Dear Mr. Bageant:
YOU ARE MY HERO!!!!
Every day, before he died in October of 2003, my husband Michael would get us both a cup of coffee, sit down beside me in bed, and we would earnestly talk about moving from the good ole US of A to Amsterdam, or anywhere in that great little country your friend is from. Michael had a very serious health condition, and was in grave fear of losing his health insurance. Besides that though, he cared deeply about people and was nervious 24/7 about what the Bush Administration would do. It took me awhile to really hear what he was saying, but by the invasion of Iraq it finally hit me: most Americans are in for a living hell in this country if things get much worse. Which they are, by the hour.
You are so right about the lassitude and complacency of 90% of "working Americans" -- and I have been convinced for quite a while now that almost every form of public entertainment is created with a hand toward keeping "the masses" in line. Look at reality TV. It's exactly the thing people need to keep them sweating their balls off in a dead-end job, going deeper into credit card debt all the while thinking they can be the NEXT whatever (American Idol, Survivor, Millionaire, etc.). Not that it occurs to anyone that these "winners" of TV fame did the same thing as winning the Irish Sweepstakes. No, no, ANYONE could be a billionaire in this great country, right? God, what a brainwashing machine!!!
Anyway, your article was insightful, totally no bullshit, and scary as hell. I am running for school board in a town full of Fundies who want to ban The Jungle by Upton Sinclair for Chrissake!! Hopefully I can win and aspire to higher office. I pledge to do my best to listen to people like my late husband and you, who are True Americans and harbingers of things most people DO NOT want to hear.
Many, many good wishes, my friend!! Keep writing!
Linda
Vermont
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Well, Linda, I can feel your husband's presence at this very moment.
My wife and I discuss this constantly. I too have a very bad health condition, COPD, and fear of loss of insurance plagues me daily. Finally, I've decided that moving to a place like Belize and living with no health insurance is preferable to the daily horror of watching my country sleepwalk into a nightmare such as the world has never seen. There are worse things than dying without the supposed benefit of a million dollars worth of high tech equipment and expensive attention by members of our medical elite, spending a couple hundred thousand dollars so you can waddle around from chair to chair toxed out on drugs like Prednazone and dragging an oxy tank just so you can gain or an extra year or so of life (if that can be called life) in a republic you fear more every day. I can imagine few less desirable ways to die.
I know there is no real escape. Expat friends living abroad tell me that the growing American nightmare stills bothers them, but at least it is not the anxiety producing daily backdrop of their lives. Most say that a life lived for something other than sheer consumption and paying the bills is a startling surprise, that ordinary thngs like a glass of wine and conversation with friends, or the smell of the air in the mornings regain their natural places in the human experience. I saw the truth in this twice in the last year, once in France with my friend Ken Smith, and once in Belize with a beautiful Garifuna family raising their kids in a more natural world.
Now this may sound like I am romanticizing the "other," as critics are prone to say. But I was raised in a lineage and class of Americans who never imagined travel outside this country, could not afford to travel even if they wanted, and whose only experience in other countries was during American wars in which they were sent abroad to kill foreigners of one type or another. That makes for a very distorted picture of the world abroad at best. And it is a chief contributor, along with geographic distance and the mind-numbing consumer hologram of television, to the insulated views of the rest of the world my people hold and defend today. That is my heritage, and so when I travel with eyes wide open I break the personal chains of my heritage.
I think I could do my best writing from the outside because the perspective granted by travel does an aging redneck American son like me a helluva lot more good than it does some some middle class American twit whose high school graduation trip was a month in Provence. Ours was to Vietnam, or more currently, Iraq and Afghanistan (a war Americans, lacking any memory whatsoever unless prompted by television, have already forgotten)
Yeah, sure, writing from inside the nightmare has its advantages, the rage comes through in the words. People respond. But stepping outside the nightmare can help one conceive of solutions ... because solutions require distance and perspective for conception. It also helps to see the solutions other peoples have found.
Otherwise, I remain just another person describing and condemning a terrible situation the vast majority here are not even mildly concerned about. Besides making my writing ever more tired and repetitive, it makes me ever more bitter. Worse yet, the anxiety and depression generated by the environment here tend to bring out the self-destructive behaviors inherent in my Southern rural white class roots -- drinking, smoking, unnatural self-loathing, passive aggressive thwarting of one's own personal relationships and best interests ...
Whatever the case, I admire you for leaning into the wheel and pushing to get this nation out of the mire.
In friendship,
Joe
