El Gringoqueño

Since I started as a chaplain in the juvenile prison system in Puerto Rico, about 5-6 years ago, there have only been a couple of kids that sent chills through me. There was a deadness in their eyes, something that made me immediately think, "God, I hope I don’t ever find myself face to face with this kid and on the wrong end of a gun." My mind flashed to the cold feeling of a pistol barrel thrust to the back of my head as I am carjacked. I took too long, I looked at him wrong, or he just wanted me out of the way. In any case, he pulled the trigger looking through me with those dead eyes. He didn’t care if I lived or died, didn’t really matter at all. I was not a person, just a thing, a plaything and in his way.  I was between him and what was now HIS car. Look at that, bullet holes. This thing got blood all over me. The holes look cool though. Let me dump it by the side of the road, wipe myself off.

Those were the thoughts that went through my mind on two occasions. Sometimes I meet with kids who are sullen, withdrawn, unresponsive, but there’s still something there, fear, trepidation, low self image. When I asked what they wanted to be when they grew up, they would say, "I dunno." When asked what their talents were, they would say none. Friends? Dunno. People you admire? None.

There was still something though.  It’s hard to try to pry something positive out of the experience, but I never felt like I wasn’t talking to a person, a real living breathing, but hurting and damaged person.

These other two that I met, though, I don’t know what they were, but I only remember never wanting to see them again.  They seemed to be soulless zombies, walking dead, animated bodies with nothing inside, no flickering light.

I am reminded of this after the Virginia Tech shooting and all the information about the shooter, Cho Seung Hui by all accounts, a sullen loner.

We all know people who keep to themselves, who aren’t sociable, friendly, or engaging. It’s not often, however, that we say to ourselves, I’m afraid of this person. I’m afraid he will do something horrible as was the case of the VT shooter. He had creeped out his teachers, his classmates. There was something not just sad about him but deadly.

I read the "plays" he had written, supposedly violent and disturbing. I didn’t find the violence disturbing. They were not actually very violent, in fact.

The plays were disturbing to me for their lack of natural dialog and oddness of language. The interaction between the characters was just wrong, weird, not natural. The anger wasn’t natural. It seemed stilted, like written by a small child with no understanding of conflict, someone stunted developmentally. His plays sounded to me like they had been written by someone from another culture, an alien with no comprehension of how a domestic dispute might go down and what might be said. So, while the plays had violent themes, what was disturbing was how far they missed their marks connecting that rage and emotion.

Cho Seung Hui couldn’t emote or understand emotion or have any empathy.  Maybe he sensed it.  Maybe he knew he couldn’t connect and it drove him mad.

Like those scary kids that I met, my only conclusion is that some people do not have the ability to see other’s pain, emotion, or feel a connection of any kind with the world around them. Are they born that way as psychopaths or shaped as sociopaths by abuse or violence and then become cold, disconnected, and inhuman?

I’ve got a bunch to say since Asier was born, but I wanted to weigh in on the Walter Reed scandal by telling a story from my experiences in the Army.

We were in the field, doing a training exercise. We had planned it for months and were executing it for some much needed operational training and team-building. As we were setting up I was notified by the battalion XO (operations) that we would have to stop what we were doing and go on a police call (cut grass, pick up any trash, paint, pretty up the range), because our the Division commander (General) was coming for a visit.

"Don’t you think he wants to see us training?" I asked.

"Just fucking do it, Captain!" was the Major’s reply. This was to be beginning of a beautiful friendship, for sure.

So we reluctantly dropped our months of preparation by the wayside and prettied up the range. My soldiers were extremely pissed. The 1SG fumed, but as all good soldiers, we went about, "making it happen."

Brigadier General Rosado arrived with his staff, CSM (Command Sergeant Major, top enlisted man in the division) and assorted sycophants. They walked around, buzzed in and circled, talking to no one but the top officers of the battalion, all the while insulated by his staff.

