It is Free!! It costs nothing!! Stated the elderly 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, with the patient wide awake, and only after injecting numbing medicine, not much deeper than the skin, on the entry site of the thigh.
Such is the plight of the poor and marginalized, 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.
Listen to the song while reading the text.
“Why O Why?” is one of the eight 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 3 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 were taken from immigrant families seeking entry into the United States, with no established plans on reunification with their parents, and held in unsanitary, 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 human decency.
As such, in the musical world of Ojos Feos’ immigrant children are never separated from their families………..and the patient always wakes up!! Irregardless of the socio-economic situation of their family.
“When it’s served
To clear the debris.
From unguarded truths
Then they will be free.”
Ojos Feos
Ojos Feos, Category: Artist, Albums: La Situación, Di Bodi Fayn, Singles: Soy Vagabundo, Top Tracks: G’bye Mugabe, Di Monki Waka, Somalia, Perdida en la Mina, Soy Vagabundo, Biography: A psychedelic Afro-Latin rock music project, Ojos Feos consists mostly of musicians who have lived in developing countries., Monthly Listeners: 75, Where People Listen: Cuenca, Santiago, Warsaw, Buenos Aires, Atlanta
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