Walls

He who joyfully marches to music in rank and file has already earned my contempt. He has been given a large brain by mistake, since for him the spinal cord would fully suffice. This disgrace to civilization should be done away with at once. Heroism at command, senseless brutality, and all the loathsome nonsense that goes by the name of patriotism, how violently I hate all of this, how despicable and ignoble war is; I would rather be torn to shreds than be a part of so base an action, it is my conviction that killing under the cloak of war is nothing but murder. - Albert Einstein

I learned today of the U.S. Army's construction of a three mile long wall dividing Sunni and Shiite neighborhoods within the city of Baghdad. I'm not a military strategist, I've never even played a game of "Risk", I didn't play with plastic soldiers when I was a tyke... but i can't help but being struck speechless. Words about stone walls fail me. They seem to me such an ancient component of human existence, a component of our collective history marked by pain, war, death, conquesting emperors, greedy kings, sacrifice, and separation. A barrier between mankind and...mankind? Back in the days of King Arthur and his valiant knights we humans built protective walls around our cities, a security measure to protect against pillaging rogues and raging armies. Given the weapons of the day, the sword and bow, the boiling hot tar and launched boulders, these meters-thick walls provided a sensible barrier from the traitorous outside world. Nowadays the sensibility factor runs thin, and these barricades serve to separate, to contribute to the rift of inequality in our world.


Already having been deeply disturbed by the construction of the "necessary" triple-fortified section of the "Wall of Shame" being built upon 700 miles of the U.S./Mexican border, this bit of news about Baghdad leaves me unnerved. Are we reverting to another Feudal Era in which the kings of our world believe that we must enclose our world in walls in order to remain "secure"? What does the word "secure" refer to? Closing out our perceived enemies, showing them we'd rather spend millions of dollars on concrete and chain link and barbed wire than on creating programs in their country to benefit the poor? Building the wall in Baghdad amidst thousands of people protesting throughout the city crying desperately for the division to STOP? Bush slaps the face of Congress for their attempts at holding his administration accountable for their deception, lies, and greed. Put Mr. President on the defensive and I suppose that's the knee-jerk reaction we should expect to receive. "Oh yeah, look at me now. I can do whatever I want. You think I’m causing civil war and destroying a country? I'll show you civil war."... Mr. Bush would do well to remember the words of his predecessor, Bill Clinton "A world without walls is the only sustainable world... If the world is dominated by people who believe that their races, their religions, their ethnic differences are the most important factors, than a huge number of people will perish in this century." Clinton wasn't perfect, but he recognized the pointless endeavor of imprisoning humans within man-made (and unsupported) confines. Bush's puppetry act becomes more and more translucent as he continues to support policies which lead to the construction of barriers and the deaths of innocent people. Stone by damned stone.


The jackhammers begin to tear away at freedom and block by block a "temporary" barrier appears in our backyard, between neighbors, across Mexico, in Baghdad, pervading our lives. What happens when we become so accustomed to this barrier that we forget its presence, we forget that we were ever truly free to speak of justice and truth and equality, we forget that we were ever allowed to dissent? Will we lose sight of things that once were our unalienable rights as Americans? will we forget? Bush has succeeded in facilitating mind-blowing acts of radical patriotism while creating a society in which we seem to have forgotten our roots. Who are we to morally impose ourselves on other countries? Who are we to say democracy is the only way to live? YES. It could be the most comfortable, safe, and freeing way to live... but does that mean the rest of the world must follow in our footsteps? Has this command been directly handed down by GOD (the one and only true GOD, of course) to Mr. Bush himself to justify a Napoleonic conquest of the world? Does our country as a whole live and breathe by and pray to this same one God our President claims to act under? Are our hands guided by a war-mongering spirit?


From what i know of Americans, I say NO.


Do we line our own suburban neighborhoods with thick cement walls? We cannot be silent and expect peace to pervade the world and to suddenly appear in our government's foreign policy. There are many Americans who have not been silent a single day about the terrible consequences and injustices of the Iraqi War and I thank them from the depths of my heart. There are also Americans like me... who are waking from a slumber rubbing our eyes and wondering "what the HELL happened to our country?" Those of us who claimed to "never get involved" with politics because we didn’t know where to start, scared that once we start to know our hearts will break, and aware that once we have this knowledge we will never be able to step back into our secure bubbles of nightly-news induced reality. We can no longer be numb to the statistics of the dead, unable to see visions of the flag-draped coffins... and yet we continue to be fed self-righteous lies by politicians who claim to be looking out for the lives of our brothers and sisters across the world.


