What´s to say? Here´s a picture of the church in the town, where they show you bloodstains, and wrote the names of all the children who got killed in it on the side of the building, under the mural detailing the event. There was one survivor, and the mural is based on her narrative:

They´ve exhumed around 1,200 bodies so far, but it´s been a difficult process. The government keeps putting a hold on the investigation. When it first happened, journalists didn´t cover it for a good while – one of the first US journalists to want to investigate it was personally stopped by the head of the US embassy. The story finally ended up in the news because someone snuck in from the Honduras side.

I feel…that there isn´t really anything “important” to say about massacres because it´s all redundant and obvious. Obviously you shouldn´t kill people. Obviously you shouldn´t support governments that kill people. What else is there? I think this is the attitude a lot of people take when they hear about things like this. “We know, we know, shit happens, life sucks, especially in countries we bomb…..Can we stop talking about it now? It´s depressing, and what´s the point?”

It´s a rhetorical question. Usually they are implying that there is no point.

But there is! It´s true that there´s not much left to say once you´ve gotten past “there was a brutal civil war, sparked by misery and popular repression, and your country helped fund it, and here, in THIS place, 1,200 people died unnecessarily.” But it´s still important to say it, because eventually (the idea is), people will actually get something from it. They´ll feel and they´ll learn and they´ll think. And when people feel, learn, and think…That´s when things like this stop happening.

They´re missing out.

This is a picture of the cathedral in Santa Ana.

I only spent a couple days in there, but I was immediately charmed and decided that if I ever come live in El Salvador for an extended period of time, I would seriously consider Santa Ana as an option.

Because honestly, I hate San Salvador. What´s to like? It´s dirty, dangerous, ugly, expensive and an all-around disappointment. From a planning perspective, it just depresses me. I see no hope for it as a city at all. From a health perspective, it would probably take years off my life because of the horrible air (I´ve never actually lived in a city with terrible air quality before – it´s amazing how noticeable it is, and it´s amazing how people think they´re used to it) and because of the stress that comes from crossing the street and other pedestrian (hah) tasks.

Santa Ana was quieter. There is a definite city center with a park in the middle surrounded by the cathedral, the theater, and the government (which is typical of small towns in El Salvador). There´s a 3-4 block radius of markets and stuff leaving the center, then there´s a good amount of residential streets that are really narrow and…quiet. Not many cars, not even many people walking. And the houses look very colonial and pretty and the city is a grid, and it´s a city but it doesn´t really feel like one. There are lots of universities, and a good amount of visible organizing happening – the day I left, I stumbled upon a collective fair. It was mostly artisan collectives and credit unions – but hey! artisan collectives and credit unions! That´s what I like to see.

I don´t like to see corporate development and sprawl happening outside the older sections. So I chose not to.

Mostly I was dazzled by the cathedral. I´m not usually a sucker for churches, but this one was magnificent. The MOST magnificent. And, okay, yeah, I´ve never been to Europe so I should probably shut up about beautiful old churches…But wow. I did get a picture of the whole thing, but I thought a more detailed picture of only part of it does it more justice.

I think that I liked it so much because of the context. *Architecture always loses something when it doesn´t have good context, which is why I haven´t been too impressed with a lot of the churches here so far, or in Mexico, for that matter, where they´re More Famous And Important (as all things Mexican are…and yes. That is resentment you are sensing). Usually cathedrals are kept as relics and more modern cities develop around them and tourists visit them and people sell things at them and this all makes that presence they´re supposed to have go away. But because Santa Ana is so quiet and unassuming and has no skyscrapers or tourists and looks a lot like what it probably looked like 100 years ago, I really felt like the cathedral made the city more beautiful, and the city made the cathedral more beautiful.

*And yes, thank you, I am fully aware of choosing this picture while making this point.

/Urban planning nerdfest.

“Do you know why popular organization will never work here? Let me tell you. I can explain it with a folk story:

There were two barrels at a restaurant full of live crabs. One barrel had Salvadoran crabs and the other barrel had imported Chinese crabs. The owner of the restaurant told his waiter to put lids on the barrels, but there was only one lid available. After thinking for a minute, the waiter put the lid on the barrel of Chinese crabs. The owner asked why he chose that barrel. 

´Well,´ said the waiter, ´In a barrel of Chinese crabs, the crabs will probably escape by creating a chain so that the whole group can get out. If any Salvadoran crabs try to get out, I´m sure that the rest won´t allow it and drag them back down, so I´m not worried about them escaping.´

So why bother?” he asked me.

