Amarguillo (How Else Could We Understand?)

A blast of the brightest sunshine yellow sparks,
brave amarguillo trees speckled
amidst dried fields of hopeful farmers
withering crops
crinkling pine needles
fallen trees crying for water, for life.
Smokey the Bear shakes in his Forest Service boots.

I’m told the dry season never ended last year,
and in some towns the water gets shut off for three months at a time.
Forty people died in Chinandega last weekend in temperatures hovering between 35 and 40 degrees Celsius.
Heat stroke can’t be blamed when water’s not an option.
The sharpened guillotine blade hangs on a thread,
perched for the fall.
This is normal.

My roommate Fransisco laughs at my awestruck shock at this statistic
and the joy disperses, as fleeting as it came
with my wondering "Como puede vivir sin agua por tres meses?
(an honest question- how do you live without water for three months?)
Honest but severely loaded.

How do you LIVE?
In one instant I’ve found why Nicaraguans have such faith in God.
His answer:
"We believe because how else could you explain a world in which we must live without water for three months at a time? How else would we understand?"
A slap in the face.

How else could a world in which people with all the power choose to
fund and fight unwarranted religious wars based on fear and oil
yet disregard poverty as part of the "other" world,
the THIRD world.

Why would we care about the THIRD world as much as OUR world?

We invest our money CAREFULLY there, in this other world
Just enough to keep them coming back for more
Just enough to keep the hands outstretched
Just enough to keep the UN off our backs
Just enough to keep opportunities for photo opportunities arising
Just enough to keep them silent and downtrodden
Just enough to keep their starry-eyed focus on our American dream alive.

What is this "American Dream"?
If it’s not meant for all of America,
rather meant to justify the rise of the rich to their castles in the clouds
and blame the victims of our carelessness,
our neighbors
who gaze in our dining room windows
awestruck at the opulence
salivating with hope for our scraps
who struggle every day just to live.

I sound cliché-
how do I paint you a clearer picture what it means to struggle every day to LIVE?

Have you woken in the morning to the same hunger pangs, knitting needles in the depths of your stomach that have haunted your dreams for your whole life?
Have you constantly and consciously been forced to drink water infused with sewage and garbage day-after-day simply because you had no other CHOICE?
Has this water given you life-threatening fevers and blinding migraine headaches?
Has your water been carried up a mountainside in 5-gallon-plastic-jugs by your seven-year-old daughter every morning, her back hunched unnaturally under its crippling weight?
Have you also been forced to send this daughter to beg for pesos to buy rice and beans,
her bare feet dodging broken glass and rusted barbed wire?

How do I get you to see this painting in color, not in the black and white of "THE OTHER"?

For if you are to realize that this type of poverty exists in every moment of every day
for millions upon millions of our brothers and sisters
throughout the entire world
and in your backyard
it MUST be in vivid color
high definition if you will.
Do I need a PowerPoint presentation and a flat screen TV
or will these words of impassioned truth
reach beyond your ears and your eyes and into your heart?

These words, " THE OTHER" and "3rd WORLD" must be abolished
we must learn to empathize
if the world can ever change for the better.
If we can open our minds and our hearts to realize
"THE OTHER" as an intimate, essential, precious component of ourselves,
if we can understand that these words "THE OTHER" and "3rd WORLD"
have been fabricated by people with power,
people who judge and fear change,
people who refuse to grant freedom,
and voices to the voiceless
their bullets silenced with a justification of "US versus THEM".

We must not buy into this
unjustified disabling dichotomy
For each time we turn a blind, ignorant, guilt-laden eye
averting our gaze from the pain and suffering of this world
we in fact turn from the deepest part of our soul.

Who felt the right to draw black lines
zigzagged boundaries across our globe?
How have we not noticed these lines are INVISIBLE?
Invisible until we forget the past
and break ground to construct another embarrassing wall
as if blocking our view of the wrong side of the tracks
will make our neighbors disappear.

The make-believe black lines are pathetic enough,
but walls go beyond the zigzags.
We’re playing a game of Risk so real
that if we allowed ourselves a moment of clarity
our hearts would break into a million pieces.

Do we need these fancy adjectives
these walls
to justify how terribly we treat each other?
Is this all just a big game to people like Mr. G. W. ?
I’d compare his game to chess
but I know the only players he’s aware of are the king and the pawn.
Maybe if he could ever wipe that all-knowing smirk off his face
for long enough to say something real
we’d have a glimpse of some sort of truth…

Ironic how mumble-jumbled and repeated key words
"insurgents"
"terrorists"
"freedom fighters"
"rebel forces"
"fanatics"
cause more conflict, misunderstanding, hatred and war than bombs ever could.

How many soldiers to this date have died
defending these words?
I’d tell you but I’m not trying to give a history lesson.
Would it matter more if it were ONE person or THREE HUNDRED THOUSAND?

How can I paint this picture in COLOR when our own government will not allow the media to show pictures of caskets being carefully carried off a military plane draped in those glorified stars and stripes?

An image sticks in my mind, a 2002 clipping from a newspaper scrap booked next to lyrics from John Lennon’s "Imagine" … a middle-aged man, long beard trailing in the dust, white robes spattered with blood, white linen and crimson death pooling around his knees, arms outstretched desperately to the skies, mouth hanging open in a primal wail that only a man at the foot of the coffins of his two children aged four and six years old could pour forth on an unjust world, dried riverbeds of tears marking the end of any happiness and future he’d seen in life. His babies, gone forever at the hands of "freedom fighters".

"Imagine there’s no Heaven, it’s easy if you try."
It doesn’t take much effort to imagine, Mr. Lennon, that there’s no Heaven
when we’re willing to kill each other in the name of GOD.

How do we think GOD feels about these justifications?
Does he sit on his throne in the sky contentedly staring down as we play plastic soldiers
with real guns
remarking to himself "How lovely are these wars in my name?"
(these words strike too close to "Hallowed be thy name")
or "I must give this judgmental sect of soldiers for Christ a first class seat on the train to glory?"
(those who claim "there are two types of people in this world, those who believe in Jesus Christ as their personal savior and those who don’t")

Even if Jesus Christ was our personal savior and the only son of GOD…
I’d still like to hope GOD sees in color.

Or…
Does GOD sit silently as tears stream down his cheeks,
mourning the death of true life?
Pleading for all of humanity
to give up our fabricated terms of differentiation,
to face each other as human beings,
casting fear aside,
breaking down walls,
tearing across boundaries,
looking through open and non-judgmental eyes,
bowing deeply in acknowledgment of the divine in all,
in communion with nature and our Brothers and Sisters,
filling the deep and lonely fear of vulnerability
with simple, deep, and unconditional love?

We claim an operation in Iraq based on FREEDOM.
Is this another fancy word we’ve manipulated for our own causes?
Freedom from what?
From our own fears and anxieties?
From having to explain the selfish reasons we’re still there?
From "THE OTHER"?
From terrorists?
From four and six year-old Iraqi children?

Where does freedom end and murder begin?
It’s a slippery slope;
the boundary between the two as invisible
as those inked black lines flowing across the maps of humanity.

Yet across the deserts of hopeless lands
rise moments of triumph and brilliant life
amarguillos, my eyes see in rusted dry brown and mid-day sunlight yellow
tufts of blossoms defiant in the face of drought,
peeking over walls to the better side of town.

"Amargo, like coffee without sugar" my friend Henry explains.
He speaks of bitterness with an unsettling smile.
It’s why we believe in GOD.
"How else could we understand?"