1 last post...

Before I go about my afternoon "run" today, I want to sit here (right here), and write one last post.

The truth is that I have exercised a great, great deal of privilege in being here. I have shirked some duties and time with my family, I have left bills unpaid, and I have taken a twenty-six-month hiatus from my own country and left friends whom I have contacted very little.

Being here has been very good. The hospitality? Soundly better.

I have taught and been taught by my students. I grew from being a student to being a real student, studying the adolescent worldview as the glorious and frustrating unfurled reality which it is. My landscape has broadened and my paradigm, shifted.

I have received the blast of any number of hormonal atom bombs, dropped sincerely and with keen precision from my students. They have been my world and my testing ground. Thank God I have been able to absorb their radiation and thank heavens I have had the faith to grow warm by it.

The furnaces of friendship and interpersonal strife have wrung out from me whatever gold was lurking within me. I feel depleted and replete with splendor now. Simply put, there are no words to describe what living on the top of the world, at thirty-six hundred plus meters really is like.

Most breaths have been conscientious. Some have been unconscionably taken away. I do not know where they have gone.

I have seen a toothless grin and promised empty things to a man who no longer is, and for this I feel horrendous.  

I have said the wrong things many more times than I wish I might admit, and the greatest verbal triumphs I have made have come about my mouth whilst firmly shut. The heart speaks best when the ear is open.

Clouds have brought rain down upon me and flooded my hair while at the end of the school day children’s smiles have flooded my eyes.

I have received, received and received until it hurt me to know how much I simply did not have within me to give. And maybe this is worse than knowing just how mortal I am as a man.

I have triumphed in accepting limitations and shattering old ties I had once made with authority. Just as the corn here broaches the soil I feel like the dirt I knock of my shoulders is now settling underfoot.

I have robbed and pillaged, failed and fancied, roared and I have despaired. I feel a million times that an apology should make it to my mouth, to beg for some pardon, but it gets caught at my throat and forms a hopeless lump. So, for some things I might only forgive myself which, is really trying.

What I want most of all is for the love I have come to know and to foster not to die. Should it dissipate I would be so glad—but not to die. Let it ebb on, splashing over others as I continue to roam off into the distant horizon where I barely make out the figures who all seem to loom there.

And may people know that when I promised I wanted to be a good person above all else, may they know that my mouth was speaking principally because my heart was full, and take my efforts with a heaping grain of salt.

Quo vadis? Ubi venis?

I moved to Peru in November of 2010, and now fifteen weeks remain. For me, this September also marks the 10^th anniversary of my induction into St. Ignatius of Loyola’s five-century-old legacy, or, tradition. In a way, my fifteen weeks left in Peru also herald my eclipsing time spent under the tutelage of the Jesuits and their works. These diminishing moments are the beginning of an end, and end to a beginning and a burgeoning point of departure.

A large part of me has unfolded under the sponsorship of the Jesuits – mainly in their academic institutions and now with the Jesuit Volunteer Corps. But the beginning of my ten years was very important. I remember the day I received my acceptance package into Brophy College Preparatory in Phoenix, Arizona. It was a proud moment for me and I felt as though I had won the lottery. At the time I knew nothing about the difference between the Ignatian faith traditions within the Catholic Church, but I prefigured that it couldn’t possibly differ much from what I came to know about Catholicism through my years spent in conservative Catholic grade schools. I was wrong.

In terms of high schools in Arizona, Brophy’s prestige equates comparably to the name recognition which Harvard seems to enjoy nationwide. And, although I’m not sure what type of national, private high school ranking status it has earned, Brophy sports a number of noteworthy alumni: Keith Blanchard II, Maxim magazine's Editor-in-Chief; Nathaniel Joseph "Nate" Ruess, lead singer and vocalist for the band The Format and Fun; J. J. Jansen, professional football long snapper for the Carolina Panthers; Gary Hall, Jr., Olympic swimmer; and even the likes of Dean Winters, an actor from 30 Rock who also plays the character “Mayhem” in those Allstate commercials.

All of my mom’s brothers and my very own dad were alums of this high school, and I felt that I deserved to learn there too. It turns out that I longed for something much more valuable than I understood. I was introduced to a learning environment rivaled by none. My whole person was educated in a way which made me question what it meant to be a human being alive in the world. I experienced the privilege of formative experiences such as traveling to Oaxaca as well as other places in Mexico for service-immersions. My high school experience gave me the push I needed to cross the country and attend a Jesuit university in Philadelphia.

