By Jim Harney

While in Milwaukee last year I went to the 40th Anniversary of Casa Maria, the Catholic Worker House, not expecting to bump into any one that I might know. I met a member of Good Shepherd parish where I had given a talk a few days before she indicated that she was giving a Confirmation class. I asked where was it going to be held. At her home she said. I asked if I could attend. She was more than happy to invite me to her home where I met fifteen members of the parish ready to get anointed, to move into the fire of the world with a sense of hope, love, mercy, all the stuff the market says trash. I gave a presentation on the Undocumented.

After the presentation I asked the youth if they would come up with some hard questions as a result of seeing Central Americans risking everything. One student took down the questions. I felt so honored to have been in their midst. I have to say that I feel so fortunate doing the work that I do.

Here are some of the questions they raised:

• What would you be willing to do (after seeing Globalization and the Undocumented)?
• How much are you willing to give up for the undocumented?
• What can we do so that these people don’t have to go through this?
• Why do we care?
• Would you sacrifice everything that they do?
• Why are they the ones that have to go through it?
• Are you willing to give up the American Dream for theirs?
• Why does it have to be this way?
• Why do we want more when people don’t even have what we have?
• What makes gang members so mean?
• Why do we pay athletes so much when we could use the money to help others?

I have these hard questions in the back of my mind as I’m at Ft. Benning listening to the booming sound of a drumbeat after the name of a person murdered in Latin America is sung and then thousands holding crosses raise them into the air and sing PRESENTE! The sound of the PRESENTE recalling martyrs; denouncing U.S. foreign policy that comes down hard on the poor of this hemisphere as well as the world; recalling years of U.S.-induced terror.

With each PRESENTE a wake-up call to a world of pain took place, brought on by political and economic decisions made by a few and defended by the world’s largest military budget of more than $536 billion. Each PRESENTE linked everyone to a concrete name, a human being with a history and place where U.S. foreign policy exercises its muscle to contain resistance, hope and life, all of which are antithetical to market values. With each name sung a profound restatement against war, violence, thuggery and death surged as we remembered Los Olvidados - The Forgotten. Each PRESENTE affirmed those who lived, however brief a time. After some of the names came the journey-moment the person walked this planet: two-days, two-weeks, two-years and 84-years before they were murdered. My body shivered. Here I am 67 years old trying to discern how to live along the journey and it’s my first time to Ft. Benning. Hopefully it won’t be the last.

While at Ft. Benning denouncing the School of Assassins, I thought of the Forgotten, living on the edge of the planet, refusing to bow to the powerful; and the market has no control over their lives. The Forgotten have the ability to share with us even at the cost of life itself, ending up in the clutches of those trained in the School of the Americas to humiliate and torture. The Grito - the cry that chimes in their flesh surges in the PRESENTE of the living. That Grito feeds us; leads us to the “Bloody Christ”, the “Crucified” as Ignacio Ellacuría killed by those trained in the School of the Americas said so well. Then the thought of the Grito of Febe Elizabeth Velasquez, a union woman murdered when death squads hurled a bomb into her union office killing some twenty others, came bolting out of the past looking me square in the face. Then came Chepe and Ricardo, two youth I knew, murdered during a bloody offensive in November 1989. Behind each PRESENTE twenty people who came into my life pushing me to remember my encounters with them, the narratives that came from their take on the world that had their families, communities, the country in mind as they risked relationship with others living in an environ of risk.

As I marched with people from all over the country I homed in on the word risk. It’s a dynamo word for those on Wall Street. It’s used daily as mega-rich individuals, powerful banks and brokerage firms figure out how much to price risk and the profit that comes when risk is sold and purchased. This violent world of abstraction has no relationship to the living, to production, to food, housing and education. Brokers put a price on it, and it’s usually high given the social, political and economic factors that weave into it like hurricanes, countries plunging into default with currencies artificially high, like Mexico and Argentina and the defaults that plunged the impoverished of the these countries further into poverty. Those with excess money buy risk, play casino capitalism, and pocket huge profits. Never in my life did I ever think that I’d be trying to understand “Savage Capitalism” in this way. The real risk however is born by the weak and fragile of the world who live on less than a dollar a day; they live in informal sectors using their ingenuity to tap into a meager bit of capital that has managed to find itself there; most capital stays clear of where the impoverished live and endure life. Yet they bear the brunt of economic meltdowns. They happen overnight when capital uproots from a country and moves elsewhere for the biggest payoff in a herd-like fashion.

Yet as we walked at the front-entrance of Ft. Benning with our crosses in hand, the word “risk” took on a different meaning. Unlike the market definition that boots the ego, the self, it entails “the others” of the world. It’s the kind of risk that brings us to deal with our spot on the planet where we make connections between ourselves and those who sit in torture chambers throughout the world. We risk imagining those kidnapped and jailed in secret prisons; we dare to confront elites engaged in unilateral trade deals with the United States, trade negotiations with severe consequences to them: more death in out-of-the- way places as human beings have less food security, less democracy, more police and military caging them into situations where water and sanitary facilities, health and education are non entities. We take the risk of confronting a world that, in the end produces no goods, but more death. Death squads move with impunity in most parts of a U.S.-backed world thus requiring the School of the Americas. The risk of taking on the death, declaring life, taking a step at a time while reinventing the world we live in doesn’t come easy. There’s a breaking out process that's entailed: a world of risk.

As I reflect on risk, I’m pondering what’s going on in Oaxaca where civil war takes place with hundreds wounded, dozens killed by police and death squads. The poverty that covers the country has much to do with the terror that swaths the city. Impoverished Mexicans head for the States to escape degrading poverty and unemployment. They can’t till the land anymore because transnationals call the shots on who eats and who doesn’t. The law of supply and demand rules. Without money, eating becomes an impossibility. Food is not a right of birth, it’s something that’s bought and sold.

Then I reflect on the risk of dealing with the hard questions raised by the youth. I hope that I’ll have the courage to tackle them and above all reach out for assistance in dealing with them; alone it’s daunting to even think of them.