Week 4 (Week 2’s readings were extended into Week 3)
This week’s readings were a reminder of the nondiscriminatory effects of the desert sun. I’ve lived in Tucson all my life, so the knowledge that heat can kill easily has never been much of a surprise to me. That being said, however, even natives to the desert underestimate the power of the sun, myself included. The two white couples Urrea described died only yards from their cars, in the dunes and at Picacho Peak. They lived here, in the Southwest, and still they perished. I remember my own ordeal of running out of water in the wilderness of Mt. Lemmon in the summer. I can only imagine the shock of the heat that the Yuma 14 experienced; they were from the tropics of Mexico and were travelling in a desert where even natives die. It reminds me that humans are not the indestructible gods of the world that we like to think we are. It takes no time at all for the heat to kill us, any one of us, without any mercy. I’m also reminded of how pointless dividing ourselves is. The President of United States would die exactly the same in the desert as a poor Mexican immigrant would. And yet we hold one of those men on a pedestal, and tell the other he can die for all we care. In the end, we all die the same way, and death cares not for who we think is better than the other. Our man made hierarchy is utterly useless in the heat of the desert, and I think only in those moments of unbiased dying do we see how small, mortal, and equal we all truly are. At our core, we are all human, and it took reading through the stages of natural, indifferent death for me to fully and fundamentally understand that. It’s easy for me to step up on my soapbox and preach about equality and repeat over and over again about how we are all human; similarly, it is easy for someone else to stand up on their soapbox and talk about deportation, and banning refugees, and national security because neither one of us has a damn clue what we’re really talking about. We would both be too wrapped up in our own ideas of humanity and society and Taker-culture to truly understand what it means to be human. We would be preaching from a purely selfish place. Words about social justice mean nothing when we do not take the sweeping indifference of nature into account; then, and only then, can we begin to fully realize how futile human conflict is. When we look at Desolation, and we read about heat death and picture ourselves in that same situation, then we realize that we are but animals with a senseless social hierarchy. I feel that I have a much better understanding of human equality now that I know, genuinely know, that we all live and die the same.
The Tortilla Curtain and The Devil's Highway 