I struggled to decide between the recording arts program at Loyola Marymount University (LA) and the arts and sciences track at the much smaller St. Joseph’s University on the East Coast. After months of waiting I received word of my acceptance into LMU’s 20-person-sized program. But Philadelphia offered something very different and seemed like much more of an adventure.

At St. Joe’s I was presented with a number of opportunities academic and otherwise. I enjoyed being sent to many different countries in Latin America by teachers and Jesuits in order to learn, to live and to do service. My degree tracks of Philosophy and Spanish presented me an opportunity to study things I grew to love earlier on in high school. As it came time to graduate, I knew that I wanted to experience a real-life application of my unfurling formative education. JVC was a good choice.   

I applied for a volunteer placement with the Jesuit Volunteer Corps in the middle of my senior year of college. Yet in a way this application started several years before. My mom gave me a ride to high school one day and pointed to a teacher and commented: “He was a Jesuit Volunteer after college.” When she proceeded to explain the international aspects of the NGO, I grew excited and pictured myself and the prospective convivencia in another country. I realize that being a Jesuit Volunteer was something I have wanted to do for a long time. So, here I am.  

— in Peru, fifteen weeks to go 

Unusual Bee-havior

Barack Obama: Our Next Republican President

Quite a few “liberals” – and mostly conscientious dissenters – are royally disenchanted with the job that Mr. Obama has done during his first term as President. A lot of left-leaning voters (grudging and resigned) are probably discovering their very own plot in a newly defined political landscape: they now reside in no-man’s land. 

I decided (a while ago) to cast my vote for the incumbent presidential candidate, Barack Obama, admiring how, other than women’s rights and gay rights sentimentality, he has managed to usurp the Republican party’s less reactionary agenda, and he has managed to make his party every man’s.   But I bear in-mind the fact that, even with Ron Paul (a person I admire not despite of but because of his political yahoo-ness, whose disciples are far worse) and Mitt, Obama seems, unfortunately, the best alternative.

In his article The Politics of Capitulation: ten reasons I’m not with Barack, Russell Mokhiber delineates his ten reasons as to why he’s not going with the “Prez.”

1.   Obama’s failure to rein-in control as head-honcho politico. “Result: Wasteland.”

2. Military-Industrial Complex: Obama prodded Congressional Republicans to increase military spending… as GDP%, military spending higher under Obama than any year under Bush.

3.  Declining democracy: Obama’s lavish feeding frenzy with his amigos the super-rich and “moneyed interests.”

4.  Taxes: No Wall Street speculation tax, no regressive tax structure reversal, bowing before the plutocracy: sky-rocketed poverty.

5.  Energy: rather than pursue a course to evade further fossil fuel addiction, Obama swallowed the industry’s adage that we need all forms = further addicted.

6.  “Israel/Palestine. Instead of standing up to Romney and Netanyahu, you buckled. Or as Tom Friedman put it, you shut down the peace process. Result: No peace.”

7.  Corporate criminals: financial crimes caused a financial crises roughly four years to-date, yet “…not a single prosecution of a high ranking Wall Street executive or major financial firm. Fraud played a major part in the meltdown. Yet, your Justice Department, led by corporate lawyers, hasn’t gotten the job done. Result: No justice.”

8.  Maximum wage: not a single thing done to raise the minimum wage to the 2008, campaign-promised level of $9.50.

9. Obama’s “kill list”: No detention without a trial, but assassinations and other killings without a trial are blessed. “And according to the New York Times, you personally pick the candidates for execution. Result: Shredded Constitution.”

10. Single-payer: 123-a-day dead from no insurance, and Obama worked to “keep the insurance companies in the game.”

Despite this list and the many other possible “disappointed-with-the-president” lists we could make, the Right hasn’t done a good job complaining of these things. Why? Why haven’t they blasted these failures non-stop in their town visits and speeches and conventions? The reason: these are what liberals and leftists in our country consider as the flagging failures of a conservative presidency – not someone like Barack Obama, 2008.

In his recent article Would It Really Be Any Different: imagine no Republicans, Andrew Levine queries, “What if the party that keeps dragging our politics rightward, to such an extent that it is now off the spectrum of just a decade or two ago, disappeared from the face of the earth?” Levine goes on to applaud Ron Paul as the only consistent GOP presidential candidate in attendance at their 2012 convention. He notes that Paul was the only “genuinely anti-war” candidate, the only true proponent of Civil Liberties, and the most economically lucid and consistent (his words) candidate. Ron Paul: the only Democrat? 

