The Center Will Hold

I was recently composing another compilation CD to add to my growing playlists. As some of you know I enjoy making theme based CD’s for people and for my own creative expression. Recently I have been in bit of a mood due to personal reasons unrelated to my service here in El Salvador which is absolutely stellar. As for the mood behind the smile that is something of a delicate matter and I am utilizing all of my cognitive resources to deal with it. Back to the matter at hand, I was in the middle of creating a new CD, two actually, entitled: El Salvador – The Black Album and El Salvador – The White Album. Like Janus, Freud, Jung, Lynch and others before me, duality is an issue I have particular interest in and I wanted to express the bipolar relationship of the country through my eyes in song.

The first CD, The Black Album is just about complete, 13 songs of violence, aggression and futility, the number holding significance to Salvadorian gang culture. I was reviewing the tracks and decided to take a break to read an article in the paper recommended by our assistant director who informed us via email. As I read it I realized something I had not before, for whatever reason, I missed it, a bigger concept not found in the pages of the newspaper, an exercise in critical thinking or human apathy. Reading the paper everyday can and does make one cynical, yes it leaves one informed, but the amount of violence this tiny country experiences far exceeds the pages allotted. In turn, along with my current mood has created a sort of symbolic relationship that may not be the most beneficial to my own cognitive welfare.

As I read the article, for a brief moment between the starting gun blast of song one fading into the next song citing, in a modern twist, the Code of Hamurabi (if you remember it, it’s the one that that’s famous for “an eye for an eye”) I realized something about El Salvador’s urban police force that made take a look outside the headlines. Granted there is rampant corruption within the flanks and measures are being taken to correct hem, but aside from that the notion that dawned upon me, between the newspapers piling on my floor showing screaming deputies or marred bodies and the Black Album filling my living room (substituted then by Gershwin), I thought of those men and women putting their lives at risk in the most violent nation in the Western Hemisphere. It stopped me for a moment. The most violent country on this half of the world and these uniformed officers deal with it everyday. Remember, this is the country where maras (or Salvadorian gang members) throw grenades at clubs for petty matters and alcoholism is as common as having a family member in the States. All things considered, it says something about integrity and sheer will of the people of this country. Here in the rural areas of El Salvador where I am stationed, I enjoy a crime free zone with utmost liberty to come and go as I please at all hours of the day and night. Coming from an urban sprawl such luxury is rare (save in small ethnic barrios) and I imagine San Salvador, the nation’s capital, to be very similar my own city of origin in that sense.

When you think about the urban police force here, they make very little, some, if not all, take on other forms of employment to make ends meet. Yet with the level of hostility and danger they are exposed to, one wonders how the government is able to retain so many different units of public regulation with bodies to fill these positions. Somehow, within all that has been going on in this country since the Conquest, the center has held. These men and women, rather than sitting at home waiting for a check from one of their family members from the States, rather than running to States themselves or flooding themselves in a fugue of drugs and excessive alcoholism have chosen, for whatever reason to stay and fight.

I realize now how every person fights their battles in the best way they know how. Some use a pen and others a sword and El Salvador has those that have tackled all available areas of injustice, with the bottom line being: many have chosen to stay and fight. With this combined effort, through the power of sheer will, maybe El Salvador will one day see the change it so richly deserves. El Salvador, literally, The Savior, it’s ironic that a country plagued with a history of dictators, oligarchies, social stratification, massacres, oppression, civil war, desperation, PTSD, violent crime, maras, earthquakes and floods should be named as such. To draw an artistic license (inserting El Salvador rather than Mexico and inventing the rest) from a quote by former Mexican dictator, Porfirio Díaz, I think to myself, solely letting the words roll from my tongue: poor El Salvador, so far from God and so close to salvation.