I don’t know how to write about this, but I’m going to try anyway.

I’ve been following the discussion on immigration for over a year, and there are a lot of complexities to it and a lot of back story.

But this story is so terrible that I don’t think you need to know all the details of the law or intricacies of how we got to where we are in the United States as far as our broken immigration policies are concerned.

This story is about an essay written by Dr. Erik Camayd-Freixas, a certified Spanish interpreter for federal courts, who was present at the ICE raid in Postville, Iowa.

I found out about this essay in a circuitous way.  I first read the entire essay at The Sanctuary where Duke had it up in its entirety.  Immediately after reading it, I rebooted the essay and found he had removed it … turns out Dr. Camayd-Freixas had asked him to refrain from posting it after finding that the New York Times was going to do a front page story on it.  Duke and other pro-migrant bloggers complied.  Now that the story has been published, the essay is once again up at The Sanctuary.

Today I read the story in the New York Times which, of course, was heavily edited due to space concerns and as a result, the true impact of what happened was highly muted, though it was still an incredibly terrible story.

Dr. Camayd-Freixas was called to Postville to interpret but was not initially told why or what was going to happen.  The ICE, now part of the Department of Homeland Security, had planned this raid on Agriprocessors, Inc. for a long time in utter secrecy.

Sam Cooke, A Change is Gonna Come:

We managed to avoid the horrors of the candidate wars, oh weren’t we the wise ones?  This community was an oasis of sanity for many all over the blogosphere, and that’s no lie.

But the primaries are over now and the detrius we find ourselves wading through that calls itself our government is something we cannot avoid.

Folks in the Midwest are losing their homes to floods and there’s fires in California and lord knows what else.  Pick a city, any city.  Our whole country is suffering.

I have read some excellent incendiary rhetoric here at Docudharma this week.  Such fires blazing in our souls!

Burn, baby, burn.

Ben E. King – Stand By Me

Got the idea for this essay from my all time favorite diary by buhdydharma, written on November 20, 2006, which begins.

Gather ye round my Brothers and Sisters, come sit by the fire with the children and the ancestors and the listening spirits and I shall tell to you a tale. Spun by a madman from whole cloth and cast upon the seas of reality to drift where it may through the warps and wefts of space and time. A tale of stunning hope and hope denied, a tale of great victories….and and the same sad tale of tragic defeat. A tale of the impossible realized and the possible left undone, the tale of us and we. All the same story all the same story all the same story. and so, and so, and so,… and here we are. Still and again. Always and now. Now and forever.

I think about the people I know and so many of them are just outstanding human beings.  I don’t have a lot of friends, but I do have a few, and I have many good acquaintances here in New York City.  So I am never lonely.  I also have a gathering of people who share my spiritual practice.  Yes, I am very fortunate.

But there is another kind of gathering together, and the folks I’ve spoken of above are not part of that.  When I invite them to this gathering, they are not interested and some of them think me quite mad to even suggest such a thing, they with their busy lives.

I asked the I-Ching if it had anything to say to Docudharma.

And I got a response.

The I-Ching is also called the Book of Changes, and the response I received had two changing lines.

I received Hexagram 61. Chung Fu/Inner Truth.

Here’s some of what the book says about Inner Truth (all quotes are from the Wilhelm/Baynes edition):

The wind blows over the lake and stirs the surface of the water.  Thus visible effects of the invisible manifest themselves.  The hexagram consists of firm lines aqbove and below, while it is open in the center.  This indicates a heart free of prejudices and therefore open to truth.  On the other hand, each of the two trigrams has a firm line in the middle; this indicates the force of inner truth in the influences they represent.

…

Joyousness and gentleness are the attributes of the two primary trigrams.  Tui means joyousness in following the good, and Sun means penetration into the hearts of men.  Thus one establishes the foundation of trust that is necessary in transforming a country.

What are hexagrams?  In my cases, I toss 3 Chinese coins 6 times and then draw six lines, one on top of the other.  Each toss has a numerical value depending on how they land, sort of a heads/tails kind of thing.  If you get an odd number you draw a straight (yang) line.  An even number, you draw a broken (yin) line.  In certain cases, the numerical value produces what is called a “changing” line.  When that happens, the line turns into its opposite and a new hexagram comes forth.

There were two “changing” lines in the hexagram about Docudharma, which means there were specific special messages in this reading.

Lou Reed:

Who doesn’t love the thought of transformation?  Pumpkins into a golden coach and all.

Cinderella, oh that’s what they fed me as a girl and I stumbled into many transformations as a result.

Modern culture calls it a “makeover.”  Well, yeah, you can change the surface in so many ways.

But transformation?  Oh that’s another thing entirely.  The surface is the form, the transformation fills that form and makes it breathe, like Galatea, like … well, I can’t think of any other examples.

Midwest city, yearning for real culture and finding none, I go to college and meet a strange group of wild misfits.

We end up renting a flat together and there are many stories I could tell about that, but I’m not going to.

h/t to jimstaro.

General William E. Odom died two days ago of an apparent heart attack.

General Odom was a harsh critic of Mister Bush’s Iraq misadventure:

“Among senior military people, he was probably the first to consider the war in Iraq a misbegotten adventure,” Brzezinski said yesterday. “He believed that we’re just stoking hostility to the United States in that region and developing an opposition that cannot be defeated by military means. He was very outspoken.”

Well before the U.S.-led invasion in 2003, Gen. Odom warned that military action in Iraq would be foolhardy and futile. He outlined his positions in The Washington Post’s Outlook section Feb. 11, 2007, in the essay “Victory Is Not an Option.”

“The president’s policy is based on illusions, not realities,” he wrote. “There never has been any right way to invade and transform Iraq.”

Gen. Odom became a fixture on news programs and never altered his critical stance toward the Bush administration’s policies in Iraq and Iran. On Tuesday, he and Brzezinski wrote an op-ed article for The Post in which they stated that the White House’s “heavy-handed” approach toward Iran would backfire and “almost certainly result in an Iran with nuclear weapons.”

Obligatory YouTube this Friday night — Ray Charles, “Hit the Road Jack” (replacement for “Busted” which got busted off of YouTube)

We got news coming down the pipeline about White House press secretary writing a tell-all and the very media indicted in that tell-all is covering it.  Just when you think things can’t get more surreal … well, I dunno, I think we’re all pretty much aware that surreal is the flavor of the day here in these Disunited States.

The story of the day.  Oh but there are so many stories of the day.

I am all for staying informed.

I’m one of the fortunate ones who can get their news from the blogs and especially here at Docudharma, where our news aggregators and analysts are second to none!

But it is Friday and I’m done with the work week.  I tend to use this day to reflect a bit and check my navigating skills to see that I’m still on the straight course.