1. The occupiers don´t know what they´re talking about

There are a lot of people going to different #occupy sites and interviewing protesters, and reporting back to the world with the news that “these people” don´t understand economics or the economic system, have no idea what they´re protesting, can´t actually explain what´s wrong with capitalism, are blind followers, can´t define socialism/communism/whatever-ism, and are generally stupid lazy social parasites who clearly know nothing about how the world works.

This isn´t entirely true, and if you´re interested, there´s plenty of evidence for Intelligent Life at OWS in the form of video and press interviews, and articles/blogs written by protesters themselves. I feel  no need to defend that point. It speaks for itself. If you don´t believe me, get off Fox News and CNN.

What I´m interested in admitting that there ARE people there who can´t explain what, exactly, is wrong with capitalism, or even what it is, and there ARE people who don´t understand economics, and there ARE people who have no idea whatsoever how to fix society. And there are a lot of them.

But I fail to see how that delegitimizes the movement.

Let´s look at revolutions and civil wars around the world. Would you side against Salvadoran campesinos during the war because they couldn´t tell you in clear, academic terms how they were being exploited? Would you consider slave rebellions and indigenous resistance “unknowledgeable about how the world works” because they couldn´t define and explain the economic system that led to their social status? Was it a waste of time for the people of India to follow Gandhi “blindly,” without years of their own political analysis, in world-changing efforts of civil disobedience? Would you divide protesting Egyptians into groups of “deserve a less corrupt government” and “do not deserve a less corrupt government” based on their ability to list EXACTLY what Mubarak did that was so bad?

I´d like for anyone who gets really upset when someone “doesn´t know what they´re talking about” to walk into an occupied space and look someone there in the eye and say, “you are not well-informed enough to deserve or even ask for anything better than what you have.” Because that is essentially what people are saying when they try to delegitimize OWS by arguing that the protesters don´t know anything.

No one has all the answers. Even the well-spoken and/or well-educated people out there have a lot to learn – but everyone, regardless of level of education or knowledge, has something to offer, and deserves to be taken seriously when they say they want a better world.

2(a): From the would-be sympathizer/people (not just activists) in “armchairs:” Their demands are unclear and they are disorganized. I might have been interested in a movement that was actually going to, you know, get stuff done, but sitting in tents in public parks isn´t going to change anything. This is, unfortunately, a waste of time.

Similarly, 

2(b):  from the opposition:  Their demands are unclear and they are disorganized. This is a good reason to consider the entire movement, at best, a useless and inconvenient waste of time. 

Oh my god, I know, right? Being politically engaged, building community and making sacrifices for your values ARE SUCH WASTES OF TIME. YOU COULD BE WATCHING TV, OR WORKING FOR MINIMUM WAGE, OR HANGING OUT IN YOUR HOUSE CRITICIZING OPTIMISTS ON THE INTERNET.

…this makes me so angry.

Amanda Palmer says it best:

occupy is a small seed. and yet it’s as huge, vast and complicated as the very unwieldy problems it’s trying to address.

i feel excited and sad for my generation, for the world, for my country. excited because i am so happy to see people mobilizing. trying.
waking up and going out and doing.
sad because it’s also underlined how jaded and difficult we are.

sometimes we forget that the world is absolutely fungible, morphable, re-creatable. we forget (maybe want to forget) that governments and systems topple ALL THE TIME, that human peoples have a habit of looking around, saying “nope, nope, don’t like this one bit” and gathering enough force, energy, and will to create a change. i’m sure at every single moment in history where a regime has seen a giant shift, there’s been those standing by, thinking that the impossible (change) would never happen, could never happen.

is that you?

could you honestly imagine a different kind of country, where business and government run without corruption, where the wealth of the land is fairly shared, where people actively took responsibility to take care of each other instead of just trampling their way to the top as an accepted way of life? or does that sound stupid, naïve, an impossible hippie-dream? what if everyone who thought that was a actually a pretty good idea stood up in solidarity and forced a change? would you stand up?

if occupy does nothing else, it’s made people wonder that.

i’ve been shocked by the number of people (even pals of mine) who actually are trapped by the idea that things can’t – and won’t – get better…so “why fucking bother?”

