Dedicated to the People of Darfur: Writings on Fear, Risk, and Hope

The Risk of Deadness

109 JIMMY SANTIAGO BACA We have the finest athletes in the world streaming into Beijing and as they train for the Olympics, they complain their lungs and heart hurt. Too much pollution, too much black smoke, and I’d venture to say much more than that— all kinds of nameless toxic-merging of poisons in the air, water and soil, passed on to foods, the clothes they wear, the words they use to speak with—polluted air does not isolate itself from our emotions; eventually our words make room to accommodate our corruption. Any politician can attest to that. But bringing that consciousness back home to America, I look around and shake my head very slightly. I don’t want too many people to see that I disagree with much. At first my disagreements were kept to myself, had little impact on my living, but then they grew worse and worse until what I saw had the pallor and menace of impending disaster. For instance: when my two boys were in high school, I noticed a certain deadness of spirit and emotion in the faces of students when I dropped my sons off at school in the morning. Gabe was just starting the th grade, and when he told me he wanted to quit I said sure, not a problem. After all, almost every single friend of his was quickly losing their center and spiraling into drugs or mental illness and I thought it was because of the meaninglessness of their lives. And it was true. No one knew how to cry from joy and sadness; it always held back and kept inside one’s heart to turn gangrenous and vengeful. When they smoked weed in the downstairs bedroom, when they went out late at night, Gabe and his friends, they did things to get lost, tracking through the city’s concrete flood channels at night, a band of urban tribal kids on the search for ritual, and finding none from adults, inventing their own. It was serious. My oldest son chose the way of pot-heads, firing blunt after blunt and living in a permanent haze, anything to dismiss and elude this nightmare we call reality. I’d find all kinds of pipes and rolling papers and his room smelled of high-grade bud. The Risk of Deadness






















CH023.qxd 7/15/09 7:45 AM Page 109 110 JIMMY SANTIAGO BACA I was learning what life was like for my two young teenagers and I wasn’t alarmed or shocked or frenzied in the O-my-gawd how could this be happening. What I saw around me had a sequential source or origin in our societal inclination to ignore the wart on our nose. In other words, we all know education isn’t working; we know that right after kids leave school they hit the line coke rail on biology book and snort; they whip out the glass pipes of meth and inhale meth crystals; they smoke up; they drop acid and chew peyote—anyone who doesn’t know this is happening this very moment with a majority of kids in high school is comatose—sleep-walking on Mars. It’s like some padlocked-brain woman from San Antonio who reviewed a book of mine wrote, “Mormons don’t drink, and because they don’t drink it makes your whole short story a failure.” I thought, well, they’re not supposed to drink, but I’ve known some who do. And like the rest of society, presidents are not supposed to be stupid and we have one now that shattered the world record for ignorance. Athletes are not supposed to be in motel rooms smoking crack and screwing whores; oil companies are not supposed to advertise on Charlie Rose and NPR advocating environmental harmony as they destroy the earth and air forever. Engineers are not supposed to create phony levees that break and kill hundreds; lawyers are not supposed to use deception and downright lies to free the rich to wreak havoc on our society; bureaucrats are supposed to help, not obscure and send away the needy; there are a lot of things people are not supposed to be doing that they do. Preachers molesting children. Wasn’t there a minister in Denver smoking meth and getting laid by a gym instructor? The list of maddening crimes we commit against our future and our children’s future is endless. So knowing most of this, I told my son...