Participant observation has turned me into an anti-capitalist therapist. How many times, and with how many different young Honduran men, have I had the following conversation?

cipote: I'm shit. I haven't done anything with my life. I'll never amount to anything. I try to find a job, I try to get ahead, but I can't, because I'm shit.
me: You're not shit. Capitalism is shit. The oligarchy is shit. Your boss is shit. The U.S. State Department is shit. But you are not shit.

Even with the Resistance, with the so-called "awakening" of the Honduran people following the coup, the soul-crushing weight of neoliberalism, with its ridiculously high unemployment rates, removal of all public services, etc., and the symbolic violence it spawns continues to be heartbreaking on an individual level. There are so many young men out there going through this agony alone. There is so much work to be done. And that work is precisely the opposite of the solutions offered by the neoliberal NPIC, which focus on that idiotic redundancy, the "girl-child." Solutions must never treat genders in isolation (that's not how people live—anyway I'd argue that in many ways young men suffer even more from the patriarchy in Honduras than young women), and must focus on structural change. And they need to address the severe psychic damage done to two generations of young men by the policies of those now in power (in particular Pepe Lobo and Oscar Álvarez). Revolution can be therapeutic, and I believe that, in order to really work, therapy must be revolutionary. In the meantime, as an ethnographer I have spent 13 years now telling young Honduran men "you are not shit." No one told me about this in methods class.