eighties on a hammock by the sea, I do my best because this is what I do.

I woke up drunk with a stomachache with Spanish words and Spanish poems. I will place them here for the time being, because they have nowhere else to go.

Tequila Tristeza

Tequila sonrisa
Tequila sorpresa
Tequila dolorada
Tequila tristeza

Tequila cariño
Tequila a mis suenos
Tequila a mi lado
Tequila con vino

No puedo hablar
No puedo oir
No puedo vivir
Solamente tengo que venir
Tequila en mi vida
Tequila en mi sangre
Tequila en las palabras
Tequila salida
Tequila sonrisa
Tequila desayuna
Tequila mi amiga
Tequila mi tristeza

Tequila Sadness

Tequila at sunrise
Tequila surprises
Tequila and the suffering
Tequila, the sadness

Tequila and the caring
Tequila in my daydreams
Tequila is my witness
Tequila and the wine

I am not able to speak
Neither am I able to hear
I am not even able to live
I only have to keep coming

Tequila is in my life
Tequila is in my veins
Tequila lives in my words
Tequila opens doors

Tequila at sunrise
Tequila for breakfast
Tequila my friendship
Tequila my sadness

Mariachis y Mafiosos

Vienen los mariachis
Sienten los mafiosos
Hombres con muchachas
Hombres con mucho dinero
En la restaurante bonito
Debajo los cielos negros
Escuchando a la banda
Canciones de amor y tristesa

Comieron los mariachis
Comieron los mafiosos
Con su Jack Daniels con vino
Hombres pensaron americanos
En al restaurante pequeno
Encima de la ciudad Nuevo
Cerca de las miembras de la banda
En la noche de tequila y tristesa

Salieron los mariachis
Salieron los mafiosos
Hombres con muchachas
En trajes con corbatas rojos
En las calles de la noche
En las calles casi vacio
Cancinando de sangre y esperanza
Con su orgullo y tristesa

Mariachis and Mafiosos

In came the mariachis
Down set the mafiosos
Grown men with little girls
Grown men with too much cash
In the pretty restaurant
Underneath the darkening skies
Listening to the band
And their songs of love and sadness

Then ate the mariachis
Then ate the mafiosos
With their Jack Daniels and red wine
Mexican men thinking American
In the tiny restaurant
In the new Mexico City
Close to the members of the band
On a night of tequila and sadness

Out went the mariachis
Out went the mafiosos
Grown men with little girls
In their suits with the red ties
Out into the streets of the night
Out into the almost empty sidewalks
Singing of blood and hope
Filled with both pride and sadness

Al Tercer Tiempo

Al tercer tiempo
Con las poemas en lenguas extranjeras
Una vida por una semana
Una causa, un abrazo de la patria Latin Americana

No puedo volver
Sin las palabras intellegentes y picadas
A una vida sin poder, sin alma
A una tormenta sin paz, sin calma

No puedo escribir
En mi idioma de mi casa propia
Las frases de opportunidad y monedas
De suenos de negociocos y las bodas

Al tercer tiempo
Con las palabras bonitas extranjeras
Una vida por una semana
Una causa, un abrazo de me patria Latin Americana

Upon The Third Visit

This is the third time
That I am with these poems in foreign tongues
Living a lifetime in the space of a week
With a cause, an embrace from a Latin American country

I am not able to return
Without these intelligent and spicy words
To a life without power, without soul
To a storm without peace, without calm

I am not now able to write
In the language of my proper house
Those phrases about opportunity and coin
About dreams and finance and weddings

This is the third time
That I am with these beautiful foreign words
Living a lifetime in the space of a week
With a cause, an embrace from my Latin American country

Day 4

Woke up late. Felt awful. Forced down dry eggs and coffee for breakfast. Found a taxi to the bus depot. Took the bus to Teotihuacan. Climbed to the top of the Pyramid of the Sun. Sat amongst the gods and goddesses as close to heaven as I’ll ever get.

Day 5

I believe that we have the potential to end world poverty and bring a level of human dignity to the lives of everyone on the planet. I believe in democracy and literacy. People need to be educated at a level that would allow them to adequately participate in a peaceful multicultural democracy. Without an educated citizenry, there can be no democracy, only the illusion of democracy. With an educated citizenry, however, there would be no poverty, and far less oppression and hate. People receive their educations via the schools, the media, and art so it makes sense to give them access to these institutions and to support those work to educate for justice via these institutions.

