It's 1986, and am in California, studying towards a graduate degree in cultural anthropology, but am considering medicine with my background in biology, being beyond curious about neuroscience. In my mind, I'm also thinking about veterinary school at UC Davis, having done research on, and cared for, so many birds. I so love those avian dinosaurs that managed to survive the mass extinction crisis prior to the one we're in right now.

I have to work. Unlike Denmark, higher education in the USA is unattainably expensive for so many, and is a major cause for America's degeneration towards a religion-justified, corporate dystopia.  America's not quite yet there, even as I write these words in 2021.  

I have a job interview at a huge landscaping firm, whose customers are mostly owners of corporate buildings that require intense botanical scenery around them. They seek someone who can analyze and problem solve plant diseases, coordinate planting, sprinkler installation and repair, guide mostly Spanish-speaking workers, interpreting landscape design schematics for them. Driving all over southern California, site to site, from the LA area to the Mexican border was also a part of the job. The salary promised to be good.

Fully decked out in my best suit and tie outfit, on a chilly, unusually rainy morning but comfortably cocooned in my car, I am straining to see through fast moving windshield wipers the narrow and heavily trafficked, curvy roadway, up and down a mostly desert region to make my appointment. Having survived a Nazi pedophilic Christian horror in childhood, which, a decade later on November 29 in Denmark, would take the life of my younger sister, I'm also struggling to pay attention to my body, employing breathing techniques to manage a creeping, very intense social angst and other symptoms from a complex form of PTSD. It wouldn't be good, if, during that interview, I would suddenly cry, or freeze, unable to express myself clearly, with buckets of sweat pouring out of me. I really needed this job, and had performed professionally perfect during the initial phone interview. To help me along, I've got my favorite Moody Blues album playing from the cassette stereo system.

As I round a very sharp corner, challenged also by fast-moving, oncoming traffic, I suddenly see a huge brown form lying still by the sandy shoulder on the other side of the road. It's a dog. Ignoring someone honking behind me, I slow down to a crawl, roll down my window, wind-driven rain plastering my face, and noticed that one of its forelegs is moving very slowly as a car just then drove over it's long tail. I can't help myself, and pull as far over to the narrow shoulder on my side as possible so cars can pass from behind. It wasn't easy to safely get out of the car and run over to the dog, completely ignoring the rain beginning to soak my expensive clothes, while also ignoring what that would do to my interview in less than a half hour.

The mixed breed, large dog could barely move its head, as its very alive but so pain-ridden and sad eyes looked up at me. I crouched down to gently pet its head, collar-less neck, and then ran my fingers down its backbone, noticing instantly that it, and one side of its chest, was broken beyond repair. At least one of its lungs worked fine, for now, as it painfully heaved, and, in putting my ear to that chest, heard the strong thumping of a heartbeat. But its pest-ridden, short matted fur stank like no dog I have ever smelled, even to today. There was no blood, except by its broken tail, which I swiftly pulled closer to the shoulder as cars further drenched us in splashes of brown dirty water. I put my mouth close to one of its ears, and began to softly sing,“Hey Jude,” as best I could.

It was pretty cold, so I took off my now-ruined jacket and covered up some of the dog with it, up to its neck, and lay down next to it, my feet safely downhill towards the scrub-desert valley below, cradling its head, kissing it, petting it, as it soundlessly kept looking deep into my eyes, struggling ever more to breathe. I kept singing that song written by Paul McCartney to soothe John Lennon's son, humming through some of the forgotten lyrics. Wondering only briefly what passers-byes were thinking about this blond dude in a brown-drenched, white-shirt with tie was doing with a suit-decked dog, it took some ten minutes more for it to finally die. Based on everything evident on its body, until that moment it had survived so much harshness from a human world that had cast it away long ago like the morning trash.

I then dragged its lifeless body halfway down that valley, and left it for nature to take its course.

I did get that job, by the way, later calling from a gas station to excuse my absence with a white lie, and thus getting a new appointment.

