Saturday, January 16, 2010

Massive Surge In Violence on OPEN NARCOMEX BORDERS

MEXICANOCCUPATION.blogspot.com
VIOLENCE ON THE NARCOMEX BORDER, AND SPILLING OVER WITH MEXICANS INVADING.
AND YET FEINSTEIN, BOXER, PELOSI, WAXMAN, AND LOFGREN ARE WORKING FOR ANOTHER NON-TRANSPARENT AMNESTY PUSH. SOMEONE WILL HAVE TO VOTE FOR THEM.


Hope and horror in Haiti and Mexico
By Mark Morford, SF Gate Columnist
Friday, January 15, 2010
It's difficult to tell which story struck me more intensely: the heartbreaking images of devastation in dirt-poor, slum-ravaged Haiti, the result of yet another unstoppable and harrowing act of nature, with tens of thousands presumed dead and billions in damages in an already devastated, environmentally gutted country, or the story of the sharp increase in nauseating ultraviolence in the border towns of Mexico, a country that began the new year with its bloodiest day on record -- 69 murders, many so shockingly gruesome it would make a horror movie director shudder.
How do you parse and turn? Where do you look for relief, for a sliver of understanding? The Haiti drama is so overwhelmingly tragic, so much pain and suffering on such an enormous scale, you can barely get your mind -- much less your heart -- around it.
But it doesn't stop there. If you begin to dig into the Haiti story at all, it only leads you down a cruel rabbit hole of unspeakable desperation and horror, as you read further about the ravaged history of Haiti and its brutalized people, and just how destitute and violent, doomed and impossible the overall situation is in the western hemisphere's only third world country.
Here's a fascinating, albeit hugely depressing, Times story from back in May, to give an overview of what current Haiti earthquake relief efforts are up against. While the U.S., China, Venezuela and many others are already sending millions of dollars in food and relief, you read a story like this, in a country with 80 percent unemployment, where U.N. and relief workers have frequently been directly involved in drug deals and gang wars, where the children eat mud, and rape is common, you can only ask: what does the international aid actually mean? How does it serve anything? Wasn't the situation already so awful, so destitute and fraught, it's as though Haiti has been in a state of perpetual emergency for more than 50 years?
Do not misunderstand: relief efforts are mandatory and helpful, and I've already donated as best I can (Partners in Health was my choice), and I very much hope you do the same. But even so, something seems dreadfully broken, at the very core.
You might even go so far as to suggest that a place like Haiti is cursed, not merely by its terrible location in the hurricane track or by tectonics, not merely from environmental squalor or its crushing poverty, but by God himself.
Indeed, you might go so far as to agree with the eternally vile Pat Robertson, never one to let a massive human tragedy go perversely unblamed on the victims, saying Haitians brought on the tragedy themselves, because they made a deal with Satan nearly 200 years ago, exchanging their very souls for freedom from horrific French enslavement.
Isn't that sweet? Oh, Pat, you contemptible Christian reptile. Don't you know it's exactly the other way around? That, according to the Times piece, it was France's rather evil demand for fiscal reparations after the Haitians won their freedom from slavery that caused much of the country's downward spiral into near-permanent ruin? Say hi to Jerry Falwell in hell for us, Pat.
But whereas the Haiti situation seems impossible from just about every angle, the Mexico scenario offers a different assortment of nails and razor blades, mostly because, while the death count in Haiti is far higher than Mexico, the latter's deadly violence is a man-made brutality, a conscious and active thing wrought by humans on other humans, the direct result of one of ugliest machinations of our severely distorted capitalist system.
Which is to say, Mexico's appalling savagery is driven almost solely by the insatiable and highly lucrative American appetite for drugs. Cocaine and pot, we just can't get enough. And Mexico drug lords are happy to supply it, at a price of about, oh, 17,000 vicious murders since 2006, the year Mexico's president Felipe Calderon launched an army-led crackdown on drug gangs, igniting one of the most brutal turf wars in the country's history. Upwards of 2,500 people were murdered in Ciudad Juarez, the drug-haven border town, last year alone. Beheadings, bodies burned alive in acid, slicing off the face and sewing it to a soccer ball. Someone should make a movie.
So, I ask again: how do you parse? How does it all slot in? After all, you don't have to look far to feel how such tales swing close to home, how these stories resonate across the miles and the ideologies. For one thing, living in California, stories of ferocious, city-demolishing earthquakes have a special reverberation, a fearful tang. We see those images and hear the tales of bodies lining the streets, and can only think, oh my God, when the Big One hits here, just how bad will it be?
Of course, we know our infrastructure, our building codes, our overall ability to handle such devastation are all countless times greater than ramshackle, poorly built, slum-laden Haiti. We are, in a sad way, morbidly reassured by this, even as we humbly offer mountains of gratitude for our blessed lives, our immeasurable wealth. What a bizarre world.
With Mexico, the line is even more direct. Our happy vice equals its deplorable violence. We appear to be only too happy to let them massacre each other way over there across the border, so long as we get our fine chemical enhancements and it doesn't scare the horses. Would legalizing cocaine and marijuana solve the problem? Maybe. Doubtful. But we're still miles from such a possibility. Meanwhile, the blood keeps pouring.
Every day and every moment they come, these never-ending reminders of the endlessly harsh and violent planet we live on. Right down to the tale I read this week of the sweet, 24-year-old jazz bassist driving to rehearsal in Oakland, shot dead on the freeway, no known motive or reason. That's not 3,000 miles away in Haiti. That's not 1,000 miles away in Mexico. That's a handful of miles away from my house, just over the bridge, another dead body by the side of the road.
I don't know the answer, by the way. I struggle all the time with how to acknowledge and respect and even analyze the devastation and the horror that streams across the media wires every day without letting it turn my bones ashen gray.
I think we can only try to realize, as best we can, just how deeply tied into the tangled web of humanity we really are; all the wars and suffering, drugs and gangs, pain and loss, even as we try -- sometimes very weakly indeed, sometimes in the face of devastating counterevidence -- to remind ourselves that there really is an equal amount of beauty and joy, hope and positivism to be had in the world. Isn't there?
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