We have to believe that the average citizen, given access to the proper information would do the right thing if we are going to believe in democracy. But we can also present the average citizen with a palpable revolution that appeals to their sense of human decency and that appears to them like existential gain. A palpable revolution is win-win for the overwhelming majority of the population who can learn to appreciate living in smaller spaces, driving smaller cars that run on cleaner fuel, and they will pay higher taxes to support better schools that increase the intellectual capital of the civilizations that will increase the need for information and manufacturing industries and generate the knowledge to more effectively use and distribute the resources we have in ways that will virtually eliminate the abject poverty that exists in so many places on the planet. Some will have more than others and that is okay, but nobody would be without and hating someone because of how they look would appear to the world as evil and misguided as our worse atrocities of the past. Because we would need to work less and we would have more in the way of peace and human understanding and we would live longer healthier lives filled with more art, more music, more scientific advancements, and more palpable instantiations of human excellence. The person with the potential to develop the cure for cancer may be entering a schoolhouse with no books and no toilet paper. And we would undernourish that brilliant mind to our collective human peril. We can give the average citizen concrete actions on the educational, environmental, economic, and existential fronts that would decrease illiteracy, poverty, environmental pollution, racism, hatred, oppression, disease, and war. Of course there are the few that benefit from these maladies, but most don’t.

Part of this education for global citizenship requires us to expose our young to the ideas of philosophy and to have them interrogate the essential questions of what is right, what is good, how do we come to know truth and who has the power to generate knowledge and for what purposes? What does it mean to truly exist and what is the purpose of knowing at all? Hopefully our youth would understand their collective power to redefine the aesthetics of a good person and a good life to mean more than the simple accumulation of capital.

Outside of the Catedral de Cuernava sit indigenous women selling mass produced souvenirs for the profit of men who look very much like the men who forced their ancestors to build that magnificent edifice to the God who stands for love and wisdom. Barely a quarter of a mile down the street rest the frescoes of the master, Diego Rivera. These murals depict in great (and grave) detail the conquest, the slaughter, the torture, and the enslavement of the various native tribes by the Spaniards leading to the building of the very building (El Palacio de Cortes) in which the frescoes exist! In the intervening 500 years between the initial series of events and the present much has changed and little has changed and now the children of the educated citizens walk past these women filled with judgement and disgust as they pay their $37.00 pesos to oogle at the paintings of the master that critique the very horrors that we continue to perpetuate through our silence and manufacturing consent and cant we see those eyes peeling from the well manicured walls and asking us to look at ourselves in the same critical detail that we do the exceptional piece of art and history.

Has this diary taken a turn and what does a writing vacation have to do with self-righteous babble? The wine tasted fresh and the views of the Catedral from the balcony of the Marco Polo restaurant superb. Diego up close can take one’s breath away. I love this place. A part of me has come to Cuernavaca to stay forever, but I cannot be completely content to witness great beauty in the presence of great suffering unless I commit myself to the struggle to make things otherwise. If we see and we know then we have no choice but to act. I am almost back home in my mind, but then I know what I must do and I know that I too am home here with this beauty, with this art, this pain, these people, this one and only planet. Who am I to say such things? Same things said Che, same things said Neruda, and Frida, and Gandhi, and all the others whose words are relegated to t-shirts and tattoes and maybe the point is not to be original so much as effective. All I see right now is myself and my responsibility; all I see are gente; I see the color brown. I see Rueben and Teto; I see the rocky steps that ascend toward heaven. I see blood, soil, I see the Volkswagon taxis, and the fruit vendors, and the modern towers, and the trees, and the flyers, and the fountains, and the monuments, and the children selling gum, and the mariachis, and the spirit and the fire; I see the writings on the wall. I see fraces and palabras; I see so much I can hardly see at all.

