I am thinking today of community and friendship. Mexico City, as we know, was rocked by a killer earthquake just two days ago and already more than two hundred dead have been counted. I just heard the CBC broadcast a comment I phoned in yesterday about earthquake preparedness in Vancouver, for when the fabled Big One hits, which they say is long overdue, will bring on the coming Apocalypse, and never mind that we have had little more than the occasional mild earth tremor in all of the sixty-plus years I have lived here.
I said, among other things, that it is more than simply a matter of each one of us stockpiling our share of unperishable food, bottled water and flashlights as though we're each going to be on our own till rescue arrives. In Mexico City the people are all pulling together, helping and supporting one another and that we who live in Narcissistic, Self-Absorbed Lotus Land, aka Vancouver, need to take a page from their book.
But this also says something about how well the Mexicans, a historically traumatized people, do community, compared to our selfish and consumerist narcissism here in smug and relatively untraumatized Canada.
I have often felt huge wonder and admiration for the Mexicans' and other Latinos' capacity for community and friendship. These people seem to really hang together. I've heard some Latino friends mention that this is one of the reasons they emigrated to Canada, to get away from the suffocating family and community ties en su madre tierra where everyone knows everyone's else's business, when they are taking a shit and how much toilet paper they like to use.
I have just read an article in one of our free community weekly newspapers here in Vancouver, the Courier. In it the author, Mike Klassen, was saying: "...social isolation (for the elderly)
is driving increasing rates of dementia...The irony was not lost on me that even when bringing people together, there are those among us who remain alone...'in a healthy community we help our families, our neighbours, and those less fortunate. We build bridges, cities and entire countries together. The very fabric of society is dependent on helping one another. '"
What do the Mexicans have that we don't? Well, skyrocketing crime and murder rates, an unwinnable drug war that has cost more than one hundred thousand lives, legendary levels of political, judicial and police corruption, and an incredible history and legacy of violence, disruption, cruelty and social inequality.
For all this, as a community, as people who hold together in mutual support, the Mexican people are unimpeachable. When I fell ill in San Cristobal de las Casas in Chiapas State, I was overwhelmed by the kindness that strangers showed me, such as I never would have experienced or expected here in clean, safe, progressive and cold and unfriendly Vancouver.
Of course, social cohesion has been necessary to the survival of the Mexican people. Historically their governments have been murderous at the worst, indifferent at the best, to the sufferings and needs of the Mexican people. The communitarian roots of the Mexican indigenous people must have provided a most powerful legacy that holds to this very day.
Trauma, collective and individual trauma, has necessitated for the people of Latin America a strong sense of community and friendships that often last from cradle to grave. There is still trauma suffered and shared, but somehow this sense of familial and communitarian love and mutual responsibility must make it more bearable as people share, love, fight and argue and reconcile together.
More than enchiladas, tequila and chilpote, this is an import that we really need from Mexico if here in the land of consumerist narcissism we expect to really improve as human beings. It could take a major crisis of the dimensions of a killer earthquake, or maybe our current problems of housing unaffordability might also be enough to drive us closer together in mutual support and community.
Time will only tell.
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