"Buzz!! Buzz!! Resume Viewing Buzz!! Buzz!!"

Imagine a future where the partnership we have with our screens (black mirrors) evolves to the next level. 

In the second episode of the first season of Black Mirror, the screens of our media are no longer held in our hands, they are the walls of our homes, projecting animated images more bucolic than nature can deliver. Think Disney. 

And who powers these lighted screens of our lives? You guessed it, we do. On gym exercise bikes we pedal for hours each day to stay in shape and power the grid, earning points like salaries which are then spent on time in bed, toothpaste, food and screen choices. Think Time Warner.

In the future the series depicts, it costs points which we pedal like hamsters to accumulate in order to sleep. Worse, and this is the gift of the episode, it even costs points to decide to close your eyes and not consume a program you might find offensive. Alarms sound and the screen blinks the warning "Resume Viewing!"

The story shows the protagonist struggling but sadly coming full circle to also fall into the trap that took his girlfriend, entering the entertainment slave class to become perform for the programs that distract the peddling slave class.  

The Artist Holds Up the Black Mirror

The first episode of the Netflix series, Black Mirror, had me at hello. 
I'm so grateful to the friend who recommended I try it. P.S. Not family friendly.

Here are five things about the episode that we watched last night that will make me keep watching.

1. I loved Twilight Zone as a kid, so my first impulse was to think this was a reboot. It's not. There are so many layers more that I see just how much the medium of TV has truly evolved. 

2. The story is about technology and its power. The storyteller is the artist, a painter living in London, who is able to show us what he sees in a way few of us could imagine.  

3. The public is fickle; the public is powerful. We are the public.  That's a lot to think about.

4. The episode is less about a pig than it is about people. This is us.

5. Our screens are extensions of ourselves, our senses and attention. See McLuhan.

Brainwashing by TV?

Does TV influence us? There are truckloads of variables to consider in answering this question: How much TV do we watch, what is the content of what we watch, what do we give up to watch it, who is there or not there to discuss its programs and themes. It's like asking Do friends influence us? It depends.

Does taking in a hefty diet of Fox News and conservative talk radio shows impact how we view the world? There are lots of variables that enter here, so it's not a yes or no kind of question. But the question takes an interesting twist when it's seen through the eyes of a loving daughter worried about her father's personality changing into an hardline conservative who she barely recognizes.

Amazon Prime's documentary The Brainwashing of My Dad   made me think that the questions the filmmaker explores may end up in the same heap of questions that have evidence to support opposite views, for example about video games or violent TV programs and their impact on people. 

There are truckloads of data to support the pro and con of media and its impact on people, but on the Fox News and Radio Talk show influence explored in the documentary, I side with the filmmaker, remembering Dr. George Gerbner's Mean World Theory (Cultivation Theory) and the communication research that he he pioneered. 

Outside of the filmmaker's experience and the interviews of her subjects, what emerged as equally important is the evidence she presents about the history of eliminating the Fairness Doctrine and the funding of conservative media outlets and think-tanks that undergird the media landscape that TV and radio currently occupy. Still many questions, such as what similar inroads have been made to make fear the driving force on the Internet and the business models currently in place there?

Rock Art Rancher

If the study of people is the definition of anthropology,  Brantley Baird, without the benefit of academic degree, is a top- notch anthropologist.

The weathered, careful speaking and listening lanky octogenarian with a gentle demeanor is a born and bred Arizona cowboy. When he married 60 years ago he began his work on the ranch belonging to his wife's family now known as the Rock Art Ranch.

In the vastness of the Arizona desert and canyons, his study of people began with reminders that the family ranch had been home to other families, perhaps hundreds of them, both in both recent history, and, as he would come to learn, from more than 9000 years ago. 

Brantley's study of people began with finding shards pots bowls cups and other hunting tools. As Brantley went about hunting and tending to livestock, he came across areas on the ranch where evidence of homes from the past emerged after gullies were washed in flash floods. It was Brantley's careful observation that two sites were uncovered on the ranch where Navajo, Hopi and Anastazi had cooked, reared families, hunted, traded and used weapons,  playing their corresponding roles in defending or expanding their tribe's territories.

Over the years, Brantley spotted on the ranch many museum quality examples of native American family life and it's remainders. The bowls, cups, utensils, and tools tell a story of people who raise children worked hard for their living using your resources and held religious ceremonies. 