Photo courtesy of Santa Ynez Valley Pride

Each June, the LGBQT+ world community celebrates natural gender diversity and sexual identification as Pride Month. Its roots go back to June 28, 1969, when the NYPD stormed a Greenwich Village, NYC, gay club, Stonewall Inn, on the pretense of liquor license violations, employed for decades to prevent gay assemblies. The NYPD committed battery on Stonewall Inn’s patrons and employees as they brutally yanked them out. This resulted in six days of intense protests against the police action outside the bar and at a nearby park, resulting in further skirmishes with the NYPD.

Perhaps first understood by many as A Polysexual, Polygendered World by Bruce Bagemihl, PhD, a Canadian biologist and linguist, in his book, Biological Exuberance, and more scientifically defined by Columbia University professor of medicine, William Byne, in his peer-reviewed Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) paper, Biological Exuberance: Animal Homosexuality and Natural Diversity.  Throughout the entire spectrum of the animal kingdom, within which human beings are scientifically classified, researchers today are finding ever more diversity in sexual behaviors, including lifetime, same sex pairings. For example, among the black swans of Australia, about 25% of the population engage in lifelong male-male pairings. Generally through one of the males briefly pairing with a female, or sometimes chasing away a heterosexual pair from the egg-laden nest, the males take over the brooding -- incubating -- of the eggs and then raising their chicks. These males been shown to have a far higher success rate, upwards of 80% to the 30% of heterosexual parents in raising their young since they can better defend more advantageous nesting territories. Upon reaching sexual maturity, their young exhibit no significant variation in sexual behaviors than can be found in the general population. This is also true of many other animal species, including Denmark’s national bird, the mute swan, from a Hans Christian Andersen story. Clicking on HC Andersen's "The Ugly Duckling" first illustration, in 1843, by Vilhelm Pedersen below takes you to to a 2 minute video by the Nastural History Museum that graphically explains the science of it in very simple terms.

130 miles north of LA – a 2 hour drive -- you’ll find the town of Solvang, with a 2021 population of 6,048. It has long been nicknamed The Danish Capital of America, not only because it was founded in 1911 by 3 Danish immigrants who purchased pristine growing land, built an irrigation system, and much more, but because today many of its streets are dotted with houses and shops that have an intentional architecture very reminiscent to a traditional, quaint little Danish village, as well as attractions reminiscent to the Danish capitol, Copenhagen. And that draws many tourists, especially those with a Danish background. Over the years, the town has, with increasingly conservative homophobic protesting against it, allowed Santa Ynez Valley Pride to colorfully express the above describred natural diversity.

Then in July, 2022, Avi Stone Williams and Joshua Jerome Eligino filmed themselves burning a Pride flag, allegedly one of two stolen from a Solvang area home and a church, which was uploaded into social media. The two were charged by the Santa Barbara DA’s office with misdemeanor theft and hate crimes, under California and US constitutional civil rights protections.

During a heated February 28, 2023 Solvang town meeting, the city council voted 3 to 2 against Santa Ynez Valley Pride to renew their right to professionally paint a town pedestrian street crossing the rainbow colors and fly Pride flags from street light poles. In an Op-Ed by Santa Barbara’s EdHat News, Jess Silverstein described how “ [s]everal homophobes...[at the meeting] expressed their clear disdain for LGBTQ+ people ruining their WASPy version of Danish-America.” Further, Siversteen referenced “...two different news articles about the Solvang City Council voting against a celebration of pride month for the LGBTQ+ community . One article was by the Santa Ynez Valley News, and the other by The Independent where [city council member Robert] Clarke said he expects to be called a bigot and subsequently rambled incoherent nonsense about gay people...

