"The ultimate and most important revolutionary aspiration: to see human beings liberated from their alienation... The individual will reach total consciousness as a social being, which is equivalent to the full realization as a human creature, once the chains of alienation are broken. This will be translated concretely into the reconquering of one's true nature through liberated labor, and the expression of one's own human condition through culture and art."
--Che Guevara
Really. There needs to be a special Hell for people who write this kind of stuff. Even aside from all the terrible things this man promoted and did, just for writing that, he deserves eternal damnation.
Alienation. Estrangement. Becoming a stranger to what you ought to feel attached to and familiar with.
It is a weird and unsettling experience. When I first moved to the Castro almost 20 years ago, it felt like a kind of homeground to me. Over the years now, I often find myself moving through it as if it were someone else's neighborhood.
As the prophet Billy Joel wrote:
Well we all fall in love
But we disregard the danger
Though we share so many secrets
There are some we never tell
Why were you so surprised
That you never saw the stranger
Did you ever let your lover see
The stranger in yourself?
Once I used to believe
I was such a great romancer
Then I came home to a woman
That I could not recognize
When I pressed her for a reason
She refused to even answer
It was then I felt the stranger
Kick me right between the eyes
Creatures who can attach can un-attach.
1 comment:
Over at GayPatriot, I discovered that Fidel Castro has apologized for what he now claims was inadvertent homophobia "in the initial stages of his revolution." Tell that to Reinaldo Arenas. Some folks were saying this made him better than recently out and formerly RNC chairman Ken Mehlman. My jaw drops.
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