Dear Joe,
Welcome to Belize. I only recently discovered your writings and I have to say I find them insightful, yet filled with a powerful sense of loss for the America that was. I am English and I too have gone through that process of mourning for the country of my birth and childhood. I lived in Bush's US between 2002 and early 2007. I found the American people to be open, thoughtful, caring and very giving. Just as my own countrymen are.
It's the system! Cheney and Bush clearly don't give a rat's ass about human life, but show the average American a child in a foreign land in need of life saving surgery and they'll organize a fund and get that child to the States to get that surgery.
I grew up in a country with a government that told my parents to dig a bomb shelter in the back yard because the Russians wanted to nuke my ass. When I was a young adult, I went to Russia and, guess what? I never encountered a single Russian who wanted me dead. From that moment, I knew that all humans share a common bond, and those who seek to rule us care nothing for us, and serve only their own greed and lust for power and mischief making.
You are too hard on your countrymen, Joe. They are lied too, constantly. They are deliberately educated down to a level just sufficient to produce drones capable of working in the corporate machine. Their information is only available through carefully screened channels, owned by that same corporate machine. Their representatives pass legislation preventing them from having any recourse for holding to account those corporations that supply them with polluted water, medications that kill them, food that makes them sick -- the production of which pollutes the planet -- and, in the case of the Federal Reserve, lulls them into taking on debt and then orchestrates a financial crisis so everything they have worked for can be stolen from them by Wall Street.
Look back through history. How often has a Socrates, a Plato, a Da Vinci, a Washington, or a philosopher of note appeared. Most people are sheep, Joe. Most animals follow the herd. Like you, I am blessed with an ingrained detachment from the mass of humanity brought about, most likely, by the fact that, like you, I am a writer. We observe. The irony is that it is the choice to live apart from society, in order to gain some semblance of objectivity, that ultimately saves us from the dreadful consequences of living in it.
Again, welcome to Belize. I live in Belize City and would enjoy sharing a Belikan beer with you some day.
Trisha
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Trisha,
Indeed, let's share that Belikan beer when I come back through Belize City returning from America. I am currently back here for a couple of months to fulfill contractual book promotional obligations, do an interview on the Bill Moyers Show and a promo book tour of Australia. Then it's back to Hopkins Village, Belize.
Perhaps I am too hard on my fellow Americans, and I recently wrote an essay that will appear soon regarding how the average American has no non-mediated, non-monetized outlet for his or her altruism. Just the highly mediated, many times removed institutionalized experience of the United Way, Red Cross, religious organizations, or in the case of the average uneducated working class kid, dying for his or her country in places like Iraq. Most of them really want to "do something for their country."
As to their being "sheep," I really don't think they are. I thick the natural state of man is that of a social animal innately given to cooperating with fellow member of his species, observing and mimicking the behaviors of those around him, probably for some sociobiological and genetic reason that makes bees and ants and other social species do the same. But the manipulation by antisocial mutants variants constitutes a hive and species social malignancy. I am no more intelligent than they. It's just that my powers of observation are a bit better honed because I was a news reporter for so many years back when reporters were expected to be that way. Observant and truth telling.
Anyway, send me your contact info by separate email and I'll look you up. I always stay a couple, extra days when I arrive at or leave from Belize City. Usually I pay a visit Wilfred Peters (the old guy with the milk crate full of CDs in front of Brodies), eat some nighttime street food cooked by the old women vendors and generally enjoy the city. Violent as it is now with the recent invasion of Crips and Bloods, (I was at the Belcove near Mike's when the gunfire from one of the city's six murders that week nearly shook me out of bed) I still love that rotting old city. Perhaps you could teach me more about it.
In art and labor,
Joe
