Monty Python, The Grim Reaper
According to the ONC (National Citizen Observatory), every 17 minutes, someone becomes a homicide victim in Mexico. If that is right, by the end of this post, 2-3 people coming out of his or her job will get mugged and killed, or someone who is closing up their business might never get home to see his or her kids again.
This has been a concurrent thought, not lately but latent. After getting that quick push notification by the news website, I just shook my head in disbelief. If that were true, I laughed, nobody would dare to go out on the streets. Yet we do, every day.
A week ago, while I was at Pueblo Nuevo, the community in the State of Mexico, with whom we are working along with the students, I went over to another community ten minutes away to pick up some other prototypes. The craftsman told me how lucky we were because the previous week, a group of people came into his neighbor's house, raided and took anything of value and fled down the road. I believe what he was saying was that if we had been there, we would not have been spared.
How do we deal with these facts? How do we understand election period without the political violence of 80 registered cases so far? When did our beaches become as dangerous as Afghanistan? How come there are not enough fridges on Acapulco's morgue to keep the incoming bodies from rotting?
This has been a concurrent thought, not lately but latent. After getting that quick push notification by the news website, I just shook my head in disbelief. If that were true, I laughed, nobody would dare to go out on the streets. Yet we do, every day.
A week ago, while I was at Pueblo Nuevo, the community in the State of Mexico, with whom we are working along with the students, I went over to another community ten minutes away to pick up some other prototypes. The craftsman told me how lucky we were because the previous week, a group of people came into his neighbor's house, raided and took anything of value and fled down the road. I believe what he was saying was that if we had been there, we would not have been spared.
How do we deal with these facts? How do we understand election period without the political violence of 80 registered cases so far? When did our beaches become as dangerous as Afghanistan? How come there are not enough fridges on Acapulco's morgue to keep the incoming bodies from rotting?
We just duck from violence, appreciate it just missed us... But to try to understand this phenomena, I guess we disassociate from the facts. Believe it's elsewhere, not in your neighborhood, not today, this is what happens to others but not yours. Weird part is, death is not what you foresee at the end of your life but something you come across the street this afternoon or yesterday in three different states.
When I was young, the elders used to say, if death by crime got you, it was probably because you deserved it, so you were either a casualty or a causality. You got drunk and were late, you were doing something wrong or hanging out with someone that wasn't right.
But today, this insatiable and rising democratization of violence has only meant that the so called good or bad steps taken in life don't matter anymore. Hard working steps of a taxi driver, gone. Honest woman going to her job, gone. Good man and father resisting extortion, gone. Journalist trying to expose truth, gone.
This denial does have serious repercussions but it seems comical the ways in which the Grim Reaper in Mexico has become inoffensive, welcomed in our country, to the point of utter disbelief.
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