noticias malas

trying to understand news reports in spanish and saying quietly to myself thats my country, those are my people..
and so angry and sad that so little was done to help these people get out of there interviews with a man whose wife was torn from his hands by the force of the water she gone he kept saying she gone and trying to explain to myself and sympathetic chileans about racism and poverty and lack of education and why exactly there are images of poor blacks looting and ignorant white men with guns and the exact statement that we are making to the world with the words shoot to kill, and the notion that so much more could have been done but wasnt, and even the very idea that my country has no system in place to recieve aid from abroad and i laugh bitterly but so very deeply sad beneath all that because those are my people, that is my country and almost poetic justice right that our oil rigs are floating and contaminating rising floodwaters but chickens coming home to roost should root out those who took away the money and resources that could have slowed this beast and sent them to seek oil on other shores not the poor people and those who had no way to leave a sinking ship. it seems so unfair and so fuckin tragic like wars and natural disasters and rumors of war just continally and simultanaity, of being confused in mexico while body counts rose and water levels, or of how the weekend before katrina hit there was all this rain and the news showed the slide of houses basically shacks falling into rivers grown wide while i gaped wide eyed and kept asking where is that, where do those people live, what part of the city is that into which my privelidged white ass has never ventured where houses are huts barely big enough for a makeshift bed and bridges melt overnight and then this, rising sweep of water and gw pats himself on the back for finally getting off his fuckin ass and wandering down south to pretend to help...last night as i talked to my roomate a bomb went off , we didnt know what the hell happened, just the loudest sound we had ever heard and we raced to the window to see a billowing column of smoke less than a block away. we live in a middle class neighborhood, really quiet and pretty, not the richest part of town but the president lives about 6 blocks away...we thought maybe it was an accident at a nearby construction site...several of the roomies went running out to see while i grabbed my coat but when i got downstairs they were running back into the house yelling about a man waving a gun around...we all got inside and realized one roomate was still out there, he had run the opposite way, he showed a few minutes later and he said the bomb hit the bank of boston out on the corner, and the guy waving a pistol around and yelling at the crowd of curious bystanders was security, when the others asked him why he ran the other way and not toward the house he said hey when a guy points a gun and yells run, you dont stop to tell him you live the other way. half an hour later the police had the area cordoned off, no more crazed gunmen or not knowing who is the bad guy anyway except that when we asked if they were trying to rob the bank he said no it was a protest because its almost september 11. no way to know. this place is going to get a little crazy i think in the coming week...