Letters from Nica Part 3: Letter from America

As I stepped foot back on cool-tiled American ground, a line from a Morrissey song popped into my head: “On returning…I can’t believe this world is still turning” (I’m Not Sorry is the tune). Okay, so maybe the world didn’t stop turning, maybe the laws of physics we still in effect, but something most definitely felt different. Maybe it was the machinery in my head that had actually stopped turning. The cogs and gears up there tried hard to pump out some intellectual reaction to what I had just experienced and what I was experiencing. But I couldn’t say anything. I couldn’t even think anything.

Now that I’m a few days removed from my rude re-awakening to all that is America, I can’t really pinpoint what caused my utter stagnation. But, I think it has to do with the realization that the world that was being paraded in front of my eyes at the airport and the one I was silent witness to in Nicaragua are separated by a gulf that airplanes can’t seem to traverse. I’m not even sure if my own words can do what I feel, what I have observed, any justice. But, I’ll try nonetheless.

As I walked through the airport, my legs and arms shivered in their turbulent re-entry into air-conditioning, making me long for that stickyness, that warmth, that unconsciously sultry and yet uncomfortable existence that you get only in the absence of air-conditioning. Going further, the sting of cleaning solution imposed and invaded my nostrils, leaving my olfactory glands to long for that punch of human stench that you only get in places like Nicaragua–the one that makes you wonder if it’s yours or someone else’s, the one that, in questioning yourself and those around you, connects you with those around you. And even seated and waiting for my plane to Memphis, I creepily eavesdropped on an 8-yr old boy begging and pleading with Mom to finish his fries for him, wondering about the 8-yr old boys in Managua who creep around restaurants and beg for whatever you don’t finish. In short, the dualities of this world overwhelmed me.

These oppositions, for lack of a better word, are poetic to me. But what is so moving, so emotionally charging, about air-conditioning? What makes me poeticize human body odor (or let alone argue that it is one of the things that connect us all as human beings)? What makes the food our kids eat (or don’t eat) something to fixate on? The disparities between the two universes I have travelled between are poetic to me only because they are unremarkably uncomforting to me. They are constant reminders that the world we live in today is still far from the world we want to live in tomorrow.

In fact, I can’t help but see every action back here in the States having some opposite in Nicaragua. As cheesy as it may sound, I’m slowly becoming a strong believer in the idea that, for every American action, for every action in the comfortable bourgeois lives we lead, there is an equal and opposite anti-action (I have no better word for it) in the undeveloped world. We have to realize that when we do something as simple as get a cup of coffee from a quaint cafe in our lovely suburbs there is someone in a rural community somewhere in a place a lot like Nicaragua who can’t afford to drink the very coffee he grows.

It’s the simplicity of this reality that disturbs me most. I haven’t been able to sleep the past few nights. But even then, I wonder, does being uncomfortable make much of a difference? We all know that it does nothing if we do nothing about it. And what can we do? What do we do when the most basic problems of the world confront us every day like some crazy version of a Patrick Swayze and Demi Moore movie?

I think having conferences and summits are all great. But these are good only for intensifying the loyalty of those who are already disturbed like us (the very people who read from and write on this blog). From what I understand about structural violence, it is perpetuated by everyone’s constant habituation of ideologies that only broaden the gulf between rich and poor. So telling people who already know the story will go only so far. Therefore, I think our job should be to make people feel just as uncomfortable as we do. Those of us who drive cars to school and/or work, those of us who have access to computers, those of us who have the leisure time to ponder our own burden on the poor of the world, we are the ones who have to make it awkward for those who don’t know. And, in my mind, we can’t do that by simply providing formal avenues for discussion. We need one-on-one discussions over coffee; we need people who are willing to talk about it informally. We should seek out those who don’t believe in our cause, and we should be willing to argue with them.