A quarter century after their uprising, perhaps the most meaningful gift from the Zapatistas is a spark of hope, a sense of what is possible, even in dark and uncertain times.
As he milks his cow, Salvadoran Gilberto Gomez laments that poor harvests, due to excessive rain or drought, practically forced his three children to leave the country and undertake the risky journey, as undocumented migrants, to the United States. “They became disillusioned, seeing that almost every year we lost a good part of our crops, and they decided they had to leave, because they didn’t see how they could build a future here,” Gómez said as he untied the cow’s hind legs after milking.
Muffling the voices of civil society rarely works over long periods of time, and the anti-Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions campaign, now penetrating the very heart of US government, is bound to eventually resurrect a nationwide conversation. Is protecting Israeli Apartheid more important to Americans than preserving the fundamental nature of their own democracy?
A look at the underlying tensions in Afghanistan after decades of war, where any situation or statement may soon explode in anger.
Copyright Toward Freedom 2019