ONCE UPON A TIME…

By Carlos Zaldívar

The sense of life. Last Tuesday I was drowning in my deepest thoughts while listening at the news. It was a non-fiction episode, It was totally real. The New York twin towers and the Pentagon Building in Washington were disappearing at those moments. While you’re reading these lines, exist a lot of writings about the theme. This, (I hope) is different.

Today, one week later, all government leaders and people of different citizenships are asking what shall appear to be impossible. President Bush asked for retaliation while The Pope asked for prudence. Millions of Americans ask for vengeance while Islamists ask for sorrow, because there’s neither direct guiltiness nor intellectual author(s).

Everybody mentioned the life, as the life of all the victims. The life of an inexistent crowd. The Mexican Press interviewed writer Poniatowska, and she commented about “what was the sense of life”. Not the life as itself in the planet, but as a life of an individual. Shall we pay with the same methods as the terrorist’s punishers? Or just declare war without goals and the unauthorization of God?

Through all the events of history we’ve been witnesses of evil ways. This is just another one. The difference is that we are living now in it.

Yes. What was the sense of life of the waitress, the secretary, the office boy, the businessman, the visitors, the pedestrians and all the people involved at that time at the right moment in the 57^th Street?

Why did they live so short time? Or, was a long time? What did they expect from life? The answers are in the notes of God.

In political or economical subjects everything is possible, but the emotional? All results will exist permanently in the psychological evolution of childhood. They will see all the war remains, in case of it; but at least they will live the drastic changes of the human being. Because life is changing from now on. Maybe Bukowski was right: “Life is shit”. Yes but there’s an individual experience, as his life. And for everyone else? Do we have to pay all errors of evil men? I don’t know, but we have to make and “Easy Living” for our kids. We must live happy and try to make a world without worries, to avoid destruction or ourselves, to work and pray for a secure world. We all know, and are conscious that evil always loses, but meantime? Patience, dear reader, patience.

Today, at this fact of history, citizenships must disappear. We are citizens of the world, against evil and everyone who just want power through trespassing human rights; as fundamentalists, fanatics, terrorists or some others “inhuman beings”.

Sometime in the future, through decades, we’ll remember these days as an experience, a bad dream which let us new ways of life. We’ll remember our relatives, our sons and our last emotional feelings; because these ones will be different. We’ll be human beings with same brain, heart and body, but different thoughts and emotions. The “doubt” and “trustless” of everything will be part of our living way.

Is this a God’s test? Or, simply refers to a battle won by evil? Patience, and soon, we all go to tell a story about “…Once upon a time, when a Twin Towers…”

God Bless America… and the whole World.

Comments to: carlos@zaldivar.org.mx

September 14^th, 2001