“But there’s something else front and center to our particular brand of misery. We are a nation of miserable optimists. We believe everything is possible and if you don’t have it all, from the perfect body to profound wealth, the fault is yours. When people suffer in this country—from, say, foreclosures and bankruptcies due to the destruction of our economy by the forces of greed—the shame is overwhelming. It’s seen as a personal failure, not the failure of our institutions. Taking drugs to numb your shame also keeps you from connecting the dots and opposing what’s taken you down.” Quote from Solnit’s Letter (below)
image from artist, Tino Rodriguez
Apologies to Mexico
The Drug Trade and GNP (Gross National Pain)
By Rebecca Solnit
http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/175566/tomgram%3A_rebecca_solnit%2C_one_big_continent_of_pain/#more
Dear Mexico,
I apologize. There are so many things I could apologize for, from the way the U.S. biotech corporation Monsanto has contaminated your corn to the way Arizona and Alabama are persecuting your citizens, but right now I’d like to apologize for the drug war, the 10,000 waking nightmares that make the news and the rest that don’t.
You’ve heard the stories about the five severed heads rolled onto the floor of a Michoacan nightclub in 2006, the 300 bodies dissolved in acid by a servant of one drug lord, the 49 mutilated bodies found in plastic bags by the side of the road in Monterrey in May, the nine bodies found hanging from an overpass in Nuevo Laredo just last month, the Zeta Cartel’s videotaped beheadings just two weeks ago, the carnage that has taken tens of thousands of Mexican lives in the last decade and has terrorized a whole nation. I’ve read them and so many more. I am sorry 50,000 times over.
The drug war is fueled by many things, and maybe the worst drug of all is money, to which so many are so addicted that they can never get enough. It’s a drug for which they will kill, destroying communities and ecologies, even societies, whether for the sake of making drones, Wall Street profits, or massive heroin sales. Then there are the actual drugs, to which so many others turn for numbness. READ FULL ARTICLE