Canyon walls along a creek on the ranch preserve hundreds of petroglyphs of people, animals and inscrutable symbols showing us humans' first written communication.

Brantley's learned from contemporary Navajos who have helped him restore two hogans or Navajo houses on the ranch, one for men and another for women. He showed us the door which always faced the sunrise to direct prevailing eastern winds through the roof opening and remove cooking fire smoke. But there was another purpose for the hogan's roof opening. He pointed to the square of sunlight on the pounded dirt floor of the hogan and told us we are watching the world's oldest clock and calendar. The sun's path across the sky told people the time of day and when during the seasons to plant and harvest crops.

Brantley has also learned from scientists at museums and universities who visit and conduct digs on the ranch's two principal sites, one residential and the other a kiva used for ceremonial worship and prayer. 

What fuels this 80 year old cowboy's lifelong interest in the preservation of native culture?  One clue is family. His grandmother was Native American and he and his wife fostered a Navajo girl. 

No one knows if Brantley's legacy with will be continued with his kids and grandchildren, but at 80 years, he is going strong as a one man Guide and museum curator of artifacts that he literally stumbled into through marriage and by working cattle on his family's ranch.

Brantley inherited this ranch in the Arizona desert, but has paid back his good fortune with hard work and, one shard and pot at a time, retrieving from the desert and the sands of centuries, pieces of history to preserve and to share with others.

Sent from my iPad

Mesa meanderings

A mesa is a table and it is also an elevated landform standing above the floor of the desert. For the Acoma it is also a home.

Yesterday at the Acoma village atop a mesa in western New Mexico, our guide explained his tribe's history to us tourists. We had driven off I 40 about 20 miles then boarded a small bus to climb to the top of the mesa. 

As he led us past 900 year old homes where 35 families live here year-round. No electricity, no running water. Today there are soar powered communal showers and restrooms installed at the edges of the mesa. He told us of the move the Acoma made centuries before from a mesa nearby. A storm destroyed the steep stairs to the top of the mesa and the tribe sent out scouts in four directions to find their new home, where we now stood. 

Children sped past us running to greet our guide with leaps and hugs. He greeted them warmly and led us through the village telling us about Acoma history and the contact with the Spanish military and religious. He spoke of the cruelty of the slavery the Europeans had imposed to build the Catholic Church here, but he included the education and care received by the Acoma people from the Franciscans in particular. 

The mesa, like an island in an ocean of sky and endless desert, gives its people protection and a place to call their own. The survival of its residents through centuries of storms and invasion from foreign forces were reminders of the timeless qualities that drive our existence, such as faith and perseverance. 

As we ended our tour, residents set up tables outside their homes to sell us samples of their beautiful pottery and jewelry. I had decided to leave my money in the car 350 feet below, so instead of shopping I scanned the horizon for the last time this visit before hopping back on the bus.

I was lost in the stillness and beauty of the moment when I was abruptly returned to the 21st century. A movement over my head caught my eye and I turned to see an Acoma man stretching his arm up, holding a smartphone and waving it in the air to catch a signal for the credit card purchase he was processing. 

Mayor Mitch Landrieu "Makes Straight a Wrong Turn"

Thank you from a Borderlander in South Texas to New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu for his efforts to "make straight a wrong turn" by removing four Confederate Era monuments from his city.

Mayor Landrieu's speech, I pray lives in our hearts, minds and most importantly, the textbooks of our nation's  school children for generations to come. 

"A great nation does not hide its history. It faces its flaws and corrects them" stated former U.S. president George W. Bush at the opening of the African American museum in Washington D.C. less than a year ago. 

Facing the legacy of a difficult war like the Civil War, its foundations and its aftermath from all perspectives is hard work.  Landrieu's speech was surgically precise in exposing the cancer of slavery in the Confederacy. He is correct. The Confederacy was on the wrong side of humanity.

Thank you from a former school child in South Texas who I once was. I sang the national anthem, while wondering how "Jose" climbed up on the flagpole to see "by the star's early light." Even in my comical confusion, I felt the swell of connection and pride in being American.  My second grader's imagination heard in the patriotic songs a rooting for her to learn her numbers and spelling because the future had a place just for her in this nation on whose soil she stood.

The sense of knowing my country accepted and took me into account was underscored by President Kennedy's words, "Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country." 

