New Mexico Mercury

Columbus Day, Chiapas Style

Tens of thousands of indigenous protestors and their allies in the southern Mexican state of Chiapas took to the streets on Saturday, October 12.  While the date is officially called Dia de La Raza and celebrated as the Latin American equivalent of the Columbus Day holiday in the United States,  indigenous Mayans in Chiapas tagged another name on the day:  521 Years of Indigenous, Black, Campesino and Popular Resistance...

Accompanying the Hibakusha to Los Alamos

Last week, I returned to Los Alamos, New Mexico, scene of our greatest crime, the birthplace of the atomic bomb, where preparations continue for bigger and better nuclear weapons. Even as the government is shut down and New Mexico has just been ranked worst in the nation for the well being of children, plutonium bomb making carries on at Los Alamos.

This time, I accompanied a delegation of 13 elderly Japanese peace activists from Hiroshima, Japan. Several of them were survivors and witnesses of the U.S. atomic bombing sixty eight years ago...

When pollution and poverty meet

Clear Lake, at 68 square miles the biggest fresh water lake in California, gleams serenely all the way east to the distant mountains.  It all seems so pretty, so peaceful, so healthy, and in some ways it is, but it is not at all what I had been lead to expect.

After all, this lake, at 480,000 years the oldest lake in the United States, is the world’s worst case of mercury poisoning...

What a 21st Century Coup Looks Like

While going about our ordinary lives—though those cannot, at the moment, include accessing federal Internet sites, visiting a National Park, or being able to take advantage of a federally-funded health study—most of us seem oblivious to the fact that we are experiencing a coup...

Weekly Poem: The Spring

Like the way a spring seems
To rise, fresh, out of a silent earth,
So my words, once started,
Find their own way
From my equally silent depths.

I suppose the invisible machinery
Of my subconscious is involved,
But a poem is more than something
Stirred from darkly distorted memories of
My pasts...

The Most Beautiful Classroom in the World

The most beautiful classroom in the world lives in the middle of a Southwestern painting.  The vaulting blue sky gives way to the magnificent whites of the billowing clouds--smoke signals from the gods.  Their shadows fancy dance on the hills.  Triangulated among the peaks of the Jemez, Sangre de Cristo, and Sandia mountains, our classroom provides a bridge from a traditional community to the modern world.

Each morning, a bus travels the dirt roads of the Pueblo and fills with bleary-eyed children.  Nearly 900 years ago, these children’s ancestors settled the fertile soil near the confluence of the Galisteo and Rio Grande rivers...

Susana Backpeddles

A Few short months ago Gov. Susana Martinez was hobnobbing with the Koch brothers out at Tamaya. This was a Tea Party love fest where Vice-Presidential-Hopeful Sooz was shmoozing and political french kissing the likes of Paul Ryan and Eric Cantor, architects of the current exceptionally smart government shutdown pulled by Republicans in the House.

Anyone who thinks the Democrats or Obama orchestrated this ill-conceived and silly catastrophe, hasn’t been paying attention for the past thirty or so years since Ronnie Reagan said in 1981 that government wasn’t the solution but it sure was the problem...

The Taos Hum

The Taos hum has long been a mystery.  Ever since 1956 residents of Taos County have periodically noticed what some have described as a low-frequency vibration, a deep rumble from the earth most often felt through the soles of the feet.  They say it is most noticeable when barefoot, but there have been reports of some people sensing the rumble while wearing Birkenstocks.  High heels and Gucci loafers seem to have a dampening effect on the vibration...

What’s Happened to Albuquerque? Part 9: Pete Dinelli, but where are the constituents?

While I personally am going to vote for Pete Dinelli for mayor on October 8, I remain puzzled and disappointed by this election.

Dinelli is strong on badly needed police oversight and leadership restructuring, strong on marriage equality and women’s rights (he was the only candidate to oppose the move to ban abortions in Albuquerque after 20 weeks), and strong on water conservation and water quality issues, including the potential disaster of the Kirtland Air Force Base jet fuel spill.

What disappoints me is that none of those vital issues attracted in-depth coverage by local mainstream media. And if organized and outspoken constituencies formed around those issues, most of us didn’t hear about it because their activities weren’t covered...

This Gang of the Rich

Our country is frozen in the filthy rich pit of a cultish Republicanism, a bunch of sick coyotes yakking the same chorus, “Kill to Win,” “Pray God for Stagnation.” “We’ll drown you in our own filth of hatred for the poor, the down trodden, the impotent, the sick, the helpless children and stressed families, the out of work, the over-burdened, the unserved, the abandoned class of the dwindling mainstream, screw you!”...