Informant38

...one way or another
one way or another
this darkness got to end

Notes - scattered, inconclusive, heartfelt:

The thing about this "immigrant" thing is if you look with an open mind at the faces of the people in question they aren't immigrants, they're natives.
Indians. Indigenous residents. Prior inhabitants.
The mix-up of language that makes anyone with visible black heritage an African-American places most of the descendants of native people south of the US in political categories like "Guatemalan" "Mexican" "Salvadoran". These aren't accurate.
They are and they aren't. Mostly they aren't.
The people in question are almost all from very bottom of the social economies of their countries of origin, and they're almost all descendants of the native populations of those countries, whose ethnic boundaries don't conform to modern political ones.
Terms of convenience can easily become lies.
Slavery's another thing the voluntary "immigrants" to the US have in common with black Americans. And the sick bargain of artificial poverty's necessity for compromise that puts a family's survival ahead of its dignity.
More and more the economies of this time look like forms of captivity to me, and the ranks and hierarchies of privilege like the rewards of submission.
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The piece below from 2004 went unpublished here then because it's too easily misread, and because it fuels dangerous ideas about what should be done about this extrapolating population.
Writing it now I'd emphasize and repeat that human control of the system is the problem, originally and primarily, and human control of the system is not going to be the answer.
Using the profusion of humanity and its unsustainable numbers to justify selection to conscious formula is exactly the wrong way to go.
But that way promises unimaginable power and control to the minorities who might achieve it, so it's very seductive, and I believe the potential of that is moving toward actualization on many fronts, which is why I'm talking about it now.
The way my mind works on these things is I get a novelized image, a nurse say, or a girl whose brother is severely disabled, and I see the disheartening sense, the doubt, the lack of substance and foundation - heartbreaking to me, and the guilt available there is something I can't stand. Nurses and doctors need to believe in what they're doing, the people who love the disabled have to fight the burdens of neglect and disregard as well as actual physical manifestations. Support or rejection is magnified tremendously there.
So then Jesus. As political solution. The Christian embrace of the living, all of them.
Because if the way things are is corrupt, wrong, biologically first and morally too, then advocating a way of being that subverts that is honorable and right. And that kind of all-embracing acceptance, reverence for life in everything including the marginal and incomplete, is subversive. Not the Jesus of big rich churches and financial prosperity - the Jesus of the dirt and the suppurating wounds, the eye infections and the broken souls.
And I'm not putting that there as central alternative but as a way through this that doesn't give the human spirit to an alien master race on a leash, on its knees.
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Swamps. Marshes. The "wetlands" of contemporary regard. Lots of it - most of them gone.
But are they gone in totality? What are they, then?
As land, as features of the landscape, yes. But as function maybe not. What that is, those places, is womb, fecundity, rich soup of living to which many animals return to begin their cycles. The pristine sterility of highways and malls makes that a nightmare of rot and reptilian threat but it's like the genitals of the world. And like the genitals, like ours, close to the waste and danger of elimination, the stench of it, and the uselessness of it.
Gone, or reconfigured?
Moved into the laboratories.
That's where the swamps and marshes are now, atomized, compartmentalized, held, dominated, controlled, bent and broken to the will of whatever it is that runs those places day and night.
There's between 7000 and 5000 tigers in the world, maybe less. Elephants too in steep decline. Chinese herbalists grinding the bones of the great creatures to give wealthy old men erectile strength.
And in there somewhere the little bitter individuals whose only shot at dominance is to turn everything upside down and get vicious.
6.5 billion human beings.
6.525 billion.
That extra 25 million dropped to get a round figure without changing the impact much.
25 million people. California in the 1980's.