Hernan Cortes and his men sacked Tenochitlan in the name of God and gold. It an old story told mostly in Spanish in a mostly Catholic nation. I have the stomach flu and my head hurts. Belts on the street run $1 American; they may be massed produced in Taiwan; the Korean television sets may be manufactured under slave-like conditions in the maquiladores near the United States border by central American immigrants in route to the U.S. If the sneak through Arizona they may be shot or die of dehydration. But if they make it to Los Angeles there will be plenty of work in our restaurants, our hotels, and our mansions. The thing about globalization is that it takes a whole world to conspire to fuck up the world. When wealth tastes like hatred and we all look so much alike we wont be mistaken for anything other than people with working minds and beating hearts borne out of the wombs of our mothers and still in search of food and love and oh so lucky to be chosen to breathe in the air and be alive. After a nap I am thinking about rum and music. The rage and writing have awakened a thirst that needs to be quenched.

Day 6

Museo de Arte Moderno. What was it about Mexico City in the 1930s and 1940s that produced such an explosion of art and culture? And where are the Fridas, the Diegos, the Siquieros’ of today these same celebrated even during their lifetimes and who can name ten living painter politicos today who ink and oil and march and passion and play on the ferris wheel of the moment the women and soil and Movado and the people of the pastoral earth, their faces like bulls and the sculpture of the robed nuns. Deco, Cubist with the flavor of tierra y liberdad to study in Paris and Madrid and to paint the narratives of home and what a city and what a day to galavant down the avenida of insurgencies or the passage of reform to stare at the shadows of the sun on monuments of stone and blood and hope and I haven’t given up on my own staring nose to nose at the sketches of Remedios Varo Uranga sniffing at the aged paper eyeballing the indentations on the skin where the pencil left the “Unsuspected Visit” and “The Call” with their goth-like elongated bodies melded into the buildings of the modern.

Art is existence and even with celluloid movement and digitization and the canvas calls, the clay demands to be molded into form our streets are too empty our voices too shallow the names too timid, and the galleries too few. The artists too hungry and Jose Clemente Orozco (1883-1949) and Diego Rivera (1886-1957), Jose David Alfaro Siquieros (1896-1974), Frida Kalho (1907-1954), Lupe Marin, Jose Chavez Movado, and all of the other children of the Mexican revolution who dared to live and paint and love!

Art today lacks the consensus not that the lack of consensus, in and of itself, is troubling. But I wonder of the substance of the conversation. Who is talking to whom and what is being said I want to know. What happens to the production of art when the conversation is lacking? What happens to the world?

Day 7

I am not free until we are ALL free- Nelson Mandela

After an early morning checkout and a taxi ride to the Benito Juarez Airport of Mexico City then began a long game of hurry up and wait and boarding an airplane on to be de-boarded and sent to another gate half an airport away and told to wait an additional hour and then have your bags checked all over again. What could happen in a walk across an airport after having gone through security and having the bags checked a second time before getting on the plane? Such is the way with travel. I am weary, the stomach is not in the best shape, and I could use a rest from the vacation, but outside of my window from the plane I see the vast beauty of the Sonora desert dotted by plumes of white clouds that cast shadows as they dance across the brown earth. Soon we will cross the boarder into the United States’ air space or maybe we already have. From this vantage point I can see no borders. All I see is the earth and maybe that is the point. The earth is my home and the human family is my family. I goddamned better well fight for them, don’t you think? My journey has been forward and inward. Not much sleep, but my groggy eyes are seeing better than they have in awhile. This text is written to me first, my diary; it represents my look in the mirror of my own soul through the travels in another land. But I want to share with you my palpable revolution, what I have learned and where my travels will take me.

The Palpable Revolution
Following is a short list of little and not-so-little things that the average educated citizen could do to save humanity and the planet. If every citizen were to do her or his best to practice all of the suggestions on this simple list, this would be more than a small revolution

SECTION ONE: HUMAN DIGNITY AND HUMAN EDUCATION

1. The average citizen can practice unconditional love for all living people and work to develop meaningful relationships with others across multiple lines of difference. Empathy and understanding come through love. And everyone deserves to love and be loved in return. Everyone is entitled to be treated with dignity and respect, and to be able to enjoy the pleasures of life and the experience of human freedom.

2. The average citizen can practice antiracism, anti-sexism, anti-classism, and actively oppose any forms of hate or human oppression.

3. The average citizen can advocate for universal access to a worthy and dignified literacy and numeracy education.

a. This means being willing to be taxed at higher rates and also holding states and nations accountable for educating all of its citizens to at least a high school diploma. All citizens of the planet are entitled to a fair and equitable education experience from primary school through postsecondary education. People can demand that governments provide more resources to schools, more scholarships, better pay for teachers, etc.

