Rodriguez - From our land to our land: essays, journeys, and imaginings and musings from a native Xicanx writer

As I write this, more than a million Puerto Ricans march, dance, and sing day after day to remove their corrupt and callous governor from office. Puerto Rico has already lost thousands of people to Hurricanes Irma and Maria in 2017mostly because the US government neglected to provide recovery assistance and supplies. It has already suffered corruption and economic hurricanes for decades on top of more than 120 years of US colonial domination.

As I write this, an international outcry has exploded against the forced separation of Central American children from their parents crossing the US border, as well as the deaths of children and others held in captivity in overcrowded concentration camps run by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). Despite having arrived as asylum seekers, which is legal under US and international law, my brothers and sisters from El Salvador, Guatemala, and Hondurasand parts of Mexico and other countries like Haitiare being denigrated and criminalized.

In addition, people have recently taken to the streets to address our compromised present and future due to increasingly irreparable climate change. Protestors and organizations have come together to decry homelessness as well as opioids and other drugs that have led to an epidemic of deaths; gunfire that continues to kill innocent students, shoppers, churchgoers, and more; the fact that the United States has 6 percent of the worlds population but 25 percent of all prisoners; how readily police are exonerated for the killing of unarmed Blacks; and the wars without end in the Middle East.

Add to this wave of protest the growing awareness of the fact that we now live with the widest gap between the richest and poorest people ever recorded in the United States.

This moment in history is not just the fault of our current government. Weve been going this way a long time. Just the same, fuel is now being added to a burning building. The ruling class of this countryvia the White House and its Republican croniesis working to consolidate an unbreakable base for fascism (among a small but entrenched number of Americans) while scattering the opposition and confusing or scaring off everyone else from doing anything. Theyre working hard to get rid of taxes that pay for social servicesincluding any possible quality healthcare and education for allas well as remove regulatory restrictions to allow more corporate theft of land, production, and labor. And they are amassing the most tax dollars into the military to increase their control abroadand into law enforcement, border militarization, and mass incarceration for control at home.

Key leaders of the alt-right have openly said they aimed to trigger the looney left with all their misrepresentations and insane policies. Instead theyve galvanized a worldwide peaceful, organized resistance thats gaining in strength.