So We Ask You Again...
by Jorge Vargas
Prior to the Spanish discovery of the greater America, never to be confused with that miniscule land going by the same name, in the year 1492, the Andean region was inhabited and dominated by a people whose history we are still attempting to understand.
We know that these Andean cultures worshipped separate gods and deities and that each culture and village adopted one god as its protector and hoped that this god would fight the gods of other cultures and villages. We know that they had achieved a highly sophisticated level of interdependence.
We know that the people of the highlands knew the people of the more habitable middle ranges of altitude and that this latter group, in turn, communicated with the people of the coast, and in this fashion each of the three groups traded and bartered and shared and co-existed, such that they all lived in relative peace.
We know that, despite the relative peace, they knew of war, though the wars were swift and, therefore, did not require the high level of sophistication in weaponry evidenced by the European conquerors. We know also that the Quechua tribe, which originated somewhere near the modern-day city of Cuzco and which worshiped the Sun-God, was the last of the great cultures to conquer the region - though not the first - and was the most sophisticated in its method of domination.
We know that the Incas - the name given to the Quechuan people - and all of the civilizations and tribes that came before them in the Andes knew how to preserve the land and how to utilize the land itself in order to expand.
We also know that, relative to income levels today, the people of the Andes were more egalitarian in their income distribution and were better off, relatively speaking, than they are today.
But enough of deifying these individuals.
What do we know of the Andes today?
We know that the Andean region is among the world's poorest, with some of the region's nations - namely, Bolivia and, to a lessening degree, Ecuador - being among the poorest in the Western Hemisphere and reaching poverty levels only seen in the Caribbean and in sub-Saharan Africa.
We know that the governments of the Andean nations are mired in webs of corruption that a few politicians there are struggling to combat.
We know that these nations are doing everything possible to develop along the lines prescribed to them by the developed nations that once called the Andean people inferior - today they call them 'developing.' And to achieve this end of development, the Andean nations are being forced to sell their resources and sign free trade agreements in a desperate search for foreign revenues, all of which means that these will become exporting nations with no actual production capacities.
We know that the desperation is so great in some of these nations that nature is forsaken.
And there begin the critiques. How dare Peru open up new mines in the Andes to excavate for gold and other minerals?! Can you imagine it? The Peruvians would rather drive their old cars to work and contaminate the skies of Lima than keep the air clean for future generations! The Peruvians think they are as entitled to abuse the environment as the Americans are! As the British were in the 1800s! The Germans, the French, and, hell, even the Spanish!
How dare those Ecuadoreans go fishing in their waters! They think they're as entitled as the Spanish and the Canadians and the Japanese! And how dare those Bolivians who pollute the Andean highlands and melt away the ice-capped peaks of that great mountain range! Only the Austrians and the Germans are allowed to do such things! Scandalous, really.
So, you see, we come to a deadlock.
We, the Andeans, do not provide more than 5% of the world's total pollution but the Andean region is among the most affected places of all by global warming. Thus, the civilized world criticizes us for being savages and for selling off our forests for development purposes.
But this is not merely about the Andeans - how provincial! - for the entire developing world is seeing this and is facing these criticisms.
And we who are developing see your developed urban sprawls. We see your Houston and your Minneapolis and we wonder if perhaps that did not require the cutting down of trees, to say nothing of your New York and your Chicago. We see your Manchester and your Paris, and we wonder if those factories do not also create smoke. We see your German and American made cars and we wonder if those are any cleaner than our Korean and Japanese automobiles. After all, you have more cars than we do, by far.
We look at your Paseo de la Castellana and your West Side Highway and we wonder if they are no different from our Paseo de la República and our Calle de los Libertadores. We look at your pipelines and wonder if those didn't affect nature as much as you say ours do.
We may be uncivilized and we may not simulate our way through life like you do - honestly, the greatest danger is a car accident if you live in New York City! - but we are like you in that we are capable of wondering. Our thoughts may not be as sophisticated as yours, but we are capable of wisdom. You may have won Nobel prizes, but if we were the ones handing out the prizes, we'd likely give them to ourselves as well.
So we have wondered and now we ask. If young Jean-Pierre Barthes and young Mary Smith and young Raúl Vázquez de Madrid's parents are able to get a planet-polluting job to provide for them, why can't the same be true of the parents of César Ccahuantico and Rodrigo Huamán and María Poma?
Let us rephrase and be more direct, for there is enough misunderstanding between you, the conquerors, and us, the conquered: If you could develop without anyone telling you how to go about it, why can't we? Why must we limit ourselves because of the environment? Why are we monsters for wanting what you want?
We want to cure cancers! We want to build great ships that can make it across oceans without refueling, not just buy them! We want to design automobiles! We want to construct airplanes based on our own models! We want to sail the stars on our own vessels, from our own launching pads, and with our own objectives!
Why are we monsters for this? Why do you look at us, the Andeans and the others who are developing, and call us irresponsible? Why do you look at us, the developing, and speak to us about controlled development, after having told us that development must be free only two decades ago in Washington? Why are we criminalized while you get to reminisce about a past that you consider majestic and which we would spit on if we had the chance? Why, why, why?
We are asking you the wrong questions. You never cared for us. Columbus did not ask why the natives of the Carib were not civilized. He asked how he could enslave them.
