The street is empty, and the wind raises the dust from the sidewalks, the people are at home, fearful, the businesses close and unemployment spreads everywhere. Some businessmen have found safety in the neighboring country, others emigrated to the south, and the rest of us stayed, as the old Greek philosopher said, “When death is, you aren’t, and when you are, death isn’t, so why worry?”
End of the week: 27 dead in 24 hours, a new record, hundreds of small businessmen kidnapped, owners of hardware stores, groceries, car washes, doctors’ offices, restaurants, living the hell of the uncertainty of tomorrow, entire families wracked by the deepest pain they can feel from knowing a loved one is in the hands of criminals. The media quacks demand security from the government, society likewise demands security and, how to provide security? Will it be necessary to place a policeman for every inhabitant to ensure that no one commits a crime? And this policeman, will he be safe or will he need another policeman?
We see spectacular crimes, beheaded ones, destroyed ones, mutilated ones, and I’d like to ask you a question about these humanoid beasts. What must happen for a normal man to transform himself into a beast like these? Those who have seen these hired killers describe them as young people, from 15 to 25 years of age. We all ask ourselves, where are the authorities? How come the President does nothing?
And many similar questions, but I don’t hear these questions: where were the mother and father of these children? Where were the teachers? Where were the brothers? Nobody goes to bed as a good child and wakes up being a heartless assassin; the transformation is a gradual process. It’s time to quit looking for the guilty ones elsewhere and for us to assume the responsibility for tolerating a society that was becoming corrupt and we did nothing to avoid it.
Of course, we isn't prudes, nor reactionaries, and if the media make their profits by pushing sex, well, we’re adults, of course, if the young fellows are having uncontrolled sex, well, it’s ‘cause we’re really modern, open minded, pal. What? Don’t tell me single mothers scare you? You’re stuck in the dark ages!
Many women collect offspring from different fathers, and as many more other young fellows imagine and compete to see who makes more girls pregnant. Women, abandoned, who prostitute themselves in order to support their offspring, children who grow up with the shame and abandonment of their mothers. Women who work and leave their children abandoned, unarmed against the base passions of their neighbors or of their own relatives; irresponsible fathers, children who grow up accumulating hatred and contempt for society. We mock decency and decorum, we take God out of our schools, out of our homes, out of our lives, we eliminate the internal police that was called conscience, and today anything goes, the more depraved, the more “in.”
Hundreds of young criminals, thieves, assassins, rapists, drug traffickers, were interviewed in a local poll; almost all of them came from dysfunctional homes, and they sought in gangs the acceptance they did not have at home. At first, the gangs would make them commit a crime, later they liked the adrenalin and feeling of power that comes from dominating another person.
We’re certainly in a vacuum of authority and, gentlemen, I must tell you, authority comes from the home. Yes, even though you may laugh, authority rests on the parents, and the conduct of authority they must follow is in morality, that word so much condemned and made ridiculous, in morality, gentlemen. In morality, in that compendium of good manners that humanity has been accumulating for centuries, and that today we discard because we’re modern. Today, youth’s chant is “Let’s fornicate and defecate because the world will terminate,” and the parents remain impassive and motionless.
Don’t be alarmed, buddy, it’s the modern times.Written by: Marcos Barraza-Urquidi
