Letter #39 (and holding to keep it young) to FIENDS and familiares

Estimadas voluntarias y respetados compañeros,

As I stated in the PCM-connect web site, I am asking my younger Peace Corps brethren to suffer an old man’s fleeting fit of wisdom to be passed along to his counterparts of succeeding generations be they millennials or Gen-Xers or whatevers. I am asking you to consider reading through three writings, the links of which are posted in this letter. They discuss three key aspects of our world that my generation will leave to yours. Two writings came, as always, through the thoughtfulness of my generational contemporary, Mr Roy Rajan.

The first article is a brief history of the U.S. by the Strafor private intel service. It explains how we got to where we are today. Beautifully written and insightful, beware of Strafor’s ever-persistent bias of characterizing U.S. power and conduct as inevitable or somehow accidental. Duplicity and diplomacy were not quite so innocent as this re-issued Rudyard Kipling would have us believe. If you can not get directly to the article, please let me know and I will cut-paste the text directly below the torpor of this dismissive missive.
http://www.stratfor.com/analysis/20110824-geopolitics-united-states-part-1-inevitable-empire

The second selection is a series of ten articles from “Slate Magazine” studying the inequality that grew under my generation’s watch. This article remains relatively free from bias and even ventures to diagnose the root-causes. Though a long read, this series is well worth the effort since this inequality is becoming serious. Not only do the poor remain invisible – many by being in jail for petty crimes – the middle-class is becoming isolated, too. The fact that a disenfranchised middle class has engineered the majority of revolutions, often among the most blood-drunk, is reason enough to sit up and take notice.
http://www.slate.com/id/2267157/

The last article is a typical anxiety spill over the perils of technology. Steven Vincent Benét held a prophetic distaste toward the information age and the Cold War during a short life that preceded both. But Mr Benét forgot one critical differentiator between man and machine: each one of us remains responsible for his or her privacy or lack of it. Neurotic needfulness is no excuse for forfeiting privacy. Accordingly, I sincerely implore you to think about the possibility that, as a people, we have, in our everyday preferences, effectively nullified the right of privacy – or shown its falsity – through the proliferation of social media, e-mails, blogs, etc.

Should this assertion of a negated right of privacy prove to be true, questions and implications galore will trouble your thinking in the years ahead. Did such a right of privacy ever really exist, at least implicitly? Or was it invented, not inferred, to suit political expediency? The answers might be unsettling for you. A couple of examples will suffice.

If the right to privacy has been devalued or belied, what will that mean for the widely accepted concepts underlying the Roe-versus-Wade Supreme Court decision or the popular aversion toward the “U.S.A. Patriot Act”? What will it mean for your children as they face the tasks, travails and bullies in the school-yard or on the inter-net? Could they become the road-kill of the information super-highway?
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2011/aug/18/how-google-dominates-us/

Finally, I ask you to indulge this, my, dubious invitation. Such a request on my time, when I was young, would have made me chafe or, worse, sniffle in contempt. Since, many (if not all) of you are destined to assume leadership responsibilities of some kind as your lives manifest continually, the few hours invested in these essays may give you a sense of what you are getting yourselves into through the mere slippage of time.

Thank you, adios…over and out.

Letter #38: Greed and Grief in modern Mexico

Walking into the science center where I serve in the Peace Corps this morning, I noticed the ordinarily jocund guard in a rather subdued state setting the three flags – those of the country, the national science council and the center itself – at half-mast. After I asked who had died, the kindly elder stated humbly, “Para las victimas del casino en Nuevo León…”.

Of course, three days before, I had heard President Calderón over the radio giving an impassioned speech out of step with our unfeeling time. The flags unfurled in the mournful remembrance of fifty-plus people burned to death by a narco-syndicate (i.e., the Zetas or the Gulf cartel). Analyses abound about whodunit and why (e.g., to knock off its balance the spin cycle of money-laundering through casinos); apparently what happened in Vegas did not stay in Vegas. This penetrating pedantry, nevertheless, misses the point.

In a speech coloured by its somber eloquence, el presidente Calderón not only called on his countrymen to rally against this state of 'anarco', he also called out United States of America as the root-cause of such grim criminality. Not the U.S. government as much as its drug-users. That’s right: our country, high-or-wrong. Would organized crime still exist South of the border without the unrelenting demand for drugs from the North? Certainly. But nothing on the scale witnessed in that casino, on the streets and during the years of fear.

El presidente Calderón’s question here becomes obvious with even the slightest reflection. Why has American leadership – Democrat, Independent and Republican alike – been intent on trying everything to stop the commerce of drugs except to address the root-cause? When will a leader risk his or her popularity – even re-election – to call us all to account? Where is the statesman needed openly to ask that hardest of all questions: Why do so many of our fellows, living in the epicenter of the American Century, find their lives so empty that they resort to drugs?

