Musings on Violence- This Love is Not for Cowards: Salvation and Soccer in Ciudad Juarez

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.