Dear Joe:
Regarding Amazon's reprehensibility regarding labor unions, I can't help but ask: Even though I admire your helping your pals in Belize, why you did not choose to direct the book monies toward something closer to home? Like, f'rinstance, the chronically messed up Katrina survivors -- I mean the old and sick ones that cannot seem to find jobs, the kind that send good ole white boys not like yourself into a lather of fear and loathing.
Another possible source of caritas is the growing number of boomers who are too damned smart, too damned independent and too damned old to kowtow to the corpocrazy. You know that hippie school of yours? I think we need a hippie *village* in some bluish state for all these folks. Maybe you could figure out how to incorporate it in some manner so the citizens could all get health insurance, and they could send another Bernie Sanders like creature to Congress.
Best regards,
F. K., faithful reader
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Dear F. K.,
To answer your question briefly regarding Katrina victims:
1. Money goes farther and what little money I have does more people more good in the Third World.
2. I need a cheap way to live out my life so I can continue doing this as long as circumstances permit. The Third World is definitely cheap if you know how to do cheap.
3. Every tiny move in America costs money. To go down to Louisiana, I would have to pay for a place to stay, buy expensive, non-ecological manufactured building materials which take special skills to employ.
4. Americans, even American hurricane victims, expect a basic level of technology and amenities that I simply cannot (and do not wish to) to support. Perhaps a quarter of the world would be thrilled to live in a FEMA trailer the rest of their lives, if you know what I mean.
5. Anything you do down there in Mississippi or Louisiana is subject to all sorts of regulation and permissions.
6. Once I have demonstrated the sincerity of my intentions, I can more or less count on Third World poor people to look out for me if I look out for them. I'm not sure I can say that about Americans.
7. I don't want to die in the America I see emerging.
Solidarity,
Joe
