I 1st drew this jukebox and dancers on a serviette at the Katchina Lodge back again in the working day when they experienced that great old Wurlitzer. Some really very good dancers made use of to go there on Saturdays pa’ tirar sus chanclas. Pura plebe, locals, including Jim Wagner and a few courageous vacationers. It was the late ’60s and ’70s.

Effectively, mi querida plebe, again then we did not really know that progress would carry the human race to the brink of extinction. There have been signals – but we were dancing! We have been youthful and failed to listen. But even now that “development” has gotten us into this mess, it however has not stopped some individuals from begging for far more of the poison that is killing us. They are even now dancing to the out-of-date tune that advancement can go on eternally.

Glance at this portray – the surrounding land is dead. These foolish, self-absorbed dancers are oblivious of the actuality that when their dance is more than – they will be in a desert wherever there is no drinking water. And they will die because drinking water is lifetime.

Generational Taoseños are desert born and bred, elevated with an angle towards drinking water so deep it truly is almost unconscious, it can be in our bones, implicit in the mother nature of the land by itself.

Indo-Hispano and Pueblo cultures have developed refined organizational techniques clustered around the priceless useful resource that is daily life – water. Cultures in desert environments in a natural way develop sophisticated irrigation systems and organizational versions and technologies.

Five centuries in the past the technological know-how of a further desert men and women who left Spain along with the Jews, the Moors, introduced the term “acequia” to Turtle Island, grafted it on to the acequia madre (so to converse) of Pueblo irrigation devices. “Acequia” has Arabic roots, as does the word “adobe.” Our diversity is not only genuine, but outdated – and just as the acequia technique helps make Taos inexperienced, our architecture would make us distinctive.

These content dancers think local climate change, and COVID are propaganda built to retain them from dancing. They believe they have a “right” to dance.

The only h2o in the painting is within the jukebox – the report is spinning on drinking water. I will have to have been wondering about the ski valley – given that they will be the only ones with water when Taos at last realizes the desire of “development” and “development” and “growth” was fatally flawed.

They will all be dancing up there, soaking in their very hot tubs, flushing their toilets, easily indifferent to the desert down right here the place we will be rationing drinking water. By then the land encompassing all our new developments, even the corridor of elite housing that is prepared to lead to the airport (that’s what the pipeline is about) seems like the land in the painting – dry, desolate, the very last tree very long considering that turned to dust.

We will not have to have growth – we have to have sustainability. We need to choose treatment of what we have, our water, our agricultural land, our labor drive, our youth – we never need to have to establish extravagant housing for outsiders when our possess generational family members are sleeping in their cars and trucks.

While advocates for “progress” are dancing their way to the bank – there are 90 homeless significant faculty learners in Taos. Pretty much 1000’s of containers of food are distributed by regional church buildings weekly to feed families suffering from food shortage. In the phrases of Jill Casey Cline, pastor at St. James wherever 1,500 packing containers are provided two times weekly – “It truly is a disaster!”

In March 1,011 households had been in arrears to Package Carson Electric for a whole credit card debt of $422,517. This indicates that whilst the promoters of “progress” are dancing, way far too several Taoseños are desperate, too many homes in this group are darkened by nervousness, despair and anxiety.

I cannot don’t forget who pointed out the self-apparent real truth that drinking water is alive and sacred in the culturally diverse, multilingual neighborhood of my long-ago childhood, but I must have been continue to young ample to see the noticeable with clarity. (It is really only later that widespread perception is educated out of your mind and gets the the very least prevalent of all the senses.) This portray is just another way of saying all that – If Nero fiddled when Rome burned, we are dancing while the earth dries up.

I paint to forget about that the empire is imploding, that we are operating out of h2o, and that COVID will not go absent until eventually we get the lesson nature is striving to teach us – inequality is unsustainable. Right until the health-related wealth of the vaccine is democratically dispersed it will keep mutating, and none of us will be harmless – not even Jeff Bezos. He is form of an American archetype – he could open up up his jukebox and enable water flow into the thirsty desert – but he is not going to.

I paint to forget that we are heading to run out of drinking water – and look what takes place.