Year End Column 2015 Written Overlooking Banderas Bay in Puerto Vallarta Jonathan Dobrer - Friendly Fire
go to original December 26, 2015

I write this year end column where I have written it for 15 years, overlooking beautiful Banderas Bay in Puerto Vallarta Mexico. Palm trees sway in the gentle zephyr and sunlight sparkles off the wavelets.

Our resort is filled with the sounds of Spanish, English and some French. People of many lands and faith’s rest, eat and lovingly watch their children playing in the pools.

In town, tourists pour off cruise ships to see the sights, shop and enjoy a very tranquil and welcoming patch of Mexico. Young people fill the streets and, long after I’ve turned in, the nightclubs. Their music throbs in the night. PV, as we call it, is also a very GLBT friendly destination. Just about every conceivable combination of religion, race, ethnicity and sexuality mixes and matches on the Malecon, the waterfront promenade.

I feel a bit like Odysseus on the island of the Lotus Eaters. I’m happily lulled by the drug of tranquility. The world does not impose itself, and I can live in grateful denial of what lies beneath the surface.

Gone, for a moment, is the awareness of what is going on inland in Mexico – the violence and corruption, the gang wars and drug trade, the exploitation of workers and disappearing of students and dissidents.

Gone too, for the moment, are the vulgarities of our present politics and the enmity among nations. Joe Louis may have been wrong when he said, “You can run, but you cannot hide.” You can hide…for a time. You must, I must eventually return to reality and the challenges facing us. However, a brief respite can reinvigorate and grant a bit of badly needed perspective.

Let me make a confession to you – and I virtually never write about process. I wrote a year end column yesterday that was terrible, irretrievably bad. It was mired, I was mired in all the muck of the world, in all the fighting, killing, greed and dysfunction. Yes, it’s all there, but it doesn’t sum up our world.

These are, as all times are and Dickens wrote, “The best of times and the worst of times.” The news conveys all our failures. The cliché is correct: News is not the million planes landing safely but the one that crashes...

Read the rest at Friendly Fire.