There is no drought in written material when it comes to reporting on the current dire and dry conditions of our Golden State.

In case you haven’t heard, we’re running out of water. Again.

This strange ephemeron echoes an eclipse, it comes around every so often, the media take tons of photos of dry lakes looking like mere puddles then it rains and everybody goes back to worry about the next bad thing.

Today, once the rubber band comes off your favorite metro newspaper, these stories pop out by the bucket. State offiicials seem to think that only when they say we’re going dry, we’ll be going dry.

It took our state-jefe months before he echoed what was bouncing off the capitol walls – no rain means no water means a full fledged drought. Thus 25 million of us Californians finally entered an “official” time of drought which means all of us must do whatever is necessary to curb our H-2-O usage to preserve the precious liquid of life.

Unless the latest delivery projection detours, it will be the first time a “zero allocation” forecast has been made in the 54-year history of the State Water Project, which is operated by the California Department of Water Resources and typically delivers Sierra snowmelt to cities and farms throughout the state. Gulp.

What does this mean for José, Rene or Fay? In layman terms, we have to find water for whatever we need it for, elsewhere, and not in the usual places like a town’s nearby lake, river or even a swimming pool run by a municipality.
Now, if you’re a farmer or a farmworker, both of you are in for a summer of discontent. Uhhuh, y’all know the drill quite well, no water plus no plants equals to no laborers needed. Of course you know that most of the farmworkers in this state are of Mexican descent and in most camps, that equals to a big “Who cares!”

Okay, back to what you need to do in order to conserve water so your sisters and brothers won’t turn to dust before their time. Let’s use a color chart for this task. Actually, all we need are two colors, white and non-white. Some may say, the Haves and Have Nots or maybe you say the 99% and 1 %, it’s all up to the way an individual looks at a particular serious situation.

However, in this case, Drought’14 can be addressed as a non person-of-color situation. Allow me to explain, for example, should you happen to be of Mexican extraction. If you are, then you do not have to do anything and still enjoy your water whenever you want to, wherever you want to and even how much you want to. Why, you ask, are you, all of a sudden among the privileged? Let us count the ways your ancestors have been conserving water for centuries.

Back in the day, Southwestern towns drew an imaginary red-line that was not to be crossed by people of color. That usually meant that your folks would be banished to survive in barrios. Barrios usually had no sewage systems (therefore no water usage there); no public swimming pools (no water wasted there either); streets were unpaved (no pavement no water used to clean them); little or no electrical power was available (thus no dishwashers, no water heaters, etc.); few cars were owned by your people therefore no need to wash them or use water for the radiator, etc.; and so on. (Please ask your elders to give you more examples because I can’t possibly remember all of the water-less things my family did back then .)

Even if your antepasados did not keep track of all the water they never used, but still had to pay for the watering of “their” city’s pools and golf courses, like my parents, who lived in a town that excluded people of color from such city-owned amenities. Can you imagine the millions of gallons of water conserved? Check this out, if you simply use a water-saving showerhead instead of the one the housebuilder screwed on, some 500 gallons a week can be saved. For those of you still trying to figure where this is going, ask an older aunt how her mom used to bathe her.

Should you need more specific information on the topic, stop some old timer and ask him how good it really was back in the good ol’ days when it came to not having all of the necessities of every-day life in the barrio. Then do the math.
Okay, let’s review. If a person has already paid for something, why is he being charged again? Or, if you have taken precautionary measures once before, it’s somebody else’s turn to do so, right? Thus, we shall agree that all of these weird and oft times wacko ideas of preserving water in different manners or days, shall not apply to our own gente.

Simply put, been there, done that.