83
" ALI He was butterfly and bee. In the ring, he floated and stung. In 1967, Muhammad Ali, born Cassius Clay, refused to put on a uniform. “Got nothing against no Viet Cong,” he said. “Ain’t no Vietnamese ever called me nigger.” They called him a traitor. They sentenced him to a five-year jail term, and barred him from boxing. They stripped him of his title as champion of the world. The punishment became his trophy. By taking away his crown, they anointed him king. Years later, a few college students asked him to recite something. And for them he improvised the shortest poem in world literature: “Me, we. "
― Eduardo Galeano , Mirrors: Stories of Almost Everyone
84
" WALLS The Berlin Wall made the news every day. From morning till night we read, saw, heard: the Wall of Shame, the Wall of Infamy, the Iron Curtain . . . In the end, a wall which deserved to fall fell. But other walls sprouted and continue sprouting across the world. Though they are much larger than the one in Berlin, we rarely hear of them. Little is said about the wall the United States is building along the Mexican border, and less is said about the barbed-wire barriers surrounding the Spanish enclaves of Ceuta and Melilla on the African coast. Practically nothing is said about the West Bank Wall, which perpetuates the Israeli occupation of Palestinian lands and will be fifteen times longer than the Berlin Wall. And nothing, nothing at all, is said about the Morocco Wall, which perpetuates the seizure of the Saharan homeland by the kingdom of Morocco, and is sixty times the length of the Berlin Wall. Why are some walls so loud and others mute? "
― Eduardo Galeano , Mirrors: Stories of Almost Everyone
86
" The outcasts, one in five Indians, are beneath those on the bottom. They are called “Untouchables” because they contaminate: damned among the damned, they cannot speak to others, walk on their paths, or touch their glasses or plates. The law protects them, reality banishes them. Anyone can humiliate the men, anyone can rape the women, which is the only time the untouchables are touchable. At the end of 2004, when the tsunami trampled the coasts of India, they collected the garbage and the dead. As always. "
― Eduardo Galeano , Mirrors: Stories of Almost Everyone
88
" ISIS Like Osiris, Isis was privy to the mysteries of perpetual birth. We know her image: a mother goddess breastfeeding her son Horus, as the Virgin Mary suckled Jesus much later on. But Isis was never what we might call a virgin. She began making love to Osiris when they were growing together inside their mother’s womb. And she practiced the world’s oldest profession for ten years in the city of Tyre. In the thousands of years that followed, Isis traveled the world resuscitating whores, slaves, and others among the damned. In Rome, she founded temples for the poor alongside bordellos. The temples were razed by imperial order, their priests crucified, but like stubborn mules they came back to life again and again. And when Emperor Justinian’s soldiers demolished the sanctuary of Isis on the island of Philae in the Nile, and built the very Catholic church of Saint Stephen on the ruins, Isis’s pilgrims continued paying homage to their errant goddess at the Christian altar. "
― Eduardo Galeano , Mirrors: Stories of Almost Everyone
