While we’re at it, what happened to Betsy Price and Voices from the Valley which last year organized to begin a new public radio organization unaffiliated with a religious organization? We had attended a rousing early-June meeting of like-minded folks at the Galeria 409 where we were regaled by an enthusiastic Ms. Price, Ken Mills, a public radio consultant from Minnesota, and David Davies, representating Texas Public Radio about the path towards a new operation. TPR was ready to share its NPR feeds with a new operation, help the new kid get local news organized and provide unstated financial help. There were reports of unnamed big money folks ready to donate. We needed two-hundred people ready to commit to funding. Exciting times.

Well, the answer is on the Voices of the Valley web site.

Bishop Flores has decided to give a fresh start to KMBH.

Now is the time for us to let him know about the support we can provide in energy, talent, expertise, and money.

You can send him an email by clicking here.  Explain to him how you can help put KMBH back on track.

This is an important step.  In a positive tone, let him know we are here, ready, and willing.

What to emphasize:

1.  Congratulate KMBH for forming the Community Advisory Board and explain how you might fit participating as a board or committee member.

2.  What locally produced programs we can create to share  nationally with our friends and family in Michigan and other states.

3.  Ways in which we can improve fund raising so that we can have the best of national NPR programs.

Apparently, last year’s noise was just that, noise and an attempt to muscle former bishop Reymundo Peña into replacing Pedro Briseño as the station’s manager. That was accomplished in April and, while Voices of the Valley’s web site is still up, nothing has been posted since then. And still the Valley is without a voice.

We called the station a few moments ago and this time got an answer. The person with whom we spoke said the engineers in charge have said that the tower knocked down by Hurricane Alex will be back up and online in two or three weeks.

Now the question: is this acceptable to you? Does the Valley need a public radio station in the Valley unaffiliated with major institutions that may themselves become objects of reporting and, when they do, interfere with that reporting? Does the Valley need a new stab at establishing an independent organization to bring a wider range of NPR and other programming to the area? Does the Valley need a local news organization with no debts to other public institutions?

Among the dormant orange trees
Along the frontage road
A graceful mockingbird, perched low,
Begins his strident song.

Below, on the ground, a faded tent
Is flapping in the breeze
While tattered clothes dry on a branch
Beneath the Valley heat.

Across the street under a bridge
One man holds up a sign:
WILL WORK FOR FOOD it reads in print
The last word underlined.

Most cars don’t stop to render aid,
His words are quickly ignored:
Another homeless, broken being
Surviving on his own.

I’ve seen him there most afternoons
The sun still burning flesh
I drive up fast and pray for green
So that he doesn’t ask.

There’s no reproach as I drive by
His face betrays no emotion
But guilt begins to gnaw at me
Like some venomous potion.

The month of May finally leaves
And June’s fire burns bright
I still avoid looking at him
When he’s within my sight.

And then one day the tent is gone
No more man with the sign
I feel relieved, but angry, too
For treating him so unkind.

Julieta Corpus
6/2010

Click on chart to read the story

(After a Miami visit in these United States of immigration debate)

The Haitian private-school guard sits in his golf cart
Under a dry-leafed tree and
Prevents wealthy white kids from being snatched
In the money making business of kidnapping.

He’s comfortable in French, Creole, Spanish and English.
He’s alert; no kids taken under his eyes.

The Cuban pool-cleaner has ten to thirteen pools
A day, skimming slime and scum, adding chemicals,
A safe swim for his customers, free of microbes.

He’s fine with Spanish and English.
No infections for dawn and dusk lap-doers with his system.

The Peruvian nanny takes a semi-break and
Walks a large and hot husky, which stops to pee
Under trees with dry leaves.

She’s fine with Spanish and English.
No ill kids, adults, dogs under her arms.

The Nicaraguan garbage-truck driver
Barely stops to send iron clamps around
Garbage bins, lift them, dump them, return them.

She’s OK with Spanish and English,
And never lets wet and dry garbage spill on that dry-leafed,
Tree-surrounded street.

June 2010

All but the most cold-hearted among Cameron County residents would say that a prisoner released from the Cameron County Jail in Olmito should be freed in daylight, after breakfast and then given a ride to one of the county’s centers, for instance, Brownsville and Harlingen.

