#18 Balboa Park by Bruce Springsteen

Watch the video here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E5PpeEqMeFE

Springsteen weaves a tale of the life of a young man living on the border between Mexico and California. He is homeless, addicted, and just trying to survive. Drugs and crime, namely becoming a mule for drug transport, become his way of life.

The border patrol sweeps through, looking to round up some criminals. These drug smugglers and hustlers who are one small link in a chain of greed and crime, who are living on borrowed time, live with only the law and the long arm of death on their backs.

The “men in their Mercedes” come through for sexual favors, criminals of the worse kind, (those who have much and take from those who have little, those whose lifestyles support the system of drugs that requires people like these border boys to smuggle in drugs, packets of cocaine in their stomachs, risking an early and violent death) go home at night to their wives and children, to their mansion on the hill, while these boys sleep under the highway, alone left to die in their own blood.

The toxic fumes of greed, the fatal flower of addiction, the poison of poverty…takes someone’s precious child and invalidates his life, like the young man struck down by the border patrol, they are not seen and not honored. They are reduced to something worse than criminals. Their humanity is taken from them all because of who they are and the life they are born into.

“Where you live should not decide whether you live or whether you die” – U2

Additional Note: Today is the anniversary of 9/11. It was tragic that so many lives were taken on that day. The nation will probably set aside this date as a day of remembrance for years to come. When we stop to contemplate such tragedies, let us also remember the hundreds of thousands of lives that are lost living a life like the boys of Balboa Park. Let us remember the inequality of humanity, built of power and greed, that still permeates the world, including our own country, which stomps out the lives and voices of the poor. Let us remember this too.

For Complete Lyrics Visit: http://www.brucespringsteen.net/songs/BalboaPark.html