No, you are not a
mistake. I know your mother told you
that having you at seventeen ruined her life; I know your father swore over
your cradle that he would never make the same mistake again. Let me tell you something.
Forsaken, starving, and orphan children looking for something to eat in the garbage dumps; decrepit old people stumbling amidst the rubble of their flattened homes, roaming over the countless corpses scattered all over the place, searching for pieces of what their lives used to be, something to cling to, to justify their existence and their sanity, a picture of their family perhaps, of their children blown to pieces by the 6,727,084 tons of bombs dropped on their land; the multitude, of all ages, and genders, children, the young and the old, with amputated limbs, and mutilated faces and bodies, wandering around, with confusion on their faces, as if asking “why?”; the fields, scorched, ravaged, and infertile, planted with strange seeds that will keep killing the living for many years to come; the burned villages; the raped women; the sacrifice of our young and innocent boys, their transformation into killing machines, weapons of mass destruction, to execute unmentionable atrocities and crimes against humanity, on both sides of the line; the mutual extermination; the business of war: that is an awfully fucking horrible mistake!!! An appalling aberration!!!
Forsaken, starving, and orphan children looking for something to eat in the garbage dumps; decrepit old people stumbling amidst the rubble of their flattened homes, roaming over the countless corpses scattered all over the place, searching for pieces of what their lives used to be, something to cling to, to justify their existence and their sanity, a picture of their family perhaps, of their children blown to pieces by the 6,727,084 tons of bombs dropped on their land; the multitude, of all ages, and genders, children, the young and the old, with amputated limbs, and mutilated faces and bodies, wandering around, with confusion on their faces, as if asking “why?”; the fields, scorched, ravaged, and infertile, planted with strange seeds that will keep killing the living for many years to come; the burned villages; the raped women; the sacrifice of our young and innocent boys, their transformation into killing machines, weapons of mass destruction, to execute unmentionable atrocities and crimes against humanity, on both sides of the line; the mutual extermination; the business of war: that is an awfully fucking horrible mistake!!! An appalling aberration!!!
But
you, you spread love, beauty, kindness, understanding, and inspiration
everywhere you go. Every life you touch
changes for the better. Everyone who
crosses your path is left behind with a grateful smile. You represent
everything that is decent, noble, uplifting, honourable, and positive, in the
human race. People like you make life bearable and liveable, giving us a reason
to believe. No! A million times, no! You are not a mistake!
© Text and photograph: William Almonte Jiménez, 2011
