Cooked by the Culture

My daughter Ruth was born twenty-seven and a half years ago in Medellin, Colombia. My former wife and I adopted her just twenty-seven years ago next month. Yesterday, she flew to Medellin on her first trip to the city where she was born. When she was twelve, we went to the city of Cartagena on the Caribbean coast, but Medellin was too dangerous then. The drug cartel was in charge, and her city was at the heart of it. Yesterday's New York Times ran an article about how Medellin is now a place of optimism; the new mayor is trying to make it lively, attractive, safe. Ruth told me before she left that Medellin is now safer than Philadelphia, where she lives. There is still a guerilla war going on in Colombia; some parts of it are definitely dangerous. She knows that. But she plans to travel around the country she left so long ago, taking care but not shirking the realities of her own life. She will be there about a month, returning close to the time she came to this country as an infant.

When I was about her age, in 1973, I flew to Nicaragua to spend three weeks on an island at the southern end of Lake Nicaragua with a community of revolutionaries, artists, and writers led by the poet and Roman Catholic priest Ernesto Cardenal. I was twenty-nine and at a moment of transition in my own life, leaving one job and city for another publishing position in another city, but at the same time unsure I wanted to continue to be a publisher. I was writing poetry and publishing it. I was going to Solentiname, the island community in Nicaragua, because I was publishing a book of Cardenal's poems in English and he had invited me to come. In those days, I was alienated from the church and still six years from my return to it, through the Episcopal Church. It is probable that my experience with the Solentiname community helped move me toward that return.

Many suggest that liberation theology was born at Solentiname, and while I was there I witnessed the teaching of Marxist-Christian theology on the porch of the main house on the island. Peasants paddled dug-out canoes from the surrounding smaller islands on Saturdays to participate in the discussions. They were learning about their own oppression under the Anastasio Somoza regime. Eventually, these teachings would influence the church throughout Latin America and help to fuel the rebellion a few years later that overthrew Samoza. Many of the young people I met in 1973 were among the first killed in one of the first battles. The community at Solentiname was wiped out by the Nicaraguan national guard.

I was helped on my way to Cardenal's community by Sandinistas, although at the time I did not know what that meant. While I was there, the government of Salvador Allende was overthrown by the CIA; we heard the news on Radio Havana one night and we all got drunk with sorrow. I remember lying in a small motorboat looking up at the incredible stars and thinking about how courageous all of these people were, living under tyranny and risking their lives. And then I threw up.

Liberation theology still makes sense to me, perhaps even more so now in North America, in the West, than it did then in Nicaragua. The conditions we face now, the extremes of wealth and poverty, the indifference of the institutional church, are like those that generated a socially conscious Christianity in the seventies. The authoritarian church is ascendant, not only the Roman Catholic Church, and the emergence of a global corporate fascism is all too obvious. We are not teaching ourselves to rebel but rather to acquiesce. Like the famous fable of the frog placed in a pot of cold water that slowly heats to boiling, we are being cooked by a culture of lies and fairy tales.

And most of us are content to lie in the warming water (breathing the warming air), imagining that we are in a spa instead of a cauldron.

I am glad that my daughter is going to Latin America where the stakes are still visibly high. She will see the favelas on the hillsides where tens of thousands live in abject poverty even in the renewing city of Medellin. Urban renewal is usually built on the backs of the poor. She will see the poverty that begat her; she will meet the people who like her have no control over the future, the difference being they knew they lack control. What I hope is that she will return with some fury in her blood.

I felt some of that fury when I came back from Nicaragua, although it didn't last. It was like what motivated me and others in the 1960s to refuse to approve of the War in Vietnam. But we had grown tired. We had to go back to work. I went back to work. And now here we are in the warm waters of our lives believing that we are safe, that God loves us, that our prayers for peace are all it will take to ensure our daily bread and safe retirement to someplace wonderful. Some might say that the government that overthrew Samosa was also corrupt--and they would be right. The Sandinistas lost their moral compass; even Ernesto became for a time a poet apparatchik. But the effort to make the change was worth it, even so. The mistake is to assume that a failure to make permanent change excuses us from attempting to make any change.

As for me, I am going to try to climb out of the pot. I am not sure yet what that means, but I don't intend to stay here treading water.