Interestingly enough, Levine begs us to imagine a world with a sound GOP extinction, a world where the Dems no longer have a serious political antithesis. He suggests that, “…This would surely be an improvement over the status quo.  Such progress as there has been in combatting racism, sexism, homophobia and other forms of exclusion and oppression would be more secure; and the quality of political discourse would be much improved without the willful ignorance and flamboyant stupidity that Republicans have lately introduced into our public life.”

But just as dedicated Dems might start to revel in such an attractive possibility, Levine asks the tough question: “But would the extinction of the GOP put an end to the Reaganite (neo-liberal, anti-affirmative state) turn of recent decades?  Would it reverse the accelerated depredations of the Bush-Obama era – reestablishing privacy rights, for example, or restoring the rule of law to pre-9/11 levels?” His answer: “I don’t think so.”

And it wouldn’t. He argues that Democrats wouldn’t know what to do were they without the Republicans from whom they take all their cues. Levine further questions the republican-ness of Obama’s Presidency, and ventures, “…that Obama’s – and the Democrats’ – ideological predilections have at least as much to do with their feckless governance as their personalities or the inevitable consequences of a campaign finance regime that encourages plutocrats to buy the outcomes they want.” Dems, Levine argues, are aimless: acting the way Republicans do because they are “cooperative to a fault.” 

Levine concludes by noting the irony of the situation, stating that, "...Republican obduracy has been the one thing keeping Democrats on a center-right – and therefore not entirely reactionary — track.  Had they been even just a tad more reasonable, Democrats would by now be nothing more than kinder, gentler and, of course, saner versions of their ostensible ideological rivals.” 

And the Republicans have another thing going for them in their soon-to-be-re-elected Republican President, Barack Obama: (for used-to-be-Dems) the worst presidential record on immigration, in presidential history. He's done an interesting job "protecting" the border. 

Hispanic This, Latino That

President Obama sparked a trend just Four years ago, and it may prove to be the biggest obstacle for the G.O.P. to remain at all relevant. Obama’s grassroots campaign which rocketed him into the political mainstream’s limelight caused a reactionary a blizzard, blending the racism-fuelled impetus for the Tea Party’s governmental insurgence with the lunacy of the “birther” movement. The final political tally: the Obama presidency proving itself a seminal work towards stunting the Republican Party’s hopes for a future.

Enter Julián Castro. The current mayor of San Antonio, Mr. Castro follows a trend of what historians argue to be a proud mayoral lineage since the 1730s. He was born on the 16^th of September, 1974, to a Chicano activist mother who helped found the political party La Raza Unida, and a community activist father. Castro graduated from Stanford with dual degrees in political science and communications, only to then study law at the prestigious Harvard Law School. Mr. Castro represents the next round of nails awaiting their hammer to continue shutting the lid on the Republican political coffin.

Zev Chafets published an article on Mr. Castro in the New York Times newspaper on May 6, 2010. In his article, “The Post-Hispanic Hispanic Politician”, Chafets writes of an affable young mayor, courted by Mr. Obama at the White House during his forum on “national jobs-and-economic-growth.” Castro was one of merely five mayors invited, and his age at 35 revealed him to be the youngest in attendance. Chafets writes, “…the president looked at him, midway down the long conference table, and said: ‘I thought he was on our staff. I thought he was an intern. This guy’s a mayor?’ The other participants – world-famous economists, environmentalists and politicians – burst into laughter.” Castro then clued-in the President, “Of San Antonio, Tex.” Obama sounded, “I’m messing with you. I know who you are.”

President Obama may have had the drop on Castro a couple years ago when he invited him to his forum chock-full of world renowned so-and-sos, but the laughter and the brevity of the situation probably indicates that the President was the only one of those chuckling aloud who really understood the importance of Mayor Castro’s presence. And the sooner the rest of the Democratic Party owns Castro’s importance, the better.

President Obama should know better than anyone just what a young, fresh-looking, nearly political background-less "minority" can do for his Democratic bastion: run the White House. The Republicans are so busy tying up the loose ends which have won them support in some of the most uneducated corners of the country as well as from the plutocracy itself, that they are busy picking running-mates like Sarah Palin and Paul Ryan. These selections translate into a whimper of a response to something they desperately lack and, because of their recent track record, may never hope to recover.

The Rolling Stone interviewed James Carville – Clinton strategist – in its recent August 16^th, 2012 issue. In the interview Carville disposes of two vital answers to questions which all but herald the end of a Republican contention for the White House saddle. When asked, “What’s the Republican strategy at this point,” Carville responds by summoning the surfacing attempts of groups like Citizens United, and their attempts at “voter-restricting ID laws”, because this election represents the Republicans’ last vie for presidential power. Carville avers, “Look at every part of the electorate that’s growing: nonwhites, unmarried, educated women…they’re all part of the Democratic coalition.” It is, as he says, a “demographic disaster for Republicans.”

