New Mexico Daily Lobo
URL: http://www.dailylobo.com/index.php/article/2010/10/america_is_stronger_than_you_think
Current Date: Thu, 24 May 2012 10:20:53 -0600
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USA needs to slow its insatiable hunger
Editor’s Note: Lobos Abroad is a regular column written by Daily Lobo staff members studying in a different country this semester.
While living in Chile for the past three months, I have noticed some things about America.
It’s like spending some time away from a girlfriend to get clarity. Sometimes you need distance to see reality. Over the past three months, I have learned a few things.
First rule about living in South America: You don’t refer to the United States as “America.” It’s all equally America.
At UNM, everyone complains about things not working, about the infrastructure and the bureaucracy sucking the life out of academia — taking unneeded money and wasting too much.
It’s been three months since I started school here, and I still don’t have an ID card. I still haven’t been integrated into the e-mail system. And when I had to register for classes, I had to go in person back and forth between all of the departments to get schedules and to inform them I wanted to take a class.
One week into classes and half mine had their times changed. One of my classes didn’t have a time set until the second week of school.
If you listen to the current political discussions, it is heavily focused on what is important to pay for and what should be cut. Communist Muslim socialist hippies and gun-toting red-tape-slashing, tea-drinking mamma bears seem to be around every corner. Although with corporate media giving people their dose of reality, it seems like Y2K 2.0, 2012 or 9/11 are just around the corner after that.
The fact is that we don’t have trash in the streets and that public education, although not the best in the world, still exists.
Living in a place like the United States puts you in a top 1 percent of the world in the amount of wealth and resources open to you.
The U.S. has lost perspective.
People accuse my generation of being overly entitled. That we want everything handed to us without working for any of it. Are we the first generation? This always seemed crazy to me that we are more entitled than the rest of the U.S. People have felt entitled to the rest of the world for many generations. Our country was founded on the idea of entitlement: manifest destiny.
Our government has been behind the destabilization of so many countries through funded guerrilla movements, terrorist organizations, proxy wars and, in places like Iraq, full military occupation.
Pinochet was a dictator here in Chile and was funded in large part by the CIA. Pinochet was responsible for the disappearance of nearly 2,000 Chileans, torturing nearly 30,000 including women and children and exiling 200,000 citizens that were opposed to the change.
The phrase “banana republic” comes from the CIA overthrowing countries for DOLE Fruit Company and setting up puppet leadership that was company friendly and worker negative.
This is deeply ingrained in our culture, and we have no sense of history. Even from the last 50 years. An upscale clothing store now takes the nickname of our covert revolutionary operations.
You know when you try to eat after you are already full, and nothing seems to feel very satisfying? Things may taste good, but you don’t have much of an impetus to stuff yourself with more food. That is what we are as a country.
Like a fat man with food in his mouth clawing at his neighbor’s plate for more and ever more, we are unsatisfied with anything we put in our mouth. After school today on my way home to finish my column and e-mail it, a bunch of anarchists lit tires on fire in the middle of the road and started throwing Molotov cocktails through crowds at police cars. And the police didn’t rush in.
They stayed back, waited for the tires to burn a little while and then started spraying the whole area with a water cannon, but not even the protesters, just the tires.
At UNM in the early 2000s when there was a peaceful protest, police rushed in and shot tear gas into the crowd and started hitting people with batons. The traffic around the burning tires in Chile didn’t even stop.
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10 comments
obama bin farteen
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due, wtf is your point?! This crap makes absolutely no sense at all. And you say you’re studying there, studying what, underwater basket weaving?
For crying out loud, please don’t tell anyone you’re an American. Maybe you can pass as a brit or canuck or something. Geeez!
Dr. Liz Hutchison
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Hi, Zach: I don’t understand your point about political discussions about budget cuts in the US: do you think people in the US are debating the wrong things? Chile’s experience might also be instructive here: before the military intervention of 1973, the Chilean state was a regional leader in providing free health care and education to all its citizens, but the Pinochet regime privatized health care, made municipal governments responsible for basic services (including education), and privatized the economy, thereby wiping out (in General Leigh’s words) “50 years of Chilean history.” The state’s role as guarantor (if not provider) of basic services is a human rights issue, which is what makes political struggle — especially in the context of the US’s abundant resources and increasingly unequal distribution of wealth — particularly important to engage.
