Some of my grandfather's last advice to me was to reconsider politics... they can "ruin a girl"...
I'm waking up in the morning every day between the hours of 10am-12pm, surveying the mess in the living area, getting dressed, and getting lunch. Everything within two square miles of where I'm sitting looks the same. Everything within ten swuare miles of where I'm sitting looks similar. After all, you could drive from one end of XXXX to the other and still get the same horrible vibes. I know from living here that self -medication, denial, or leaving is the only way to handle it. One looks over the swelling golf courses and gated communities and feels as though the city is made on a garbage dump, or an indian burial ground, or on the backs of something.
I'll sit here sometimes and grapple with the fact that while I'm sitting in my car bitching about someone's bumper sticker in front of me (one hint: they're all the same!) someone is being bombed. Someone just got dragged out of their house and arrested in Iraq. Some girl just caught a rubber bullet going to school in the Palestinian territories. A woman's face is splashed with acid in Afghanistan. A child starves to death in Africa. A student loses hope in China. A teenage girl my age is forced into prostitution in the Balkins. A family is run off their land in South America. And an Amazing Part of that suffering and degredation is my fault. I'm an American, after all, and I live in the system their pain has afforded me. It's my mother's fault, my best friend's fault, my boyfriend's fault, my professor's fault. Everything I care about on a day to day basis is built on suffering and pain to bring me luxury and comfort and security.
Everyone is chock full of the Christmas Spirit! I am not. It is hard, but the only real way one can function in American society today is the same way you can handle XXXX -- self-medication, denial, or leaving. Of course, only one of those options really works. You don't think about the Arab who scalds his hands setting fire to an oil pipeline while you're filling your car with gas, and you don't think about the Zapistas in Mexico while you're buying groceries. After all: look at the city. It's not built on a garbage dump, it's built on the fact that out of the three percent of the people who live in America, an even smaller percent control this place and live here in comfort and ease. Denial is the only way to fit in the system today; otherwise you'd drop out.
XXXX, to me at least, is the ultimate in living in denial. I spent too many years searching for its unseemly underbelly to be able to come back and close my eyes and not see Gaza and think to myself My God, what are we doing. That's where the self-medicating is coming from. Today, after I write this, I'm going to go be in denial. At least after Christmas, I can leave.