What is explained can be denied but what is felt cannot be forgotten.

Fear of being killed and fear of killing attracts people to killers and murders. Anyone who has covered homicides for a daily paper soon learns this reality from the questions people ask of a story over coffee.

There are two ways to lose you sanity in Juarez. One is to believe the violence results from a cartel war. The other is to claim to understand what is behind each murder.

I am always an optimist. The pessimists are the liars who refuse to admit what is happening. And I'll give you three things we could do this instant to help Mexico: legalize drugs, renegotiate NAFTA so that it pays a living wage, protects unions and protects the environment and stop Plan Merida which gives $500 million a year to the Mexican army, the largest single criminal organization in Mexico.

Legalized drugs would cause dislocations in the US economy - the prison industry for example and tens of billions spent annually on drug enforcement. But because the US economy is so large, this would be a minor blow, hardly as severe as the ultimate nightmare for the US economy, global peace, which would shutter its death industry commonly called the military/industrial complex.

If drugs were legalized in the US, the Mexican economy would collapse since the earnings from drugs bring in more hard currency than its largest licit source, oil sales. Mexico is a corrupt state that has now become dependent on the earnings on an illegal product. But inevitably, the product will become legal and then Mexico will retain its corruption but must face the needs of its citizens now employed by the drug industry who have become steeped in violence and conditioned to higher incomes.

Being alive is gardening and cooking and birds and green and blue, at the very least.