Time to think....

Today almost everything shuts down in Bolivia for the elections. No public transport, and supposedly only cars with special permits can circulate. Hence, I have more quiet time to think, to sit online, and to write to you...

One thing that has been predominantly on my mind is how difficult I find it to escape my middle-class habits... I feel far more comfortable in wealthier parts of town, and in wealthier countries in general. I recognize that I will not commit class suicide, and with this comes an uneasy understanding that I will also have to juggle blindly my privileges.... potable tap water, for example, an amazing privilege I just can't let go very easily when considering a place to raise my future family.

But in general there is a deeper sadness when I consider the cultural differences between me and most of those around me.... waiting in line, for example, to buy bus tickets, to get information at a kiosk, or anything, is a practice which I undertake naturally but which also seems wholy alien to people around me. I cannot expect to be attended when I am 'waiting in line' since the attendants themselves don't even recognize that there is (or would be) a line!! Add to this a whole list of other differences... here are some noted in Church this morning: dogs being taken through a stroll, cell phones ringing, an armed policeman...

My habitual reaction is to declaim the lack of respect - my reaction is to consider my exogeneity and ignorance - the result is my sad confusion....

In some ways, when I am lied to, when I am left to undergo discomforts that any would feel, when I understand how the chaos makes life more difficult for most involved... I simply stomp my feet and damn the falta de educaçäo, the lack of 'education' in the cultural sense, not the formal academic sense.

On the other hand, the discomforts are still my own, from my own contrast of experience and expectation. Take this example:

When traveling from La Paz to Cochabamba on a daytime bus, we stopped for lunch at a road junction. Our bus supposedly had a bathroom in it, but it was piled up with buckets and clearly out of order. I tried to talk to one of the three agency representatives who travelled with us on the bus, I asked him why those things were in the bathroom and why we couldnt use it. Well, we were stopped, and I clearly could have used the bathroom at the restaurant, and the young man was clearly angry with my questions. His anger expressed itself, inclusively, in speaking so quickly and with such slangs and hard accent that I was sure not to understand him. It felt like being barked at.

The problem for me wasn't so much that there was no functional bathroom, but that I was told there would be one. An untruth that may not have been intentional on the part of the agent who sold me the ticket, since he couldn't know the status of the bus, and tells the situation as it is supposed to be, whether or not the actual state of the buses conform to that. In addition, the bother for me was the complete disrespect the bus agent at the stop willingly expressed to me. There was no attempt to patch up an un-service... in fact, there is no concept of customer service. There is what you get, and complaints are never welcome. In fact, complaints are seen as a disrespect on the customer's part. Perhaps by expecting and complaining about that situation I was asserting an inferiority of their expected and regular state. Hence my deserved being-barked-at, which can only make sense like this, as an after thought of my own, which may not even occur in the mind of he who barked... for him, perhaps, I was just another offensive gringo.

If I could vote today I could come face to face with this dilemma: the ideological choice I would like to make would mean having my white urban privileges confronted directly. Yet, what I have is the inevitable blind oppression: even seeking out the comfort I (thought I) paid for in a trip is an act that reasserts a class and race structure that continues to oppress an impoverished majority... There aint no ballot box there, and there isnt any action I can take that would easily shed my expectations of 'proper manners' that any people should have.

This is more than the differences of culture easily explained such as "forks or chopsticks". Those who use forks and knife at a table might consider it barbaric to suck your noodles or rice from a bowl... Those who use chopsticks might consider it barbaric to butcher one's food on one's own plate... But both can recognize the "civilizing" intention behind it all.

Contrast that with the talking loudly in museums, getting in front of each other and never considering lines, hacking on the sidewalks, doorsteps, and even inside buildings, and generally just honking one's way about town as though there were no lanes, no lights, and as though it were the case that cars in front of you could magically disappear at the sound of one's horn...

Where is the civilizing intent in that?

And fuck that charge against "civilization" made by Daniel Quinn.... Blame industrial society, blame bureaucracy... but there still seems to be a wiiiiide gap between all of that an a set of social manners that express recognition and respect for the other.

There is either a disconsideration of what "the good life" (Vivir Bien) would entail, eg., stepping on other people's hacked luggies must be "just fine and dandy", or worse, there must be a simple disregard for the other - a selfishness, an egoism that is sin in any culture, religion, time or place. That is the disrespect I fear plagues so much of our world...

Now, lest I be misunderstood, I am not leaning back towards those arguments that "the underdeveloped are so because of their own problematic cultures". I would sooner think these cultural problems of poor social habits are a result of political and economic situations that constitute the so called "underdeveloped" as the other side of the coin of "development for some". Yet, of course, this doesn't excuse the mal-educados (the ill-mannered) from their responsibility for improving social habits. This also doesn't mean that improving social habits can solve political and economic problems... Nor does it mean that only political and economic "solutions" can affect these social habits. Call it "dialectic" and give it an -ism if you would like, but the point is that in real life things are complicated, families raise their young, and political and economic changes affect the context in which this takes place... There is little that can be done outside of raising one's own young, and dealing as lovingly as we can with our peers... be it to reprimand them when they need to be shown back to the narrower path of recognizing-the-other, or be it to follow them ourselves on that path when as we try to stumble alongside it...

Enough rambling for now... later I will write about the events of today's election.