“Clarke said he just couldn’t wrap his head around the idea that banners hanging from city streetlights would make Solvang’s LGBTQ+ residents feel any better about themselves. And how could he? First, he's an idiot. Second, he's incapable of understanding how anyone different than himself might feel. He's in the majority. As a (presumably) straight, white, male, he's never had to worry about being denied services because of the color of his skin, not being paid an equal wage, or not able to marry who he loves. So why should he care about anyone else that differs from him? Clearly this position of being a sworn public servant meant to represent everyone won't change his stance, making him the worst kind of idiot: one that is aware of his shortcomings but will do absolutely nothing to learn, grow, or attempt to understand how others may feel or experience life. Defiant ignorance.”

In response to the several year long civil rights pressures felt by the Santa Ynez Valley Pride, Copenhagen Pride has promised to replace every flag stolen or burned in Solvang by homophobic civil rights violators. 

Copehagen Pride spokesperson, Lars Henriksen, stated “[We are] stunned to hear about the opposition to Santa Ynez Valley Pride and smaller Pride events in Solvang, including the burning of rainbow flags. We brought WorldPride to Copenhagen precisely because we are a beacon for LGBTI+ equality and acceptance globally and so the opposition to Prides in Solvang is far from reflecting the values we cherish in Denmark and Copenhagen. We had to ask our Lord Mayor to write to Mayor Infanti and we sincerely hope he hears her friendly message.”

Copenhagen Social-democratic Lord Mayor Sophie Hæstorp Andersen wrote: “In the spirit of friendship between our cities, I urge you to give Santa Ynez Valley Pride and your local LGBTI+ community the full support of your City Council, in the same way that the Municipality of Copenhagen wholeheartedly supports Copenhagen Pride for the benefit of all Copenhageners, and to show the world that respect and acceptance are vital elements in a modern, welcoming society.“

FULL COPY OF HER LETTER WITH SIGNATURE AND COPENHAGEN SEAL 

The story desn’t quite end there. In recent years, developers and enterpreneurs, keen on capitalizing, revitalizing is the catch phase, Solvang’s proximity to scenic California beaches, vineyards and wildernesses, as well as its historic Danish tourist traffic, would like to see an end to what they have termed as the Danish mafia.

In a September 24, 2022, article by Andrew Pridgen of the San Francisco publication, SF Gate, he writes, “Resistance to change may be what’s prohibiting the hamlet of more than 6,000 residents, in the heart of the Santa Ynez Valley, from becoming the next must-visit destination in California. One factor: an older guard that continues to rely on the town’s [Danish] traditions to stay afloat.”

In an interview by Pridgen with Rene Kaerskov, wealthy owner of a nearby vineyard by the Danish Mill Bakery in Solvang, which he also owns, he explained, “We should attract an audience that will stay here in the hotels, eat a couple great meals and enjoy a higher spending experience... I prefer the Carmel audience. They have eight restaurants in the Michelin Guide. They have Tiffany & Company... Solvang, however, is in conflict.”

That view is echoed by other entrepreneurs who, to SF Gate, have stated they would like to capitalize on Solvang, but can’t due to what they term as “the old-guard [Danish] gentry.”

“It’s been struggle city,” explained Michael Cobb, “...a Disney alum and owner of High Roller Tiki Lounge in the town’s center... The town isn’t helping in any way to change... All they seem to care about is their bakeries. We call it the Danish Mafia and it’s true. It’s well known that’s what’s happening. A small group of people made decisions for everyone — there’s a lot of corruption going on, it was happening before I got involved. Now I see it all.”

Does this underlying conflict play a role in the city council’s decision to not reniew Santa Ynez Valley Pride’s application to colorfully express the liberal, natural gender diversity and sexual identification?

A critical, peer-reviewed socioeconomic analysis of Solvang, titled, Global capitalism guided by desire- Solvang, CA, as a “real” place, was published by the Journal of Rural Studies in 2021. 

