Scouting Buenos Aires

A friend sent me this, a passage from Joe Bageant.

It took me over fifty years to figure out there is no running away, or finding some perfect life. We just exchange one set of problems for another. I ran away to the US Navy to escape a small redneck town. I ran away to the West Coast to become a hippie. I ran to homestead in Idaho on an Indian reservation, I later ran back into the straight world, mostly out of fear for financial security. And when it became personally undeniable that America had become a lonely totalistic empire, whose heart is a bank vault, and that I would not survive its enforced loneliness,  masked by gunpoint cheer and state authorized messages of “hope,” and loudspeakers above the workhouse extolling the ”work ethic,” well, it was either be somewhere else or die inside. Get a different set of problems. Some nights even sickness or hunger looked acceptable, compared to the screaming, yet silent anxiety I was experiencing. I swear it was fucking unbearable. By 2005, I was in Central America for I did not know how long.

Personally, I found that the problems I encountered every day in places like Belize (and now Mexico) somehow suited my own innate sensibilities better. I had no expectations really. Which is good because both paces would have been extremely disappointing if I had. Mainly I just wanted to give up any “advantage” I supposedly had as a citizen of the “greatest nation on earth,” which was, as I said, quite literally, killing me, much as it seems to be killing you.

Beyond that, I wanted to spend the remaining 10 or 15 percent of my life doing stuff with human beings, face-to-face, asshole to belly button — babies being born, people dying, getting drunk, worshiping their gods, experiencing joy. And I wanted to do so without any mediation by soul killing American corporate culture. I did not want ”security” as Americans and Europeans perceive it, and still don’t. The only way to do that is to intentionally stay pretty broke. Money is a rigged game — you cannot win by trying to buy security. Oh, you can have the illusion of it, but the price is your soul. The entire world architecture of money, beyond basic sustenance, is a horribly corrupted — especially since the advent of the “virtual world economy,” a paper and digital racket that sucks away the people’s hard earned wealth before they ever see it.

Well, I say, fuck their offerings. And screw childish “hope.” Hope is for little kids and tooth fairies. The world we awaken to each morning is the only real thing there is. And if we are spiritually, morally and philosophically intact, and humble enough to feel it and love it each day, we don’t need to hope some unseen force or bunch of politicos, or an “economy” or so-called leaders are gonna make it better for us. The orchids outside my doorway are blooming and my wife still loves me after all these years. A real gypsy taught me a song yesterday and Easter is in the air in Mexico. I guess that as a burned out old hippie and a writer, I cannot imagine anything else to hope for.

When I arrive Thursday in Buenos Aires the city will be celebrating its four day weekend.  Easter.