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| Alubujid, Philippines June 6, 2004 This trip to the Philippine islands has been enlightening, but not in the way that I expected. Yesterday, instead of spending time with an asawa, wife, it was another family outing, to a nearby beach, movie and dancing at the city disco. For the folks I am staying with these are all novelties, rare events for a family without budget. It seems strange that at 42 I am learning so many things for the first time too, again. There are some very basics among them—washing in the stream, laundry by hand, eating vegetables grown and fish caught by my neighbor, shitting without toilet paper. Life on a sailboat in San Francisco Bay was so connected with the land, even though I was off the grid on board—sneaking into the marina’s showers, eating bad junk food at the local convenience store. It is easy to forget how to live. What is the use of long, expensive schooling that teaches Dostoevsky and algebra, the very top of the human pyramid, without making sure the foundations are solid? When American politicians decided to frenzy the yahoos against the French last year—forgetting how Lafayette’s navy defeated the British during the War of Independence and generously left afterwards—hot and greasy potatoes became “freedom fries.” But why smother innocent potatoes with lard, salt and ketchup at all? How could Paris have retaliated? Banned American cheese? A French farmer earlier burnt down an even more potent symbol of our food—a McDonalds—over an open fire until hamburger grease ran thickly into the sewers. The best test of a nation’s way of life is whether it could apply to the whole world instead of a single country. Climates, culture, clothes are different. Human nature isn’t. And the naked facts—a nation consuming one-quarter of the world’s pie, three times its fair share, gorging itself until crude oil runs down its many chins—are indecent. If the rest of the diners at the galactic restaurant were equally greedy, the waitresses would need to 86 the pie and send the busboys to do a wet clean up. It takes very little to live right—food, shelter, love. Everything else is a luxury, and like luxuries can smother instead of providing comfort. If more than a billion Chinese, almost as many in India, and the rest of the earth too, had the bad habits of America, the planet would run out of oil and then breathable oxygen very quickly. Despite our horrible American mistakes in foreign policy that have cost millions of lives, the rest of world will never just hate us. There is too much to admire—the great energy, bravery and ideals that still shine through the cracks of the walls we build. Just as we have led the world to a dead-end of power run amok, the answers to a simpler and better life survive in places like the Philippines, and off the grid in our own land. |
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