Giving Thanks for New Mexico

All around us our world seems to be in a mad swirl of meaningless change, vacuous politics and horrifying cruelty. Rogue law enforcement preys on helpless and impoverished migrants and their children. Climate change deniers gut sensible and crucial environmental regulations. There is no way to escape the news. As useless and bleak as we might feel, we know we must steel ourselves and bear witness to these cruel and atrocious times.

For many of us, though, who are blessed with the enormous good fortune of being New Mexicans living in New Mexico, there are deep comforts to be found in our beautiful blue state.

If we’re here by birth or by choice, chances are we feel deeply at home in the unique splendor of our landscape. The sky, the mesas, the golden bosque in the fall, the vast distances and intimate valleys inspire us, expand our perspective and give us strength.

Our love of the land mirrors our loyalty to family, community, culture and to the children who brighten us with such utter delight that the future has a tinge of hope for us even in a contemporary environment that challenges our ingenuity and often overwhelms us.  

Commitment to family is mirrored, itself, in the tenacious familial bonds of friendship that New Mexico’s invigorating toleration and celebration of differences makes possible. So many of us have extended families that range across cultures and friendships that ride the waves of generations.

We are a deeply religious and morally driven place. Our devotion to faith and  authenticity, cultural and individual, is mirrored by our fascination and commitment to a history that is rich and indelibly ours, even if we can only identify with it from an immigrant’s distance.

Yes, many of us are painfully burdened by the troubles of poverty, isolation, violence and prejudice. Too many of us live in fear of guns, crime and addiction. But our various systems of belief inspire a spirit of charity here. Our communities manage to still survive and often flourish. We know them to be the basis of whatever the good life might mean to us. 

New Mexicans tend to look out for each other. Yesterday, I hobbled to my mailbox, wobbling with my cane over dried ruts from the last rain. Out of the blue, a gentle, grandmotherly person who I did not know stopped her car, rolled down her window, and asked if I needed help. I didn’t but how generous and upliftingly kind she was to ask. That’s New Mexico.

Earlier this month, the New Mexico Legislature in its second special session this year passed a near unanimous bipartisan bill that secured funding for the almost half a million New Mexicans in need of food stamps. Without that act of decency and compassion, more than a quarter of our state’s population could have been held hostage to the barbaric penny pinching and cruel indifference of the Trump administration if we have another government shutdown. It makes you feel prouder than ever to be a New Mexican.

Not only do we tend to look out for each other, our communities have somehow managed to regularly escape their silos so that many of us have the blessings and full comforts of friendships across boundaries that in other places would prevent meaningful relationships and their enduring loyalties.

Sure, we have our own bullies and bigots and nasty misers, but somehow here they stick out more than in other places I know of, and stink more too. Much of our strength comes from our secular and religious charities. I’ll only mention three out of a multitude, but they say volumes about our communitarian core beliefs.

The Roadrunner Food Bank, for instance, is so sincere in its efforts and so well organized that it coordinates a network of some 350 partner organizations to deliver over 30 million pounds of food a year to New Mexicans in need.

Albuquerque Health Care for the Homeless serves 5,000 to 7,000 people a year who find themselves without a place to live. It provides primary and urgent care, dental and vision aid, as well as mental health services, health education and free medications.

New Mexico Voices for Children is another well-respected nonprofit organization struggling with the fallout from our state’s chronic economic doldrums. It’s associated with the Annie E. Casey Foundation which spearheads efforts to improve the lives of children around the country. Voices for Children here is focused on evidence-based analysis and child advocacy in what is often financially the poorest state in the union.

What helps us survive and flourish creatively under such conditions is that we are never very far from the historic and ethnic treasures that make up the abundance of our common landscape as New Mexicans. A great gift to give yourself this Thanksgiving season might be to read the late historian Marc Simmons’s classic book “New Mexico: An Interpretive History” from UNM Press. It was published in the 1980s as part of the bicentennial project of the American Association for State and Local History and was funded by the now Trump-defunct National Endowment for the Humanities. Simmons is a riveting storyteller and one of the state’s most trusted writers of history. I’d read his “New Mexico” once long ago and found it again in my library last month. Once I started reading it again, I literally couldn’t put it down. His love and knowledge of the state and its hidden canyons and mesas is infectious as only genuine enthusiasm can be. He takes us from Shiprock, Tierra Amarilla and Raton, down through Las Vegas, Tucumcari, Portales and Hobbs, over the dustlands from Carlsbad to Deming and up through Zuni, Silver City,  Albuquerque and Santa Fe over a span of more than 500 years. He reminds us vividly of the vast richness of our shared past and how it has evolved into this place we love so much.

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Dear readers, thank you more than I can say for giving me another chance at trying to speak my mind as best I can in my 86^th year. Here’s to an overwhelmingly joyous Thanksgiving and the deep soul pleasure of counting our blessing here in the Land of Enchantment.

*Nullius in verba: take nobody’s word for it