Acrasiating Pt 1: How Did I Get Here?

From the relative discomfort of our phone and computer screens, and then the horrified stories shared with us by friends, my wife and I gazed at the seemingly inexorable process of Trumpism, or Christian Nationalism, or whatever the hell it was, Project 2025 and the angry ghost of Barry Goldwater, driving the United States of America off a fragile cliff of neoliberalism and into the abyss of fascism. We had already thought about leaving the USA back when Roe v. Wade was stripped away unceremoniously and the nation barely blinked; Californians rested semi-securely in their California-ness (like us, although we didn’t feel secure); people prepared their underground railroads of secret car drives across states borders for terrified women or teenage girls, and set up their pipelines of misoprostol to deep red states. The time didn’t seem right, though; we decided to stay and ‘fight’, whatever that meant.

We were no strangers to street activism and weren’t big fans of electoralism solving these problems; we had protested and protested hard, and often, against Proud Boys and police after the murder of George Floyd, and were heartened by a few small state gains to regulate policing in California. When Joe Biden stood in front of his teleprompters, however, and said “Defund the police? No! Fund the police,” we knew the Democrats weren’t getting the message.  Electoralism is the Way of the Democrat, and unlike the Project 2025 folks, they had no real plan except Vote Blue No Matter Who, and then some weak neoliberalism that wouldn’t really change anything. Liberalism, as someone said, enables fascism, and Trump 2.0 put fascism in high gear. This wasn’t un-American; this was all of the promises of the slave owning states, the anti-immigrant factions throughout history, the Gilded Age oil barons and JP Morgans of the world who lived on in their immortal corporations, the Reconstruction South and the Barry Goldwater planners and all the capitalism and imperialism and oligarchy that had steadily entwined around whatever idealistic bits were remaining in post-WWII America. Lemme make that clear: this fascism was as American as apple pie; as American as the American Bund, as American as Manzanar, as plantations and “super predators”.

I didn’t want to leave. I love California. My white grandparents came here for college (UC Berkeley); my Mexican, browner grandparents came here to escape Pancho Villa. (if you were a Porfirista, they shot you; if you were a Maderista, they grabbed your menfolk to fight in Pancho’s army. My grandfather chose the third option and went to the EEUU.) I grew up in the sleepy suburbs of Los Angeles. I missed California dearly after spending too many years in Boston (first for Harvard, and then stuck around for jobs and a girl), and when I got back I felt at home under sun drenched skies with the San Gabriel Mountains telling me where North was.  I and my wife Judith--also a Harvard grad and a SoCal girl—met, fell in love, raised small children, took care of my mom in true sandwich generation fashion, and carved out a life. I did academic administration work as a day job and scored movies on the side; later, I worked for a film composer and did nonprofits and activism on the side, and then when the film industry nosedived, I did *everything* on the side, from audiobooks to grant writing to pulling weeds in wild lands to substitute teaching for K-12 students, while caring for my mom and kids more.  The lack of steady work was stressful; the walking of children to school was not.  The slow farewell to my mom was a bit of both. We saw my mom through her gradual, and graceful, health declines (punctuated by fun visits and taking her out for tacos and beer) until she was only memories; we guided our children through neurological jungles and into private (!) schools (who knew they had scholarships?). I planted native plants, and they lived! And I ate of their berries and learned of their medicines and worked with Tongva culture bearers and drag queens alike at events.

However, the finality of the Big Beautiful Bill was shattering to us. ICE’s budget went from 9 billion to 130 billion—enough to allocated $2000 for each and every Latino in the USA, and Laura Loomer, that vile victim of poor judgment in both political stances and facial filler, made it clear that at least some of the conservatives wanted every single one of us in a concentration camp. I didn’t grow up feeling very Mexican and certainly my Latinidad is a complicated sentiment that waxes and wanes—mainly wanes—with loads of qualifiers—but damn if I didn’t feel Mexican after Loomer posted her bloodthirsty tweet about feeding all of us Latinos to the alligators. I considered heading to Mexico with the family. My grandparents were fleeing a chaotic country; I could do the same. I could finally be closer to my Uto-Nahuan language, Rarámuri ra’icha, and the distant ancestors on my dad’s side, the Tarahumara or Rarámuri. I knew people in Chihuahua City, and Baja, and Mérida!

