Murder City_ Ciudad Juarez and the Global Economy's New Killing Fields - Charles Bowden [31]
Yes, yes, he says, read Ephesians 6:10-20. It is a tale foretold and there is nothing left to do but live out the book. This is the second revolution. First, as he noted, came the reduction of family size. Now, the forces of Satan must be slain, the men, the women, the children, all who are in thrall to evil. His world has perfect order because he knows why people are dying and so the little details hardly matter. For example, he has no idea which cartel now controls Juárez—it is very confusing at the moment, he tells me—but he is certain that the murders are divine justice and so for him, they are nothing to worry about.
He taps his Bible, leans forward, and reads again to me: “For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world. . . .”
The present is always acceptable. Period. The city teems with shacks, poor people, dust, violence, and music booming out of open doorways. Women wear lipstick, children scurry past wearing clean clothes, buses rumble down the street spewing black exhaust, and the hours of the day slide by and it is life and it is normal and people cling to it one and all and it is good, good enough to make a life out of and to cherish. The stories float over the city, stories of murders, of executions, of rapes, robberies, stories of men protesting, stories of women holding vigils. At the bridge linking Juárez and El Paso, a memorial stands to murdered and vanished women, pink ribbons fluttering in the breeze, each ribbon bearing the name of a soul lost to life. And yet, each day, men huddle at the base of the memorial hawking newspapers, and cars line up to cross and the little tower of pink ribbons becomes invisible. I stand there, I stare at it, and I still cannot see it. It is not part of the city, it is part of an effort to imagine a different city and this effort is ignored because the present is acceptable. Period.
Everyone knows the facts and yet the facts slip from everyone’s hands. Walk a hundred feet from a body on the pavement—the blood puddled around the skull—and it never happened, the young girls smile, the traffic zooms past without slowing, the city beats on and on, and the dead no longer exist and soon the memory of the dead will be a rare bit of fact polished and cherished by the family and ignored or forgotten by everyone else. This is a survival tactic and it crosses all class lines. This is the fruit of living without history. This is the result of amnesia in television, radio, and print. This is the sweet drug that comes from fantasy. The authorities are real. The police enforce the laws. The courts function. The army protects. The streetlights sweep evil from the night. There is a consensus here to believe the unbelievable, to insist that things are normal—the government is in charge, the incidents, should they even come to notice, are accidents, little imperfections in the tapestry that is life and this tapestry is sound and beautiful to both the eye and to the hand as it strokes the elaborate weave of lives that make up the city.
It took me a long time to accept that the present is acceptable. Period. I remember . . . a car pulls over, a man I know tells me with excitement in his voice that the police have arrested a man who has been killing all the women and the guy is convinced, the guy is intelligent—and I think at that moment that what the guy is telling me is nonsense. And then, the killings go on and on, and nothing is ever said of that moment, nothing is recalled of that bubble of excitement, nothing is mentioned