Reflection N° 142 - Back Home

Fortunately, I am born in the countryside –at Jocolí Viejo– in a province that still was colonial, with a number of European immigrants cultivating traditions like home, house, orchard and chicken coup, fruit trees, irrigation canals and domestic animals. After we moved to Mendoza outskirts for we had to go to primary school, we passed two months –January and February– with our aunts and uncles in such rural district, amid vineyards, alfalfa’s grounds, fruit scrublands, groves, cows and farm horses, with no electricity and radio to listen news and music. We went early to bed, and I learnt to walk in the dark, playing with my brothers and cousins. The rest of the year, there was a rigorous ten-month school calendar, including Saturdays. Without leave days, public holidays in the school were met with allusive classes and cultural events shared by all pupils. We went to school 15 blocks away, without anyone to accompany us, but in family groups. The schoolmistress taught, and we had a personal reading book in our suitcase. The first class, 45 minutes, consisted of reading the book, one by one in front, properly standing at attention; the schoolmistress was responsible for correcting. I still remember some few pages of Leo Tolstoy, Domingo F. Sarmiento, Miguel Cané, Edmondo De Amicis and others. The second class was arithmetic; we learned addition and subtraction, and multiplication tables, which were studied by heart. The third class was history and geography, and the fourth class was devoted to natural sciences. We practiced calligraphy and drawing, and spelling was corrected in all notebooks. There were no canteens or school alfajores when we entered; the school gave each child a German bread sandwich with ham wrapped in wax paper. Rude words were severely punished, and parents never were called. The school was a matter between schoolmistress and students, and every issue was solved between them. Issues were not serious because in the school there was discipline in terms of hours, behavior of the schoolmistress with the students, and between them, with the presence of the Principal observing classes. There was one schoolmistress for each grade, teaching every subject, and there were no gym classes but games for playtime. In those days, in the Thirties, teacher salaries were higher than those of public employees and store clerks, and sufficient to support a family. Mendoza had only one Normal School founded by D.F. Sarmiento in the nineteenth century. I studied there when I finished primary school.

Again, we were fortunate when we moved to the city: a large house with galleries, vineyards and gardens, dirt roads and ditches through which water flowed to irrigate the trees of the streets, a light bulb in each corner, many close gardens with fruit trees, no police or cars, and some few vendors offering milk, vegetables, firewood and charcoal for cooking, in a horse-drawn carriage. Every week, the bread was cooked in a clay oven. After lunch, the entire family was together, every one at his place, commenting the news of the school; we made quickly our homework, and later we had the afternoon to play. In those days we were aware of hundreds of games and we made our own toys, from kites to little wheeled cars to race. In Mendoza there were no toy stores or TV, and the local radio was not much, one hour in the evening after dinner. We have the right to go to the movies once a month, a Sunday, and our excursions consisted of going on excursion, on foot, to uncultivated fields of the neighborhood, by the irrigation ditch of plum trees. It was an entertained life and we were ready to form groups and socialize with our neighbors. Occasionally my father took us by car to the foothills of the mountains to spend the day and other times to visit our aunts and uncles in the countryside.

That life of mine came to an end when we moved again closer to downtown, paved streets and cement irrigation ditches, minibuses before us, a lot of cars, admission to the Normal School, and puberty. It was another way of studying, many professors, long pants, jacket and necktie, and every day Los Andes newspaper under the front door. The Second World War had started and I was interested, reading the newspaper news and listening at the London BBC and the Germany Voice in Spanish half an hour every night. My heroes were the Field Marshall Edwin Rommel on the African desert and submariners in the Atlantic Ocean. I collected photos of the war when I could. I stopped playing, learning to be alone. I was reading tirelessly.