The roles of family, church and school are important in a child's development. My cultural inheritance was rich living on the U.S. border. It was informed by what I learned at the knee of my mother, who was reared in Mexico, the media I watched and listened to, and what I learned from books and in school. In my case, tamales and mariachis marched beside Benjamin Franklin, Paul Bunyan, Tom Sawyer and Brenda Starr, the newspaper comic strip woman-reporter in whom I saw my own star's guidance to a career in journalism. My parade of pioneers were inventors, makers and people who ask why.

I admired our founding fathers in the Northeast U.S. and also the settlers of the Americas and Southwest U.S. who came from España, leaving the old world for a chance to farm and prosper. If my ancestors could cross the ocean for a better life, could grow crops and raise cattle with the scant benefit of 17 inches of annual rainfall in the hardscrabble Chihuahuan desert, then I would proudly carry forward in whatever way I could contribute. 

Would I become a nun like my teachers? Would I become a public servant in government like JFK? Would I write the great Mexican American novel? Whatever I decided, I knew from living on the border with Mexico that I had a strong advantage in being a U.S. citizen. With so much effort and belief behind me, I felt encouraged to use my education to explore the opportunities it offered.

I had a wealth of resources in my education and the cultural treasures of my family's Mexican and American cultures, but there was also another force powering my progress which I had not understood until watching Landrieu's speech. 

My identity itself of being an American was the fourth leg to complete my table of family, faith and education. I now understand my 'luck of the draw' in being born a U.S. citizen, whose founders saw a place for me in the peace and prosperity of this country and its future. I finally see the role played by America's education systems, colleges and universities, health protections, environmental safeguards,  banking regulations, anti-monopoly laws and policies that protect and serve all Americans, including "hyphenated" ones like me. 

This inheritance was an invisible hand that rested on my shoulder, pushing and sustaining me to completion of high school and college, successful careers, and engagement in society. 

Landau's speech reminds me that the narrative that I believed, that I was being lifted and carried by a movement in humanity's timeline much stronger than race, culture, history or personal wealth, truly fueled my life's journey through difficult times. Here is the evidence: My father's work union protected our family of five when he was killed in a smelter accident. Social Security provided for our family until we five siblings entered college or the military.  There were grants, loans and scholarships that paid the way for multiple academic degrees for my family including a nursing degree, two doctorates, one brother's excelling in real estate and another becoming the state's second Texas Ranger of Mexican American descent.  

What would it feel like not have that gentle push on your shoulder, not having a sense of the backing of your country and its founders? What would it matter if the lift and support I felt ever present in my personal story had never been there? 

Living on the border, I knew a little of what that might feel like from first-hand knowledge. The elite and racist old-Europe strain had taken hold in colonial Mexico and lived on along the border where I lived.  I saw it in my own family, which favored light skin and male privilege. I saw it in school where children from the orphanage were treated differently than the daughters of lawyers and doctors. I saw it in corrupt local police, judges, media and politics. 

Later I experienced the different "Texas" strain of racism first hand in East Texas visiting family, and in Austin where I studied. But as an antidote, I also benefited from Great Society initiatives like my mother's evening Adult Education classes, my low interest college loans and grants and FCC employment rules that for a brief time opened doors for women and minorities in radio and television stations. 

Landrieu's speech prompts me to ask what national narrative would I have had I had been born African-American? True, my family, faith and education might provide the backing for my journey as a young person, but I would most likely lack my fourth leg of support, my sense of being accepted and taken into account as an American. 

The removal of monuments of the Confederate era in New Orleans may or may not prove pivotal in rectifying errors in our nation's history. It's only one step in a long journey, after all. The only way to know for certain is to wait and to see how the next generation of Americans hailing from diverse backgrounds perceives their country as either supporting their humanity and progress, or being on the wrong side of humanity by
celebrating their enslavement.

Today I'll trust the Earth

Today I'll trust the Earth to bear my weight,  to carry me.

The habit of years reappears.

Distrust is contagious. Watch Fox News: the business model guarantees the disease.

My steps withheld,  weight tenderly delivered, energy spent containing within an imaginary armload.

My steps on the planet are mine alone or are they part of a composition?

The ego answers from behind the curtain "Oh, it is I who manages all, your DNA, the era that you were you were born in, the wealth of your country's treasury, the policies in place, all mine."

How did the mind and the ego decide I couldn't trust the earth to carry me?  

That my tightened gut and jaw, my clenched fist, would guarantee the trick of walking without falling or being swallowed by the earth?