In his Conclusion, author Jørn A. Cruickshank, professor of Global Development and Planning at the University of Agder in Norway, wrote: “The property of Solvang is upheld by a motive force that produces a Danish-style village area, either as a “necessary evil” (CC) for the local economy or as an expression of nostalgia and romanticism, a desire among tourists and residents to celebrate the memory of an ancient Danish or northern-European Old-World culture. This desire guides commodification and the emerging qualities of Solvang and fends off competing forces, producing something more than an average American rural settlement surrounding a Danish museum in the middle. The task of the critical geographer is not to contribute to a fight against capitalist commodification, in an attempt to return to an illusory past, but she should instead be aware of what works and what threatens the place.”

In socio-psychology, commodification  “describes the process by which something without an economic value gains economic value that can replace other social values. “

Continuing with Cruickshank's Conclusion, “[t]he main contribution to critical geography here is not that it should go looking for what exists and what works, to conserve it. The suggestion is that instead of looking for what is wrong or describing an alternative world, the critical geographer should seek knowledge about existing desires that have an interest in their social milieu and want to make it even better. This is the more positive and appropriate ground for political engagement.”

The hypothetical point here, in celebrating "...the memory of an ancient Danish... culture...[Jørn A. Cruickshank, above]" could be that homophobia may persist in Solvang due to attempting to conserve a generations' old Danish mindset, one which existed throughout America equally, considering the June 28, 1969 police raid on a gay bar in New York City, the very reason Pride is celebrated in June.  And Copenhagen Lord Mayor's point in her letter is for that old mentality to catch up with the reality of today's Denmark.

During the heated debate on February 28 at city hall, 5th generation Solvang resident Jesse Condit Bengoa said, “First it was a Pride parade through downtown Solvang this past June, then the drag show idea in December. Next it was the Valentine’s Day social media post featuring a gay couple, and now rainbow sidewalks. The city ought to reject this ‘woke campaign,’ maintain its Danish heritage, and ‘stay true to who and what we are.’ Mayor Mark Infanti also voted to deny the Pride application, but on the grounds that a single business, a toy store, would capitalize on the affair. In an interesting play on words, he is married to Gay, a natural woman as natural as what Santa Ynez Valley Pride wishes to celebrate in Solvang.

Copenhagen Lord Mayor Sophie Hæstorp Andersen concluded her letter to Mayor Infanti by stating: “Echoing the theme of Copenhagen Pride 2023, we should #ComeTogether for love, equality and human rights, in Copenhagen and in Solvang.”

On October 7, 2018, "the United Nations released a damning report. The short version: We have about 12 years to actually do something to prevent the worst aspects of climate change. That is, not to prevent climate change—we're well past that point—but to prevent the worst, most catastrophic elements of it from wreaking havoc on the world's population. To do that, the governments of Earth need to look seriously at the forces driving it. And an honest assessment of how we got here lays the blame squarely at the feet of the 1 percent.

"Contrary to a lot of guilt-tripping pleas for us all to take the bus more often to save the world, your individual choices are probably doing very little to the world's climate. The real impact comes on the industrial level, as more than 70 percent of global emissions come from just 100 companies. So you, a random American consumer, exert very little pressure here. The people who are actively cranking up the global thermostat and threatening to drown 20 percent of the global population are the billionaires in the boardrooms of these companies.

"There are probably no individuals who have had a more toxic impact on public and political attitudes about climate change than the Koch brothers..."  --Luke Darby, GQ

Under a Facebook post which described US House member Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s efforts towards more social democracy and less billionaires with unlimited political influence, it was pointed out by a wealthy man who despises her that the founding fathers were billionaires with a privileged background. Yes, most of them consisted of individuals who had some degrees more privilege and education -- or worked hard like Benjamin Franklin towards it -- than the average, deeply and royally suppressed Joe & Jane of the mid 18th century colony.  But by no means were any of them remotely close to a billionaire status, converting 1776 wealth to today's currency. That status belonged solely to the European nobility, monarchs, and within the Vatican. And that relative *privilege* may have offered something interestingly unique to how the neurosynaptic architecture of a few good brains developed the conscious capacity for critical thinking through their curiosity-empowered upbringing. One important thing to keep in mind is that the people in the 18th century did not think the way you and I do today. The cultural and physical environments that feedback-interacted with the developing brains of children at that time were entirely different. If you were to travel back in time to 1776, you would instantly be hit by cultural shock  You'd think, especially if you are a woman, that you were on a different planet, no matter how much you may have studied history.  And unless comatose through this millennium, none of us think like we did even two decades ago. Each thought we have, each sensory experience, physically changes the brain.