This is why I love *Amanda Palmer. There are so few people who understand that just because nothing “big” will result from setting up a tent in Zucotti Park or wherever, it doesn´t mean nothing is being accomplished. Starting conversations, planting seeds, getting people informed…Those are all really good and useful things.  You know what´s NOT useful? Standing on the side and being all “you´re doing it wrong.” Who is that helping?

And if you´ve been silent about the matter because you´re just not sure about it, or it´s not interesting, or you aren´t ready for the actual physical commitment of “occupying,” then get together with some friends or facebook friends or random people and talk to them about it. But not one of those “did you see those protests on the news? that pepper spray was some crazy shit” conversations. Don´t just talk about what you think you know. Ask each other about what you don´t know, talk about what is important to you, what you think is possible or not possible, if your ideas and hopes for the world are being addressed or not addressed (whether by OWS or elsewhere), and is there a reason for that, and if they´re not being addressed, how can they be? 

I would be very happy to break my current resolution of not being a news junkie in order to point any interested parties in the “informed and engaged citizen” direction. Cause I completely 100% believe it´s worth it. Do you?

tl;dr: (1) stop being such an elitist asshole, and (2) get out of your armchair. stuff is happening.

*If you´re interested in more Amanda Palmer, she blogs about OWS at length, here, here, and here.

Sometimes one-way communication makes sense. In the case of art, for example, it works splendidly. An artist presents their work, and the work speaks for itself, and it becomes meaningful to whoever experiences it.

But my blog is not art, and it never has been, and I don´t want it to be. I´ve been thinking about what kind of interactions I want in my life, and none of the weird relationships that come from blogging are on that list.

Right now I feel that is important to have a high level of meaningful human interaction in life, and while my nearly ten-year blogging career* has dwindled to almost nothing, my desire to express myself well, to share experiences and ideas with other people, and to continue to develop my ability and motivation to do these things has vastly increased. So I´ve been writing a lot and trying to do it in an intentionally personal and straightforward way, and the reason I find myself absolutely unable to write anything that I would want on a blog is because I am absolutely unable to write anything watered down. For the writing I want to do, I need space to be honest, and right now that space comes from an audience I know and trust.

*not an exaggeration. most of my old blogs are private, but it has actually been that long, dear god.

With a blog, the trust is not really the issue. It´s more the knowing. I don´t know who reads what I write, and that just makes me feel weirder now than it did before. I don´t think it´s a matter of insecurit y. I´m not embarrassed or ashamed of anything I have to say. In fact, it seems to be the the opposite. I want to say things! Many times, I even know how I want to say them! And I know exactly what I want to accomplish now, with regards to writing, and it just happens to be exactly the opposite of what a blog is for.

So, I´m officially retiring from public internet publishing for now. I will stop feeling guilty about never posting, and I will stop pretending that I will ever update again.

But! I am definitely very writing-active, and happy to tell you about my life, and doubly-happy to hear about yours. So if you´re interested in recieving a few emails a month about what´s going on with me, let me know. I won´t think you´re weird if I haven´t heard from you in ages (god, with the amount of lurking I´ve done…) and I won´t care if you never reply or even never get around to reading the emails. My intention is not to shut myself off from the world or be a more “private” person. Not at all. The idea is to strengthen the quality of my connection and communication with people – and I would be happy to do that with any of you.

The sushi restaurant was of the variety that men wear black t-shirts and clean jeans to, downtown and popular and not good for groups but groups go there regardless because they’re not really going for the sushi or the service anyway. They go for the exotic, expensive (but not extraordinary) food, for the proximity to the clubs, for the generic soft-beat techno, all of which that trigger associations with modernity and city life and being young and independent and surrounded by twenty of your best acquaintances on a night out. I don’t want to say that the desire to be — that — is necessarily wrong or right; I merely wish to state that it seems to be an overwhelmingly popular aspiration that I have never identified with.

When we arrived (late, thank god), the table was not looking very spirited. The woman to my left was half-heartedly picking at fried rice with chopsticks, several people were barely making an effort to text surreptitiously, the birthday girl appeared utterly indifferent to everyone around her but extremely interested in her California roll. That’s not to say there wasn’t a conversation happening – people were laughing and joking with each other and complimenting each other’s choices in tempura or tuna, but sometimes when I am feeling far removed from situations, body language is more memorable. It is only my own that I could not interpret. How good of an actress am I, I always wonder. Is my apathy visible in my lack of makeup or heels? Does anyone notice that I laugh only when it would be awkward not to? And then I remember that acting requires an audience, and more often than not, no one is watching. And it’s not so much that I care that no one is paying attention to me – it’s more that the larger issue of the decrease in amount and quality of human interaction in the world suddenly becomes very localized and relevant and you remember why so many people live their lives rarely feeling or thinking anything at all. I hadn’t felt anything – not the least connection with anyone there – for the first 45 minutes, except perhaps hunger and isolation.

