to know compassion...

Sometimes I think our job in being human is to watch, listen, and take in our world.
Then both try to find a way to react humanely, but also recognize other's suffering. Relieve it if we can.

Tonight I read an article in the news from the internet. It gets difficult to read the papers for me, though I do take several. It gets harder still to know if the news is the news as is reported, or is this as it was wished. Or asserted. So I read the article in several reputable sources. Every time stopping to consider the implications of the report.  It is basically about returning unconscious undocumented workers (here  I assume to Mexico)- transporting them- because of cost to hospitals, done apparently by hospitals. I'm still amazed. Is something missing here? Is this what families would WANT?  600 or so the article stated.

"Some patients who were sent home subsequently died in hospitals that weren’t equipped to meet their needs. Others suffered lingering medical problems because they never received adequate rehabilitation, the report said." from the article

Sometimes I've taught folks, children, in a 30 year career in several locations, that might have been in that undocumented status, but I don't know because we don't ask. But. Somewhere along the line the Supreme Court allowed us to offer children school. And these issues remain debated in the couches across the land. It's different for me as far as just talking goes, I'm working with real people I know.

I just saw Arlo Guthrie singing. In Santa Barbara at the Lobero Theater. It was a great experience and he sang a song I have loved since first learning to play it over 25 years ago in a town called Greenfield in CA. First hearing it I thought about the people I saw the very first day we drove there. This was 6 hours up from LA to his interview- me waiting on my friend as he interviewed for a teaching job- watching humans working in the fields getting sprayed by a plane full of pesticide. Later I'd get dusted when out on yard duty when winds moved in certain directions. I was single then. We were following a job fair in Monterey County giving a lead for teaching employment.  I was driving around with him, the guy I married, seeing the area where we would both come to work. I saw that spraying just lay down right on my car windshield, wet enough to write your name in  as if fog had fallen,  and looking out there were about 50 people working in a grape arbor. No one was running for cover. I had been looking in silence as we headed toward the Arroyo Seco.  There is a ghostly beauty there. Unlike anywhere on earth really. I got out of the car in almost fury because my father raised me to understand pesticides. Then my next experience that day was sitting in the grape orchards watching people work, up close, for over two hours as I thought about what I might be committing to do with the rest of my life. They were moving through what I personally know to be very hard labor. Making the grapes, that turn into the wine, that some in this country are tossing back as they go about their book reading salons. Unaware and uncaring about ...oh...I'll just pass on more memories. Enjoy that wine, no thank you for me.

I wasn't there as an activist. I was there as a really young teacher, disoriented, following a job lead.
And finding out about where I was.


This article -I'd like to have the skill to write the song it deserves.

I do know a song it makes me remember.



I do know compassion. Surely we do know this in our country. Or are we doomed to repeat....
Surely this isn't done without a scintilla of our compassionate heart.