Daily Consumption

for my fellow Guatemalans- an admonition. Translated from the original in Spanish

You would have had 1000 Rembrandts

except you made artificial playing fields

and concrete surfaces the gods

of your town. You made your art

as non-threatening as possible,

and forgot that children need crayons

as much as they need love and vitamin B.

 

You should have had 500 Madame Curies,

but you kept the hands of 10,000 girls

occupied with wash water and found

10,000,000 excuses for them to never

leave home- and an infinite number of

ways to enforce the rules of man and

church and a purported god that hates them. 

 

You could have had 50 Gandhis

if you had not coerced your sensitive and

thoughtful child into following your

footsteps selling gum on buses

to buy your wide-screen tv; swallowing

the medicine of self-negation and being

convinced that it is not work if you are

not producing something to be consumed.

 

Selling childhood, virginity, innocence

as commodities on the open market;

bodies are appropriated as well

as any other form of slavery in history.

The whole scene designed to plaster a

happy colorful smile over a broken spirit

and muffled voice; to be present but never

contribute; recipients of visions selected

by prejudices and limitations of their

supposed superiors.

Author's Note

This piece was originally written in Spanish. It was precipitated by a series of conversations about the crippling effects of poverty on human potential, especially on children of exceptional ability who are denied opportunities that their richer counterparts have. Tourists flock to the country I live in to snap pictures of the happy colorful indigenous children out working in the streets, without ever realizing that, for many of these children and youth, they are forced into a form of servitude that replaces education and normal maturation. As someone recently posted on Facebook, "I am far less interested in the size of Einstein's brain than I am in the number of child geniuses laboring at menial tasks who never get an opportunity to show their greatness."

Photo is my own from 2016; taken while leading a youth group tour of a protected forest a few miles form my home. This is a normal sight. The firewood in the picture is most likely poached.

original here:

http://www.writerscafe.org/writing/zorra_encantada/1870873/