Pictures from the evening tell a different story. Everyone is focused and smiling and close and enjoying a shared experience of camaraderie and seafood. And of course, these days it’s also somehow normalized and necessary to look at the pictures immediately, as if looking at your sake and squid salad on a screen enhances the reality and pleasure of having them right in front of you. I want to say that I don’t understand, but I do. I understand what it means to grasp at straws for conversation, because even though so many people resist it with their actions and habits, I think most of us DO want to love and connect with each other. We have just forgotten how, or perhaps have forgotten that it takes effort. Eleven different perfect and unremarkable hairstyles were documented this evening. I counted. I don’t know how many shades of lipstick or eye shadow. I only know that collectively, hours must have been spent getting ready for an evening of socializing, and still people arrived completely unprepared to relate to each other. My roommate spent 45 minutes in front of the mirror before we left, and during a conversation about how everyone looks so nice, bragged about how little time she spent preening.

The whole ordeal was over after two hours. We even had separate checks, so there was never any need for me to know any of the people’s names on the other side of the table, or what kind of fish they liked, or if they were as overwhelmed by the menu and evening as I was. I managed to duck out as soon as I got my card back and walked home, trying to make sense of it all: misanthropy and love and sushi bars, in the middle of a desert.

Update: upon publishing this post, wordpress gave me the following message:

“This is your 83rd post. Great! This post has 13 words.”

Positive reinforcement at its best.

Honestly, I was not prepared for what I was in for. Usually at this sort of lecture, I take notes about events and ideas that I have not heard of. But Cornel West barely said anything that could be considered academic outright – he did cite a lot of different facts and statistics and their authors, but not as what he was saying, but to support what he was saying, which I think is a concept that social justice academics lack a lot of the time. They are too busy talking about their research.

Anyway, the point is that he spoke powerfully. He was engaging. He was incredibly personable and human and passionate and I know the reason many people don’t speak like him is because it takes a lot of courage to stand up in front of people and tell them how you feel instead of what you know. Nowadays, as he said, “too many people don’t want to be courageous. They just want money.”

I think this is only partially true. I know plenty of people, both personally and not, that are willing to compromise their safety and comfort for the good of others. That is what we are told courage is, right? Police officers, border patrol agents and soldiers are told that they are courageous. Peace corps volunteers, firefighters and human rights observers are told they are courageous. But Dr. West spoke of a different kind of courage. The kind that those in power speak of as a perfectly valid idea, but never as anything to seriously practice. He spoke of having the courage to think critically. To live decently and compassionately. To realize that assumptions and pre-suppositions that have been deposited in you by society require scrutiny. To love. This is what we should be encouraging as the idea of courage – but we are unfortunately and not coincidentally trapped within the idea of material safety and happiness. In our society, success is material and being well-adjusted to injustice. Whether that means you have succeeded in keeping your body intact in a dangerous place or “earned” your access to items of physical comfort and luxury, as long as you manage to enjoy that privilege and ignore the fact that the world is systematically oppressing women, people of color and lower classes, you will be well-respected in mainstream society.

Are people who call for the end of injustice well-respected? Are people who dare to raise their voices among the cacophony of lies well-respected? Are people who have the courage to externalize and share their identities as much as heterosexual, white males do well-respected? Are people who sacrifice their dignity in order to fulfill their needs well-respected? Only in very small circles, and even within those circles, most good-hearted people stand around, waiting for a leader and a voice that has the courage to be what they are scared to be.