Obama may not truthfully represent the very first multiracial, multiethnic, multicultural presidency, but what he does represent is the first chip to fall in the obvious simple truth for American politics: there’s no going back. With a prominent, DNC 2012 speaker who shines as bright as Castro – and the Latino/Hispanic vote KNOWS they’re being courted – and exclaims in the NYTimes, The New York Times, "Joaquín and I got into Stanford because of affirmative action. I scored 1,210 on my SATs, which was lower than the median matriculating student. But I did fine in college and in law school. So did Joaquín. I’m a strong supporter of affirmative action because I’ve seen it work in my own life." The Republicans don’t have a prayer’s chance in evangelical-fundamentalist American support land to win any foreseeable election here on out. Mr. Castro is their worst nightmare incarnate, and the next possible heir to the presidential throne.

decolonizing our volunteer-selves

“Guarding knowledge is not a good way to understand. Understanding means to throw away your knowledge. You have to be able to transcend your knowledge the way people climb a ladder. If you are on the fifth step of a ladder and think that you are very high, there is no hope for you to climb to the sixth. The technique is to release.” -- Thich Nhat Hanh, Being Peace

There are volunteers (in my specific context) whom, harboring purposes not anathema to my own, seem to go other places and act very much like colonized people. But, what does a colonized volunteer think? How does a colonized volunteer act? What are these individuals doing out in the world anyway? Well, you might as well just ask what a colonized volunteer wants.

The easy answer to questions of the foregoing nature is: a colonized volunteer wants to grasp something the way it is, understand it in that way only (no matter how Hegelian), speak a foreign language to describe this something (to enter into a verbal communion with it), to never let it go and, ultimately, to become master of something if threatened only by change.

One might say, “So what, then. All things change and so the threat to colonizing anything is too great to be overcome.” The problem has an inherent remedy, I cede this. It is apparently true. The problem, though, resides in (a) people’s unconscious or conscious refusal to become aware of their way of being, and, (b) the underpinnings of a hopeful mastery of their context.

There following points of departure are problematic. They all relate to a competitiveness which seeks to govern a lived, personal experience as if it were an economic commodity subject to such predatory attitudes. The tangential qualms all found with these statements will be addressed later. These are not arguments either; they are much more indictments than anything else.

1. People within a volunteer’s context can seem a lot like prime resources in and of themselves. Taking-on people’s pain and hardships as a task for classification and recognizing patterns in those sufferings is a prostitution of the people in a volunteer’s context.
2. The simple fear of losing one’s ability to communicate in the relative language(s) after no longer being a volunteer in said context is, also, I believe, unfailingly a sign of an immature freedom harbored towards living a foreign language ethically. Living a foreign language is, I also believe, a step well beyond living in a foreign language, or under the auspices thereof.
3. Knowing “all there is to know” and knowing “more than anyone else” is akin to stripping a volunteer’s context itself specifically of what I have noted above as "prime resources". It is a shallow attempt to normalize one’s own self within the context of a place (a) unknowable, (b) overwhelmingly unconquerable, and (c) elusive to a volunteer without any ability to summon common occurrences or memories from their own respective native culture and lived patterns therein.

Knowing people and familiarizing oneself with their suffering is at best a necessary evil. This is difficult because some might assume that, by growing privy to what it is that pains and ails the people in their context, they are thereby granted (or stumble upon) the keys to the kingdom of things like sympathy, compassion, solidarity, etc. 

What is dangerous about approaching this living leitmotif without the adequate humility and understanding needed to precondition such a departure is that the volunteer risks estranging him or herself, most dangerously and without knowing it, and truly remaining peerless. 

Being peerless is the bane of all attempts at being human and does not make for a virtuous relationship with people in the volunteer’s context.

Language can seem to be a weathervane for volunteers who do not know how communication works. A skill is habitual because it is practiced and communication does not need perfection (or verbal language abilities to always fire on all cylinders); developing a language to be the “best at it”, is one of the most surefire ways of never hearing anyone, what they are saying, and it crushes a virtuous communion in which people can communicate like the brothers and sisters they are. I do not need for my sister to say, “Brother, I am upset”, in order for me to understand a communication of her uneasiness; if I practice hearing her in a loving way, she need not say anything at all for me to intuit her presence.

