Armando Vazquez
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By Armando Vazquez / Guest contributor
At the end of 2013 we have had 14 senseless killings in Oxnard, the community reacts in horror, the cops mobilize, and maybe just maybe the true killers are arrested. Who knows? Things don’t change much in Oxnard and other American cities with major socioeconomic disparities and the accompanying myriad of social calamities and disorders that poverty and hopelessness breed and propagate. Things do not change because the structural and foundational inequities that contribute greatly to our often bloody and violent dysfunctions and twisted outlets are never addressed by those in power and in the position to help begin to create a new and just paradigm shift. In his book, the Structure of Scientific Revolution, Thomas Kuhn writes, “Paradigms determine large areas of experience at the same time…the proponents of competing paradigms practice their trades on different worlds.”
That is precisely the point! The power structure of Oxnard wants to paint over the graffiti problem to the tune of approximately one million dollars per year, and will never meet and try to work with and help turn around the “ criminal kids” that are vandalizing and tagging for attention all over Oxnard. The cops run a boxing program, cruise around in a pimped out car that cost over $150,000 of tax payer dollars. The cops have the PALS program, Pride, The Alliance, and a whole host of other community programs; still they have to enforce three city wide gang injunctions, regulate and enforce local draconian gang association behavior; and yes try to catch the bad guys that are killing people. Poor folk, especially poor youth, struggle to fit into the world of the powerful and the elite; that is because the poor and the elite of Oxnard practice life in different worlds, while inhabiting the same space.
There is however one world that we can all inhabit, now, together and forever and that is the world of unconditional love. We all have it in us, those of us that are fortunate to be alive, hopeful and filled with the spirit of love. In Oxnard we can learn to live in the same spiritual world and be a model city for the entire nation. I have argued vigorously in the past two decades that the infusion of art in all it glorious manifestation into the everyday fabric of the city will create an immediate and resounding community safety and health catharsis of mind and spirit. The poor and disenfranchised of Oxnard are more than willing to try revolutionary social and economic change, they have nothing to lose except oppression; it is the powerful and the elite that are loathe to changes. So let us talk about the unspeakable, the unattainable, the impossible, let us talk about unconditional love.
“Unconditional love is not so much about how we tolerate and endure each other, but rather how we welcome and embrace each other, no matter the circumstances. Unconditional love is about how we promise ourselves to never under any conditions stop bring the flawed and humble truth of who we are to each other.
Much has been said about unconditional love today, in the noise of the egos it has been badly misconstrued as an extreme form of turning the other cheek; pathetic advise to anyone who has been abused or suffers in pain. This exaggerated passivity is quite different from the unimpeded flow of love that nurtures, strengthens and guides who we are, and more importantly who we can become.
In truth unconditional love does not require passive acceptance of whatever happens in the name of love. Rather in the real spaces of our daily relationships it means maintaining a commitment that no event, condition or circumstance will keeps us from bring all of who we are to each other with pure unadulterated, honest and democratic participatory love”
Father Boyle, of Home Boy Industries, talks about unconditional love being most needed and received at the very periphery of humanity; those dark and sometimes foreboding and barren edges of society where there appears to be no light, no hope, no direction, no way out. No paths leading to that spiritual light. At the edge of this dark and often suffocating periphery is where the greatest pain, suffering and need is for many of our overwhelmed brothers and sisters; and this is where loves call is the greatest. It is where God’s call is the loudest and we are asked to be present and to act; to bear witness, to give humble service in the name and spirit of unconditional love. Most of the youth and their families that we have worked with at the Café On A, over the past decade reside in this oppressive, dehumanizing and foreboding abyss, and not one has trekked into his dismal world of pain, hopelessness and darkness voluntarily.
The powerful and elite and the poor and disenfranchised can inhabit the same world in Oxnard and that is the world of democratic participatory love. As Michael j. Sanders describes in his book, What Money Can’t Buy: The Moral Limits of Money, “Democracy does not require perfect equality, but it does require that citizens share a common life…For this is how we can learn to negotiate and abide our differences, and how we came to care for the common good and treat persons as worthy of dignity and respect, rather than an instrument of gain and objects of use”. Love is the Key, Oxnard let us all embrace it and transform our city now!
— Armando Vazquez, M.Ed., and Deborah De Vries are co-executive director of The KEYS Leadership Academy@ Café on A in Oxnard.
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