The Capitalist System
Thanks, Julian1, for asking how we are discharging and thinking about the capitalist system, and for your thoughts about how important and necessary it is to replace it with a society that is humane, inclusive, and equitable for all women and men in the world.
I am a woman raised in a working-class home. My mother and father were born and raised in a rural area. They came to the capital city when they were young, to keep up their schooling because in the countryside there were no options.
I was about five or six years old when I had my first experience (that I can remember) of realizing I was living in an unjust society. A little girl my age knocked on our door at night while my family was having dinner. She had come to beg for food. She was barefoot, her clothes were dirty, and she was noticeably thin. (Later, as the years went by, I understood that she exemplified the state of malnutrition of children in my country.) I remember being very affected by this experience. After seeing her, I ran anxiously to my father and told him what I had seen at our door.
My father´s response was, “Go back to your meal, my dear. Don’t worry. She’s a poor little girl. In this world there will always be rich people and poor people. Best2 to finish your food, because there are a lot of people like her in this world who don’t have enough to eat. Be grateful to God that you do have food every day and have a family.”
Every time I remember my father’s words and that little girl’s face, I cry deeply for long periods of time. I’ve never forgotten that event.
At the age of fifteen I visited the United States, as a quinceañera3 birthday gift from my father. When I returned, I understood clearly that I lived in a country that was poor, inequitable, unjust, and inhumane. I also understood that there were countries with lots of resources and others, like my country, that were very poor. Since then I have been committed to studying about the reality and roots of this inequality and to changing it. I couldn’t sit back and do nothing. It was not possible. The poverty of my people, of the children, hurt me deep in my soul, and I am still hurting.
I joined the Iglesia Popular de Liberación (The Catholic Liberation Church) and the struggle to change the system. I have been in this struggle for forty-five years and in RC for eighteen years.
Re-evaluation Counseling has helped me discharge my impatience, letdowns4, and frustrations and the feelings that sometimes make me lose perspective and my hope that a world free of oppressions is possible. It has helped me understand that revolution is a process built day by day, with small victories of personal and collective transformations. It has also helped me understand that each session, each bit of discharge, each decision I make, after a re-evaluation, to change the world is a revolutionary act that helps transform the world.
Anonymous
Translated by Pamela Shepard García
Reprinted from the RC e-mail discussion list for leaders of wide world change
1 Julian Weissglass, the International Commonality Reference Person for Wide World Change
2 “Best” means it is best.
3A quinceañera is a celebration of a girl’s fifteenth birthday and her transition from childhood to adulthood.
4“Letdowns” means disappointments.