4. The average citizen can advocate for universal access to health care to reduce the number of deaths from treatable diseases, the infant mortality rate, and preventable diseases like HIV/AIDS, which threatens more than 20 million citizens on the continent of Africa alone.

5. The average citizen can educate themselves on issues of national and international importance and vote. The average citizen can educate her friends and family as well.

6. The average citizen can support the arts and all of those who work to bring messages of hope and understanding through music, painting, sculpture, dance, writing, film, and any other medium of communication through federal grants, personal consumer choices. Without a well-apprenticed and well-supported cadre of artists, we will lose touch with our sense of humanity. I cannot overstate the relationship between a free and subsidized artistic production and the revolution I envision.

SECTION TWO: SHARING THE LIMITED RESOURCES OF THE PLANET

If everyone on the planet lived at the standard of living of those in the United States, we would need three planets worth of resources to sustain them. And if all citizens of the planet were to consume in the same way that we do in the United States, the impacts of global warming would be catastrophic. The palpable revolution requires all citizens to support and engage in practices that would allow for more equitable distribution and conservation of the earth’s precious and limited resources.

7. The average educated citizen can live in the smallest dwelling place possible and encourage responsible urban development with more apartments, condominiums, and connected homes.

8. The average educated citizen can take public transportation or walk when possible.

9. The average educated citizen can drive the smallest vehicle possible and, when possible, drive hybrid cars or cars that run on cleaner fuels. The educated citizen can put pressure on governments and corporations to develop cleaner fuels.

10. The average citizen can develop a personal (or family) plan that includes drastic steps to reduce water and electric consumption.

11. The average citizen can recycle all plastic, aluminum, and paper goods.

12. The average citizen can buy products from companies that are friendlier to the environment.

SECTION THREE: ECONOMIC JUSTICE

Without economic justice, how can we expect peace? With so many resources on the planet, how is it that so many have so little? We define ourselves largely by our utility, by our service. Take away a person’s ability to be useful and you have taken away their dignity. The world’s richest 1% owns 40% of the world’s wealth and the poorest 50% collectively own 1% of the world’s wealth. Shame on us. Just shame on us is all!

13. The average citizen can support a livable wage and access to clean and safe housing for all fully employed citizens.

14. The average citizen can place pressure on governmental bodies to create decent and respectable jobs for all who seek jobs and to create transition and skill development programs for those who need to develop the skills needed to function in the postindustrial global marketplace.

15. The average citizen can buy Fair Trade foods and groceries and not spend money on corporations who choose to repeatedly violate human rights.

16. The average citizen can support local businesses, local vendors, sellers of local produce and develop a plan to spend their money in a more focused way that benefits local entrepreneurs.

17. Our national and international goals should be to work toward a 0% unemployment rate, quality education and job training, and a livable wage. This would, in effect, end global poverty.

SECTION FOUR: ACTION

Mahatma Gandhi encouraged us to be the change we want to see in the world. Einstein said to never doubt the fact that a small group of committed people could work together to change the world. We don’t really need mantras, though, to know that we could be doing more to save humanity and the planet. After all, what is more important, or more pleasurable, than a committed life to peace and justice and love?

18. Every citizen can support, join, or create an organization that helps people and the environment. Everyone can give time, money, or other resources to causes that they find worthy.

19. Every citizen can donate unwanted or unneeded goods to charities that can redistribute these goods and materials to those who need them.

20. The average citizen can live a committed life; a life committed to others in service and in love and the world will know the difference.

I am at home now. I can see the vanilla haze that is the Los Angeles skyline. Amidst the heat waves I can make out the western vista and the welcoming asphalt of the international airport. There is the Hollywood Park racetrack and the urban sprawl of Inglewood and Westchester. People are restless in their seats. Parents ready children and guests sit with their faces smacked against the plastic windows. It is difficult not to stare; Los Angeles is a magnificent city and there is no place I would rather live. I am ready to engage on an unprecedented level. There is so much work to be done; but what is a life without a vision, without a focus, without a goal, and without a set of traveling companions equally committed, equally in love with life. I see the pathway, even through the fumes and the smoke, and the painted air. It’s going to be a marvelous journey. It has already been. The flight attendant is telling me to store away my electronic equipment and to prepare for the landing and I’d be smart to oblige.