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Gimp, on Injusticia and Economy
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First of all, if you are a ninny from the local paper, I am going into, what did you call it? Ah yes, 'multicultural hippie wantabe [sic] mode'. This is your queue to get the hell out of my blog unless you want your brain to melt.

I have been thinking a lot about this particular post. I wanted to make something meaningful, but at the same time I began to feel that I would have taken an eternity in wording it. Hence, I decided to go ahead and splatter the wall with my brain, as it were.

A couple of days before I was set to leave Matamoros, I was sent back to the store. My sis in law and I pile in the hooptie and we head to Soriana for whatever it was we needed. While there, we happened upon another bottle of New Mix. Here, take a look:



While we were getting our things, I noticed a couple of typical rubber-neckers and a uniformed guard running towards an aisle. As I passed, I turned my head and locked eyes with the perpetrator. He was...guess. CD's? Cigarettes? Liquor? No...he was in the baby section. He had a carton of milk and some diapers hidden in his shirt and he was being taken down HARD. As I watched him get handcuffed and roughed up, I continued walking, but that scene stuck with me the rest of the day and for some time after that. It was almost as if it had happened in slow motion.

I don't condone shoplifting. It's a horrendous wrong in society and I think people should be caned for participating in it. But then again, it wasn't like the shoplifting you see here so often. You know, the opened pregnancy test box at Walmart, stuck in the drink aisle. Or the empty cd case in the beer section. This guy obviously had a child, and he didn't have a way to provide for it. It just...hurt.

That same day, I was walking to the centro to do some last-minute shopping (fake Ray-Bans anyone?), when I happened upon another scene that bothered me.

You see, there is no middle class in Mexico. There's an upper class, and then there is the lower, dirt-poor class. There's not a neighborhood with families using two minivans to ferry kids to soccer practice. There's not the proverbial picket-fenced yard with two cats in the yard and a golden retriever named Riley. Nope.

There's what I saw. There's the large house, with marble steps leading to the front door. It had golden bars to keep the 'riffraff' out. There isn't really concertina wire, but there's something a helluva lot more sinister. When your brick wall is still setting, you smear mortar on top. While it's moist, you break up any glass bottles you have, and you set them in the mortar. I really pity the bastard who tries to climb one of those at night.

Anyway, there was a family with a setup like that. They had a jeep grand cherokee, and a H3 hummer. They were outside grilling on their porch, laughing and drinking sodas. It was the mom, the dad, and the kids. They had a dog, but he was on a chain to keep him from being stolen. They had a really nice house...but on either side, their compound walls formed the border for another scene. On one side, you have a house made out of old wood, with cardboard patches here and there. You have a well in the yard because you don't have water. And on the other side of the compound, you have a very similar scene, but with an old woman sitting on a broken water heater, sobbing. As the grill smoke wafted over the wall and into this woman's world, I have to ask myself if the smell turned her stomach because she didn't have enough to eat.

You can call me a hippie for thinking about things like this, but it doesn't change the fact that suffering in the world, well, sucks.