The director of the factory in "Brave New World" (Adolus Huxley) quotes his forefather Our Ford in a frightening statement "History... is bunk".


Have we come to a point that we're so wrapped up in our actions and reactions of the moment that we are unable to look at the past with any type of intelligent reflective thought? Have we removed ourselves so far from reality that we cannot notice the parallels between our current situation and feudal times, times of the Berlin Wall, the Vietnam War? Do any of these historical events ring enough bells to create a fury of action, do they stir our lives enough that we begin to realize that we're the ones who must take responsibility for changing the doomed course of our country's policies? Have we already forgotten the slippery slope that was Vietnam, and how suddenly our boys overseas were being lost by the hundreds and by the thousands, how the death tolls mounted and mounted to a 58,256 name-long black granite cry to the heavens....


I've experienced this monument, this memorial to a generation lost in the jungles of Vietnam. a bitter sob caught in my throat, I wanted to drop to my knees and wail "WHY?" angrily at the skies, to shake the White House on its foundations "WHY WAR?". Blurred eyes searching the heavens for an answer, fingertips tracing letters- each one a prayer of peace on my lips. The Vietnam Wall. Another wall of our history, another wall for which so many boys died needlessly, another wall which divided a country and families and lives forever.


I looked though the iron bars of the White House, choked on my thoughts- it's so small. For the amount of destruction the decisions made within those walls have created, it should be a palace, a small country, a ridiculously giant theme-park adventure complete with flashing neon signs and a "Bombs Over Baghdad" theme park. If one saw the President's lair out of context, it wouldn't be much of a statement of power. I can't bring my mind past it's color- set against a "true-blue dream of a sky" (e.e. cummings), forged of the purest white... where's the spattered blood of the world?


Certainly not on our hands, for we are the purest form of freedom and democracy that exists on this planet, and our actions come with oh-such-good intentions. Adolus Huxley wrote, "Hell isn't merely paved with good intentions, it is walled and roofed with them". Good intentions matter not when they lead to the murdering of tens of thousands of civilians, they matter not when they lead to the death of one innocent person. Stacking our things around us as protective individualistic walls, we are able to feel that we own our own part of the world, and our prized collection mounts with the dust of years of inaction and spiderwebs woven from a life of closed eyes. But, we have our own little lives, our own museums, monuments to our fleeting lives, and we continue to hoard and justify our miserable mizery. Thing by damned thing.


Reading these utopia-based books leaves me wondering what point we've come to in our world... I live in a small town on a mountaintop in Nicaragua where 80% of people struggle to eat every single day yet own the same amount of high-tech electronic mumble jumble as my friends back in the states- giving up their daily rice and beans for a sugary dose of daytime drama and farcical news. Chuck Palahniuk wrote, "The sound shivers though the walls, through the table, through the window frame, and into my finger. These distraction-oholics. These focus-ophobics. Old George Orwell got it backward. Big Brother isn't watching. He's singing and dancing. He's pulling rabbits out of hat. Big Brother's holding your attention every moment you're awake. He's making sure you're always distracted. He's making sure you're fully absorbed... and this being fed, it's worse than being watched. With the world always filling you, no one has to worry about what's in your mind. With everyone’s imagination atrophied, no one will ever be a threat to the world". Big Brother constantly keeps the spoonful of sugar within arms reach. Just when we're ready to make a movement toward thinking in terms of freedom and breaking free of societal constraints, there he is dangling shining objects in front of our oogling eyes, enabling us to forget the pain of reality and the necessity of being awake and fully alive. We are being spoon-fed day after day in our educational systems, in our institutions, in our media... with symbols and repeated key words and new things to wish and dream about possessing. Spoonful by damned spoonful.


