Terrorism Comes to Texas

The Four-Syllable Word, Terrorism

A four-syllable word can muffle the meaning of concrete feelings.
Take terrorism.
Once a headline for tragedies in far away countries.
It happened to people you would never know.

Sharper focus comes in first-person conversations :
• Schools and churches closed in your grandmother’s village.
• Nine people executed in another ranch town in the sierra where you spent a magical week Christmas ’08 hunting handmade straw chairs, hiking in canyons overlooking a desert oasis.
• The sierra where palm trees grow sideways in walls of slate
now a training camp for ex-police who traded their promises to keep the peace for profit in a new profession.
• News reporters are murdered; those remaining are silent, or writing obliquely to save their lives.

People turn from mass media to word-of-mouth:
• Whispers about a thousand troops sent to the border from the interior.
• Rumors about the Tamaulipas town of Camargo blockaded, no one allowed to leave or to enter.
• An entire village in Chihuahua packing it up and moving to Texas to seek asylum.

This is the new Mexican Revolution:
It convulses the country and spills across borders in a slippery, red flood.

Terrorism doesn’t explain the pain of the mother praying a novena for the son lost in the rain of bullets crossing the street to his class at the university. Nor does it fit for the 17-year old girl who survived two kidnappings, now uproot ed 500 miles from home.
Heartbreaking maybe.

Also, the word longing:
Sweet connection of bridges over a river that gave life, never severed.
Now threatened by greed and machineguns.
Force of might asserting will, gaining turf.
The deaths of thousands never entered on laundered-money ledgers

I am impotent remembering more peaceful times and long for their return:
We flitted like hummingbirds from flower to flower along both sides of the border,
singing songs in English or in Spanish, sometimes both.
We laughed at jokes in English or in Spanish, laughing crosses all language borders without a passport.
We ate at fast-food joints having tacos al pastor or burgers.
We learned the dance of two cultures by afternoons of shopping, visiting with family and friends, dancing in smoky clubs
How the border really was,and when it wasn’t; when it mattered, and when it didn’t.
Like a four-syllable word, the border we lived in had divisions that were apparent, but not discussed.
Layers beneath layers , which we saw, but could not explain or understand.

We never looked up to see
The storm that was brewing outside the fancy restaurants and gated neighborhoods of castles and green lawns.
We didn’t notice
The thunderheads forming over the card-board homes in the desert and the sierra
Where the have-nots watched on television the lives of those that did.
TV showed the way, the ticket to all things.
Old patience worn thin, faith, religion, hope and optimism exhausted.

Words like terrorism, narco-trafficking, money -laundering, and underground economies,
Cloudy constructions, foggy filters that obscure the vision and visceral reaction:
Sit,instead, for just a while in a shadowy chapel.
Cringe in sharp sorrow with mothers and widows who grieve for departed souls and memories of more peaceful times.