It's not a failure of culture


A former America basher finds that it is really about responsibility and opportunity. Even if it took a trip to Guatemala to learn.
The Musty Man has a different point of view on America and personal responsibility.

An aversion to whitehats and fast food might be a reason to leave the country, but it's no reason to bash it. To fail to find a place for yourself in the USA might be a failure of fucking imagination, but it ain't a failure of the culture to provide. I dunno... I've given up on thinking that I can really tell anyone else what should be going on in their head - but when I go from America to Guatemala to America to Guatemala, the virtues of our ways of doing things are pretty self-evident. Guatemala is a sucky place to be born. Without qualifiers. A lot of people come down here and backpack around and go back to the U.S. or Europe talking about what a great place Guatemala is, how nice the people are, whatever. They're wrong. I think they're even objectively wrong. I've had a couple good Guatemalan friends in my life, and they've all followed about the same trajectory:

Grow up, demonstrate potential, work hard in school, try to learn everything you can, hit your teens, get blindsided by your hormones, impregnate or be impregnated by someone you don't particularly like, get married when you're three months pregnant, abandon your long-term plans in favor of addressing your suddenly multiplying short-term needs, hate your life, fuck around on your spouse, realize that the stuff you deferred has become unattainable and that your obligations will never release you, hate your life even more, live in daily realization of what you could have done but didn't, try to make up for it by loving your fourteen grandchildren.

This isn't everyone, of course, but walking around Guatemala is as much a lesson on squandered potential as anything else, and this almost always triggers some resurgence of First World Guilt/Realization of Entitlement that I've been wading through for so long that I think it's completely fucking boring, on me or anyone else, but it took me years to arrive at this point. I don't even debate the idealists anymore. I think everyone who has an opinion about whether poor people are just lazy, whether they're for or against, should spend a little time in Guatemala. You'll come away convinced of both, all at once, and you'll never be able to explain how that simultaneity of opinion is even possible.

But I could never convince myself that I wanted to be born here, that I really wanted this to be a legitimate reality for me. And that makes it playtime - make believe. The real action, ladies and gents, the peergroup that I will ultimately find myself with, is still back there in the U.S., drinking good beer and talking about interesting shit. No reason to hate on the motherland. And if I can't really go through with that "me as them" rhetoric on a level that means something - marry a local, get a job, buy a house - I'm talking out of my ass. Guatemala has a lot to recommend it, but I can't even begin to put it into any sort of a hierarchical relationship with anywhere else where it comes out ahead in a way that isn't superficial - talking about things like papayas and long siestas up against getting an education and living past 50.

The whole thing is pretty good, and it's another perspective on that American Guilt thing I keep talking about.

Are they better or worse? It depends on what your goals are. Mostly they are different.

Hat tip to Johnathan Wilde at Catallarchy.

— NeoWayland

Posted: Fri - August 4, 2006 at 07:42 AM  Tag


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