Written by: Carlos Teran
Dear Nicaragua,
An Economic/Philosophical Poem that Meets All The Requirements of the Biannual Summative Blog Post
Nicaragua. Why are you the way that you are?
When I was a child, I loved your green pastures, your beautiful mountains, the leaves that danced on your trees, and the good life that you gave your people.
My people.
Not but a generation ago, your pastures, mountains trees and streets were painted red.
With the blood of 50,000 fallen Nicaraguans.
For the freedom of your valleys, for the freedom of your people.
Not but a generation ago, a proxy civil war for the battle of territorial economic control and the spread of Capitalism and Western culture versus Eastern culture and Marxism backed by Reagan and his band of misfits as well as Mr. Gorbachev broke out in your confines.
And you were painted red.
And in the name of what and whom?
You cut the head off of a snake, attached to the head of Medusa.
Your shaved your capitalist free market head with a communist command market Mach 3 razor only for your hair to grow back thicker.
And now you pick up the razor again.
The man who promised you prosperity,
And that your rivers would run thick with milk and honey.
Stole all social security from the very same people who fought for him to gain power invested the money into his construction companies and laundered drug money through those same companies then lost all of the money in his offshore accounts and asked for the very same people who gave him the power in the first place to bail him out with a regressive tax system that makes the retired the old and the poor give him and the government more money (Chavez)
The new generation, they stay woke.
Because sleep is the cousin of death.
And for opening their eyes and mouths,
More than 40 students were killed fighting for your freedom (Chavez).
And now the streets are red once again.
Don’t you know that if you continue to have revolutions for your economic and human freedom that it will prevent capital inflow to your country and deter Americans from investing and from exploiting your resources to build water parks so fat American families with their fat American dollars can use you as a place to “get away from their problems”? Thus causing your Cordoba to depreciate in the foreign exchange market because demand for your currency will decrease to the left on the money market graph and the global market.
And increase unemployment because you won’t have those waterparks, and the would be workers won’t have the opportunity to continue to be slaves with blue polos, who would go home and still wouldn’t be able to afford a good home and a life for their children, and some food to feed them every night.
Ok this poem is getting long and I need a thesis.
What should my you do?
How do we stop the violence, and provide a stable economy?
Do we buy bonds and increase the money supply so that interest rates will decrease, which will in turn increase investment as well as demand, hopefully increasing our GDP?
But would that really work?
If I knew the answer, I think I’d be in a better place.
Plus I only know my opinion of other people’s opinions.
So I’ll ask my comedian/philosopher friend Bill Hicks. Bill what should we do?
“Take all that money that we spend on weapons and defense each year and instead spend it feeding and clothing and educating the poor of the world, which it would many times over - not one human being excluded - and we could explore space, together, both inner and outer, forever, in peace.” (Goodreads).
The End.
Works Cited
“A Quote from Love All the People.” Goodreads, Goodreads, www.goodreads.com/quotes/511079-fundamentalist-christianity-fascinating-these-people-actually-believe-that-the-world.
Chavez, Nicole. “More than 40 People Were Killed in Unrest in Nicaragua, Rights Groups Say.” CNN, Cable News Network, 29 Apr. 2018, www.cnn.com/2018/04/27/americas/nicaragua-unrest/index.html.
