| A Way Out of the Nightmare |
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A Way Out of the Nightmare
New York Cesar Chelala “This is a war universe.
War all the time.
That is its nature,”
wrote William S. Burroughs-
envisioning the violence
provoked by the word war.
In our current world, this brings to mind
Iran, Gaza, Ukraine, Yemen.
There are, however, other wars --equally deadly--
where civilians of every age
are unwilling participants.
Forgotten wars, buried
under the clamor of daily headlines.
They are the wars against the displaced,
who cross borders
searching a better life-
in the very countries
that often carved up the migrants’ ancestral homelands
in a brutal quest for gold and dominion,
leaving fractured societies
and broken democracies behind.
But these battles don’t stop at the border.
They are also waged against the rich countries’ own people-
Against citizens growing poorer,
sicker, and unprotected,
while the powerful prosper
on their labor.
Is there a way out of this nightmare-
this machinery of callousness
that threatens to reduce us to dust?
There is,
but only if we revive
two vital,
luminous words:
common good.
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