We citizens of Cameron County should demand better of the sheriff and his jailers.

Highway 511 is not a walker’s dream, night or day, and for one already addled, it can be fatal as it was for the woman who died last week.

The Cameron County Commissioners when looking at the sheriff’s budget request for the upcoming fiscal year, should include money for a released-prisoner-transport-van, even if it is not sought.

Sixty years ago
The junior high school
Principal told us
to say The Lord’s Prayer,
Think of Christ and
Support the troops in
Korea.

We did.
We knew nothing
Of millions of dead
Koreans, thousands
Of dead Americans.

The principal controlled
The morning announcements.
The generals controlled
The blood in heat and cold.

We went to class.
We went home.
We heard the same principal
The next day.

Each one of the full-fledged adults in my family goes to the gym, once a week, a few times a week, or even twice a day. My sister-in-law regularly attends a 5:30 aerobics session at the gym, comes home, showers and starts her day, a pure amazement to me, my ritual being to arise, jot down a thought or dream in my journal, check email, peruse the newspaper and smartly jot little answers into the squares of the crossword puzzle. I’m the only abstainer.

Should I join a gym? It’s not all that expensive, maybe $35 a month. It’s not that I don’t need it. Exercise elevates mood; structure helps endow moments with meaning. Sometimes my moods swing with the wind from one moment to the next. I worry about foolish minutia—what’s with this wart on my nose? could that blotch on my tongue be tongue cancer? Out comes the health book; on with the Google search— and improbabilities and am besieged at times by darkness, the uncomfortable, intrusive nag of: What is the point? I know that fifteen or twenty minutes of aerobics can stimulate the production of dopamine and serotonin, promoters of serenity, decimators of irksome philosophical questions.

Married and comfortable with my form, visible to others, not me, I have no longing to lose those five or ten pounds that might make my clothes hang more happily; if I did, I would eat less, but I love to eat. However, years do come apace, 56 will become 60, 70 and 80, if I’m lucky, and I could contain the wear and tear of aging somewhat, improving arthritis, bone density, legs that mysteriously ache during sleep. And there’s that palpable mush of underarm fat that makes so many of us shun sleeveless attire. And there’s the mantra, the steady, meditative rhythm of the treadmill, the jollity of the nearby micro-TVs broadcasting—cheery Opie, and Andy lovingly scolding feckless Barney Fife—what might embarrass me to plop on the couch and gaze at while the dusty tile and stinky kitty box awaited my care.

So what do I do? Join the gym, of course! But the idea smites me with irony. I drive my car, with its expensive gasoline, to the gym to walk on a treadmill. I leave my carpet unvacuumed, my floor unswept and unmopped, cockroaches at play, so I can lift weights or dance aerobically. Further, though I don’t, I could render assistance to one of those elderly women pushing grocery carts down Elizabeth Street.

Look around town, any town, and you see shabby, sagging, cracked houses, straggly, unmown lawns, white ghosts of Wal-Mart bags billowing in the wind and beer cans strewn along curbs. Children, left alone by working parents, dawdle, viewing endless TV programs.

In short, while we work out, we do not use our God-given strength, our powerful minds and bodies, to perform chores that need performing.

Am I performing these chores? No, yes, well, some of them. It seems to me that, as Karl Marx promoted, each of us should indeed act “according to his ability” to maintain and improve upon our spots in the world. We should be busy cultivating our gardens, wherever they are.

Our proclivity to spend not a little bit, but a great deal, of money and time at the gym is, I think, symptomatic of one of the diseases of our time. No, I will not join the gym, not now anyway.

I love turning pages in twilight.
Easy to see, if the slanted orange light enters.

More turned pages, and some squinting,
Turning the book to catch light.

But the orange goes, the words blur,
And it is time to squint to the end of the chapter.

Longer days, more pages,
And the season shifts,
And the pages decrease ….

Book down, book marked,
Until morning light
Captures a page and side page ….

Turn on a light and read?
Wonderfully simple, and easy,
Though the fading orange,
And then the soft white,
Heighten words’ wonder ….