The Canadian National Newspaper: Why I Wrote About the Assassination of President Kennedy in Trail of Death

How can a man who voted for President Reagan twice, and who used to vote a straight Republican ticket, write a novel that compares America's current leadership to the men who assassinated President Kennedy? It's a question my conservative friends ask me all the time, and, needless to say, they are not very happy with me. But they are still my friends-I used to believe exactly as they do now - so all I can do is tell them the truth. My departure from the Republican Party began when the Environmental Protection Agency gave its yearly report on the state of the environment in June of 2003. I kept waiting and waiting for the EPA to describe how greenhouse gases from auto tailpipes and factory smokestacks were heating up Planet Earth and creating climate catastrophes all over the globe. Droughts, heat waves, and fierce storms with torrential rains that caused deadly flooding were occurring everywhere. (You might recall the heat wave in Europe in the summer of 2003 that killed thousands of people.) And yet the EPA did not mention any of it.

Stunned by what I considered to be an act of negligence and sheer incompetence, I tried to understand how a group of people who seemed so intelligent and so devoted to the environment and to the planet could make a presentation that left out the obvious. I guess I wasn't the only one who was surprised. A prominent liberal newspaper apparently was as appalled as I was. They ran an article shortly after the EPA report alleging that key members of President Bush's staff had deliberately edited out of the report any mention of how greenhouse gases were adversely affecting the planet's ecosystems. After doing my own research, I became convinced that this article was on target, and soon after I left the Republican Party.

When I tried to explain my decision to my conservative friends their usual reaction was: "Big deal-government reports are edited for content all the time. Why should you leave the party just because some members of Bush's staff are doing their job?" And my reply was: "What do you mean by the word job?. If your job is to lie to the American people and mislead them into believing that a potentially catastrophic situation is perfectly okay, then maybe you need to go to work for people who define the word "job" the same way you do - people like Hitler or Stalin."

It was at this time that I began working on the book entitled Trail of Death. It took me almost four years and loads of research and heartache. When I finished, I was emotionally drained and spent. I was so intense that I threw up seven times just after completing the last major group of editorial corrections. No one who loves America and our beautiful Planet Earth wants to believe that our own leaders would hurt us on purpose. No one who believes in the concept of all human beings as part of one great family wants to consider the notion that the men we have elected to represent us would sell us out just so they could add to their own personal fortunes. We would like to believe in the dream that one of our most eloquent Presidents expressed so beautifully. President Kennedy once said that it was not the goal of his administration to create a Pax Americana - a unstable "peace" enforced by American weapons of war-- but rather a peace that would last for all time. In the same speech he went on to say that we all breathe the same air, we all inhabit this small planet, and we are all mortal.

Today, more than forty years later, our earth scientists are trying to tell us the same thing. How can we all inhabit this small planet if the air we breathe is poisoned? And how can we create a peace that lasts for all time if the glaciers and rivers and lakes that provide us with fresh water all run dry? The only thing we will know of a certainty by destroying the world's natural wonders is our own mortality. According to the United Nations, more than 130, 000 people die each year because of the effects of global warming. Over sixty percent of the world's ecosystems - the ecosystems that give us life-- have sustained severe damage and will soon reach a state where they cannot be preserved unless immediate action is taken.

My conservative friends think that I have crossed the line when I say that the character assassination of our earth scientists resembles the physical assassination of U.S. President Kennedy on November 22, 1963. They say that my analysis of the way our scientists have been treated is crude and profane. But after four years of study I want them to know what is truly profane. What is profane is what happened to the people in New Orleans after Katrina struck, an event directly attributable to global warming, which heated the waters in the Gulf. What is profane is more than 3000 American soldiers dead in Iraq because our government would rather assuage its addiction to oil than search for alternative energy sources as our scientists have advised us to do. What is profane is tens of thousands of our children in our inner cities who do not graduate from high school and who feel left out and neglected. There are more than twenty thousand gangs in the United States - many of them violent in nature. Instead of creating programs to assist our children, we spend billions of dollars on weapons and supplies for war - wars fought over the very fossil fuels that cause global warming. Gone are classes in art and music. Gone is the concept of after-school programs that would give our children support and hope and keep them off the streets. And all that's left is the greedy ambitions of a few very powerful and wealthy men who can never seem to get enough.