Did anyone else catch the ironic news of the construction company building the US/Mexican border fence being fined for hiring illegal immigrants to build the wall? What about first-hand accounts such as Michael Finkel's short story entitled Desperate Passage in which he describes an ill-fated venture with a group of Haitians crammed in the hull of a boat named Believe in God? Of the desperate measures those from the poorest country in the Western hemisphere must go to in order to have some hope of a life? What are we saying about our own standards and values if we can't understand that people from these countries, if given any chance or opportunity of having a future, would rather live in the warm circle of their own families than existing on the outskirts of our society?



One of the men in Finkel's story, a Haitian named David, speaks of his stint as a drug dealer in Naples, Florida and his fear that upon returning to the states he will return to this lifestyle in order to afford a North American lifestyle. "In America, he mentioned, there is shame in poverty -- a shame you don't feel in Haiti. 'People are always looking at the poor Haitians who just stepped off their banana boat' he said." the words "illegal immigrants" are just as emotionally and politically loaded as "terrorist" or "insurgent".


What if we were made to look into the eyes of every scared shitless "illegal immigrant" who'd left their home and family in search of the mirage of the US? For our façade of glory? Would we be able to regard them as an equal human and still justify building an eyesore of a fence between the Americas? What if we had to look into the eyes of every mother and father in Iraq, of every “insurgent” brother or sister who'd ever lost someone due to "Operation Iraqi Freedom"? Would we be able to believe in their freedom if we had to brush away their tears, if we were deeply aware of their humanity, if we inscribed every name of an Iraqi casualty on our new wall in Baghdad and traced our fingertips across the letters, the alphabet in a foreign hand yet our own hands connected on a deeper level, aware of the significance of each character, each letter, each pair of eyes?


Would we drop our gaze to the ground and pick up another stone? OR would we cast our stones aside and reach out to grasp our brothers and sisters to honor the lost and help them re-build their world rather than continuing to destroy it? In 1984, George Orwell writes, that if the average citizen "were allowed contact with foreigners he would discover that they are creatures similar to himself and that most of what he has been told about them is lies. The sealed world in which he lives would be broken, and the fear, hatred, and self-righteousness on which his morale depends might evaporate. It is therefore...the main frontiers must never be crossed by anything except bombs".


Bombs and walls. Fear and hatred. Self-righteousness. Possessions. Lies. We cast the stone.
We dangerously mock history.


Will we continue to allow ourselves to be fed, spoonful by damned spoonful until we become so engorged and addicted to ourselves that patriotic tears of glory arise with the news of another "insurgent' death?
Will the shining objects in our lives continue to lull us into a nightmarish dream-world in which we forget the reality of freedom and justice?


Will we avert our eyes and continue to cast stones?
Or will we fall to our knees in fumbling clarity and mourn for our war-torn world?
My question is not who will cast the first stone
For as Jesus told us we have all sinned.
My question is, who's humble and valiant enough
to put the first stone back where it belongs
in the arms of Mother Earth?


As Robert Frost wrote:
Before I built a wall I'd ask to know
what I was walling in or walling out,
and to whom I was like to give offence.
Something there is that doesn't love a wall,
that wants it down.
This something Frost refers to, the deepest part of ourselves, the collective soul of our world, refuses to be silent.


My last question: when will we finally take a moment from our own diversions to stop, to consider, to release that something, to break walls, to break the hand of the spoon-feeding institutions, to rebuild our own world, to remind ourselves of what freedom once was, to regain the glimmer of hope in our eyes?


Put your stone down, return it to its Mother.
Embrace your own selfishness.
Embrace your neighbor.
Let love travel through these walls
and shatter them into the useless rubble .
Let them become a part of history,
a part I hope we'll never again be trained to ignore.

discoveries

last week as i sat outside the casona sharing a beer with my peace corps buddy oliver i started noticing floating spots of light flashing in the darkness of the garden spread out in front of us. in general i would take this to be a sign of impending eye doom seeing as major eye issues tend to run in my family and seeing flashing spots of light is not a good sign from normal eyes, however oliver informed me that there were LIGHTNING BUGS all over the place in cusmapa... which i had never noticed before that very instant. how in the world i missed such a glorious little insect for nearly 5 months when every other bug in the town seems to have found its way into my life or my bed or my pants is beyond me. my faith in the bugs of cusmapa is entirely renewed, because i don't know much about lightning bugs but i have a completely romanticized childlike fascination with them. like i wonder if when the power goes out i could catch a jarful of them instead of using my headlamp. they would make for much softer lighting, of that i am sure.

