Derecho de Replica

Here I am expecting just
a little bit too much
from the wounded.

3 Libras, A Perfect Circle

Mr. Bush:

I write to you as a slave of the world.

For all my life, I have seen history wreck through my country and the entire planet, in the name of freedom, liberty and wealth.

I am not free to pursue my goals in life, and I'm not free to make my own decisions. All around me, people are not free to take upon these liberties either. Women and children die of starvation or medical negligence, men die from bullets and bombs and all in the 'search' for freedom.

I have decided to speak up and fight for my freedom, and as you promised, I hope you'll stand by me on this one.

I am oppressed by religion. My country, as well as your country have firm religious institutions which flaunder our most basic human rights, like the right a woman has to decide over her own body.

I am oppressed by my government. Daily, hundreds of mexicans die from the violence imposed and created by our terrible, greedy and corrupt politicians and their hard branches of law enforcement. Hundreds of women are murdered a year by 'unknown' serial killers, murderers who are part of our government institutions or are pampered by them. Thousands of kids die from treateable diseases such as the flu or diarrhea. Millions of us live in fear daily, afraid of being kidnapped and held for ransom, of being separated from our possessions by criminals, of being murdered in the streets at the hands of our own judicial forces.

Thousands of mexicans die at the hands of drug lords, be it by weapon of choice, through the terrible consequences of untreated drug addiction, or the poverty and corruption caused by this phenomenon. Add these up to the people in Nicaragua, Bolivia, Guatemala, Colombia, Brazil, Peru, El Salvador, Afghanistan, Saudi Arabia and any other countries which get sucked into the vicious cycle of drug laundering and production, only to keep your own, American population stashed with these drugs, these innocuous substances that your constitution ammendments have christened as lethal, dangerous, wickedly evil.

A thousand others die from the incapacity of the world leaders to provide basic food, shelter and medical necessities. I don't mean to get personal here, but as I recall, YOU are the leader of these leaders.

I am oppressed by government policies which weaken my possibilities to study what I want to study, wherever I want to study it. I am fortunate in having an education. Thousands of brilliant kids, untapped geniuses, don't even get to go to school because they are forced into slavery, exploitation at the hands of your associates by the names of Walmart, McDonald's, and what-not.

I am oppressed by global economic agendas, and their enforcers upon us all. My country's single wealth comes from petrol and oil extraction, which you despicably buy at unconstitutional prices and through the complicity of our corrupt president. Millions of mexicans die from poverty because their sources of food and growth have been destroyed by your agricultural companies, who step over minor producers, destroying communities, exploiting the workers and flooding the market with your (I must add) illegaly genetically-modified products.

I am threatened by the use of weapons of mass destruction from the world powers. I hate to bring this up again, but your country is the power over these powers. I can't see where on your idea of freedom and respect for all human life does a nuclear bomb fit. Nor a regular bomb, nor a missile, a military aircraft carrier, an automatic gun or a single pellet. All of these instruments, sadly, have the single purpose of destroying life, not preserving it. I call upon you to destroy all of them, thus ensuring life for us. Logic.

I am terrified by the pollution and destruction of our home, our planet. Environmental change has begun to happen. Around the globe, climatological change has started and with it, the disruption of the world's balance and well-being. This is no joke, as our brothers in California and Asia have witnessed in the last months. Change in the environment will bring unstoppable disaster, tragedies no terrorist could ever dream of creating. The first way we can stop this is to stop burning all this fuel. We don't need it, really. What we need is a planet to live on. I'm sure your friends can find another way to keep raising those millions at the expense of some poor undeveloped country without destroying the entire world. That would be a start I'd like to witness in my lifetime.

I am oppressed culturally by globalisation tendencies. My family and national traditions, which have standed firm through centuries and several brutal invasions, are now severely threatened by the allure that capitalist and especifically American culture have poured on us like landfill. We are unable to stop this. The policies of the companies responsible for this are too harsh, too cruel and too inhuman to even start accounting for them. They are terrorists on a grand phantasmagorical level.

Finally, I am oppressed, spritually, by the idea of war. Since I was a child, nothing seemed more beautiful and at the same time so ellusive as world peace. I have seen conflicts arise and unravel, countries devastated, millions of photographs of sheer destruction, sadness and grief at our own hands. Humans killing humans. I am afraid of my own kind. I cannot live this life on this world that we have constructed. All of my freedoms are not. I have no liberty in this Earth, but the liberty inside my head, with which I call to you, and all other responsible for the direction of this our modern human society to put a stop to this destruction, to the evil that only belongs to human realm and which will, surely, at yours and others' commands, destroy us.

I am a slave to all these worries, and I stand for my liberty. Will you stand by me, and my freedom?