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I Used To Pry Out Stories For A Living...

A side tangent on journalism today & why during this time of hypothetical pause it's worth asking - what stories are you telling yourself AND which ones are you listening to. (This is from my weekly Contrarian Thinking Blog Series - signup here.)

You see, that’s what we journalists do, we pry truths from souls with a promise to give their stories life. Or at least that’s what we used to do. We journalists, not commentators, not tweeters.

So, I used to be a Journalist. With a capital J.

I wrote about human trafficking, drug smuggling, and the worst type of violence against humanity you can find along our US/Mexico border. I saw bodies dangling, autopsies performed and dreams shattered.

It changed me. It carved its memories into my skin as sure as a knife.

Writing my senior thesis from a little shanty I borrowed from an incredible nonprofit called Rancho Feliz in Agua Prieta Mexico, I would travel back and forth from the maquiladoras (a type of factory where a majority of immigrant women worked), to towns like Juarez (also known as La Ciudad de Muerte). Each trip my heart broke a little more. Each trip I struggled to see the human in humanity. All against the vibrant, contagious melodic backdrop I’ve come to love called, Mexico.

I remember vividly crossing the border in Juarez from El Paso for the first time. I did it on foot. If you’ve walked those steps, you’ll never forget them. Over the Rio Grande you go from a land of industry, little violence and prosperity, to the most dangerous city in Mexico. Just a few weeks prior to my time there a Sinaloan cartel leader was broken out of a maximum-security prison when his gang bore down with Apache helicopters holding anti-tank missiles and decimated the police force.

The meek do not inherit the earth in Mexico.

Escaping the barbed wire and steel border fences to couldn’t help but gaze upon a towering wooden cross in the middle of the Juarez road. I can still see it. The wood was all but covered in photos, pink ribbons and momentos from the thousands of “las desaparecidas”. The disappeared. These were the women of Juarez who had been murdered, brutalized and often raped all along the Mexican border.

Every day the newspaper would tell of unnamed women, or more likely a foot, a hand a leg or two, found scattered in the desert.

The daily tally of appendages was almost as common as quoting the stock market.

Warm tears slide down my face the first I saw that Juarez cross. You can’t look at a visual representation of death come to soon on a cross 10-12 feet high, littered with tokens left by devastated mothers, and not cry. To escape it I walked the streets a bit in search of air. Yet scattered throughout the city were a million other reminders. Posters of young women put up by tormented families who had sent their girls north for a better life, only to be greeted by the afterlife. Another street showed unmarked graves, another brothels, another clubs for tourists.

I felt a supreme sense of the brutal but true realization that life is simply not fair.

After all my name is Sanchez. I’m a young(ish) Hispanic woman, with long brown hair and brown eyes that went into the workforce for a better future. My face would have fit in on that cross. Yet, what is different about the life I have been gifted and those who share my name but have been given something different altogether? Why me?

The only solution I could come up with was that I am lucky. I won the birth lottery. No deserving or earning being born into a middle-class family in the US. I just got it.

In a way everything I have done in my career has been touched by the shadow of that cross and those faces upon it.

It's why I went into finance instead of journalism. After all awareness is great, but money is what pulls people out of poverty and into safety. It’s why we lock our doors, talk about financial security, fight for new jobs, and move to the suburbs.

Money is why I built my first business in Latin America, it’s why we hired almost exclusively women and minorities in the white male dominated world of finance. Business and capitalism is an opportunity to give a hand up, not a hand out. To employ those who could change future generations. And ultimately, it’s why I came to cannabis.

Those humans who brutalize women get away with it with the resources acquired through illegal activities. They traffic in things our government chooses to ignore.

I was reminded of all those walking through the streets in Mexico City during the Women’s March against violence this spring. Thousands of women marched in solidarity with those who had been murdered so carelessly their killers walked free with impunity while their mothers never were free again. In Spanish they call protests Manifestacion, which is just close enough to manifestation is English to make me smile at the idea of those who do wrong manifesting those who demand right. The protestors marched and graffitied and shouted because what other recourse did they have when feminicide was rising year over year?

Someone the other day said to me that this industry of ours, cannabis, isn’t an impact investment. They said it’s a vice. I’d say in response, what greater impact can there be?

Predators play and prosper in the dark. It’s only by shining a light, that we can see them.

It’s only by acknowledging that enough demand means supply will be given one way or another. That to regulate means to shine a light, to bring people in from the dark. That we created a war against a plant that is more a medicine than a vice. That we can maybe, just maybe, make the hope of, “Ni Una Menos” (Not One More), become a truth.

It’s not the only change we need but it’s a step. I’d like to live in a world where no more pink ribbons are added to that cross, where no one with cancer has to worry about the law for their medicine, where anxiety is managed not with pills but with plants, AND THAT is an impact worth fighting for.

Question everything. After all entrepreneurs, founders, doers are the only ones who... sacrifice your now for a vision only you can see. (My toolkit here for entrepreneurs who want hockey stick growth).

Some of the articles I think are worth seeing today:

Another US Wide Housing Slump Is Coming - From a friend Danielle DiMartino Booth (former advisor to the President of the Dallas Fed), I'm not sure I agree with her but it's worth a ponder.
Market Correction Is Coming - From another friend Kathryn Rooney Vera. Tend to agree with her points: This rally was unsustainable. Expect a renewed correction because of 1) magnitude of economic collapse 2) earnings + pending defaults 3) possible second viral bout/Medical Uncertain...

I Was A Journalist, That Used to Mean Something