To her credit, Secretary of State Clinton has begun to say publicly that the U.S. bears at least some of the responsibility for Mexico’s tragedy. One reason that the obvious question remains unasked reflects the likelihood of no answer. Until an incumbent national leader cries out with the pain afflicting his people, as have great leaders through the ages from King David to President Lincoln to Prime Minister Churchill, the suffering will continue. My upbringing included a stricture that I not criticize the status-quo unless I had a solution. Of course, I have no solution, either.

While many leading citizens are proposing the legalization or de-criminalization of drugs, I remain uneasy with that approach because distribution channels are already in place to encourage consumption in the future of 'black-market' substances (i.e., stronger than allowed) by under-age users (i.e., children in junior high on up). In any case, the perspective of focusing on behavior patterns still fails to address the void inside most people – that quiet desperation Thoreau could not finesse – that seduces many into looking for oblivion, god, rapture, peer approval or allayed curiosity, whichever comes first.

One used to say that when the United States sneezes, Mexico catches pneumonia. The Mexican dictator of the nineteenth century was far keener with his wit: “Poor Mexico, so far from God but so close to the United States.” Perhaps we can change that ugly fact of life, not only for our neighbors but for ourselves by treating addicts and recreational users as people in pain, defenseless against the nothingness or the hopelessness that stalks them patiently, day in and day out.

There are no magic answers here because drug users have as many reasons for, and behaviors associated with, drug consumption as there are users. But recalling the pragmatism of F.D.R. in the face of a darker challenge to our national well-being presents a refreshing response. We take our best shot at giving the poor hope, the wealthy purpose and the middle class a future.

If a national system of rehabilitation centers does not work, then we try stay-home-approaches. If de-criminalization does not diminish crime, we start indicting drug dealers to under-age kids for human trafficking as well. If schooling the poor does not curb use, then we offer scholastic aid to those making the effort to stay clean. For the poor at least, up-or-out has an entirely different meaning than for untenured academics or foreign service officers.

In short, we do what it takes within the limits of democratic constitutionalism. America has a reservoir of goodwill within her people that, once properly stimulated, can better the lives of diverse Americans of all flags, taking Bolivar’s dream to a long-delayed destiny.

Letter #37 to Fiends and Familiares: Mexico at one year

My group of Peace Corps is bumping into its first anniversary in Mexico. Before I arrived here for this tour, I had private fantasies of Hesse’s Siddhartha, not tending the ferry across the river, but teaching in some pueblo lost somewhere on the Baja peninsula.

Well, wisdom attained on other people’s money has not quite come to pass. Truth is that I am basically working on a traditional capacity-transfer project, living in a cosmopolitan city and enjoying the symphony with my novia at seven bucks a pop.

Nevertheless, in an engaging spirit of public service combined with a simple sense of a destiny not mine, I am writing down ten lessons from my first year so those who follow me have absolutely no excuse for being pathetic human beings.

PASCAL’S PAINFUL PARADOX. “Man is neither angel nor brute. The misfortune is that he who would act the angel acts the brute.” Learned that one the hard way this past year.

KILLING TIME, KILLING ME. Beware if you have not enough to do at first. Inventing activities to fill the time can wreak a peculiar vengeance. When you are ready to let the activity fade away, feedback comes galloping in, begging for the brain-murder to continue.

WHY MEXICANS ARE FRIENDLY. Because they are, stupid gringo.

NO ATHEISTS HERE. Gone are the scintillating sociopaths born without conscience, living without consequence and ready to die without continuity. Most so-called atheists here are people struck dumb, perhaps damned, by scrupulosity with no way out.

TRUTH of CULTURAL ASSIMILATION. Giggling punctuated by intermittent, delicately timed one-word slurs like ‘bueno’; ‘bien’; and, ‘verdad’. “¿And what do you do, blend?”

VINDICATION of SHAKESPEARE. "Be not afraid of greatness: some are born great, some achieve greatness and some have greatness thrust upon them." Twelfth Night. Included to make me look like some intelligent visionary and other good stuff.

THE GREATEST GAUNTLET EVER THROWN. “Charity suffereth long, and is kind; charity envieth not; charity vaunteth not itself, is not puffed up, doth not behave itself unseemly, seeketh not her own, is not easily provoked, thinketh no evil; rejoiceth not in iniquity, but rejoiceth in the truth; beareth all things, believeth all things, hopeth all things, endureth all things. Charity never faileth…”

TIME TAKES TIME. I thought after a year, I would be fluent in Spanish. Nope. People often try my patience by urging my patience.