In my novel, Alfredo Gomez, the greatest boxing hero ever to come from Mexico, disguises himself as a poor migrant worker and journeys down the treacherous Trail of Death through the desert into Texas. There he is abducted by soldiers who work for the greedy men who can never get enough. But somehow, fate delivers Alfredo into the hands of a kindred spirit-Senator John Henry Longfellow of Texas. John Henry, when just a lad of twelve, was hiding behind the banister of the staircase in his father's mansion when he overhead the conspirators planning to assassinate President Kennedy. Suffering from alcohol poisoning that is killing him, Senator Longfellow stays away from the bottle just long enough to tell Alfredo what really happened on that day in Dealey. And mixed into his story is an explanation of how the same ideology that led to the murder of U.S. President Kennedy is also responsible for the attempt to silence our climate scientists today.

I do not hate my conservative friends who are angry at me because of the things I wrote in my book. I just don't live in their world anymore. I live in the southern Arizona desert just a few miles from the Mexican border. For a living, I teach children who have been left out of the American Dream. They often come to school in clothes that are unwashed and with stomachs that are empty. And yet they still have smiles on their faces because they believe that somehow my fellow teachers and I are going to show them how to prosper in America. As I go to work each morning, I pass by on the roadside ragged groups of illegal Mexican immigrants sitting with their hands cuffed behind their backs. The Border Patrol officers are preparing to take them away. Their crime? They are hungry and they are trying to make it into the United States to gladly perform the minimum wage jobs we don't want to do-landscaping in 100 degree desert temperatures, washing our cars, doing our laundry. Like my students, they have faith that someone in this country will believe in them enough to show them a better life. After all, they say, isn't it written on the Statue of Liberty that America is a country that reaches out to the tired and poor whose hearts yearn to be set free?

I wonder what would have happened if the Native Americans had treated the first white colonists from Europe the same way we treat the so-called "illegal immigrants." The Native Americans shared with our ancestors their food, their survival skills, and their land. They didn't ask for anything in return. They did not make the Pilgrims fill out any forms. They did not force the first colonists at Jamestown to sign any documents. They simply welcomed these white settlers to the New World and asked only that they live in harmony and peace with the land and each other.

They asked of these new settlers the same thing that President Kennedy asked many years later. What kind of 'peace' do I mean, President Kennedy queried. Not a Pax Americana - but a peace that lasts for all time. And that's why I wrote "Trail of Death." I wrote it for every student who smiles at me in faith each morning even though they are not sure if their parents will have enough to pay the rent or even make it through the day. I wrote it for all the kids who feel they have been betrayed and who join gangs to make up for being left out of the system. And I wrote it for myself-because I know that each day someone who is hurting far worse than I can ever imagine is waiting for just one American to finally admit that the American Dream should be all-inclusive-it should be for everybody.

A couple of years ago, early in the morning in the winter, some of my students rushed into my room and said that a little kindergarten girl was freezing to death outside. I ran out into the street, and there I found the little girl, shivering and crying and waiting for someone to love her. Her desperate parents, unable to pay their bills, had abandoned her in the family trailer without heat or electricity, and returned to Mexico. As I carried the child in my arms to our warm cafeteria, I could only wonder how many other children around our country and throughout the world were waiting for the same thing this child was waiting for - someone to love them. Only a few years ago, when I was still a "compassionate conservative," I would have tried to blame someone else for what happened to that little girl. I would have blamed the child's parents or the "irresponsible Mexican government for not looking after their own." I would have done anything accept take responsibility on my own shoulders. And I admit, my life would be a lot easier if I were to return to my old party and blame everyone else for the violence and hatred and greed and despair that fills the lives of so many people worldwide.

I could blame the people in New Orleans for not evacuating soon enough when Katrina struck. I could blame the soldiers in Iraq for not fighting hard enough even though they have become human targets and drive vehicles that do not have sufficient armour to protect them. I could blame the "damn earth scientists" for stirring up trouble and trying to prevent me from making my next million dollars in the oil business. I could blame the "lazy fools" who do not have health care, even thought they live in the richest country in the world, for not working hard enough. I could blame the other nations of the world for not doing enough to combat global warming - and then use that as an excuse for why I refuse to do anything about the consequences of climate change. Yes, I could do anything I want except take responsibility for my own actions.

But the problem with refusing to take responsibility is that it doesn't bring warmth to that shivering little girl. It doesn't feed hungry children - more than 20,000 of whom starve to death each day worldwide. It doesn't prevent wars that are started because of the lies and deceit of avaricious leaders. It doesn't save our natural wonders and our ecosystems, which must be healthy in order for us to be healthy. I don't know what life will be like for me outside of my old political party. But I do know that for me to have stayed faithful to that party would have turned me into a something that I cannot accept-a liar and a coward whose sole desire is to lead the people of the world down the "Trail of Death" just so I can make a few more dollars.

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