I’ve got to do something about this. I don’t fucking care if it gets me in trouble. I wormed my way up to the Command Sergeant Major and took him aside.

"Do you want to know what’s really going on here?" I asked him. "Do you want an honest assessment of the training and readiness of your battalion here and now?"

"Of course," he answered.

"Don’t tell us you’re coming. That’s it. Don’t announce, don’t make a big hullabaloo. Come here quietly, just the two of you, show up unexpectedly, and talk to the enlisted soldiers. Ask them what they think, get them to be frank. That’s all I ask."

"I’ll let him know," he replied.   The Sergeant Major seemed to be a thoughtful pro-enlisted guy, so I hoped that my comments were welcome. I think he really took them too heart. He seemed a decent fellow. This might work.

A few months latter the CSM resigned and from what I heard through the grapevine, it was over styles of leadership. The CSM wanted to get his hands dirtier. He wanted the hands-on pro-soldier approach that I suggested, but Gen Rosado, for whatever reason, would rather have had his little buzzing snapping field of sycophants.

Whatever.

I bring this up, because the Walter Reed scandal smacks of the same ol’ shit. Forget the fact that the General in charge of Walter Reed had only been there six months. Many are saying he is but a scapegoat. How could he have changed things in six months? Poor guy. It was his predecessor that screwed it all up. Why should he take the blame?

My question to him is this: How many times did you visit the facilities, directly inspect with no announcement to the staff working in those places, talk to patients, demand frank ugly reports from your subordinates? Six months is a long time to be unaware of the problem.

You weren’t fired for not fixing the problem. You were fired for not even knowing about the problem.

But unfortunately, this is the problem with much of the military. Gen Patton said it best, "The more senior the officer, the more time he has to go to the front." Why? Because that’s where the operation is and guess what, Mr. General, YOU’RE IN CHARGE! I’d also add that the more senior the officer, the less time he should give before an inspection. The General should want to know what is really going on in his command. He should trust nothing but his own eyes, his own perception. He is the General. He is in charge.

Stop grooming yourself for bigger and better things and DO YOUR FUCKING JOBS!

With that said, our new Secretary of the Defense, Robert Gates, is really getting on my good side. I like that guy’s attitude, very pro-soldier.

WP: Some unaware of King’s dream - washingtonpost.com Highlights - MSNBC.com

I’ve said it before ( In Observance of Martin Luther King Jr. Day ), but it seems to bear repeating.

Last night, I was at a party and one of the party goers, an American, mentioned that he had to leave.

"Oh, the party’s just getting started," I offered, hope to cajole him into staying.

"I have to get up at 4:30."

"You have to work tomorrow?! What? They are making you work on the birthday on one of the greatest Americans who ever lived?"

"Who might that be?" he asked with a frown.

"Um, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.," I replied, not sure what he was getting at.

He smirked, "Oh, him."

I was unsure if I had just experienced a racist moment. I suspect I had.

I was watching CNN this afternoon. Featured was a young Palestinian-American living in Gaza.

"What’s it like?" the CNN reporter asked him. "Are you scared." She furrowed her brow with concern.

"It’s tough sometimes," the young man said with nary an accent, his skateboard dangling limply at his side, shoulders slack. "Yo, my buddy was almost blown up. It was like, messed up an’ stuff. This rocket, like, it came screaming in and almost hit us. Yo." We, the viewer, are treated to a little montage of our youthful ghetto urban kid from the "street" yo doing lame jumps around Gaza on his skateboard.

Then his mother comes on, Shelly "American Name hyphen Palestinian name." "I worry about him. It is dangerous here. But what are you going to do?"

And I’m thinkin’, GET THE HELL OUT OF GAZA, IDIOT! So here we have an American woman married to a Palestinian man, and the best living arrangement they could come up with was Gaza? WTF?

