observations of privilege

2013.03

I'm on a bus! A bus from Bogota, heading for Pereira. Because Colombia is really big... it takes a pretty long time to get from one major city to the other. This bus ride is estimated to take 7hrs (but I've heard some people say it might take up to 10 or 11...). On the one hand, sitting on a bus for that long isn't great.

But on the other hand, it's such a great opportunity to do all sorts of things! I have this super laptop here in front of me, with a full battery and no internet connection, so I can write-up this blog post. I also have some pants with me whith a big giant hole in the butt (from sitting on rough rocks while hiking), which need some mending. And plenty more photos to sort through.

Lorena is the lady who posted her backpacking trip on couchsurfing.org, which I got to sign-up for to join her and her friends. I went to hang out with her at her family's house last night, and she filled my mp3 player up with Spanish reggae and ska music (and a little James Brown)!

The on-bus entertainment is a black and white movie from the 50's or something, about Jesus. That's interesting.

Passing through the suburbs of Bogota in this nice [expensive] bus with big huge windows offers me another great opportunity to learn more about this city. Again I'm leaving, but expecting to come back. Next time, I'll get to stay at my friend Lorena's house with her family, instead of in a hostel. And I'll probably get to hang out with Eduin again.

Ok, now for some more general observations about Colombia and my trip...

[sidenote: I'm trying to stop referring to myself, people from the US, or the country I'm from as “America”. Traveling so much in Canada and now South America, I've realized how insanely ego-centric it is for the United States to assume that it's the only really significant country in “America”. America refers to North and South America, and includes at least 20 different counties.]

Colombia is a solidly middle-class country (by United States standards). According to Emilio, one of my fellow US wwoofers at La Juanita, this booming middle class if fueled by selling oil to the United States. Yes there are affluent areas of Colombia, contrasted with areas with more poverty. There are rural farming areas to, and those areas don't necessarily overlap with poverty. And I'm sure that statistics would show a much higher population of poverty in Colombia than in United States, but maybe that is more a matter of perspective, than of “happiness”. One night at the farm, us three US wwoofers were sitting at the dinner table complaining about US healthcare... after enduring this for a bit, Felipe, our Colombian host, interrupted us saying, “you guys need to realize that you have a huge privilege just being able to discuss this. In Colombia, if you get sick, you either have money, or you die. End of story. There is no safety net.” And that was a sobering reminder for me.

In general though, I find much more similarities between Bogota and cities in the United States than differences. Perhaps it's because that's what I expect in some way – I expect that humans all over the world are generally more similar to each other than different. Or perhaps it is because of the pervasiveness of corporate consumer culture. Some of the companies are different here, but the race to have a bigger pile of the correct “stuff” seems very similar. One thing that really surprised me at first, (maybe it shouldn't have, but it did) is that your average Colombian city person is, for the most part, indistinguishable from a North American city person.

What I mean is, people identify with the culture of the conquistadors – not with the culture of the vast and advanced indigenous societies that have been occupied, oppressed, and repressed (Eduin and I had a long and detailed conversation about this concept in particular). This is surprising to me because there is much more integration between the conquistadors and the indigenous communities here than in North America. Maybe it is some racism programmed into me, but part of me is sincerely surprised to see all of these people in Colombia – most of whom are brown and obviously related to at least one indigenous person in the past three or four generations – surprised to realized that all of these brown people identify as white. To me, it seems to shed some light on the way in which people are programmed to oppress themselves... it seems to shed some light on the so-called “privilege” of people in the United States.

One big similarity I see between Colombia and United States is unhealthy diets. Now in Seattle (and most large coastal cities in the US), there is a special culture of healthy eating, a growing fetishization of organic, local, small-scale farming. And I think this is amazing. This culture seems to be just getting started in Bogota, with farmers and community organizers like Felipe, and his friends around Guatavita, and lots and lots of growing urban farms all over Bogota. And in the United States, the “healthy, organic, local” food craze is still a niche market – globally powerful, but niche nonetheless. The vast majority of United States citizens eat a pretty shitty diet, composed mostly of processed fast foods, monoculture potatoes, chemically grown and manufactured corn and wheat products, and waaay too much meat, grown in horrible soul-killing factory farm conditions. Most United States citizens are malnourished (meaning badly nourished, not that they don't get enough calories...). And here, I'm gonna go out on a limb and say that malnourishment – the kind that causes mass obeisity – is caused by NOT EATING ENOUGH RAW VEGETABLES.

And the diet of your average Colombian is not much different. But the funny thing is that here in South America, in Colombia, this is the ecosystem of all of the new fancy, hot-shit health foods that many people in the US are now coveting... these health grains, the saviors of the US health food craze, they come from the Andes mountains. And in this case, I find the contrast really obvious, because wheat is, literally, the grain of the conquistadors. The Spaniards forced indigenous farmers to destroy their quinoa and other crops, and replace them with wheat from Europe. According to Felipe, the popularity of these grains in the US market actually creates an opportunity for farmers here to start growing their traditional grains again in an ecologically viable way.

So my point here is not to distort the reality or Colombia culture, or to convince anyone that it is “just like America”. The thing I'm trying to get is poking holes in the delusion that United States is the “wealthiest, more stable place in the world, it's people the best taken care of...” Because I don't think that is true at all. Along with the 'privileges' that being the biggest consumer of material crap in the world bring... is the oppression of being little obedient consumers, always ready to buy the next bullshit that corporations can come up with in order to make a profit. The oppression of being fat and sick because corporations are spending millions of dollars figuring out how to make junk food as addictive as opiate drugs and getting us hooked on them... The privilege of school systems that teach us to be obedient consumers (not empowered community members)

The thing I'm trying to get at feels really resonated by a poem in the book, “The State of North America”, written by a white woman about the betrayal she felt from her own government and culture in it's oppression of indigenous people... the betrayal she felt as a white kids growing up in poverty in the midwest... because the side affect of our “white privilege” seems to be an amputation of our right to belong to the land... amputation of our relationship with nature... we are made to be dependent upon grocery stores and shopping malls. We don't know what plant in our environment are edible or not, and we don't even know how to grow the plants we would buy in the grocery store, because they are grown with huge machines and chemicals and shipped huge distances to be displayed in perfect packaging for someone to buy off the shelf without ever having to think about how it is produced.

And this is a self-replicating system, this de-skilling of the United Stated populace. Because the less knowledge people have about their natural environment, the more dependent they become on buying things in stores.

So what I see in Colombia is a bunch of people who might be judged, by United States standards, as “living in poverty” because their GDP is considerably lower, because their houses are not as big, because they don't have as much disposable cash to buy bullshit. Because the level of gang violence in the country is so much higher, fueled by the US demand for illegal drugs and the US government's efforts to control and suppress those drugs...

But the basic fundamental details of life... I don't find all that much different. Most specifically, I don't think Americans are particularly healthier than Colombians. I do think that eating shitty diets of processed, chemical food is the way that people, all people of every economic status, have been trained to oppress themselves. The option of choosing to spend more money on “healthy” food, on vegetables, is definitely a privilege of wealth. But done right, by focusing on locally grown food, strong community networks, fairly traded international foods, eating well and healthy is also a protest against occupation and oppression. It's standing up and asserting your sovereignty, and your right to have a relationship with the land and with your community. And it doesn't have to be a privildege of wealth... ideally that's the whole point – figuring out how to make locally grown food more economically viable, because the reality is that it is more efficient!

Ok, so this blog post got away from descriptions of my trip, and into a bit of diatribe about my opinions on American culture... but that is also sort of the point of my trip, eh? Gaining perspective on my home with the fresh viewpoint of experiencing another place.