She doesn't have the credibility of Homer though. Maybe she can eat her Mezcan flag blanket. If she loves Mezigo soooo much WTF is she here in the USA????? HUH!!!!!
Love it or LEAVE IT Mamacita.
Posted on 04/20/2005 8:59:28 AM PDT by NormsRevenge
SAN PABLO - On the fourth night of her front yard hunger strike, Diana Ponce lay delirious under the carport, fighting off the chill under a fuzzy blanket emblazoned with the Mexican flag.
Neighbors sat clustered around her on white plastic lawn chairs. Children smacked at a yellow volleyball in the street. Toddlers tricycled past fence-strung banners that read "Tenemos Que Unirnos" -- We have to unite.
Outraged by recent news accounts of vigilante Mexican border hawks, the 32-year-old San Pablo woman took to the streets -- really, her driveway -- on two lawn chairs pushed together. Ponce, a diabetic, is fasting there for a week.
"How dare they call us terrorists," she said.
She refused not only food, but also water for the first two days of her fast, which ends Thursday.
Worried friends and family finally convinced her to drink fluids. Now she's sipping a kind of children's Gatorade that her husband, Feliberto Diaz, serves her before he leaves in the morning for his gardening job.
Ponce can be stubborn, relatives say.
"Once she gets into a certain cause, she really goes all the way," said her sister, Christina Gastelum.
Earlier this month, Ponce read a newspaper account of the Minuteman Project, a loose band of armed volunteers gathered in Arizona this month to catch illegal immigrants crossing the Mexican border.
President Bush has called them vigilantes, but the administration has taken no action. The group is slated to speak in front of the Congressional Immigration Reform Caucus next week, according to the Associated Press.
"How can the government in 2005 allow this, let people take the law into their own hands?" said Ponce, whose father came from Michoacan. "Why do they need to be armed?"
Ponce discussed a protest with her husband and her three children.
"I told him, I need to do something," Ponce said.
She considered a demonstration at the border, but then took a cue from March4Education, a Bay Area activist group. Besides walking 70 miles to Sacramento last year to protest school budget cuts, members starved themselves in Oakland and Sacramento.
Ponce marched with them, but missed the hunger strike. This time, she saw her chance, she said.
She took a week off as a manager at Century Theatres in Pleasant Hill. At home, she built her lawn chair platform, piling it with red plaid and denim comforters.
Each night at dusk she holds candlelight vigils, occasionally filmed by a TV crew. She sleeps outside on the improvised divan, in a spot usually reserved for her 1953 Fordomatic, the barbecue or, on really hot days, her free-standing pool.
She knows there are more conspicuous places for a protest.
But Ponce said she wanted news cameras to show the world her neighborhood -- a tightknit Mexican-American enclave of families with children, all of them with inalienable rights.
"And I figured the government can't get involved if it's my own property," she said.
To her right, a statue of Guadelupe clasps her hands in prayer, wooden rosary beads dripping from her plastic digits. Fatima beams in a gilt white robe, a trio of doves at her feet. A bust of Jesus flashes Ponce the peace sign.
About 8 p.m. Monday, as Ponce lay weak, the mini-congregation lit long white tapers, saucered by red plastic cups to catch the wax.
Friend Lisa Ramirez began the prayer:
"Our father, who art in heaven ..."
They repeated the prayer a second time in Spanish.
Ponce gripped a pink teddy bear, the tag dangling from its left ear. Someone turned on the TV to watch the news, but there was only the mustache of Dr. Phil.
Ponce drifted in and out of sleep. Soon, her husband would light a fire and let out her dog, Vega, a pit bull-German shepherd mix, to guard her.
Through her homebound protest, Ponce is following not only her conscience, but the stars, she said.
The day she read about the Minutemen, her Gemini horoscope (after warning her of troubles with strangers, authority figures and traveling) ended with an edict:
"Help a cause you believe in."
"has the world been turned inside out or is it just my imagination?"
wiping off my monitor screen, lol!
Uhh, Diana, has anyone told you that Mexican drug smugglers are armed? Has anyone told you that Arizona is a "carry" state? Has anyone told you that it's illegal to sneak over American borders? Diana, you're one dumb chick.
Beautiful,wonderful!
Hey - what say we go by McDonald's, grab a couple bags of burgers, and head on over there??
Are they serving popcorn?
Stoke up that barbeque grill, ma, the party's at your house!
Let's hope she does go "all the way". It will be guaranteed to be euphoric
"On behalf of alienated aliens everywhere, I'm proud to accept this Darwin award...."
Maybe that *childrens type gatorade* is really Koolade.
She doesn't have the credibility of Homer though. Maybe she can eat her Mezcan flag blanket. If she loves Mezigo soooo much WTF is she here in the USA????? HUH!!!!!
Love it or LEAVE IT Mamacita.
Good grief. She's a diabetic for heaven's sake. This could really do great harm to her, even death. Doesn't she care as much for her family???? Amazing! People are nuts!
Yep, it has!
She's diabetic and she should never be fasting. It could kill her.
NO, you can't go on a hunger strike without trouble. My blood sugar went down to 43 once and I had to be taken to the hospital by ambulance. I was incoherent and it took quite a while to get my blood sugars up again. It's no joke.
She got the media to pay attention.
I don't like seeming insensitive here, but Marysecretary, she knows what she's doing - or she knew what she was doing.
It's all crazy, mixed up, bazarre. As Alice said: things are getting curiouser and curiouser.
Type II requires carbs as well in those of us who are on insulin. This is nothing to fool around with.
If I may add, I recall that not eating may result in damage to the pancreas and liver. In fact, type IIs are advised to even eat a snack at bed time so as not to go too long from dinner to breakfast.
It is true to an extent. If your blood sugar goes too low, you can become comatose. Drs. can bring it back up again but this is really dangerous.
Of course she does. She's doing it to make her point, without thinking of the consequences to her family. What a dunce.
Nam Vet
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