The aforementioned book by Robert Andrew Powell caught my
eye at the library, partly because S.L. Price reviewed the book favorably, and
I’ve read Price quite a bit due to Sports Illustrated existing in the Henning
house for all my waking memory.
Plus, this was more than a sports memoir, but a book about the drug war
in Mexico, particularly Juarez, where I have spent five days of my life. Coincidentally, I found out through
reading this that the year we visited to build a house, 2008, was the start of
the uptick in murders to astronomical rates (from 300 executed in 2007 to 1,600
in 2008, to a depressing 2,700 in 2009- THAT IS JUAREZ ALONE, not all of
Mexico).
Powell moves down to Juarez for the year 2010 to follow “Los
Indios” a team in the coveted Primera league,
who loses nearly every game. What
is amazing about this team is that anyone will
play in Juarez, because when you are rich you are an especial target for
extortion, kidnapping, and robbery.
Powell connects with one of the young soccer stars, and is bemused to
ride with him in the only vehicle the star feels safe in: a dented, old, beater
with so much wear and tear that even the drug-lords shouldn’t find it worth
stealing. It creates tension in
the reader to watch this team (and really, any person that lives in Juarez,)
try to focus on their job, when the news meets their ears daily of new violent
murder after senseless murder. The
reader, through Powell’s eyes, learns about “Los Indios”, their crazy,
pot-smoking fan club, local politics, and a bit of an insight into the messy
drug war.
I’ve been thinking about this book particularly in the wake
of the tragedy in Boston (and other horrifying news in the U.S. and abroad) and
recently watching the movies Argo and Zero Dark Thirty. The people of Juarez live cautiously;
their public life plummeted with continual carnage. People normally do not go out to restaurants or bars
anymore; they only feel safe when their own doors are shut and bolted. Everyone is touched, in some personal
way, by the violence. For one, I
do not want to live in a place like that, where murder is the norm rather than
the exception. And I assume that
it takes a community a long time to heal from a constant foreboding of violence
after their safety is threatened in such drastic ways as we have seen
lately. The other response, as
outlined below, is to develop “tough skin” and ignore the tragedies around
you.
This book shows us how an American grapples with this
barrage of bloodshed in his adopted “hometown.” Powell writes that he hoped Juarez could have become his new
home; he moved there indefinitely in December 2009. For me, the most moving scene in the book is when Powell
decides he needs to leave Juarez because the violence is beginning to be so
commonplace that he is barely moved by an insidious cartel bombing-
“world-class terror-” that happened two blocks from him as he watches a soccer
game on TV. After the attack, he
gets a call from a friend of his, a Mexican pastor named Manuel, who visited
the site of the bombing, just to make sure that it really happened. I’ll quote some of the exchange, and
Powell’s thoughts, as it is a very human, very poignant response to all this
evil he breathed in (long-ish, but really interesting):
“Everybody’s acting like nothing happened!” he (the pastor) shouts. It’s five full days after the bombing,
an eternity. I ate at McDonald’s
only one day after the consulate murders.
I went running along the river just one day after they dumped federale (federal police officers) body
parts up and down my normal route…Five days is five lifetimes in this city, yet
Manuel is dismayed to see everything already back to normal….I’m not sure why
Manuel gets through to me. Why I don’t
just tell him to get over it and move on like the rest of us. So much of what I’ve seen has dribbled
off my psyche. I’m Teflon by
now…He may have broken through because a man of his age and stature, at least
around here, isn’t supposed to be affected, to show weakness or fear. He tells me it’s not even that the car
bombs went off, as unspeakably horrible as they were. It’s that we are not
speaking about them! As if nothing happened!
…He gets through to me. His words—his plea for me to wake up, for all of us to wake
up—pierce my calcified skull.
Everything hits me. Months
and months…They dropped two bodies in the drive-through lane of a convenience
store and the store stayed open for business. They murdered that crusading mother, and while we admire
her, we remember above all to stay on the
line. They shot up a house
full of high school students. They
kidnapped, tortured, and murdered a groom on his wedding day…They murdered a
doctor who’d rushed to the scene (of the car bombing) because he felt he could
do some good. They killed
him. They fucking killed him. And I ran a 10K on that same street the
very next day. A 10K! A road race! How ridiculous is that?! It all hits me, and it hurts me, and I’m feeling pain and
the pain is telling me I’m not yet dead.
That somewhere inside me I’m conscious and human and still sane. And by the time Manuel and I end
our conversation, I’m feeling my own tears. And when I click off the phone they just come…I open up and
I cry and I cry and I cry. And my
face is so twisted and ugly even my dog is wondering what’s wrong with me…and I
know I’ve got to get out. I can’t
stay here. I’ve got to go.”
Powell’s response is his own, but I can connect with
it. Maybe it’s because I don’t
watch the news often enough that I can still cry when I see televised faces
wrenched in grief and fear. But I
know I can only take so much pain—and then I feel like I have to leave other
tragedies unacknowledged or under-stated, so I keep myself sane. However, I know that one of the
beautiful gifts we can give each other is empathy and presence, feeling the
pain of another human being, in their physical presence. When global and local violence and
tragedy desensitize us to a grand degree, I think we may lose the ability to be
to others as Christ was and will be to us: incarnational. Present. In our flesh, feeling our unique sorrows, dying our
death. This violence of late (and
really, of always) is horrific, and I do not think we will be imitating Jesus
without letting it affect us, in some meaningful way. Of course, we have to have some Teflon to our constitution,
lest the barrage of sorrow keep us in bed forever or push us to end our lives
once for all. It is the paradox of
our existence, hitting me in the face once again. We are neither to be so strong that tragedy does not move
us, nor so weak that we cannot rise up in the face of pain. We must
be joyful, because life is not only or ultimately pain (think: bodily
resurrection of Jesus at Easter, as a harbinger of ours as well), and is full
of good gifts given over and over.
But we must identify with our
fellow human beings laboring under great sorrow, even though it causes us great
pain. Joy and sorrow- the two
inescapable realities in this earth, where we groan inwardly, awaiting the
great hope of resurrection and restoration.
I guess the question I’m still asking myself is: how do we
respond to far-away tragedies that we will never be present to empathize with
in a physical sense? Powell,
living in Juarez, saw dead bodies, heard the stories of countless people who
lost a family member or friend, was a few blocks away during a (drug)-terrorist
bombing. I have not had that type
of experience. I think the feeling
of pain and anger and overwhelming sadness he experienced at devastating and
local bloodshed was good, and he made a tough and personal decision to embrace
the pain and leave Juarez, realizing living in Juarez deadened his human
responses. It is harder for me to
know what is a healthy, sustainable response to the tragedy that strikes
further from home. I have a feeling
that there is not a right answer.
My musings have brought me at least thus far: we should fight to keep
responding in some emotional manner to violence and disaster when we are told
of it, so that when tragedy strikes our friends and neighbors, we are
incarnational: empathetic, present, and not emotionally deadened to the
particular form of pain experienced on our front porch.
