chacal does tumblng

quote

On a recent visit to San Francisco, I ran into a friend who lived in S.F. but was from Italy. She asked if I was still living in El Paso and when I said yes, she looked me in the eye and said “how can you do that to your children?” She wasn’t kidding and stared as I stumbled through my defense of El Paso; quiet streets, nice people, great food.—Lisa Degliantoni, Editor-in-Chief, El Paso Media Group"

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“The violence in Juarez is our problem”: Essays from a frontline - Newspaper Tree El Paso

Lisa closes her response to this all too frequent type of encounter, which sadly occurs to us who choose to live on the frontier. Such reactions are but mere attempts to pit us, who understand their effect upon our home here on the border, with those with a limited world view. As such, we must rebuke such attempts to shoot us full of unhealthy doses of guilt and condescension:

“The failed drug policies of the last 40 years have caused me to lose access to a people and a culture that I am watching get destroyed everyday, all because some kid in San Diego wants to smoke weed before he goes to see Twilight.”

No matter how self-identifiably cloying and progressive such “friends’ present themselves to be, they are the same people who naively think Lisa puts her children in danger because she chooses to work and make a positive life for all of us here on the border. In fact, Lisa truly makes a difference for frontera by trying to communicate the benefits of a healthy community, whether physical, mental, or spiritual.

It is the woman in San Francisco who truly has “no idea,” or cares, for that matter. She lives vicariously with the aid of magical thinking and seems to need the satisfaction that only comes from self-absorption and delusion. Her magical thinking affords her comfort by believing that the doobie her nephew or sister (or even she) tokes will have no effect upon anyone else.

Like shit it does.

Tags: /border drug war /el paso /essays on the drug war /juarez /newspapertree /magical thinking