My latest publication

This a link to my latest publication, it's in Spanish so, enjoy!

http://elpostantillano.com/component/content/article/318-cartas-de-una-antillanoa/2821-yalitza-santos.html

Chain Reaction

Puerto Rico has turned in a place of violence. This weekend alone (from Friday to Sunday) there have been 10 cases of murder reported. The once “Island of Enchantment” has turned into a place where people are afraid to come out of their houses because they know that now more than ever it is more of a possibility to die waiting for a traffic light to change, picking up an order in a fast food restaurant of jumping back into your car after a day of shopping. What ever happened to sense of community that moved people to take care of each other of the codes of the streets where no innocents, women or children were to be hurt in the process of “taking care of a situation”?

 While the public slowly marinates in the panic, government official and political parties focus on smear campaigns and playing a “tag blame game” amongst themselves. Red senators blame blue ones and those blame red district representatives and those blame blue mayors and those blame red senators and those then go back to blaming blue Governors and so on so forth they continue to play tag while women are being battered to death by their abusive partners, children are being physically, sexually abused and murdered, senior citizens rights are violated by badly trained and psychologically unstable police officers and citizens are being murdered and robbed in their own homes.

 Meanwhile, in the United States political parties and government officials are focused on denying people the right to public health insurance and women the right to choose whether they want to have children or not. Instead of focusing in the education and economy problems of the country they just “want to show those second class citizens who’s boss.”

 As we can appreciate here our socio-economic situation is not only our own, but it is a chain reaction. The worst part of it is that it will continue to get worse if we don’t pay attention to the social components of the problem. People need help. Not only in the economic sector, but also access to objective information, quality education, to know that they have a choice and that they will treated with respect and dignity. Otherwise these situations will only get worse; which is a shame because it is those who are innocent the ones who end up paying for the sins of the guilty.

Re- designing

Today I took my car to the repair shop because the AC  was not working (and in this tropical weather AC is a must), turns out it had been a mistake from the mechanic, he left one cable adrift, and that messed up the car. And that took me to think, how many times does the domino effect destroyed something you have been planning for quite a while? Just one thing is left unattended and BAM! in your perspective, everything else goes to hell. Well, in that case we have to adopt a new term, re-design. If you are focused on everything that has gone wrong you will have no space in your mind to enjoy the things that actually go ok. So let's learn to move with the flow of things, and everything will end up just fine I don't know, it seemed kind of important for me to share this.

You're not a 100 dollar bill, not everyone is going to like you.However...

 Regardless of who you are and how you act, people will always have their awkwardly fantastic (as in fictitious) opinions about you. I mean, you could be a declared saint and there will still be people that will find something wrong with who you are, what you do, what you wear and more importantly, what you think. Why do I say this, well let’s just say that just now for no specific reason I started reflecting upon a situation that happened to me a while ago with a certain person that for anonymity’s sake I will call, DUH!. DUH! was seen by everybody as a happy go lucky person filled with the knowledge of traveling the world, to me, DUH! Seemed like an ok person, so I decided to be-friend DUH!. One time when we were having what I considered an academic, open minded argument, I told DUH! that I considered war an unnecessary thing, responsible for destroying so many lives and yet, soldiers became soldiers because it was their decision, so whatever happened next to them once enrolled it was not only the government’s fault for creating conflict, but also the soldier’s fault for becoming soldiers. My point was of course personal responsibility; don’t blame unto others what is a consequential misfortune of your fully aware, conscious decision taking. DUH! Took it in such a personal way that up to this day it (will refer to the person as it to maintain full anonymity) will not speak to me, it won’t even acknowledge my presence in a room and has told people horrible things about me, my personality and my personal believes. So I guess it really doesn’t matter what you do to try to make other people be friendly with you, they will still paint the picture of you in their minds that better suits their perspective of reality, so might as well just keep walking and enjoying life being who you are and not who anybody wants you to be.