In other words, to get remarkable brains as we perceive of the Founding Fathers in today's world, the best chances would most likely be through kids being raised by parents who nurture and safely empower them into the world as it is, so they best can manage and adapt to its pressures and changes, no bullshit myths about anything, within an environment that is as stress-free and caring as possible, and then seamlessly socialize and educate the children until the cognitive learning and decision-making areas of the brain have matured into lifetime adaptive plasticity. The neuroscientific evidence indicates this takes almost 25 years. That's why it is incumbent upon any decent nation of We the People, any successful civilization, to ensure equal access to all its citizen to childcare, healthcare, education, child and mother protections... basically, ensure and protect their welfare at any cost.

There exists in this world no true democratic or even social-democratic state. And there exists no government on this planet that is free from the near absolute power of a small handful of billionaires and their corporations. There currently exist about 26 individuals who own as much wealth as the total wealth of 3.75 billion people, the poorest and most disenfranchised half of the world population. And just beneath this set of apex predators, exists about 2000 lesser billionaires, most of whom competively seek ever more wealth. Not all are like that, but most are... simply due to conditioned emotion-driven behavioral patterns -- you have, I want, for example -- wrought by evolutionary biology, lack of facts to demystify the world, or narcissistically choosing not to consider evidence which challenges desires and beliefs. 

In fact, "[w]hile billionaires and the companies they run have spent years insisting that climate change either doesn't exist or is overblown, they've known the reality of the situation for a long time. PayPal cofounder Peter Thiel, for example, used to donate to the Seasteading Institute, which aimed to build floating cities in order to counteract rising sea levels. And Exxon Mobil allegedly knew about climate change in 1977, back when it was still just Exxon and about 11 years before climate change became widely talked about. Instead of acting on it, they started a decades-long misinformation campaign. According to Scientific American, Exxon helped create the Global Climate Coalition, which questioned the scientific basis for concern over climate change from the late '80s until 2002, and successfully worked to keep the U.S. from signing the Kyoto Protocol, a move that helped cause India and China, two other massive sources of greenhouse gas, to avoid signing." --GQ

The true political power on the planet rests with these billionaires, who can loan-shark billions and have infinitely deep pockets for politicians to look the other way at best, whether you live in Russia, America, Cuba, Haiti, Denmark, Afghanistan, the DRC, China, Japan etc., and however a nation’s government and debt is defined locally... representative democracy, communist, dictatorial, military, theocratic, fascist and even the so-called true democracy of Switzerland etc. Whether you are a horrific ISIS leader seeking weapons of mass destruction, or a dictator seeking more power, or a president seeking absolute power (to wit, Trump and Putin), or whatever and whomever, in this geopolitical world you are still under the power of the wealthy ruling elite. Pure and simple, an oligarchy. An oligarchy that grew very empowered and politically influential in western democracies during the Thatcher and Reagan years, and exponentially more powerful and concentrated among ever fewer after the financial crisis of 2007-09. Back at his farewell speech in 1961, about to give the keys of the White House to JFK, Republican President Eisenhower warned of its influence.

And it is this fistful of billionaires and their multinational retinue who control enough wealth to bankrupt a nation like Greece, and even France, according to billionaire and former banker, Rainer Voss, who states that it "all began in the 1980s and the heady days of Thatcher and Reagan, when deregulation spawned a wave of suspendered, striped-shirt-wearing American financial analysts preaching to their more staid European colleagues about the wonders of unhitched capitalism. Voss [explains how he] heeded the call and quickly became one of those cowboy-like gurus riding bareback on the golden calf, trying whatever worked for a hefty profit."

