The Final ICE Age…Frozen Consciences

Get Ready for the Coming Global Warming of the Human Heart

The recent ICE immigrant raids in Camarillo and Oxnard, CA have brought me to tears.

Camarillo is my old backyard. My husband Dave and I owned an avocado ranch in the Santa Rosa Valley for over 15 years, and we sold our fruit annually to the Camarillo Co-op, named “Calavo.” Some of you may have even eaten avocados that I once grew, or guacamole made from fruits that we once harvested.

Our lead grovier, Manuel, was an immigrant from Mexico. A harder, more cheerful, more skilled worker, I don’t think I’ve ever met. I could call Manuel in a panic at 4:30 AM, because a primary water line had broken somewhere in our grove, and he’d be over before sunup, locating and repairing the break to stop the flooding.

We had a small grove, unlike the larger commercial ranches in the area, so when picking time came Manuel would let me know the open co-op windows when the larger groves weren’t picking. That way, we weren’t competing, price per pound, with the bigger farms around us that sold to the same co-op, so that we could get top dollar for our fruits. He brought his own ladders, crew, and ordered the proper number of bins he thought we needed to contain the crop. All we had to do was watch the process.

In winter, Manuel brought us free firewood every year from the trees he cut down for other ranchers, as a Christmas gift. One year, he and his crew helped us expand and install curbing on a very steep, narrow cement driveway that led to our home on a hilltop, high above our orchard.

Manuel was far more than our employee—he was a trusted friend, and when we eventually sold the ranch we encouraged the buyers to continue to work with him for best results.

Did I ever “check his papers?” No. I never once asked him about his immigration status. I asked him if he could do the job I needed done, and that most white Americans had zero interest in performing.

That’s the thing about living in Southern California—most people don’t actually care who washes their cars, mows their lawns, babysits their children, paves their drives, or picks their food. They care that they can go about their business trusting that those functions get performed very well, so that they can perform their own functions and the city can run as intended. Those of us who populate the southwest have generally lived, cooperatively and peacefully, alongside Mexicans since long before CA ever became a state, because much of this area was once governed BY Mexico, and it only became American territory after the Mexican-American war in the 1840’s.

Texas only joined the United States in 1845. CA became a state in 1850; Oregon entered in 1859, Nevada joined in 1864. Utah signed up in 1896, followed by Washington in 1889 and Oklahoma in 1907. Arizona and New Mexico joined the Union in 1912.

New Mexico, by the way (fun fact!😂) is the only state in the US that prints “United States” on its license plates, because some Americans seem unaware it’s not a part of Mexico—so we helpfully try to clear that up for the geographically ignorant among us.

All of this means that our “American” southwest is literally filled with former Mexicans who came along for the American ride, post-war. They are indeed the original settlers, ranchers, and landowners of the “American” Southwest, and they lived and worked for centuries, mostly peacefully, alongside the Native indigenous tribes—many of whom, like the Hopi, Navajo, Zuni, and even the Apache—were also farmers, and built complex towns and vast, vibrant trading communities that spanned all the way down to Central America and connected them up with the Maya and the Inca.

Just visit the southwest, and go explore the indigenous and Spanish ruins you’ll find all over around here. Go to Chaco Canyon, or Mesa Verde, or any number of old Spanish missions that dot the entire area. The evidence of multiculturalism (and its occasional, violent ideological clashes) can be found literally everywhere you look. Walk in the hills around Santa Fe and you may come across old shards of pottery washed up from ancient middens and swept down by rivers and creeks, with their worn, yet unique paint designs that define each tribe still visible.

My own current city, Santa Fe, is the oldest capital city in the US. It’s been continuously populated since the early 1600’s, and once served as the primary rest and restocking stop for weary settlers preparing to cross the desert to reach California. Santa Fe was a thriving metropolitan hub long before the United States became a “thing.” Here, all three cultures—Native/Indigenous, Spanish/Mexican, Euro/Anglo—converge in astonishingly beautiful ways; so much so that we were just named the #1 tourist destination in the country!

Why people love visiting here is, in large part, because these cultures have coexisted historically in ways that today create an exotic, artistic, charmingly enjoyable, amazingly diverse community of humanity. We have so many different types of foods, crafts, building, architecture, and artistic expression that it literally bedazzles the senses!

Stripping our local communities of their rich cultural diversity and the integrative capacity they have built up over generations, simply because we are being groomed now to support white Christian nationalism and behavioral/religious/political belief homogeneity (and why else would diversity, equity, and inclusion have lately been treated like “dirty words?”) only impoverishes us all, in the end.

Watch, and you will see.

As the ICE raids on our California farms and ranches continue, the crops we all rely on will rot in the fields. Prices will rise; supply chains will be disrupted. And no…those elderly people on Medicaid aren’t going to stand outside in 90°-100°+ temps to do the dirty, sweaty, backbreaking work of picking strawberries or harvesting lettuce every day. Our political officials and Washington bureaucrats are so out of touch with regular people that they suggest such outcomes cheerfully, as if some person living in a rented room in south-Central LA can even afford the transportation costs to travel over an hour, each way, just to pick crops for minimum wage (or sometimes less, because the pay is often based on the volume of crop being picked, not by the hour.)

We are all going to experience the harmful consequences of treating other human beings vilely—mainly because we have created a patchwork quilt of arcane, complex, and confusing laws that we are now using to render so many “illegal” in our eyes, and in our own minds.

People are just trying to live, survive, and to get by in a world that now values its own rules, organizational patterns, and behavioral practices above the needs of all living beings and the entire planetary biosphere.

Let’s see how that goes, from such a hubristic perspective.

Helpful noticing: There is no such thing as an ”illegal” human being. There are only social systems that refuse to honor all humans (whether born there, or born elsewhere) as innately worthy of love, care, respect, opportunity, support, and grace.

If you are one of “those people,” and you now hide behind “illegality” as a justifiable excuse to dehumanize, degrade, and torture/terrorize others while depriving them of life, liberty, and their own pursuit of happiness, then your issue actually isn’t with “those filthy, vermin others.”

You’re really in a battle to the death with the evil, fear, and rage that presently darkens and infects your personal soul—and let me tell you, having experienced my own dark night(s) of the soul—your ego can’t possibly win that war, though it may arrogantly assume that it both can, and will.

And so I now sit, report, observe, and wait.

I need do nothing more than offer continued loving kindness to the occasional stranger who passes my way. I’ve bought bags of groceries for desperate families; I’ve handed out cash and life necessities to those who have no homes or ways to earn income. I’ve taken in and homed the unhoused, clothed and fed the suffering, nurtured and encouraged the abandoned and terrified, cleaned up and supported the abused and the societally reviled. Not all whom I’ve taken in have later thrived, but enough have that I’ve lived the benefits of unconditional kindness, firsthand. I know that kindness serves life better than does hate, or cruelty, or committing mindless violence against “the stranger.”

So I can sit here today with a relatively clean conscience, knowing I do not turn away blindly when I see cruelty or injustice being performed in the name of “the law.”

No earthy law earns my respect or my unquestioned obedience if it violates my core human values. That’s healthy self-governance, 101.

I encourage us all to try healthy self-governance based entirely on the inspired insightfulness of our own souls—and not the self-serving fears of our minds, nor the irrational reactivity of our own, dysregulated emotions—because truthfully, behaving according to a system that governs to the lowest common denominator of calcified minds and hardened hearts walking among us cannot, and will not, serve us.

It actually cheapens and weakens us all, which is how I know “ahead of time” that this terrible idea is already doomed to fill the horrible dustbin of human history.