redbloodedamerica:

Socialism in Venezuela

Imagine a darkness, something darker and scarier than the deepest parts of the ocean.  Darker than that awful darkness of space, the darkness of night, a house shackled by darkness because there isn’t any electricity and there hasn’t been for months.  But then again, that’s not the dark I’m talking about.  The real dark is the dark part that lives inside of you, the things that you now have to do on a daily basis just to stay alive. 

Around the corner, you hear the beastial shouts from a Caracas jail.  The prisoners have taken over – at least that’s what you hear.  They feel they can do a better job of controlling themselves then whoever has been doing it lately.  It was a hundred years ago that this country was lavished in wealth.  Not too long ago, you too were rich.  You were healthy in that chubby 19th Century Russian diplomat way.  You ate well.  You probably ate too much.  Black turtle beans and fried bananas, Asado Negro – you drool just thinking of the tender shredded beef and the carrot and oregano tinged broth.  You strode through steak houses on special occasions, you ate T-bones like a Texan, you you drank Chilean wines – Malbec from Argentina, occasionally a glass of cognac.  Not because you were a drunk, but because you could.  Because you enjoyed the sprouting goodness that life had to offer.  Man, that life it seemed like it was never going to end.

Now look at yourself.  You’re a bag of bones.  Bones jutting out like false teeth.  At times you think about all the energy you waste just breathing.  What happened?  Now you can barely afford a single egg…one egg!  Eggs that fall out of the backsides of chickens, and I can’t afford it?  Your mouth quivers at the thought of a fried egg tender, so tender it pops open with just the prod of a fork oozing onto the fried papaya and rotisserie chicken.  

You’ve lost a 120 lbs since it all started going to hell.  And now you’re in it firmly.  You weren’t rich, you were middle class – lower middle class even.  That’s just how good things used to be.  Although there was always the cinder-block hovels that you can see from the plane as you land in Caracas.  Now it is spread.  The office where you used to work as an accountant, it’s now empty, abandoned, overtaken by squatters – people like you, who lost everything, who limp a little more each day toward their death.  Men all in black now patrol the streets with shotguns, black bulletproof vests, and black tarp like shirts, and black pants, black military boots.  People hamper cars in the street because there’s nowhere to go, nothing to do.  

Gasping a bit, you rest below a crucifix statue.  The left tilting head of Christ emblazoned in a soft and sad light.  The burnished rise of daylight breathing into a new day.  Looking at Christ perhaps for the first time you understand suffering.  You understand his defeated look, the look of hopelessness and violence and death.  The hopelessness of surrendering, and surrendering until it stops mattering.  You hope, you have that one hope left that all things will change, but you really hope that just anything begins to change.  It was all so promising at the beginning.  Everybody was going to be able to live the high life!  And now only a handful are, and they are the ones that live behind the gates.  

This, you think to yourself, this is the socialist utopia they promised all of us as Venezuelans?  As you’ve sit there under the statue you begin to replay it all in your mind and wonder, where are all those Americans, those celebrities, those from Hollywood that praised our leaders and helped convince us that this was the road to prosperity?  I wonder what they’re eating tonight?