Healing is a Revolutionary Act

From the Indians who welcomed the pilgrims

And to the buffalos who once ruled the plain

Like the vulture circling beneath the dark clouds

Looking for the rain

Looking for the rain

Just like the cities staggered on the coastline

In a nation that just can’t stand much more

Like the forest buried beneath the highway

Never had a chance to grow

Never had a chance to grow

And now it’s winter

It’s winter in America

Yes, and all of the healers have been killed

Or sent away, yeah

But the people know, the people know

It’s winter

Winter in America

And ain’t nobody fighting

‘Cause nobody knows what to save

Save your soul, Lord knows

From winter in America

–Gil Scott-Heron, “Winter in America”

It’s been a long cold winter in this country. That poem/song by the late great Gil Scott-Heron (including powerful music by Brian Jackson) came out in 1975 not long after President Nixon’s resignation. Nixon was part of the right-wing’s war against civil rights, peace at home and abroad, and for a clean and healthy planet, while committing crimes along the way. This backlash has continued till this day, yes mostly with Republicans but also many Democrats.

I’m 72 years old. I lived through that period and the cold policies that have frozen our overall assets, healthcare, education, housing, and labor needs. My oldest son Ramiro was born in 1975, fifty-one years ago. I married a year before my “high school” sweetheart (who was only two months out of high school). In two years, my daughter Andrea arrived.

In 1975, I worked at the Bethlehem Steel in Southeast Los Angeles. Prior to this, I’d been a troubled youth, in a gang, in and out of jails, homeless for three years, and a drug addict. I gathered myself. I quit the crazy life. I found love and family. Life consisted of 16-hour work days (double shifts they called it), and rotating work schedules (one week days; the next week afternoons; the following week nights–the “graveyard shift”). I didn’t mind. It was better than the street life I came out of. I endured the long sweaty hours, the aluminum foil on the windows so I could sleep, the back-breaking labor while also helping take care of my babies. I worked hard. The steel mill helped me begin to raise a family.

By 1984 that mill was gone. As were the auto, rubber, defense, refinery, garment, and other jobs of the largest manufacturing center of the country: the Los Angeles area. This massive deindustrialization created the “rust belt” cities of Chicago, Detroit, Cleveland, and Pittsburgh. By then, my young family had fallen apart. Reagan became president and the greatest loss of manufacturing jobs began. By the end of Reagan’s and the first Bush’s presidential terms, the U.S. began the “Wal-Marting of America.”

While I could have gone back to crime and jails, and often been tempted to do so, I didn’t. I pivoted to become a journalist (going to school at night, then a summer program to train minority journalists, working first in weekly newspapers then in a daily newspaper, and later news radio). I eventually became a multi-genre writer, working for myself with bestsellers, fellowships, speaking and teaching gigs (including 45 years in prisons, juvenile lockups, and jails). I gained notoriety as a poet, and a publisher of poets. I’ve now traveled throughout the U.S., Canada, Latin America, Europe, and Japan.

I also remarried, had two more sons, and now have grandkids and great-grandkids. Life goes on, with many setbacks and missteps, rages and sorrows, as well as blessings, along the way.

Just the same, I’ve seen recessions, inflation, and other economic crises. I’ve seen long gas lines and people fighting over sugar and toilet paper. Yes, the economy picked up here and there, and then fell down. I barely made it through the 2008 financial crisis, the Covid-19 pandemic, through the recent ICE raids, and many wars, but unlike others I survived. With Trump things have worsened. But it may only point to the fact that worse things are yet to come. Fascism is not just a “man” but a system of rule when old ways of “ruling” no longer suffice for the most powerful and wealthy capitalists and financiers.

Now with AI, a smaller number of people own much of the social wealth–the top 1 percent own 30 percent of the country’s wealth, a total net worth of $43 Trillion. We’ve now had our first trillionaire, even as people are driven from jobs, homes, and ability to feed their families.

We’re still in the winter of America.

As Gil Scott-Heron said, the healers “have been killed… or sent away.” Today, I also have seen “healers” arise from the trauma of poverty, of violence, and neglect. Twenty-five years ago, with my wife Trini, I helped create a bookstore/cultural space in a working class, mostly Mexican/Central American community, in the northeast San Fernando Valley called Tia Chucha’s Cultural Center & Bookstore. New books about healing, personally and collectively, are on our selves, mostly using Indigenous spiritual practices. I’ve seen books addressing directly the racial-class-and-gender disparities. Despite the distraction and lies in politics, and the disconnects in mass media, people are also having their eyes and hearts opened.

For decades, we’ve been pushed out of the arenas of healing and transformations, but that hasn’t stopped more and more people from tapping into their “ancestral intelligence” (not “artificial intelligence”) to prepare the ground for a new way of thinking, of organizing, of reimagining and renewing the social compacts for shared well-being.

I dedicate myself to that thawing of the season that has held us back for generations. We need to prepare for the spring of new life, new governance, new relationships based on the embracing abundance in nature, mother earth, and our own creative capacities.

We need healers more than ever before. Healing not as “glossing over” but as integration of body, mind, and soul on personal levels, but also the aligning of our vast resources on earth and in people to meet all our fundamental needs to be whole, healthy, and in peace.

It’s time to end this season of coldness and detachment, to enter a spring of healing and giving and growth. We are at the cusp. It won’t happen by itself. We need to help make this happen. We just need the right pivot, a powerful shift, to realize the best and most enduring of our values and principles. Join with me–for healing is a revolutionary act.