Corrections and Caveats

I got an email recently from a dear friend who just graduated from Duke--so therefore, for the purposes of argument, we'll say that his brain is a lot more used to thinking deeper about things, analyzing things to the core, as it were. Mine has gotten used to being excited 'cause I'm gonna have pizza tonight, or thinking it's a sweet deal when I get paid $7 an hour to babysit.

So when he wrote to me with a concern about one of my posts (Back in the Land of the Free), gentle readers, I listened. He pointed out that it's not viable to compare Latin American governments to the US government because, in so many cases, they got to be as weak/corrupt/inefficient/poor as they are because of our interventions--free trade agreements, drug wars, military actions undermining their fledgling governments, etc.

And although it's not really what I meant to say, he's totally right and there is that implication in what I wrote, looking back. I don't want to change the post because I really was looking forward to coming home and was thinking those thoughts about missing certain things about the US of A. But I had not considered the implication that it was Their Fault and Their Problem to Fix, when, in most cases, it is so much more complicated.

I remembered another story I heard on NPR: about a US drug-fighting campaign that involves spraying herbicides on coca plantations in Colombia. Not only has it proved inefficient, because people just replant (and should we be surprised, if we destroyed their only livelihood without providing a viable replacement?), but the runoff has entered the Amazon basin and we don't even know the extent of that damage, although both people and the environment have appeared to suffer the consequences.

What I meant to say was that, while there, I was looking forward to the luxuries we have here--the luxury to not always be on your guard, to not pay attention to the war in Iraq, because it's not happening in our own backyard even though we ought to be painfully involved, the luxury to not think about how we got the freedoms we have--the luxury to Take For Granted. And I don't think it reflects particularly well on me to have been missing those luxuries.

Uplifting, no? So thanks, P, for holding me accountable. I'll be back with more depressing riffs soon.