Day 334 Wisdom

Wednesday 9 July 2009

I wake up feeling better and lay off the antihistamines, but I blow my nose early and I blow my nose often in the fashion of the best voters—at least I don’t have to wade through voter’s pamphlets. At midmorning I feel well enough to collect $48 (USD) from our stash and walk to the BCP branch to pay our two Telefonica cell phone bills. When I get to the bridge on the river Piura there are soldiers dressed in camouflaged fatigues standing around with locked & loaded M16s slung over their shoulders, and I can’t help myself—I begin to whistle the theme from Bridge on the River Kwai. I stop whistling before I’m within hearing distance just in case one of them knows the movie, but my interest is piqued as to why there are so many young men (four-six at each corner of the bridge) with weapons of mass destruction casually held in their itchy-to-shoot hands—I don’t like it, I don’t like it at all—where’s the wisdom in this?

I learn later that there’s a noontime paro planned by the local chapter of Confederación General de Trabajadores del Peru (CGTP), the oldest labor union in Peru formed in 1968 by the Peruvian Communist Party, but a strike doesn’t really explain soldiers with loaded guns does it? It’s like asking for a stupid incident to occur, it seems unwise—I think of national guardsmen and rifles and students at Kent State in May of 1970. This paro is to protest the free-market policies of President Alan Garcia. The local newspaper says the military forces are to guard the city’s infrastructure and to maintain order; sometimes I’m very glad I’m an American.

I finish my chore at the bank, walk back home, and never do I hear a shot fired so I guess order was maintained and the city’s infrastructure is still standing. I work on this journal a bit more in the afternoon, but I tire easily again today and take several breaks to read more Faulkner. During almuerzo Teri and I talk about the protest; she heard at the colegio that some teacher and transportation unions joined CGTP. It’s amazing to read that this union was formed by real live communists. The economic creed “from each according to his ability and to each according to his need” has always appealed to me since first learning of it in college and it seems so morally superior to “everyman for himself,” and I think of Bob Dylan’s ‘My Back Pages,’ ah, but I was so much older then, I’m younger than that now.

When I get into bed I seem to fight sleep with my brain firing off disparate thoughts and ideas about belief and truth, aging and youth; during the struggle I come up with an aphorism that I go over several times so I’ll remember it in the morning: The most important aspect of wisdom is the recognition that as we get older we don’t get wiser.