La Politica

I posted a few pictures of happy people yesterday, so make sure to check those out too

Politics here are more or less a joke. Everyone knows that the mayor is corrupt, apparent from “the Municipality’s” big new black Ford pickup, the police are corrupt, and the high government officials are corrupt. The presidential commercials often go to the point of showing a minute of nearly-naked women dancing then flashing a name and asking for the vote. Rallies are worse, they display hours of professional dancing mixed with concerts finished off by a little show of the candidate shaking hands and waving at people. Despite all this, the main form of advertisement is through stickers displaying a name, a picture, and a party color. They are pasted everywhere. Enlarged versions are on billboards or painted on walls.

Qué fue? Oh that’s right, you want to find out about what matters to each candidate so that we can decide which single person’s opinion we want to turn into a guiding force. Well my proud citizens of the United States, that knowledge is not really available here. But somehow plenty of people have been convinced that it does. At the camp training for counselors, intelligent NGO workers who had no idea what any government plans were still insisted that each candidate had presented a government plan to someone at sometime. They must have some plan or else they wouldn’t be running! Indeed.

I was surprised at first to find out that the main point of doing these camps all over our department is to encourage youth to be politically active. We analyzed the political commercials and talked a lot about how we could try to get youth to think critically about candidates and officials. But it doesn’t stop there. We’re also trying to turn them into locally active community leaders with a more complete understanding organizing and of gender equality. We’re attempting to equip youth with knowledge of their own people power.

As logical and good as that may seem to us, I think you North Americans could use a good bit of knowledge of your own people power too. The problem is that we are encouraged to make change by being passive, through voting for people to make our choices for us. The fact of the matter is that we can change our communities; it just has to be important enough for us to give it an honest effort, to make sacrifices.