In my opinion, it is ultimate greed at a global scale, occurring just as the evidence of greed to a lesser but accelerating scale over recent human history has led to anthropogenic climate change, which currently is most impacting huge population groups of the world's historically most marginalized people.

Foreign and domestic intelligence agencies, sent afield or via cyberattacks by governments in deep pockets, have their manipulating fingers in every hot spot on the planet where there are resources* to supply an often well-designed, top-down and malevolent demand by titillating all our senses into becoming recklessly addicted consumers.  Fossil fuels, precious minerals for iPhones, and now even water are examples*, but also the human resource of near-slave labor. Exploiting unstable or weaker nations and groups of people, often where there is deep conflict among often ethnically polarized groups, has been the mainstay of ancient history to today. The Eurocentric voyages to distant lands, some under the Crusades banner, and Columbus also, and colonizing through horrors unimaginable aren’t any different than the history of Russia’s empire building, going east in its own manifest destiny, so to speak. China’s dynasty history of empire building is no different. Mongolia, Japan, Rome, Persia... It just tastes different, in a culturally relativistic way, and the stories written by the conquerors, including Mao and Stalin, have always glorified in romantic ways the true horrors of what occurred. Down south in Dixie, people still yearn for the glory of their slave-owning heroes of the Confederacy, and again, it is and was only about the economics of a resource, human slaves from Africa.

Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. And the reason this adage holds so true is quite simple. It’s theoretically due to evolutionary biology’s interaction with deep culture and conditioning, and that the predator-prey, stimulus-response neural networks of the brain, where reward/addiction systems can also be found, were laid down long before the more recent evolution of the cerebrum’s critical thinking and executive decision-making areas, which can theoretically best functionally inhibit those primitive impulses that amount to narcissistic greed if appropriately nurtured, socialized and educated to the real world in the 1st 25 years of life.  To best achieve this requires societies where child care, laws that protect the rights of women and children, public education as far as one can go, healthcare etc to rise to a human right for the sake of a well functioning and successful civilization.  Not sorry for repeating myself.

This is an oversimplification of the most complex biological system yet discovered, much of it still a puzzle waiting to be further demystified.  It is a dynamic biological architecture that works as a whole in its feedback interactions with one's body and its sociocultural and physical environment.

As an adult, the brain's natural plasticity also allows most anyone to change deep-seated, perhaps childhood-conditioned, dysfunctional to the real world thinking and behavioral patterns by choosing to persistently work hard like an athlete against any walls of emotional pain, as you manage cognitive issues like confirmation bias, especially if it is feedback group reinforced, such as by one’s ivory tower peer... or those countless demographics who worship or adulate it like some almighty god. As the 2nd video below also points out, advances in neuroscience are pointing to the future probability that we can medically enhance brain plasticity. But the most important issue in my mind is one’s moral compass.

Studies indicate a “neuromoral” network for responding to moral dilemmas centered in the ventromedial prefrontal cortex and its connections, particularly on the right. The neurobiological evidence indicates the existence of automatic “prosocial” mechanisms for identification with others that are part of the moral brain... The presence of a moral sense is consistent with a focus of human evolution on mechanisms of individual behavior that maximize survival in social groups. Evolution has promoted social cooperation through emotions against harming others, a need for fairness and the enforcement of moral rules, empathy and “Theory of Mind” (ToM), as well as other behaviors that feed into the concept of morality.  
--The Neurobiology of Moral Behavior 

In my mind, the important point to understand there is ...survival in social groups.  If one's social group consists only of billionaires in their ivory towers and those cultural, religious, and political etc. demographics that willingly serve such illusions, then you are contributing to a fatalistic delusion. In prehistoric dog-eat-dog jungle times, it was theoretically important for survival to base one’s moral code only as far as it applied to the tribal group to which you belonged.  Except for some isolated tribes deep in the Amazon, the planet is no longer in that epoch.  We are now in the Anthropocene.  In today’s globalized socioeconomic system, much of it based on the same insanity as explained in the previous sentence -- and where we are now defining our own evolution -- with a physical environment, the biosphere, critically under threat due to billionaires leading us unto death like a Pied Piper, and on the heels of an endless history of countless groups and then nations fighting and competing among themselves for resources domination, our empathies and cooperations must stretch out to the entire Pale Blue Dot hanging in the vast blackness of space. We must tear down all walls. We must ensure the welfare of every child on the planet.