Also, the rioters you saw in Concepcion (probably students striking in solidarity with the Mapuche hunger strikers fighting for their right to trial by civil courts) are part of a long line of extra-legal political action that stretches back to early 20th-century Chile: what do you think we in the US should learn from it?
Northern Sole
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Maybe his point is that the US is a great place to live and grow and that a lot of people fixate on what’s “wrong” and how they want to change things to what’s “right” instead of appreciating what they have and learning to work together to preserve what we have and make it more available to more people? Just my guess.
By simply living in the US we have it better than 99% of the humans that have ever existed, that’s not a bad thing. Is it perfect? Far from it, but it’s better than the rest of the world (in general for a land mass this size with the number of different demographic groups that comprise the population.) Shouting vitriolic epitaphs at one another because we don’t agree on ideology or we have different philosophical approaches is like littering, and we could all use less of that.
Read more …
I now expect obama bin farteen to say something stupid and twisted.
Zach
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for photos of the demonstrators go to www.AdiosABQ.blogspot.com
Humberto Fontova
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In a famous speech in 1961, Che Guevara denounced the very “spirit of rebellion” as “reprehensible.” “Youth must refrain from ungrateful questioning of governmental mandates,” commanded Guevara. “Instead, they must dedicate themselves to study, work and military service, should learn to think and act as a mass.”
Those who “choose their own path” (as in growing long hair and listening to “Yankee-Imperialist” rock & roll) were denounced as worthless “roqueros,” “lumpen,” and “delinquents.” In his famous speech, Che Guevara even vowed “to make individualism disappear from Cuba! It is criminal to think of individuals!”
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Tens of thousands of Cuban youths learned that Che Guevara’s admonitions were more than idle bombast. In Guevara, the hundreds of Soviet KGB and East German STASI “consultants” who flooded Cuba in the early 1960s found an extremely eager acolyte. By the mid-‘60s, the crime of a “rocker” lifestyle (blue jeans, long hair, fondness for the Beatles and Stones) or effeminate behavior got thousands of youths yanked out of Cuba’s streets and parks by secret police and dumped in prison camps with “Work Will Make Men Out of You” emblazoned in bold letters above the gate and with machine-gunners posted on the watchtowers. The initials for these camps were UMAP, not GULAG, but the conditions were quite similar.
Today, the world’s largest image of the man whom so many hipsters sport on their shirts adorns Cuba’s headquarters and torture chambers for its KGB-trained secret police. Nothing could be more fitting.
The most popular version of the Che T-shirt, for instance, sports the slogan “fight oppression” under his famous countenance. This is the face of the second-in-command, chief executioner, and chief KGB liaison for a regime that jailed political prisoners at a higher rate than Stalin’s and murdered more people in its first five years in power than Hitler’s murdered in its first six.
“When you saw the beaming look on Che’s face as the victims were tied to the stake and blasted apart by the firing squad,” former Cuban political prisoner Roberto Martin-Perez recounted to this writer, “you saw there was something seriously, seriously wrong with Che Guevara.”
“Castro ordered mass murder,” remembers Martin-Perez, “but for him it was a utilitarian slaughter, in order to consolidate his power. A classic psychopath, the butchery didn’t seem to affect him one way or the order. But Che Guevara, as his chief executioner, obviously relished the slaughter.”
As commander of this prison/execution yard, Che often shattered the skull of the condemned man by firing the coup de grace himself. When other duties tore him away from his beloved execution yard, he consoled himself by viewing the slaughter. Che’s second-story office in La Cabana had a section of wall torn out so he could watch his darling firing squads at work.
