On March 25, a huge number of people showed up in downtown Los Angeles to draw attention to illegal immigration. What sort of attention did they draw? The estimated half million people who were there paid attention. From the reports I heard, you couldn’t even move without paying close attention.

The gathering had been promoted by Spanish radio stations for weeks. Viva la Raza everywhere. I don’t understand Spanish, so I didn’t know about it until I spoke with my co-worker. Gus was born in Mexico and has a lot of family still there. His father applied for immigration to the US and legally brought his whole family to America when Gus was little.

Gus told me how the radio stations had been ramping up for this protest event for a long time. He’d just had to shut it off. It made me really mad. He remembered the work his father did to gain entrance to America. He told me how these protestors had one hand grabbing for instant American citizenship, and the other hand reaching to pull Aztlan —legally known as the state of California–back into Mexico.

That seems a little conflict of interest. But we could hardly expect otherwise, with that many people involved. It was a lot of people! In my mind. It was really a big story–a huge cultural event.

And it wasn’t just the Saturday protest. Myspace.com had been organizing a walkout for high-schoolers. The teenagers left school and went downtown to protest longer. Monday had a big crowd of kids holding signs. They had even blocked the 110 freeway with their March.

I heard the morning news the next day, exclaiming, “The kids were walking in the freeway! That’s so dangerous! Someone could get KILLED!”

I know that stretch of freeway. It is never free flowing, never. Those kids were never in danger, which is a good thing.

I wanted to hear what other people were saying, so I tuned into my radio stations to hear what the reports and opinions were. What a revelation! Here is the line-up:

KPCC [NPR]: a feature about the California condor
KCRW [NPR again]: a sampling of eclectic alternative music
Power 106 “Where Hip Hop Lives”: Destiny’s Child is getting their Star on the Walk of Fame
KISS fm [ugh…Ryan Seacrest]: Destiny’s Child is getting the Star! And King Kong DVD is out today
KBIG [80s, 90s and TODAY!]: King Kong is out on DVD
Latino 96.3 Reggeaton and Hip Hop: ~~Now this is where it gets interesting

The reggeaton station is a Spanglish station, and reggeaton is teenager music. Mostly the DJs speak English, and some Spanish. Usually they are repeating the same thing, once in Spanish and then again in English. It’s about 90% English, 10% Spanish.

But not Tuesday. It bumped up to about 60% English, 40% Spanish during the high school walkouts. They were talking about nothing else. They were taking calls from teenagers to ask about what they thought, and how they felt about the protests. It was from there that I first began to understand the role myspace played in organizing the protest. To hear the excited kids calling in on cell phones to talk about their opinions–it confirmed to me how important this event was to these kids. It probably was a life-changing experience for them.

But I wanted to hear more. I button punched to the other radio stations, thinking they must be taking calls too.

It was a deafening silence on the subject.

The only other radio station I found talking about it was KPFK, an NPR Pacifica station. They are fringe of the fringe, and I can always count on them to report on any given protest.

This is sort of my point in writing this. Our free and democratic society seems very willing to ignore the issue. What kind of all-men-are-created-equal institution can get up and say there are jobs that Americans are unwilling to do (presumably because they are distasteful–beneath them) but are willing to exploit non-Americans into doing?

Mainstream culture is humming with its fingers in its ears. The top radio stations don’t want to talk about it. Even NPR. Condors! There’s relevance for you.

This is a serious issue for our whole nation. This is not something only Spanish-speaking media outlets should be covering.

Those in positions of influence, our journalists and univerisity professors, should be listening and proposing solutions. The politicians and policy makers need to put their heads together and find a new way to come to terms with this situation. We need a way that is fair and respectful of the equality of all humans.

What’s happening right now is not working.

I’ve been really mulling this one over for a while.

Things have come to a pass. I have questions about why certain political choices are being made,and the voices I am hearing from media outlets are almost exclusive liberal voices.

