Eduardo Galeano - Children of the Days - A Calendar of Human History

Without intending to, these sharp instruments of religious propaganda paved the way for the editorial cartoons of our day.

In 1986 Mad Cow disease struck the British Isles and more than two million cows suspected of harboring contagious dementia faced capital punishment.

In 1997 avian flu from Hong Kong sowed panic and condemned a million and a half birds to premature death.

In the year 2009 Mexico and the United States suffered an outbreak of swine flu, and the entire world had to shield itself from the plague. Millions of pigs, no one knows how many, were sacrificed for coughing or sneezing.

Who is guilty of causing human disease? Animals.

It’s that simple.

Free of all suspicion are the giants of global agribusiness, those sorcerer’s apprentices who turn food into high-potency chemical bombs.

In Mexico tonight, as every year on this night, the living host the dead, and the dead eat and drink and dance and get caught up on all the latest gossip from the neighborhood.

But when night comes to a close, when church bells and first light bid them adieu, some of the dead get lively and try to hide in the shrubbery or behind the tombs in the graveyard. People chase them out with brooms: “Get going,” “Leave us in peace,” “We don’t want to see you until next year.”

You see, the dead are real layabouts.

In Haiti, a long-standing tradition forbids carrying the casket straight to the cemetery. The funeral cortege has to twist and turn and zigzag to fool the one who has died, so he won’t be able to find his way back home.

The living minority defends itself as best as it can.

Not only men lost their heads. Women, too, were decapitated and forgotten, since they weren’t important like Marie Antoinette.

Three exemplary cases:

Olympe de Gouges was beheaded by the French Revolution in 1793 to remove her belief that women were citizens;

in 1943 Marie-Louise Giraud climbed the scaffold for having performed abortions, “criminal acts against the French family”;

and the same year in Munich the guillotine sliced off the head of a student, Sophie Scholl, for handing out antiwar leaflets against Hitler. “Too bad,” Sophie said. “Such a fine sunny day and I have to go.”

“Who could lay siege to Tenochtitlán?” the songs asked. “Who could move the foundations of heaven?”

In the year 1519 messengers reported to Aztec king Moctezuma that several strange beings were on their way to Tenochtitlán. They spit thunder and had metal breasts, hairy faces and six-legged bodies.

Four days later the monarch welcomed them.

They had arrived on the very same sea by which the god Quetzalcóatl had departed in ancient times, and Moctezuma believed that Hernán Cortés was the god returning. He said to him, “You have come home.”

And he handed Cortés the crown and gave him offerings of gold: gold ducks, gold tigers, gold masks, gold and more gold.

Then, without unsheathing his sword, Cortés took the king prisoner in his own palace.

In the end, Moctezuma was stoned to death by his people.

In 1714 Bernardino Ramazzini died in Padua.

He was an unusual physician, who always began by asking, “What work do you do?”

That this might matter had never occurred to anyone before.

His experience allowed him to write the first treatise on occupational health, in which he described, one by one, the most common illnesses in more than fifty jobs. He demonstrated that there was little point in treating workers who must swallow their hunger and live deprived of sun and rest in shuttered workshops that are airless and filthy.

King Charles II was born in Madrid in 1661.

During his forty years he never managed to stand up or speak without drooling or keep the crown from falling off his head, a head that never hosted a single idea.

Charles was his aunt’s grandson, his mother was his father’s niece and his great-grandfather was his great-grandmother’s uncle: the Hapsburgs liked to keep things close to home.

So much devotion to family put an end to them.

When Charles died, the dynasty in Spain died with him.

One night in 1619, when René Descartes was still quite young, he dreamed all night long.

As he told it, in the first dream he was bent over, unable to straighten up, struggling to walk against a fierce wind that propelled him toward school and church.

In the second dream a bolt of lightning knocked him out of bed and the room filled up with sparks that illuminated everything in sight.

And in the third, he opened an encyclopedia, looking for a way to live his life, but those pages were missing.

They flew to Monterrey in a private plane.

There, in the year 2008, they kicked off their triumphant tour. They were declared distinguished guests and were put on nine floats to tour the town.

It was as if they were politicians on a victory lap, but they weren’t.

They were mummies, mummies from the cholera plague that devastated the city of Guanajuato more than a century and a half before.

The eleven women, seven men, five children and a bodiless head, all dressed for a party, then crossed the border. Though these mummies were Mexican, no one asked for their passports, nor did the border guards harass them.

They continued unimpeded to Los Angeles, Las Vegas and Chicago, where they paraded under flowered arches to cheering crowds.

On a day like today in 1989, the Berlin Wall met its end.

But other walls were born to keep the invaded from invading the invaders,

to keep Africans from collecting the wages the slaves never received,

to keep Palestinians from returning to the country stolen from them,

to keep Saharawis from entering their usurped land,

to keep Mexicans from setting foot on the immense territory bitten off from their country.

In the year 2005, the most famous human cannonball in the world, David Smith, protested in his own way the humiliating wall that separates Mexico from the United States. An enormous cannon shot him high into the Mexican air and David fell, safe and sound, on the forbidden side of the border.

He had been born in the United States but, while his flight lasted, he was Mexican.

Brazilian physician Drauzio Varella calculated that the world invests five times as much in male sex stimulants and female silicone implants as in finding a cure for Alzheimer’s.

“In a few years,” he prophesied, “we will have old women with huge tits and old men with stiff cocks, but none of them will remember what they are for.”

The first time was in Moscow on this day in 1821.

He was born again at the end of 1849 in Saint Petersburg.

Dostoevsky had spent eight months in prison awaiting the firing squad. At first he hoped it would never happen. Then he accepted that it would happen when it happened. And in the end, he wanted it to happen right now, the sooner the better, because waiting was worse than dying.