Language is alive inasmuch as we live it and pay attention to it. No volunteer can logically expect to develop a second or third language well enough to retain it as if it were at all cacheable in some weird, metaphysical language coffer behind their eyes. It is not like ore with which we can gorge our ships and then set sail expecting that ore to shine as brightly as it once did. This is an indication of a selfish attitude towards communication and language itself. It would seem egotistical.  

A lack of or deficit of respect for language do not enter into the gifts of language whatsoever. You never forget what you love. If one understands what a language is, and loves it without any objectification, then it was never fashioned to go to waste in the first place.

Most of all, I think hearing volunteers talk about the “truths” relevant to their contexts is puerile. All a volunteer absolutely has at any given moment is his or her perceptions of what is. When ships set sail from Europe to the Americas, it returned with more information than it did precious metal. Volunteers can get overwhelmed and caught up in resources which can be stowed – like knowledge – so much so that the saturation makes them evidently near-sighted and unassumingly and very quietly blinds them to the transcendence that would be otherwise possible.

*** No argument has been made above to indicate that encountering the suffering of a particular context is impossible or irrelevant; no argument has been made to state that operating in another language seems futile and pompous; nor argument has been made to say that knowing anything about anything is a sign of outright imperialist tendencies inherent to the volunteer.

What I broached here is the self-evident possibility that volunteers might wander off to other countries and lands, acting very much like the colonized people we often tend to be – unknowingly, of course – and that the danger with this is that we spend so much time waiting that, rather than live like free human beings in any context, we choose to colonize while we wait, spreading what we know, unawares. 

Thanks, Peru, for teaching me "together" matters most

Teachers need to learn lessons too, and to be taught whether or not what they say or think is in fact true. This is what makes a pupil the greatest litmus test for hypotheses based on what the truth seems to be; it's what makes students the greatest teachers. And in society, it's the spark which makes your neighbors the measure of your level, your own benchmark, your place to stand and be gauged and engaged, over and over again.

Pick-ax, pick-ax, move rocks, move rocks, pick-ax, pick-ax, move rocks, move rocks, and so on. This embodied definition of monotony, repetition and sameness echoes very consciously in the morning sun. Rocks here have to move there, shoveling and pick-axing are necessary to get them where they need to be—meditating all the while is the added perk of the job.  

We decide today to lend a hand to the Spaniard overseeing the guinea pig farm being built in a neighboring village. We are without school due to the trending teacher strikes which now affect Peru nationwide. I find it comical to watch our Spanish friend give orders (in English) to the wayward French volunteers. They also put in their time and money to complete the project, but I’m not sure as to how exactly their feelings about the labor sit at present.

I wheelbarrow a few loads of rocks from one end of the field to another; beautiful, glorious recurrence, tedium! And, more quickly than is normal, meditation takes root, aware of my body under the sun.

There is so much to pay attention to: the body’s many hinges and articulations forever adjust to the load and where exactly the weight is to be borne by these parts specifically; joints conforming this way and that; muscles pulling and sometimes wrenching this bone or that tendon; brute force and exertion; the human life force coursing through each and every vein; man-strength; sheer will; power and projection; commitment; freedom. Again, there is so much to heed.

Yes, this manual labor seems glorious even if glorious only under the guise of privilege. I know the men who duplicate this work with much greater frequency, and it is not uncommon for them to take hard drink in the morning. We call it, therefore, “hard labor” because it is hard, and seldom anything but. Seldom, however, cares to mean that hard labor is different when we have the privilege to pick it up and leave it whenever we please.

The Spaniard sees me with the wheelbarrow chock-full of rocks and yells, “Work!” He has a great sense of humor. And as I have the chance to laugh at myself and the hyperbole in his shout, I relish the moment. He has called me out of my radiant tedium.

The man who keeps the place stands where I return the wheelbarrow and I see him caught in his own moment. Time for me to pull him out of it:

“You know,” I confess with an unrepentant heart, “I used to think that finishing the work was the end goal, that completion was the desired and highest end to our work.”   

He is now listening to me with care and attention, the Spaniard too.

“But now I know that the building will get done. Nevertheless, what the building or project means amounts to nothing unless built by people who firstly understand that brotherhood is what makes a building or project great upon completion—not the fact that it is done.”

Now there is a great deal of concentration floating about my preachy words.

“A building built by people who are really together and really with one another is a building worthy of being built. An edifice erected by power without understanding and confraternity is an idol, and damned. ‘Together’ is what matters, and the building without that is nothing at all.”

The man turns back to his work and mutters, “That’s just it—you’ve said it all. You’ve said everything.


My suspicions confirmed, I adorned the repetition of the work and thought I might be closer to a newfound understanding here.