"We succeeded in taking that picture [from deep space], and, if you look at it, you see a dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever lived, lived out their lives. The aggregate of all our joys and sufferings, thousands of confident religions, ideologies and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilizations, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every hopeful child, every mother and father, every inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every superstar, every supreme leader, every saint and sinner in the history of our species, lived there on a mote of dust, suspended in a sunbeam.

"The earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that in glory and in triumph they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of the dot on scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner of the dot. How frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity -- in all this vastness -- there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves. It is up to us. It's been said that astronomy is a humbling, and I might add, a character-building experience. To my mind, there is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly and compassionately with one another and to preserve and cherish that pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known."
--Carl Sagan, 1994

In Puerto Rican parlance, and a derivative of the indigenous language and Spanish, the island is known as, “Borinquen” or “Borinquén.” Puerto Ricans, in turn, call themselves, “Borinqueños,” “Borincanos” or “Borícuas.”

“Lamento Borincano” is a plaintive song that describes how Puerto Rico fared in the economically depressive state into which it was thrust after it became a ward of the U.S., as a result of the Spanish-American War. One of Puerto Rico’s most popular songs, it was penned by the island’s prolific composer Rafael Hernández (1892-1965). Hernández, a Puerto Rican with obvious African roots, was a longtime resident of New York City. There, undisturbed by economic and other encumbrances that befell the island as a result of becoming a U.S. prize of war, he was able undisturbedly to compose a variety of musical elegies dedicated to his beloved Borinquén.

In light of what Puerto Rico is going through today, I thought it would be interesting to imagine, by way of the following versification, what Rafael Hernández might be saying about the current state of affairs.

The Puerto Rican, “jibaro,” a naïve small-town dweller, was used by Hernández in the diminutive form, “jibarito,” to personify the island’s grief at that time.

This is my translation of one stanza of the song:

And sadly,
The jibarito goes along his way,
Singing, mumbling to himself, crying:
“What will become of Borinquen,
“My dear God?
“What will become of my island?
“What will become of my home...?”

***** ***** *****

My concept of what Hernandez might be thinking today:

Puerto Rico, my isle in the sun,
Snatched from Spain by the bold Yankee gun,

Still wearing chains in this verdant cage,
Still wond’ring when we’ll become of age.

Tata Taíno, long-vanished blood,
Disappeared under the Spanish flood,

Your spirit remains within us all;
Through song and dance, you plaintively call

The African drums that followed you,
Beat out the whip’s lash that you felt, too.

The ebony hand that touched those drums
Still lives today, and the cuatro strums.

The jibarito did suffer much –
Money-deprived, of trinkets and such –

But, never in his’try has cruel fate
Left Borinquen in such a state.

Money is useless with naught to buy;
Such damage can only make one cry.

Wind and water turns green to pale;
The lack of power hurts those who ail.

Dwellings are lost, or just stripped bare;
There’s no release from oppressive air.

Babies cry, and their poor mother’s moan;
Supplies are all cut down to the bone.

In hamlets, far from the food supply,
With the roads blocked – can copters still fly?!

Why has the Army not established
Command posts, just to serve those ravished?

With sun all day and nights without light,
Three million souls all suffer this plight!

It will not end tomorrow or next’
Mi pobre gente seem to be hexed.

Isla bonita, hurt as you are,
This your Borinquen soul will not scar!

Marc Anthony does a modern rendition with his own touch at the end;