the terror

man, I was so pumped from last week and how there were so few problems, and now we get the bloodiest time since independence. Yet another problem for Latin America.
People tend to become angels or demons when looked upon with a modern eye gazing into the past. Their actions are boiled down to what they did once, how they acted in political power and the role they played, rather than becoming the sum of all of their parts. I don't think it's entirely possible to take a historical figure and not try to categorize them as good or evil, because that's how we deal with the past. the past is evil, the past is not who we are today because we have learned from the past and we will (try to) not be those people again. We are inclined to sort people into good or evil boxes in our minds and I think that's okay.
Binaries are how we are generally taught to see the world and this is something that we can unlearn as we grow away from these ideals, but they stick with us. Good and evil looking into the past, for example, is always going to be fairly binary. The Axis Powers were bad; The Allies were good. We have heavily romanticized this ideal of good overcoming evil and we love looking at stories where this happens so it makes sense to categorize history in the sense of good and evil.
The paranoia that filtered down to Latin America from the United States about the cold war just feels wrong to me and I don't particularly have words to describe it. It feels like the US handing out weapons to Latin America is just not a good thing, and I have this sense of foreboding about it because this week is described as the bloodiest time since independence. So, this handing out of arms seems like a great idea!