The SECRET behind PREENING POLITICOS: Intellectual struttiness where neurotic exhibitionism amazingly morphs into self-actualization.

TRITE NOISE. People my age may believe that “children should be seen and not heard”. The young volunteers have a better point. Oldsters should not be heard, either: they snore.

Some of these lessons come from fashionably disdained sources as most people are too modern to admit to the truth of anything written before 1900. Yet these same, these dull, lessons remind ‘yours truly’ that humility really is the currency of the realm during this magical Mexico tour.

Mexico labours under the heavy burdens of a withering despair always whispering: drug wars, acute poverty affecting 45% of the population, etc. Yet her people rarely fail to help me when I ask; her women know that dainty art, long lost in the United States, of making any man feel special; and, strangers invite me to parties at least once a week.

In closing, let me affirm that I fall so far short of reciprocating all that these lovely people do; one would have to resort electron microscopes to discern what, if any, progress I have really made. Mexico will certainly not make me a Saint or even a Mexican. Yet she will continue to make me happy. Thank you: good-bye!

Letters to Friends and Familiares #36: Culture Schlock-101

The first few months in Mexico proved to be mightily disconcerting. In so many ways, Mexicans acted with solicitude and courtesy. Women appreciated my closing the car door. Gentlemen would hold the office door open for me to spare the effort of using the identification card (here known as la credencial) to activate the sensor to unlock the door for me to open the door and for me to enter the building.

While such preter-techical activity saved me at most five seconds, the gesture mattered more. My Mexican counterparts in business, my novia (Angélica) and my few acquaintances displayed nothing but patience and courtesy with my mangled Spanish that sounded more like a phonetic fragmentation bomb.

At work, people included me in their parties and ‘chismes’ sessions of office gossip, which I usually avoided with diplomatic deftness, “Tengo que ir al baño” (i.e., “I gotta go to the can, man...”). Senior managers at the (one of twenty-seven) national science and engineering research centers where I serve made sure I had decent tasks that could conceivably help the institution.

And so I wondered what the HELL was wrong with me and why I kept getting mixed signals. Thanks to a fairly strict pair of parents, I had had the benefit of a solid upbringing – though four decades ago “upbraiding” was more contextually convincing – and so my manners and social instincts were fine, as evidenced by the warm and appreciative smiles coming my way from people of all walks of life in Querétaro.

Yet I kept slamming into mixed signals from these same otherwise delightfully authentic people. The first time I noticed was with the Human Resources liaison for the Peace Corps volunteers, an educated, glamorous and charming young lady. On a chilly December morning, we crossed paths and I said in Spanish my standard, “How are you?”, in the formal third person, being the polite prig that I am.

She said in her spritely way, “Just fine. Thank you. Good-bye!” I did not show my rather startled reaction and simply let this eerie cross-current swirl right on by.
This type of thing occurred repeatedly and I became increasingly unsure of my communications skills.

Yet everyone remained so forthrightly friendly in every other respect that I figured that acceptance of something beyond me would be the most constructive course. Then in March, I got worried. At eight o’clock in the morning, I ran into the man who tracks the schedules of the busses as they go by and asked how he was. He said, “Great! Thank you. Good-bye!”

Well I had been through this enough to know to let it go. Then at the entrance and the guard booth, I asked how the guards were. In unison they bellowed, “Fine, thank you, goodbye!” Now I was really worried. Next along came my Department Head and, upon the usual courtly exchange, he answered, “Well, thank you. Good-bye!”

When the administrative manager of the office – a woman of noble mien – said the same mixed message, that did it: I was officially unnerved. There must be something wrong with me. At ten-thirty in the morning, I ran across the street to the farmacía where I bought some deodorant, though I remember applying the ‘Old Spice Original’ just hours before, and some mints for my breath.

Of course, these Mexicans were being indirect and I had to do something about it. I called Angélica and asked her how she was hurriedly. She said in Spanish, “Happy to hear your voice. Thank you. Good-bye!” Since Angélica is fluent in English, I blurted out in my native tongue, “Don’t hang up until you explain something to me…” She protested that she had no intention of hanging up and asked me what was the matter.

Confusion nagged my every nerve. How could I smell bad or look worse over the telephone? So I asked in English, “What is with this business of saying, “I am fine. Thank you. Goodbye…”? That woman of my dreams had the temerity to laugh and laugh heartily. Crestfallen, I braced myself for her answer.

“Ned, we are saying ‘Bien. Gracias a Dios’ like thank God, not Gracias. Adios…” That’s culture shock for you, now isn’t it?