I am trying to follow the tangled thread. Here are some of the things that concern me:

Health Care
Cost of Living
Whether jobs will be available
How much stuff costs
Being fair to everyone
Taking good care of natural resources

These seem really basic to life enjoyment. I have to live, I have to pay for stuff, I have to have a job to pay for said stuff. I think that we have to be fair to everyone, because it’s the right thing to do. Plus, if we aren’t fair, they will exact revenge.

And we have to take care of natural resources, like the EARTH for a big example, because I have to look at it when I am not working or shopping for stuff. And I like the earth. It’s where I keep my stuff (okay, that’s a quote from The Tick).

If we take care of the stuff that keeps my list of concerns taken care of, we’re doing okay.

Alright. So who pays for Health care to keep me living? In the USA, insurance companies do. That’s really really convoluted. I mean, at one point in history, Doctors used to take their knowledge and think of a way to cure the person, and then they would take money or some trade item from the person they were treating. That was the end of that.

Now, getting your tonsils out takes huge statistical charts and indexes to pay for. Whoa. That’s strange and weird. But that’s really what we are living with.

The people that pay the insurance companies to pay the bills for our medical needs are:
the employers, i.e. Large Corporations

Mostly, that’s true. Some individuals can pay the premiums themselves, if they want. The governmentactsd as a safety net, that picks up the slack sometimes for those who don’t have an employer to pay.

That’s how we do it in the US. In Europe, the government picks up the tab for the whole bill. It’s called socialized medicine. And socialized medicine has a whole host of problems, such as lowered quality of care and restaints on compensation for the professionals who are therefore unmotivated to innovate and invent such needed things as new cures.
Socialized medicine is not the best way to do it. But neither is our way. Both of us are figuring out what to do next.

But things being the way they are, Large corporations are the biggest customers of the health insurance companies who control the health care in america.

So, when you are dealing with health care, it’s really a lot about large corporate interests.

Large corporate interests = the Republican party

right? well, maybe.

But the democrats are the ones who are always bringing up health care concerns. And they are full of speeches about how new programs can be funded by new taxes that will be paid for by big business or ‘the rich.’

But, if the democrats expect to milk the corporate cow, it would seem to require checking that the cow is well fed. If we learned nothing from the stock crash of 2000 it’s that businesses are quite apt to fail.

Interestingly, the democrats are for ‘equality’ too. That is what they seem to talk about a lot. I hear a lot about people being underpriviliged. Or people being minorities or poor. Sometimes, they even talk about people being oppressed.

These are pretty big words. The conservatives tend to say things like “Idiots” and “Morons” about the liberals. Not very helpful, just to oversimplify into name-calling.

But the liberals voices seem to forget where their bread is buttered. I have listened for a long time, and I can see that their basic idea is to take money from rich people and from big business in the form of taxes and redistribute it (through government branches) to ‘the less fortunate’.

That bothers me. This country has a high regard for independence, and we seem to be setting up a structure whereby people become dependent on the government, that thing that NO ONE, conservative or liberal, trusts.

It seems to be better to take obtacles out of people’s way and let them do what they feel like doing.

I like the idea of compassion that the democrats supposedly espouse. I’d like to be a democrat and help out where help is needed.

But this constant talk of ‘the less fortunate’ seems to place those speaking on a superior plane than the others. Sure, they may be speaking about compassion, but there are ways of giving help without stripping the recipients of their dignity. But the speechers raise themselves by referring to others in a one-down position. It’s as if they are attempting to become patrician by designating all others as plebian. But it is smoke and mirror. We do hold to the truth that all people are created equal.

It is non-humanitarian to create a system of whereby people become dependent for their basic needs. That’s infanticizing the ‘less fortunate.’

So, I have a bad taste in my mouth for these psuedo patrician non-humanitarian democrats. I know there may be plenty of truly compassionate charitable people who work hard to help the less fortunate, but the loudest voices in the democratic party (at least those around me in liberal LA) are terrible examples.