Whack Link, Political Ink

Okay, give this one a shot.

http://www.new.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2020107&l=e7276&id=28600444

You should be able to see the pictures from here. I´ll write more soon, still in Salta but I think I´m leaving tomorrow. Saw a ton of people come into the main plaza today for a holiday special to this city, where the icon of the Virgin Mary is carried around the town in procession as a way of remembering a miracle that occurred here some 300 years ago. What I hear is that a huge earthquake ripped through Salta for two straight days, destroying the church, and the people brought the icon of the Virgin out of the rubble and prayed to it . . . which prompted the earthquake to quickly abate. I saw groups of teenagers passed out from exhaustion after having walked from as far as 200 km away for the festival. Serious business. That aside, the most exciting thing I´ve done in the past week is go to the local supermarket and admire the infinite varieties of pasta and yerba mate for sale. I feel privileged to have met two such stand-up people as Gabriella and Gustavo, but I also feel like it´s time to find 2nd gear again.

Finally . . . I wanted to say real quck that my original plan to go to Bolivia in the coming week needed to be amended, due to an outbreak of political-related violence in the country. I am most definitely out of harm´s way here in Argentina, although most of the shaking has been happening in the southern part of the country; much of the Bolivian-Argentinean border has been shut down at this point, and even if it wasn´t I´m not quite up for trying my hand at freelance conflict journalism right now (tools-wise or balls-wise). I do think it´s worth taking a few minutes to read about what is motivating the fighting there right now, though, because it is not an issue foreign to us first-world citizens either . . . when a few people have access to a majority of a greater area´s wealth, is it their duty to share it with people whose lands have considerably less intrinsic riches? And is a moderate consensus possible in such a charged issue? I certainly don´t know, but I do know (via an especially inspirational college professor of mine) that a human life is more valuable than all the idealisms humanity has ever created put together. Including ´´-ocrats´´ and ´´-ublicans´´ and all the stripes, circles, and squares of all the world´s nations. An affiliation should never be confused with a person. That being said, I hope in a month or so I´ll be able to march into that pretty little country with my American dollars and unavoidably feed the ´´ism´´ of travelling that makes what I´m saying right now perhaps a little more interesting than if I was, say, working at your neighborhood Chili´s. I guess the fear is mostly mine, that adding layers of identity obscures something more basic in the human heart.

If I had a Republican to kiss, surely I would feel a little better.