This idea speaks volumes of what we have internalized. Dr. West said that even without a formal education, most people in the United States have been schooled. Various demographics have been been taught self-devaluation, even when society at large already devalues them. They have been taught to feel powerless in a society that has the audacity to call itself a democracy. They have been taught that we base our country’s educational success on the education of the well-to-do. The 50% of Mexican-American students throughout the country do not count. The women that leave school in order to take care of their children do not count. And when I say “they,” I really mean all of us. Even those who are privileged enough to be able to speak without being forced to represent whatever race or sex or class they are, they are have been taught to be afraid or to feel inadequate if they bring up injustice. How many men can call their friends out for sexist comments without hesitation? How many women have made the commitment to stop insulting each other based on sexual practice or wardrobe? How many people have the courage to say they are moved and saddened by commercials about hunger and poverty instead of normalizing them? People will make fun of you if you say these things, or they will devalue your feelings by telling you there is nothing you can do about them. Or worse, they’ll stop thinking you’re a normal, fun, well-adjusted person worth hanging out with. They’ll think you’re a downer when you tell them the restaurant they eat at doesn’t pay their bussers minimum wage. We are taught to feel that we will be devalued or trivialized when we respond to disaster.

Well, I completely agree with Cornel West when he says, “So what? We NEED more maladjusted people! We need less people who are well-adjusted to injustice!” We need people who will not just tolerate everyone, but actively respect them. We need people who will intensify Socratic energy in society and have the courage to follow through with empathy and compassion. People who realize no culture (their own non-violent, pluralist culture included) has a monopoly on truth, goodness or wisdom, but that all traditions must be vital and dynamic. People who confront political complexities and contradictions. People who ask themselves not only “what is the truth?” but also “How do I  love wisdom and justice?” We need people who love and cry. “Anybody who has never cried, you have never loved people…You may love wisdom in the abstract, but you have never loved people.”

It is not enough to know. It is not enough to fall into the systems (non-profits, churches, political parties) that have been created by mostly well-intentioned people in order to save the world, or to talk to people who already believe you about the world. To truly facilitate a higher-quality life for others takes more than that. It takes the courage to be completely 100% unapologetic about justice.

**Most of this essay is what is considered creative plagiarism, or paraphrasing, of what Cornel West said last week. I only elaborated, condensed and categorized. Honestly, I don’t think he’d care if people know who said these things, but I think it’s important to share that it’s not all coming from me….

But anyway, I’m here, and I don’t think I’m going to quit, so I might as well talk about the actual work: There are so many people from so many places (as far as Canada and Germany, as close as people I meet in the street in Tucson) that want to help. And my job is to tell them how they can do that – and honestly, I don’t know what to do with them all! We are not limited by the work that has to be done, but by the work we (as an organization) can provide.

What I want is to know what to tell these people. I want to ask my roommate, who is a history major with a focus on labor movements and writing his thesis on the social movements of young people in the United States, what HE would have happen if he had a lot of people who were saying, “we want to be part of this movement.”

But I’m worried that he’ll tell me there are no answers. If there were, we would know them, wouldn’t we? Sometimes I feel like I am incredibly under-qualified for my job, being so unsure about everything, but I know that historically, even people who have a lot more training and experience than I do haven’t changed much from this position. I only know this from the fact that nothing substantial is happening. Our organization continually loses people who want to be part of an anti-racist humanitarian-centered movement because we are unable to mobilize them! As much as we “resist” racist legislation here in Arizona, it continues to get passed. As much as we learn about and document abuses at the hands of our government, people continue to get shoved into cactus and taken away from their children and denied access to water in the DESERT, of all places. I’m not saying resistance is futile and we should just give up – but I think we need to resist BETTER. I do not see any organizational improvement where I feel it’s really necessary – but every day, there’s a new way to brush your teeth faster in the morning so you can get to work earlier and make more money and shave more closely and effectively so that no one has to get razorburn. THIS IS WHERE HUMAN ENERGY AND CREATIVITY IS GOING!? Where and when does educational theory turn into practice as far as social  movements go?

In reality, I do know some answers. I just don’t know how to address them. First of all, I really believe that it’s great that people come down to the border to volunteer – BUT – they need to understand that the action isn’t all here. It’s everywhere – people are getting deported and exploited in Chicago and New York and Tennessee and oh god, Idaho. So it bothers me when people say they want to help, but that they feel they have to be here to do it. I want to say, “stay home! start organizing over there!”

The other thing I know is that the government has no interest in ending death and suffering in the desert or in comprehensive immigration reform. This is because it’s beneficial to them to have cheap and quiet labor. The solution to immigration problems is not going to come from lobbying our “representatives.” Its backbone is going to be in labor rights and corporate boycotts. You DEFINITELY don’t have to be on the border to be involved with that. No More Deaths is just a somewhat effective bandaid on our country’s damaged skin – the true cure has to involve the whole body.