“It is Free. It costs nothing,” stated the anesthesiologist to the boy’s family. “To put your son to sleep for his surgery costs absolutely nothing! It is Free! Free! But to wake him up?…very very expensive!”
Indeed.
Moments earlier, in the same pre-operative area in this public hospital in a large Central American city, I witnessed another local medical doctor, drill a metal rod horizontally and completely through an indegenous patient’s femur, while the grimacing patient was wide awake, and only after injecting numbing medicine, not much deeper than the skin, on the entry site of the thigh.
Obviously, most Americans are never faced with such choices when considering surgeries and other medical procedures, however, such is the plight of the poor and marginalized in economically challenged countries, of which I have witnessed as an anesthesiologist, in over 30 international surgical missions, and which dominate the lyrical content of Ojos Feos’ original psychedelic Afro-Latin rock compositions.
“Why O Why?” is one of the 8 original, social justice-themed tracks on Ojos Feos’ most recent release, La Situación. It is a 3rd person account of a Central American mother who has had her children forcibly taken away under Donald Trump’s Child Separation Policy.
“Where, oh where
Will my babies be?
Taken some place
To never be seen?.”
As the political and economic situations have been in precipitous decline in Central America and Mexico over the last 5 years, an increasing number of families have chosen to undergo the hardships and perils of the journey to the United States rather than endure the constant threat of drug lords, shake downs and violent crimes in their home countries. Unfortunately, the Trump administration had labelled these same people as “rapist,” “criminals” and “murderers” and made their odyssey a central part of the 2016 presidential campaign. Not long after Donald Trump was elected president, under his “Zero Tolerance Policy,” children seeking entry into the United States were taken from their families with no established plans for reunification with their parents. Already traumatized by being torn from their families, these innocent children were detained in unsanitary, unsafe and understaffed conditions with little access to the staples of daily living.
“Far away,
The sick and the frail.
Innocent lives
Are sleeping in jail.”“Why O Why?” is an upbeat and danceable, high energy composition based on a fusion of reggaeton and calypso world rhythms. Hoping not to take away from the song’s catchy groove, Ojos Feos’ intention, with their newest hit single, is to add their voice to the thousands who are working diligently to reunite incarcerated and innocent immigrant children with their families and to minimize the damage from this senseless, and highly political, separation policy which promotes racism and is an assault, not only on social justice, but on human decency.
In the musical world of Ojos Feos, immigrant children are never separated from their families and, regardless of their economic situation, the patient always wakes up!!
“When it’s served
To clear the debris.
From unguarded truths
Then they will be free.”– Robbie Cree