One day before his death in Bolivia, Che Guevara — for the first time in his life — finally faced something properly describable as combat. So he ordered his guerrilla charges to give no quarter, to fight to their last breaths and to their last bullet. With his men doing exactly what he ordered (fighting and dying to the last bullet), a slightly wounded Che sneaked away from the firefight and surrendered with fully loaded weapons while whimpering to his captors, “Don’t shoot! I’m Che. I’m worth more to you alive than dead!” His Bolivian captors viewed the matter differently. In fact, they adopted a policy that has since become a favorite among Americans who encounter (so-called) endangered species threatening their families or livestock on their property: “Shoot, shovel, and shut up.”
Justice has never been better served.
phillip howel
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ZACH GOULD, less acceptance of hateful lies about the USA and broad research may provide you with a knowledge of history so we are not subjected to the false statements you offered.
Manifest destiny is not what you said: “Our country was founded on the idea of entitlement: manifest destiny.” It was a political ideology of the Democratic party and President Polk (D) that was advanced in the 1840’s. It was rejected by Abe Lincoln and knocked out of the political lexicon by him and other leaders who recognized it’s inherent evil. The Declaration of Independence and the US Constitution are the opposite of “manifest destiny.” A small, limited power government cannot have such grandiose ideas and agenda. Both of our founding documents clearly speak to the inherent rights each person has, rights that cannot be abridged by a small government.
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Your second major error is this: “the phrase “banana republic” comes from the CIA overthrowing countries for DOLE Fruit Company and setting up puppet leadership that was company friendly and worker negative.” The fact is the idea “banana republics” comes to us from Captain Lorenzo D. Baker who in 1870 described the small republics of the America’s who provided bananas to his company. American companies who exported bananas to the USA were started in the late 1890’s, early 1900’s with Dole being founded in 1924. The USA did not have any kind of intelligence gathering operation until the late 1930’s. The CIA was established in 1947. The CIA could not establish governments to favor a company that existed 23 years before it was established.
The store Banana Republic began in 1978 as a mom – n – pop operation selling safari clothing. It is a major chain because it was acquired by GAP. It’s name is an advertising gimmick.
ZACH, as the librarian has often – properly so – said, do the research. You said, “ and we have no sense of history. Even from the last 50 years.” I say to you, Amen. Except change the pronoun from “we” to I and “sense” to knowledge.
phillip howel
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DR. LIZ HUTCHISON your statement, “ …the US’s abundant resources and increasingly unequal distribution of wealth — particularly important to engage.” is important. I question why anyone would believe the government should distribute wealth. My wealth is mine, not the governments, as your wealth is yours. Increasingly the government is distributing wealth rather than people acquiring wealth through their own effort. I find this very troubling, except that I have neighbors who have more than me and I’ll be happy to get my greedy hands on some of theirs. Do you have more than me?
Econ 101
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The reason the US uses the most resources is due to our high productivity. Our economy is still (globally speaking) among the most efficient at producing goods and services, trailing only mini-states Switzerland, Finland and Singapore in the latest WEF Global Competitiveness Index. http://www3.weforum.org/docs/WEF_GlobalCompetitivenessReport_2010-11.pdf
If Americans want limited global resources wasted through inefficient allocation, then continue cheerleading Obama’s Marxist economic foreign policies of redistributing wealth to less efficient nations. You may then applaud yourself for a lower quality of life in exchange for guaranteed equality-of-misery for all. This anarchist hope for increased Chilean Molotov imports tells you all you need to know about the author’s self-loathing.
Smiley
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Well now Zach, you’re at the point where you actually know about all this stuff…
So, time to reclaim our government?
In conclusion – a human can do as it wants, but if it stops learning and seeking truth, then it might as well be dead. Don’t stop learning about the people and world around you, or its past.
Romeo
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Zach;
So I guess you’re going to slow your insatiable hunger first? No wait, you’re entitled to it. Even Lary Fitzgerald commented Monday night about how the new generation does have a weird sense of entitlement, and how they chellenge everything and don’t want to learn from veterans who have been around. Know it alls-I wonder why? Is it the just the BUSH generation’s way? Probably.
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