I was able to know and live the home life. As the primary school is a private matter between schoolmistress and pupil so as to produce the cultural phenomenon of the class, without any intervention from inspectors, other teachers or parents, so the home life is a communion of parents and sons, and sometimes by charity of a grandfather. Any strange human or technological element interfering with such nucleus destroys this home and its creative magic. Home was ever fire, in my youth days cooking and baking bread; other times, it was the chimney where we cooked and baked rye bread, and above, on hot flagstones, there were beds to sleep on snowy nights. Now, in my house of the Children’s Village, every day I light the chimney, cook some food on a little grill, and relax while I am thinking of Reflections.

Farewell to home and school. The first actors –mother and schoolmistress– have been replaced by irresistible technological devices that are meant to children and adults. Primary and secondary pupils fail time and again, and eventually many times give up; they cannot speak, read or write a simple letter without spelling errors. They leave the school and work anywhere to earn money and buy their self-destruction –cigarettes, drug and bars. In the Colón School of this locality, Las Vegas, with some few pupils, there are more than 17 employees in the General Directorate of Schools: principal, first secretary, second secretary, monitors, grade schoolmistress and music schoolmistress, et cetera. At the end of the primary school, these pupils go to the secondary school in the neighborhood. At the end of the secondary one, they go to the city working in a store or cleaning car windshields at the traffic lights. In case of living as a couple, they take refuge in a slum, with dish antenna, and begin to breed.

Television programs, electronic games, Internet and e-mails are democratic and cheap, the same for all. They are designed for the masses and when something important has been announced, all channels remain in connection with such event of whatever kind. The TV set remains on continuously and there is no home; demons have caught that family environment, which is the first of all, and from there it controls and rules over men, adults and children. Politics, creeds, economy, education, passions and desires are flowing from such device flooding houses and souls. Virtually, one can get anything from those screens. There is no tangible reality. Now, laboratories are tirelessly investigating so as to get an accessible and convincing 3D of subjective sensations –touch, taste and smell. It is the hell on the Planet of electrons. In society, manipulators want to replace life for cybernetic devices and robots. It is the decomposition of the Christian civilization, produced by is own achievements, technology, communications, massification and money. Also Atlantis collapsed in this way by the 1500 Year War through tools from the Black Magi: use of elementals, storms and earthquakes, astral journeys and mind control. These days I have read in a newspaper that the United States are massively creating remote control weapons, with no pilots but with automatic robots. In their opinion, wars shall be led from the Pentagon.

In the society of the twenty-first century, its protagonists cannot come back home unless they adopt Renunciation resolutions and begin to live differently, in another place and with new ideas, which are set out in the Teaching of the American Race.

A home admits two meanings: family intimacy and inner life. A family lives in an exclusive house of necessary elements for the full development of its members, parents and sons in all stages of life until the time when the young set up an independent, different and new home, with other aims. When a home is harmonious and tolerant, permanent values are conveyed in this way from generation to generation with short steps of every one for society as a whole, and human history achieves proposals of each evolutive stage.

Home also means inner life because our physical and psychical system and its complexities and variations, contradictions and apprenticeship, joys and suffering, are a home for our soul. It is our permanent house accompanying us until the time of death. We can be at the center of a perfect family, with our chimney and its fire burning, and much love, and we shall have two homes in synchrony: those beings that are with us and help us, and the riches of an inner life with a flame burning and illuminating all our deeds. The little home represented by our parents and brothers and sisters, the house in order, mutual respect, a Great Home that we are, and every one radiating treasures of inner life.

Both homes almost have disappeared in modern society because we stay at the end of the Christian civilization and we should change Races starting again. We can lose the family home because there are difficult factors of interference, and one remains alone. But we should not lose that home of inner life because there is the legacy of generations, seed of the new times, and hope of those who are being born.

Our intimate home ever is with us, right or wrong, in sorrow and joy. If we move away and feel attracted by the will-o’-the-wisps of the changing outer world, we can come back, finding again experiences of our childhood and occupying the warm environment of the soul, which gave us peace in sad moments, hope in desolation, and resignation before unsolvable suffering.

Dear reader: Let us come back; let us come back to the hearth that is burning.

José González Muñoz
February 2011