So okay, I’m thinking, benefit of the doubt time. Maybe they are international aid workers. Maybe he is well-educated and has a call to social work and civil justice. He cares about his people and wants to help them.

But then I thought about Chernobyl.

Yeah, Chernobyl.

Would you raise your kids there?

There’s a toxicity in the ground, in the air, in the water that isn’t going to dissipate for hundreds of years. The best thing you can do is leave. Barring that, you die. This is the same scenario for any one of the US Federal Superfund sites, communities laid to waste by greed, incompetence or ignorance. Guess what happens, folks. People pack it in and head for the hills. The ground’s been spoiled. The land isn’t worth having. It sucks, but we’d rather be alive someplace else then die young from non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma or have our kids born retarded and/or with missing or extra digits.

So it makes perfect sense to leave. You do not want to raise your kids in a toxic environment because it will make them sick and they will suffer and die.

You do not want to raise your children in an environment of violence, hatred, and poverty because it will make them sick and they will suffer and die. Living in such a place will make you just as sick as if it was pesticides, mercury, or uranium.

Why do we have so little insight into societal toxicity? What happens when a culture, region, or neighborhood is so overwhelmed with hatred, violence, crime, and oppression that it becomes impossible to grow up healthy and unaffected by the mutagenic qualities of the environment? Why do we as stubborn idiot humans feel some sort of social responsibility to the land and/or the community? How come the help we feel we need to render is something other than a ride out of the place?

An environmental worker explains, holding an intricate cylindrical device connected to a number of brightly colored tubes, "You see, resident, we just need to filter the water through this special radiological filter - don’t forget to change it every 3 months *nervous laugh*, and make sure that you don’t go outside without your dust mask. And don’t touch the dirt. Oh, yeah, you can’t hunt either. All animal life is carrying alpha emitters. Oh, yeah, make sure you sleep face down with a sheet over your head and put tape over all points in your home where there is air infiltration: door jam, windows, etc."

"Um, miss, we just want to leave. Can we go someplace else?"

"Why would you want to do that. This is YOUR land."

"Yeah, but my, um, urine glows."

"Who’s a mister negative. You just have to make it better. Where’s your sense of responsibility?"

"It left with my hair."

So you see it doesn’t make any sense in Chernobyl, why should it make any more sense in Palestine, the favelas in Brazil, La Perla in Puerto Rico, North St. Louis, or Iraq, or any place else that has been spoiled completely by societal toxicity.

Get out, get far away, let the half life of hate and despair take its toll on the area. Let it return to its placid state. Once the haters have killed each other, you might be able to move back and reclaim the land, but it’s going to be a long time. Don’t expect it in your lifetime. All forms of toxicity take generations to dissipate, hate included.

Well, actually they do want more troops in Iraq, but it’s just that commanders want so many more, that another 30,000 may as well be zero. The problem once again is rhetoric. Military commanders are loudly sounding off that they do not want more troops in Iraq. How does this reconcile with claims by these same military commanders and analysts that we went in with too few troops?

Observe this behind closed doors exchange with the Decider:

Bush: How many more do you boys need to pacify Iraq?  I’m all ears and willing to do what it takes to go forward.

Commander: 300,000 minimum. We coulda done it with less going in, but now we’re going to need to ramp up to 500,000 to get the job done.

Bush: Hmmm, I hear ya.  I hear ya, but I can only spare you 30,000. 30,000 more is all the political capital I have to spend. Politics won’t allow me to send more than 30,000. Ya see, that number 30,000? It’s all I can send.  I’ve decided.

Commander: Well then you can keep ‘em. Don’t send ANY then. 30,000 is like zero - exactly like zero, except that there are going to be more bodies sent home. Casualties will increase with zero increase in effectiveness.

Bush: Son, listen, this is politics. You just be a good soldier and put these boys to good use in the war on terror, guarding Haliburton facilities, etc. We’re going to win, you hear! I’ve decided it!

Commander: Whatever you say, sir. *salutes leaves*