My last attempt to chronicle New Mexico’s healthcare and policy catastrophes resulted in a Chinese face-cream hacker and, now,  a questionable “interior design” firm taking over my blog after a job-mandated hiatus left it unattended for five years.   But selling the concept of publicly-accountable healthcare delivery to New Mexican frontier towns and urbanizing centers was worth it, I guess, a la the Affordable Care Act (ACA), which has been a life-saver for tons of us here.

But New Mexico still needs help – beyond your visit to Santa fe for a Pueblo pot or Navajo rug, or your one-time foundation grant for “change” that fails to address the real, structural stuff.

This place – my home for nearly 20 years – holds enormous strength the modern eye often overlooks when it focuses on our sadness, ill health or economic doldrums. It’s true those things help define us, as they do anywhere else.  But looking past these indicators of modernity’s struggle, as visitors tend to do when rushing up the highway from the Sunport to Santa fe or Taos, obscures the timeless reality of this place:  New Mexico is the nation’s reflection in a broken mirror.  You can’t understand New Mexico unless you care to look deeper, and first, at yourself and your privilege, and how the modern world around you is pushing most people everywhere, especially in the US, to their limits if not beyond.

Before you think we’re just another shaming downer blog, think again.  My hope is to frame the common struggle as one that may look different, even as it feels the same.  New Mexico’s struggles are the nation’s struggles; we just got to them first. Or, perhaps we’re just getting there for the first time.  It doesn’t matter.  That’s a complicated question out here, and mostly not for white folks to answer.

What matters is your awareness of how policies, practices and public workings can flaunt their indifference to the health and well-being of huge swaths of people, right under our noses – and how some battered people keep rising to that fight.  Which is the real story of New Mexico, after all.

When you buy your turquoise jewelry on the Santa fe or Albuquerque Plazas next time, look hard at the one-legged Native woman you’re paying and slide her an extra $10.  It’s the least you can do since that’s what a preventable diabetes epidemic looks like.  And, please, make eye-contact with the Mexican immigrant who clears your plate at the latest Coyote’d Cafe so your tip will be a humane one.  His post-NAFTA family counts on every penny.  Don’t miss the able-bodied yet debilitatingly meth-addled young man, or elderly homeless African American man on an oxygen tank on the exit ramp when grabbing for your change, please. Black folks are a rising demographic in NM – up to 2.5%, now, and I wonder what that may mean for their health here, and for our collective ability to stage a proper public outcry for Pete’s sake.

In any case, these are the faces and facts of our future under such public neglect in New Mexico, so plan your generosity accordingly.  Chances are, our dystopian reality is coming to a state like yours unless we all get to know each other better, including how to really help in hard times.

Hint:  It’s not just dropping a few greenbacks here and there. But they don’t hurt at all.