For the Good of All by Otto Rene Castillo Listen, look, touch this voice, for underneath a man burns sweetly for the good of all. Cliches? You, try to be worthy all day long. Afterwords we'll speak alone if you wish. I tell you. At this stage of our time after twenty centuries of christian word, man is worse than ever more evil than ever less caring than ever. Even the word love has been lost —love! This at least in my country gentle and sonorous as no other. And in spite of it all, there are nations where man sings a duet with tenderness. And eats enough. And drinks enough. And constructs enough, and more. And loves, more than enough if the blind torment appeals to him, rock and air. And who made these nations? He, he with his hands cordial and hard. And the heat of his head from where the future bursts like a rocket in space. He, the new man who looking on the horizon of his hands, said one day: Enough hunger! Enough misery! Enough being the toy of divine forces that don't exist! Enough and enough and enough! I am my own destiny! From now on he said, the centuries will come to kneel before my image, proud, alone, and human. And he began to climb the mountains of hate, to conquer the enormous moles of envy, to penetrate the labyrinth jungles of misery and hunger. And his soul became light with the swallows of tenderness. And all the magnates of the world, laughing, laughing with the pure politicos, hung over with their lives of commerce and industry. Have they stopped laughing today? Naturally not, biologically not! He, only he, the powerful of this century, the proud of himself, the solitary and the human, the man who works, has won, wins, and will keep on winning. Like a comet he'll disappear in history with his forehead in flame but his fire will continue lighting the centuries to come. And if you come now to the plaza of his acts to the streets where he risked his life, you'll find bread on everyone's table, a roof over everyone's head, a kiss on the lips of everyone, friendship running in the veins of all. And when will this cosmic force arrive in my sweet country? Sonorous and odorous like a petal in the sea? When we, all of us, decide to make it arrive! Or never. Only in ourselves the light, the dawn, or nowhere. Beneath our night a sun awaits us greater than the universe: the authentic freedom of man. But freedom is like wheat. It must be planted, softly, and watered every day. It must be protected till it multiplies fills the mouth of the wind, the hunger of all, and becomes invincible. So, I say, our evil, our badness, our lack of care, will only be wiped out with the unity of all for the good of all. If we unite we will win over the fearful smelling his own death, enemy, howling already, definitive and huge. Now do you understand this voice? It is not only mine, nor yours, but that of all. And I know that many hear it, they sense it, they see it, and cry in hiding because they recognize in that voice their own, the voice already lost or not emerging. And I know they love and respect this voice, because no one can deny that beneath the voice a man burns sweetly for the good of all, even for the good of those who have not heard it.