Patria

Today there was an article in El Diaro (a Bolivian newspaper from La Paz) about a movement to slow and eventually stop the importation of used clothing into Bolivia in order to support local garment industry. This has been one of the that get under my skin.
As I remember when I lived in Bolivia and when I visit, used foreign clothing is ubiquitous. There are Aymara and Quechua people high in the Altiplano surrounded by the Andes, living in mud houses and scratching a living from the arid earth that sport dusty suit jackets, dirty polo shirts, and other garments that confound me. How did they get a hold of that item, why are they wearing it?! I asked. The answer is simple an enterprising person in the US gathers up the tons of discarded clothing we produce and sends it down to South America for a tidy profit.
The clothes are cheap and carry a little of the city/American mystique with them. So people drape themselves in garbage.

no object

confesions crashing against a cliff
against your inavility to change.
what kind of sea is my love
that after years
so many years of crashing
it can't bear your flesh
worse than stone
no granite like the lack of place
for me in your heart

Ahh but the answer lies in the sky
it is but to move the moon
to change the atraction of this world
moving the planet
tilt away from your continent

Patria

Yesterday as I listened to the radio my eyes tiered up as I was filled with a great sadness and anger. I was sitting in Rt. 123 traffic on my way to my part time job, listening to Market Place on npr; they were doing segment on immigration and how the current system came about and the consequences for US demographics and the rest of the world. I sat and listened, smoked a cigarette, watched the moving walls of SUVs around me, tried to absorb the statistics and anecdotes coming from my speaker. Every one wants to come to the US for a better life... and I'm here waiting in traffic so I can work 5 more hours on top of the time I already spent in the cubicle, contemplating the cell phone calls i'm expecting for the weekend bar scene.
As my car idles and fumes I think of the black oil and Africans trying to get into the United states. I take another drag of my cigarette breathing in the sweat of migrant workers cultivating the crop. I reach for my phone to touch the same plastic a Chinese factory worker placed in a box as he contemplated how lucky the phone was and how much he wanted to follow it on it's transpacific voyage. I hear the crunch of their houses and standards of living underneath my ass when I stop at a drive through and order in Spanish. Tomorrow I will go by Starbucks and perpetuate a Dutch English tradition of subjugation and exploitation now half a millennia in practice.
I could have been one of the people they interviewed, my parents escape Bolivia's hardships and in the middle of becoming a US citizen: College educated, paying taxes, transracially dating. We all left behind our homes, my parents and coworkers pine for that land. Having grown up mostly here I am somewhat removed from that pain but for me the news and history of all these people escaping homelands to join the rape is infuriating. How can we blame ourselves though? We all saw the lifeblood sucked straight from the ground, straight from the brow of the campesino and sent up a slick feeding tube directly North. So we followed our own blood and sweat so we could stop being victims and start being victimizers. It all seems so innocuous, so simple to live inside this country with playstations, vending machines, central air, MRIs, ICBMs, cars, planes, cheap thrills, and easy addictions.
No matter how "fair trade" "living wage" "ecologically friendly" we are each time we buy a cup of coffee, not just starbucks any coffee, or fill up a gas tank to go to a rally, hell ride the fucking metro and tell me the difference, it is another crack of the whip to our homelands. As long as any one of us lives here and partakes of this lifestyle we are killing and raping and murdering.
But it really isn't all that bleak. There is hope. There is the rising awareness in Latin America and East and Central Africa, some parts of Asia. Strength is building, ideas are coming together, action is planned and in a generation or two all that we covet and all our sins of betrayal will be cleansed by fire. The North American continent will tear itself apart and in its death throws it will slash and claw, scheme and lie to keep istself alive but it will be too late. The US and Europe, and even China will starve.

Sunday

I went to Kings Dominion today and rode the rides. my favorite is the volcano, it dispenses with the clank clank of the nerve wretching assent of most rollercoasters. Instead only moments after securing your seat and a short distance later woooshhh. the first time I saw it the image of the flycycles of Return of the Jedi was immidiate. how freaking cool is that? straight into the first turn you don't go down you don't go right or left you are hurled straight up into a sweet dogfight manouver. and then out comes the banana with corckscrew after corckscrew screaming upside down. and then dive into a stop that forces Gs through your body slaming the chest into the hard harness.
rode that like four times.