Breathe
By Linda Atach Zaga
"America's golden age begins now."
Trump, 2025.
Terror is a double-edged sword. On the one hand, it overcomes our reasoning, takes away our logic and plunges us into a stress capable of taking over our mind and body, to the point of making us sick. On the other hand, and thanks to the fact that it activates our state of vigilance, terror is the most effective mechanism of self-defense and survival. As instinctive as hunger and satiety, since the world began, terror has served us to keep us alert, as the alarm that resonates inside us to save us and make us react, just like a wild animal that approaches us with a weapon to harm us.
Unlike fear, which depends on perception and involves the supernatural, learned issues and certain experiences that condition our behavior and beliefs, terror does respond to a real threat. Maybe that is why there are less and less people with unfounded fears, but more and more people terrified, and not by the threat of a crocodile or a hungry tiger, nor by a hurricane or an earthquake, even though we have suffered so many lately, no.
What terrifies us today is humanity itself, those who have been close to us and do not know us, our prejudiced neighbors and leaders determined to deny that we have a shared condition that, rather than dividing us and sowing hatred, should unite us, for we are all human.
Trump's return is a real threat that has already penetrated the soul, bones and skin of the more than thirteen million undocumented migrants in the United States, who are only looking for work and a dignified life, but who are seen and treated as criminals of the worst kind. The saddest thing is that, parallel to the daily threats of deportation, Trump has decided to end the tranquility of these people and make their lives miserable. Who can be calm if they hear daily that they can be repatriated and uprooted from the life they always dreamed of?
That is why, since they understood that they could be banished at any moment, children fear losing their friends and school and suffer from incontinence and panic attacks, while men, women, the elderly and the young have dry throats and are unable to cry. They also feel short of breath, their hearts are overly agitated and their lungs widen in order to fill their limbs with oxygen, ready to flee. They do not know it, but the anxiety they experience significantly increases their glucose and although at times they feel full of energy, it is only what they need to react to danger, but in reality they are weaker and weaker, without appetite and with their stomachs in knots, unable to digest anything but worry. That is what sowing fear is for, to sap strength and annihilate people.
It should be emphasized that, among this multitude of hopeless, emotionally hurt and at-risk beings, there are more than five million Mexicans who have put down roots and who, although Trump insists on denying it, enrich the vital pulse of Los Angeles, Chicago, New York and Texas.
There is nothing worse than surviving with the knowledge that your safety and your future hangs by a razor-thin thread that the thousands of Enforcementand Removal Operations (ERO) operators can break at church or at school, no matter what it entails.
What can one expect if on the first day of his term, Trump ordered an end to "humanitarian parole" for Nicaraguans, Cubans, Venezuelans and Haitians, without understanding that a good part of these people came to the United States to save their lives? How to stop the use of hate for political purposes?
I think of the fathers and mothers. The grandmothers who have just been reunited with their children and grandchildren. I also think of the number of families that Trump has decided to break up for good, because there is no love or will that can withstand so much mistreatment.
The problem with terror is that it is contagious. And that those who act under its effects are not thinking clearly. Trump is sowing violence realize it. And violence always returns to its source.
*Art historian, lover of life and defender of Human Rights.
Expert in visual culture and gender. Proudly graduated from UNAM.
The opinions expressed are the responsibility of the authors and are absolutely independent of the position and editorial line of the company. Opinion 51.
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