The brief flights of fancy regarding going to México, Anahuac, Wichímoba, the kawí of my anayawiri, landed abruptly when faced with reality: my wife was simply far better connected in Costa Rica. She has something like *one hundred* cousins there, in the Central Valley primarily. Costa Rica is the shining star of Central America. It was able to resist the gunboat diplomacy of the United States, which converted Indigenous majority regions such as Guatemala and Honduras in to death-squad filled banana republics, spiralling chaotically and forever unstable due to outside imperialists (the USA, and also a few companies such as Dole and the United Fruit Company, and a jerk by the name of Walker, who was wholly endorsed by the US). Costa Rica repelled Walker, defied the USA, and eventually abolished their own army. They are not perfect; they are fairly prejudiced against the “Nicas”—the Nicaraguans who, ravaged by Reagan-backed Contras (surprise! they weren’t like the 1776 freedom fighters!), corrupt Sandinistas, and back in the day, Mr. Walker, have been fleeing into Costa Rica en masse. The Costa Ricans look down upon Nicaraguans the way white Americans look down on Mexicans…interesting parallel, eh? Despite issues like that and mildly rising drug trafficking related crime, Costa Rica remained the best option.

At this point, including right now, I had to just start letting go of my own attachments. Not all of me completely wants to go to Costa Rica. I had the romantic visions of reconnecting with Mexico. I will miss friends in Southern California. I’m not even 100% sure about the house that my wife has fallen in love with…although I couldn’t tell you why, rationally. It’s 3 minutes away from the school our kids will go to; it’s right near a fútbol field/multiuse park; it’s in a quiet neighborhood and there’s plenty of room for my musical instruments and entertainment space galore. I just…I just wanted to look at other houses. I don’t know. Things are moving quickly. Assenting to another’s wishes is not always easy, right? And yet I must remind myself that that is what my wife did for me—she moved to the foothills of Tujunga partly because it was equidistant from our workplaces (at the time), but a lot of it had to do with the fact that my mom, who helped us with the financing of the house, really wanted to be in the hills in a place with a yard. A yard that admittedly she did help fill with native plants and set me on a native plant planting/identifying/rematriating in disturbed lands journey…but I’m digressing; the point is, my wife let me take the lead on getting this house, and now I’m letting her take the lead on the next house…and city…and country.

It wouldn’t be the first time she was 100% right and my fears were unfounded.

[At this very moment, Judith is talking to the realtor in Palmares, and contacting an appraiser. Negotiating on a house thousands of miles away, that *admittedly* her cousin and friend just video-toured and whose realtor is friends with Judith’s uncles, well, it’s still a little scary.]

So am I gonna wake up in a few months in Costa Rica going “this is not my beautiful house!? How did I get here? My God, what have I done!?” Perhaps. But I’m going to try to take some solace, not in music, but in some very odd amoebae that people used to think were fungi.

Slime molds. You might have seen them on a log, looking like mustard that froze while flowing. Or, at other times, looking like dog puke. There’s literally a “dog vomit slime mold”. They aren’t fungi, though; they are amoebas. Amoebae. Little tiny eukaryotes that band together in times of stress and form something bigger than themselves. The main group of slime molds are family Acrasidae, formerly Acrasiomycota. (Mycota being fungi.) Acrasio- comes from the Greek akrasia, meaning “against one's judgement”. When the individual slime mold amoebas get stressed (usually when they run low on water sources), they form a stalk that stretches high into their firmament. The amoebas do not lose their individuality while they do this (I find this rather relevant). The stalk then topples over, forming a ‘grex’; a colony of amoebas moving along like a slug. Eventually they find a nice place to stop and sporulate, and this time, form thousands of stalks with fruiting bodies. And then they release spores and die and crumble—ok, we can stop the metaphor right there! The point is, they’re moving together; they haven’t surrendered their individuality (Wikipedia mentions this more than once, so it must be important); they are trusting to group decisions to find themselves a better place. Or uh, at least for their kids.

So, here we go. The USA is running low on the sweet water of civil rights, social services for all, liberation, and let’s face it, my beloved American West is simply running low on water itself—nice job draining the aquifers, O short term thinking capitalist city burghers. It’s time to surrender to the grex, perhaps doubting my own judgement and trusting that of others, while maintaining my individuality.  

Time to realize I can only do stuff like this once in a lifetime, and go seek that water flowing underground.

amí ba’wí,

Eric S.

[“All Apologies” to Talking Heads]