So now we will speak your language: How can we get you to see that we are not monster? How can we get you to speak to us as if we were equals? How can we open your eyes so that you will finally realize that, despite your many tricks, the future is ours and you can have the past and rot with it? How will you respect us as we once respected you?
We tried to be brilliant, but you ignored us. Our scientists are relegated to second-tier status unless they make a discovery that you could never make, and then you emphasize that they were educated in your universities. Our teachers you fall deaf to. Our politicians you call corrupt. Our schemes you view as second-rate. Our solutions you think solve no problems. Our militaries you mocked and made mince-meat of. Our economies you thrashed and relegated to Third World status.
So now, we must ask, how will you respect us? We can, of course, fight, and what a war that would be, but then we will die by the millions and you by the thousands, and, in the end, nothing will be achieved, for we fight with triggers and you with buttons, and in such conflict, there is no room for respect.
So now, we must ask, how will you respect us? We can, of course, withdraw from your game altogether and create a new game, so that you can have your First World Cup and we can have our Third World Cup, but we will miss you and, perhaps, you will miss us, and we will need you and, though you'll never admit it, you'll need us.
So now, we must ask, how will you respect us?
But that, too, is not the right question. For Columbus did not ask simply 'how can I enslave them?' but rather, 'how can I enslave them on my own terms?'
So now, we must ask, how will you respect us on your own terms? You have told us what to do so we could follow. Yes, yes, we could follow your commands!
But we tried that, and we paid a harsh price for it. So now what must we do?
We are in another deadlock. We tried to yield, despite our uncivilized ways, and your commands were to our detrimend. Our legs were broken at the knees yet you told us to jump.
So we could try to impress you by coming up with our own plans, but you will fear those, because your language does not know 'suggestion,' it merely knows 'command' and it does not know 'advice,' it merely knows 'insult.' Some of you, like the Spanish and the French and the Italians and the Germans, are more capable of understanding us, for you have known what it means to have both knees broken, but those few are not enough.
So now, we must ask, what do we do? We can not make you respect us enough to learn our language, and we can try to follow your commands but those are to our detriment.
And we continue trying to develop in the ways that you developed, yet we are destroying our planet's environment just as you destroyed it and continue to destroy it, and amidst all of this destruction, you realize what is happening but only selectively, so you criticize us for our end since, clearly, you lack a mirror to look into. And then we, the uncivilized, slowly begin to reason and to think and we start to wonder and to see, and we start daring to disturb the universe, and animosities are born, and accusations are made.
But perhaps we can simply act, in this one instance, as the more civilized of the two. You do not own mirrors, we are slowly learning. But we do. We can see that Lima is constantly covered in smoke. We can see the Andean ice-capped mountains are becoming browner with every day that passes. We notice our nets catching less and less fish. We notice that the life-spans of frogs are getting shorter. We notice that respiratory diseases are on the rise throughout our Andes and beyond into the whole of the developing world.
And we who are developing throughout the entire world see this when we look in the mirror and we recoil. We will not debate about gay marriage yet, and we will not all be at the forefront of gender equality, because we have more at stake than that - again, we poor bastards only know how to live life and are not advanced enough to simulate it. We will debate about our air. About our water, which we know you will one day try to buy. About our food, which so many of us can no longer afford while you throw it at weddings so that the ants may eat.
We are not happy with you and, maybe, we never will get over the crimes you have committed against us. Maybe we will always be asking God to bring justice to our world.
But we live here, too. You will pollute our world without realizing what you are doing, but we the united developing States of the world will not be blind. We will invest in mirrors while you invest only on windows to watch us from. We will listen to your advice and control our development, and we will live in respect of nature as our forefathers knew how to do. You will think we are doing this because you are not leaving us another choice and so you will go to sleep thinking you did a wonderful thing.
But, call it pride or call it dignity - we call it both -, we will act in accordance with our collective conscience for somewhere in our savagery and somewhere in our poverty, and as we watched starve our brothers and sisters of the Andes and of the African Great Lakes and of the Sahara and of the American isthmus and of the Orinoco range and of the Ganges, we learned that we are human. And we learned that humans are sacred, even if you think we are too uncivilized to understand what 'sacred' means.
Somehow, we learned about respecting human rights, though we are not yet as eloquent in writing about it as you are. But, soon, we will reach you even there. And when we do, we will do our best to show you how mirrors work, for we think that this is a bit of technology that may be of great service to you.
So, fear not, we will continue trying to keep the environment clean, if only because we live here too. You think we are ignorant of that fact, but we wonder if perhaps you, while you learned to simulate life and danger and even death, forgot what you yourselves taught us when you were being so clever with your philosophies.
Perhaps we have overtaken you, just as you dream about in your movies about creations overtaking creators.
We only ask that you stop reading your history of Romans who learned only to expand and Greeks who learned only to push limitlessly, and perhaps read of our Incas (yes, we return to the provincial despite your obsession with the cosmopolitan), inferior though you think they may be to your Romans, and see how they learned to accept their physical realities and expand within those limits. We know that this conflicts with your notions of freedom and entitlement, but we ask that you re-think those notions as well.
We are capable of working with you and we would build great things together, but you must first learn to accept us as your equals and not as your conquests.
Until you do that, however, could you please stop wasting our resources and dirtying our environment? You have the past, if you want it, and we'll let you keep the present for a short while longer, but the future is ours, and we want a clean one.
Thanks!
