Leave the world for others to tend while I'm off treading the red carpet and look what happens ... .

Found myself wondering today while watching the huge demonstrations all over the country--why on earth those hordes of people--with a great cause to champion--aren't doing their marching and demonstrating in Mexico city under President Vicente Fox's windows, or in El Salvador, or Guatamala -- whatever their country of origin? Perhaps we could help them to pressure their countries to address their needs for gainful employment at home. Then families would be spared the need to be uprooted and risk life and limb digging tunnels and climbing wired fences, braving arid desert crossings and armed vigilantes -- in order to provide cheap labor for exploitative US corporations.

I cannot imagine that it hasn't occurred to anyone that we may be following the wrong path while trying to save so many deserving people from uncertain futures in a fast-changing world economy. "Twelve to twenty million," and counting. What happens when the number is forty million?

Failing that, do you suppose that when the number reaches critical mass -- they could simply vote the new lands back into Mexico by proclamation? It worked in Hawaii where we eventually had enough haule settlers exported into the islands to vote themselves and everybody else -- including the native islanders -- into the Union to become another state. It worked in Alaska where white settlers eventually outnumbered the Aleuts and the Eskimos and the Indians then voted to become another state of the great Union. Couldn't it work the other way? The Alsace-Lorraine voted itself out of France and into Germany at the beginning World War II, did it not? Could not recent arrivals from Mexico simply vote Southern California, Arizona, Texas, and New Mexico back into Mexico -- when their numbers become impossible to manage and immigration reforms fail? After all, those lands were theirs to begin with, right? Are those states not an extension of the Great Sonoran Desert? Why not? Who's working on this one? Hopefully not any of those mindless dudes responsible for recent critical decisions that now threaten world peace as well as the well-being of the planet!

(What global warming?)

I'm told that, unlike the northern border, Mexico's southern border is practically a fortress; almost impossible to penetrate. President Fox has done a fine job protecting his country from illegal immigration from Central and South American refugees seeking to move through Mexico toward the US border. Interesting.

(From this post it's clear that I'm half-in and half-out of the past and half-in and half-out of any reasonable position on the issue. But I'm getting back into gear again, albeit slow-ly... .)

Crazy times!

Photo: This beautiful slab of Italian alabaster (looks much like coral, doesn't it?) is embedded alongside smooth slabs in one of the exterior walls of the Getty Center in the mountains of Los Angeles. The material is comparatively "young" and "raw" with none of the sleekness a few more eons would give it. The colors are muted earth tones. It is a stunning use of natural materials as art.