discovery #1: lightning bugs are the COOLEST BUG EVER. i want one for a pet.

things in my life here have not slowed down remotely, but after an incident last week in which the entire nicaraguan passport system crashed overnight leaving me and 13 kids and their parents standing in a non-airconditioned office in somoto wide-mouthed in utter shock of our bad luck and the irony of the situation (i really had a "michael shut your mouth, we are not a codfish!" mary poppins-esque look on my face, you could have fit a 12" submarine sandwich in there and i would not have noticed). anyways after that shocking turn of events (and by shocking i mean not very shocking at all, sort of like a game of chutes and ladders with much bigger stakes, or like getting a "go to jail, go directly to jail, do not pass go, do not collect $200" card instead of landing on free parking) i basically threw my hands up in the air and surrendered myself to the powers that be. if this trip is meant to happen for my kiddos, it will happen and there's nothing more i can do about it. thank goodness the system crash finally brought our president down here into the mix and magically the system's up and running today (monday) when last friday i was told it would be another month before new passports would be renewed. the way he said it made it sound like the machine that made the ACTUAL passports themselves had just decided to take a haitus and that we just had to be patient with the thing because vacations are important things. great news though, my utter lack of control has made me feel a bit better about this whole blasted situation; and has also led me to a few realizations and new experiences i would not have expected... the first of those being the lightning bug discovery.

discovery #2: planning for chutes and ladders type events to happen on a consistent basis is a good way to make sure you don't end up wide-open-mouthed in a government office or making voodoo dolls of lawyers.

my third discovery of the week involves fabretto's new volunteer up in cusmapa, ingrid, who's in her early forties and is from madrid, spain. she is lovely and i'm really excited to have another companera up there (i mindlessly referred to her as a gringa as in "wow it's going to be great to have another gringa up here" before i knew that 1) gringa is a word only used to discuss folks from the US of A, 2) i insulted her by using this word... this was the same day i met a guy from utah and said "oh i was born in utah, but i'm not a mormon! hahaha" to which he most solemnly replied "i am." DAMN. i put my foot in my mouth even when i speak my own language!). ingrid has made it her goal while she's here that i will speak better spanish and actually corrects me when i make mistakes (which is something everyone else is either too polite to do, or they just like me sounding like an idiot... either way my spanish is not improving). yesterday she told me "i've noticed that you have trouble with the verbs SER and ESTAR" (which are basically the two forms of the verb "TO BE" in spanish... the most important verbs out there) and proceeded to give me a grammar lesson. i think i've been under the impression that my spanish is much more proficient than it actually is, because i am able to communicate with people... but like david sedaris writes, it's likely that i've gone from speaking like an "angry baby" to rambling like a "podunk hillbilly".

discovery #3: my spanish, which i'd thought to be at the level of at least a preteen, has currently dropped to the late toddler years (which i'm told is a very important time of brain development, so i have that going for me, right?!). though a woman today asked me if i was from spain after we chatted for a minute... maybe it's the current euro mullet i have going on (result of cutting my own hair and not using a mirror) and thick rimmed glasses style combo i'm apparently currently sporting.

my fourth discovery (well not really a discovery, since its something i've known for quite some time) is that it's HARD to break a HABIT. for example, i'm staying in managua right now with 13 of the kids and 11 of their parents and we had to be at the migracion office this morning at 8 AM (meaning we'd have breakfast at 7 and that 6 AM would be the ABSOLUTE EARLIEST anyone would have to think about waking up). yet... at precisely 4:30 AM (after i'd sweated my brains out for 5 hours trying to sleep and had moved myself outside to sleep on a sheet on the ground only to wake up a few minutes later with ants crawling all over me... and had finally fallen asleep inside for an hour or so) EVERYONE in my room except me was shuffling around, showering, and getting themselves ready for the day. i vaguely remember looking outside at what i knew was a very early morning sky and asking one of the mom's "que hora es?" and her responding "5" and me turning over and mumbling "porque?" (WHY? which in this situation seemed an extremely valid question). i ended up sleeping until 6 AM and feeling like a SUPER late riser. then when i asked why everyone woke up this morning so early nobody could give me a straight answer other than "it was hot". when i told karlita about my early morning wake up call she said "what do they think, that they need to be up making tortillas or something?!" which sounds insensitive but since karla's nicaraguan i guess she's allowed to say stuff like that.

