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We should be looking for painfully real monsters

Last week, a cable TV network broadcast a different program every day about a group of adventurers traveling to distant and exotics places looking for monsters, from the Abominable Snowman in the Himalayas to black panthers in southern England. Unfortunately, no monsters were ever found.

The script was the same for each episode: the adventurers traveled to their destination, interviewed some local residents, used high tech equipment (preferably at night, so you can show your night-vision gadgets), talked with some experts, and returned empty-handed to the U.S.

I guess that probably hundreds of thousands if not millions of dollars were spent to fund these “expeditions”, only to find nothing. However, the impression is that the adventures were really looking for monsters, including the Yeti, Bigfoot, giant snakes, live dinosaurs, the Apeman from China, and many other monsters.

I am speaking against crypto-zoology. In fact, almost every week a new animal is discovered. And I am not against any analysis of popular cultural or folkloric traditions talking about the existence of animals not officially accepted yet by scientists. After all, the gorilla, the okapi, and the platypus were once in that category.

I am, however, against the trivialization of the search for monsters. Even worst, that trivialized search never arrives to any conclusion. If there is a person with the time, money, and resources to travel around the world looking for monsters, perhaps that person will use those resources to look for real monsters.

This is my suggestion: why don’t they go out and document with images the monsters of poverty, discrimination, school dropout, endemic unemployment, and health care disparities? Those are real monsters.

Perhaps the Yeti, Bigfoot, and giant snakes are real, or perhaps they are not and they belong to the same category with the Kraken and the mermaids. While we are looking for monsters that may or may not exist, other monsters, these ones very real, are literally menacing our communities.

What can we say about the monster of poverty that kills the present and the future of countless families all over the planet? Or what else can be added about the high school dropout level among Hispanics and other minorities, robbing them from achievement a good level of academic formation?

The ugly face of racism is as ugly as the ugly faces of those horrible monsters TV adventurers try to find, but racism is real and it can cause a traumatic experience similar to those supposedly caused by the encounter with a giant wild man.

If in order to find their monsters those adventures, interview people who supposedly experienced a direct encounter with monsters, why then we don’t do the same to know more about that monstrosity that is the current immigration system and we talk with those with first-hand experience dealing with that monster?

Perhaps one day we will discover that some unknown creatures do exist. But we don’t need to wait even for one more day to see destruction caused by other painfully real monsters.

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