In the order of life a mother should not bury her children. In less than one year my aunt has lived to see two of her sons killed in brutal ways. In a span of five years , a grandson, and a nephew also. She is not a number. Her name is Mercedes ,to me she is my Tia Meches. She is a blonde petite waiflike woman in her late eighties. She has lots of freckles and puts those plastic fruit shaped things filled with flavored sugar on her Christmas tree as ornaments. As a kid she would let me come over to her elegant old school looking house in la Flor Blanca and eat them without telling my mom. She loves music..she is a woman who's heart has been broken too many times by wars, her own and our country's. El Salvador is so many things; A small paradise, a little corner of the world full of magical places, fertile earth for happy people, gente cachimbona. Sadly it also has always been a scenario for wars, for violence. From the famous "soccer war", to our very uncivil civil war, to the gang ridden vulnerable place it has become. If I reason it out in my head I think the sickness of our society can be traced back all the way back to when the civil war ended. The lack of values, the loss of principles, the demoralization in general that comes after a war could be where the gestation of our present situation started. To that I would add a string of governments who were unable to truly serve their people, unable to provide employment for those old enough to work and education for those young enough to make a difference down the road. Add the massive deportation of criminals, the disappearance of a sense of community, of the thread that holds society together and El Salvador is suddenly the saddest paradise there ever was. It used to be that some of us had the luxury of living in a bubble, that luxury can no longer be afforded. Lurking in any and every corner is someone willing to cheat you out of your life for a cell phone, a watch, some cash. Dehumanized. That is what criminals are, and sadly it is what we are slowly becoming. The repeated practice of reading about murders every day has led us to register less and less shock as the days go by. As bad news invades our tv sets, our computer screens and our newspapers we are losing the ability to be appalled, to be enraged, to DEMAND the security that we need. Some say we should take it into our own hands, the old "eye for an eye". I don't necessarily think the world would go blind like Gandhi did, but I do think that it would force good people to stain their hands with another human being's blood. And then they wouldn't be good anymore. Violence generates violence, it is a law as true as the law of gravity. It is textbook cause and effect. So how do we fight our wars? we fight them by bothering to meet our neighbors, by rebuilding the threads of community and solidarity that make a society strong. We fight them by not giving up, by doing anything in our power to make the lives of those around us safer, nicer, happier, easier. We fight by getting involved in civil organizations, be it volunteering to teach impoverished families a trade, or their children how to read. We fight with the one weapon that can touch a human heart, even a hardened one, and that is kindness.
I want to give my best thanks to all of you who through emails, texts, facebook messeges and phone calls expressed your sadness for my family's loss. There is one more thing you can do, tomorrow there is a demonstration against all this violence at Salvador del Mundo, at 10:00 a.m. If you or your family have been victims of crime, go. If you know someone who was, go. If you have kids that you wish a better life for, go. The power of masses has been seen all over the world this year, become involved.
Thank you again from the bottom of my heart.
Beatriz
