And He's Back

It has been pointed out to me that I live life backwards. It was spring break time so I left Mexico and went to New York. The LR was working in Tijuana, the next week so we spent the weekend in San Diego. Again backwards. And finally, the area I live in is in the news making waves, and instead of capitalizing on it and snarking my butt off, I take a month’s vacation from blogging. It’s backwards.

But the thing is, I don’t have much to say about events on the border. From my vantage point down here, the recent coverage of Juarez says a lot more about the US media, and the U.S.’s appetite for news in general. Every once in a while a story in Mexico gets picked up by American news media for whatever reason. This time, I assume, it was because the three people killed in Ciudad Juarez were associated with the U.S. Consulate, so the President officially commented. Then for three days the story is in the news, and then it goes away again. The same thing happened in February when 14 people were massacred at a party.

Look, I understand that there is limited space both in the American newspapers (especially now as the print media industry circles the drain) and in the American psyche. Hell, we can’t even remember to think about the troops in Iraq and Afghanistan on a regular basis, and they are American. So, I don’t expect there to be ongoing news coverage, but the fact remains that this is not a new news story. And when the news treats what is in fact a chronic illness as an acute attack, it becomes impossible to reconcile the coverage with the reality.

Is it sad that three people died? Of course. Is it newsworthy? Absolutely. But those aren’t the important questions, these are. Is it sadder or more noteworthy than the ten Mexican citizens that died the day before? Or the ten who died the day before that? In Ciudad Juarez alone over 650 people have been killed this year to date. There were well over 2000 murders last year, and over 1200 the year before that. Murder, violence and the drug trade are just a way of life here. In a very real sense it’s a war zone, except instead of being a world away from the U.S. it’s less than ten minutes.

So, since I don’t have much to say about the violence down here, the blog is going to undergo a bit of a retasking. The blog is about my life on the border. At the moment my life on the border consists of trying very hard not to get shot (either accidently or intentionally). To that end, I stay inside a lot, play with my puppy, watch tv and root for the Yankees. So that stuff will be making more of an appearance on the blog. I’m not saying there will be 1500 word treatises on American Idol, or the back of the Yankee bullpen, but I’m not promising there won’t be either. There will still be amusing anecdotes (although probably more about Texas than Mexico for the time being), it just won’t be exclusively amusing anecdotes about the mess that is Mexico.