it's the truth though, i was thinking that for the majority of these mothers this 5 day trip to managua will be the longest vacation they've ever had away from the daily cooking, cleaning, washing, child-caring that goes on nonstop for most if not all of the years of their lives. i wish i had the money to take them to do something really fun! the women are so cute, they tisk tisk over everything and don't seem to be satisfied with anything (ranging from the cleanliness of the sheets to the quality of our food... (to their kids' hair before the passport picture) that isn't starch clean or infused with lots of good-ol cusmapan beans and salt. i have a feeling that my kiddos are going to starve when i bring them to the states, because if they don't like the food we've been eating the last few days they most certainly won't like the food there! and being kids too makes it even harder, i remember being about 13 years old and only liking VERY specific types of foods. we shall see. thing is that i know most of the women here are used to going to bed around 10 and waking up at 4 or 5 to make tortillas, start the day's pot of beans, and feed the animals before their kiddos are up for the day demanding attention. and the concept of vacation just doesn't exist- you're either working or with your family or your work is your family... not a lot of planning for the trip around the world in my new sailboat type of moments around these parts. i also believe that for some of these parents this might be their first trip to managua (lord knows i've been here enough times for all of us combined) because i feel like i'm supposed to be a leader here and i have NO clue what i'm doing. people wait for me to make the first move, it's like i'm responsible or something. yikes.

i had a moment this morning in the migracion office where i was getting frustrated with people asking me questions about the ONE FORM i had each of the parent/kids fill out for their passports... when one of the mom's walked up to me and asked me if instead of signing it she could just put her initials on the form because she DOES NOT KNOW HOW TO WRITE. OH. i'm an asshole. of course they have questions if they can't read or write on the form, and although my spanish is sketchy at best i at least know the letters and the general gists of questions.

discovery #4: although they will complain about being tired all day, every group of nicaraguans i've spent the night with makes a point of getting up before it's light out to make sure they're good and squeaky clean for the day... even if it means just sitting around for 3 hours until breakfast. go figure.

discovery #5: vacations are not universal.

discovery #6: reading and writing abilities are a GIFT i will not take for granted.

my seventh discovery: i really miss my family. all these kiddos are so close to their parents, and i think being around them and not having my parents around leaves me looking like a lost little kid tugging on pantlegs asking "MOMMY?!" hopefully yet peering time after time into the faces of strangers. i want to hug my family.

discovery #7: i really am still a child.

my eighth discovery: i finally found something that i REALLY miss about americans. we are overzealous about thanking each other, sometimes to the point of exhaustion but every now and again it is really important to be told that what you're doing matters and to have people be verbally thankful of your efforts. i've found that to be very difficult these past few weeks as i've been running around like mad trying to collect all these papers and not having a clue what is really going on and literally i have not had one parent or child say a simple "GRACIAS" to me the entire time. the ENTIRE time. sometimes it seems more like they're waiting for me to make a mistake, to falter so they can titter about it. the thing is, i can see that they're thankful in their eyes... and i guess the other thing is what do they REALLY have to thank me for? i'm taking their kids on a choir trip that's basically a fabretto PR tour... their kids will be the face of fabretto in the states. it's not like i'm giving them scholarships to go to college or anything spectacular like that. i can only do so much...

discovery #8: as cynical as i am, i really do miss some things about the states.

i saw my first nicaraguan rainbow on our bus ride down here yesterday and pointed it out to my seatmate miriam expecting her to shrug it off (which is what happens 99% of the time when i point out a natural event to someone here which i consider to be particularly miraculous) but instead she seemed absolutely delighted and we marveled at it for a few brief moments until the highway took our bus around a hill and it was POOF gone. hope lingers.

discovery #9: miracles happen in EVERY MOMENT of every day. miracles ARE universal!