Sorry for the bother
By
Eduardo Galeano
From
La Jornada, May 9, 2009.
I
want to share some questions, flies I have buzzing in my head.
Is
justice just? Is justice standing on the feet of an upside down
world?
Iraq’s
shoe hurler against Bush was condemned to three years in jail. Don’t
you think he actually deserved to be honored?
Who
is the terrorist? The shoe hurler or the one hit by the shoe? Is not
the serial killer who invented the Iraq War, assassinated a slew of
people and legalized torture and then ordered it applied guilty of
terrorism?
Are
the residents of Atenco, Mexico, or the indigenous Mapuches of Chile,
or the kekchies of Guatemala, or the farmers without land of Brazil,
all guilty, accused of terrorism for defending their right to the
land? If land is sacred, even if the law does not state it, aren’t
those who defend it also sacred?
According
to Foreign Policy Magazine, Somalia is the most dangerous place of
all. But, who are the pirates? The starving who assault ships or the
Wall Street speculators who for years have been assaulting the world
and now receive multimillion dollar compensations for their
eagerness?
Why
does the world reward those who ransack it?
Why
is justice blind from only one eye? Wal-Mart, the most powerful of
all companies, prohibits unions. MacDonald’s, also. Why do these
companies violate international law with delinquent impunity? Might
it be because in today’s world work is worth less than garbage and
even less are the rights of workers?
Who
are the just and the unjust? If international justice truly exists,
why does it never judge the powerful? Authors of the most ferocious
massacres are not imprisoned. Might it be because they are the ones
who possess the keys to the jails?
Why
are the five most powerful nations who have veto power at the United
Nations untouchables? Is that power derived of divine origin? Are the
peacekeepers those who make war a business? Is it correct that world
peace be charged to the five powers who are the principal producers
of arms? Without underestimating narco-traffickers, isn’t this also
a case of “organized crime?”
But
no punishment is demanded against the world’s owners by those whose
outcries everywhere demand the death penalty. But there’s more. The
outcries are aimed against those who use blades, not against those
who use missiles.
And
one asks himself: since those who seek justice are so crazy with a
wish to kill, why don’t they demand the death penalty against
social injustice? Is it a just world that every minute destines $3
million for military expenses, while every minute 15 children die
because of hunger or a curable disease? Against who does the
so-called international community arm itself to the teeth? Against
poverty or against the poor?
Why
don’t those who push so fervently for capital punishment demand the
death penalty against the values of the consumer society which
regularly put public security in harm? Or perhaps the bombardment of
publicity which provoke crime by stunnking millions and millions of
unemployed youth, or the badly paid, repeating night and day that to
be is to have — to have an auto, to have name-brand shoes, to have,
to have, and who doesn’t have, is not?
And
why isn’t the death penalty implanted against death? The world is
organized at the service of death. Or doesn’t the military
industry, which devours a large part of our resources and a good part
of our energies, fabricate death? The world’s owners only condemn
violence when it is practiced by others. And this monopoly over
violence is translated to an inexplicable fact for the
extraterrestrials and also unbearable for terrestrials who still
want, against all evidence, to survive: humans are the only animals
specialized in mutual extermination and have developed a technology
of destruction that is annihilating, along the way, the planet and
all its inhabitants.
This
technology is nourished by fear. It is fear that creates the enemies
who justify military and police waste. And while we’re implanting
the death penalty, how about considering the death of fear? Wouldn’t
it be sane to do away with the universal dictatorship of these
professional fear mongers? Those who sow panic condemn us to
solitude, prohibit our solidarity: every man for himself, squishing
each other, our fellow human beings are always a danger who lurk,
careful, he or she will rob you, that one will violate you, that baby
carriage hides a Muslim bomb, and if that woman looks at you, the
neighbor who seems harmless, she will surely infect you with swine
flu.
In
this upside down world, even the most elemental acts of justice and
common sense are scary. When President Evo Morales initiated the
re-foundation of Bolivia so that this country, of mostly indigenous
people, would lose its shame when looking in the mirror, he provoked
panic. This challenge was catastrophic from the traditional racist
point of view, which thought itself the only possible order: Evo was
bringing chaos and violence and because of him national unity was
going to explode, shattered in pieces. And when Ecuadorean President
Correa announced he would not be paying non-legitimate debts, the
news produced terror in the financial world and Ecuador was
threatened with terrible punishments for giving such a bad example.
If the military dictatorships and the political thieves have always
been carefully taken care of by the international banking system,
haven’t we gotten used to accepting as our destined fatality that
the people pay for the stick that hits it and the greed that ransacks
it?
But,
might it be that common sense and justice have been divorced forever?
Weren’t common sense and justice born to walk together, very close
to each other?
Doesn’t
that feminist saying make sense that goes that if we, the macho men,
were to become pregnant, abortion would be free? Why isn’t the
right to an abortion legalized? Might it be because it would no
longer then be the privilege of women who can afford it and of the
doctors who can charge for it?
The
same occurs with another scandalous case of the negation of justice
and common sense: why aren’t drugs legalized? Isn’t it, like
abortion, a case of public health? And what gives the country with
the most drug addicts the moral authority to condemn those who supply
its demand? And why do the large media outlets consecrated to the war
against the flagellum of drugs, never mention that most of the heroin
consumed worldwide comes from Afghanistan? Who is in charge in
Afghanistan? Isn’t that a militarily occupied country by the
messianic country that attributes to itself the mission of saving us
all?
Once
and for all, why aren’t drugs legalized? Might it not be because
they bring the best pretext for military invasions, while also
bringing the juiciest earnings to the large banks that at night work
as laundries?
Now
the world is sad because fewer autos are being sold. One of the
consequences of the world crisis is the descent of the prosperous
auto industry. If we had any common sense left, and a bit of a sense
of justice, shouldn’t we be celebrating this good news? Or isn’t
the descent of the automobile not good news from nature’s point of
view, which will end up a little bit less poisoned, and people
walking, as fewer will die?
According
to Lewis Carroll, the queen explained to Alice how justice functioned
in wonderland:
“There
you have it,” said the queen. It is locked in jail serving its
time; but the trial will not begin until next Wednesday. And by the
way, the crime will be committed at the end.
In
El Salvador, Archbishop Oscar Arnulfo Romero proved that justice,
like the snake, only bites the shoeless. He died from bullet wounds
for denouncing that the shoeless in his country were born condemned
beforehand for the crime of being born.
The
result of the recent elections in El Salvador, aren’t they in some
way homage? A tribute to Archbishop Romero and the thousands who like
him died fighting for true justice in the land of injustice?
Sometimes
stories of history end up wrong; but history never ends. When it says
goodbye, it says see you later.
Eduardo
Galeano, famous Uruguayan writer and author, has written among other
books, “The
open veins of Latin America”.
