My first blog, ever

OK. So, here's a confession.

Blogging scares me.

It's not that I can't write down my thoughts. Or that I can't will myself to the computer. It's just that blogs are right and left and crazy with opinions. We all have readers out there lerking in the shadows desperate for a sliver of a bias -- which we all have, but are loathe to admit --  and I hate to give them any ammunition.

Or is that just my readers?

LOL.

Anyway, here's me... writing a blog.

Before moving to Palm Springs nearly five years ago, I thought what everyone else did: it's a playground for the rich and affluent. What shocked me wasn't so much the huge disparities between the wealthy and poor, almost every community has these, but that those differences are somehow lost on the folks who live here.

Mecca and the Torres Martinez Indian reservation are just a short 30-minute drive from the golf courses and mansions in Palm Springs. But it's worlds away.  The Purepecha Indians from Michoacan, Mexico have been migrating to the Coachella Valley since the 1990s when deforestation left the town without a livlihood. Mostly artistans, they abandon their art here to stoop in the fields.

Migrant farmworkers are the backbone of a nearly $500 million agribusiness in the Coachella Valley, and yet earn less than $15,000 a year.

They live here in mostly ramshackle mobile homes that the federal government tried twice to shutter for health and safety violations that included open, raw sewage. But waiting for them in Mexico are empty, middle-class brick homes built with the remittances they send home.

The American dream is no longer what it once was for immigrants of the past.

We all know that money buys finer things, nicer cars, bigger homes.

But it also buys better health. And that's something none of us can afford to live without.

So, I want to take a closer look at exactly what money does buy.