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.