America the HOPELESS America the UGLY

I lived in Europe for more than twelve years. I was a pedestrian in Europe for more than twelve years. And, during that time, not once did someone shout at me from the open window of a car speeding by.

I put that down to a deep cultural difference--a way in which the United States of America is backwards, primitive, and hopeless, prone to aggression and violence in ways large and small.

This remark was provoked by yet another case of a peculiarly American tendency to abuse power--albeit the relatively small power implied by the possession of an automobile, a climate destroying opulent waste of resources--with the attendant ability to abuse a person with less material resources.

As I walked down the street near sundown, a car sped by with its windows open, and a head projected from the driver 's side, shouting at me, saying words I could not

understand, but speaking words which were unmistakably aggressive, taunting,

threatening, and unfriendly.

This was not the first such incident since I have lived in El Paso. I have blogged about this before, and I have not blogged about every single such incident. But every time it happens it is disturbing and unpleasant, and I see no reason to believe that these incidents will stop any time soon.

This was not a member of the wealthy ruling class. This was one of the country's poorer citizens abusing me because he considered me to be beneath him.

I see no hope for a country whose residents are so brainwashed by the consumerist ideology.

By the same token, El Paso itself is tremendously ugly.

Yesterday I sat outside a coffee shop near the local university. Countless noisy cars and trucks sped by, many of them loud enough to disturb my reading.

A mindless orgy of glass and steel.

Who could imagine that this is a pleasant scene? Quite apart from the facts of climate change and the United States' excessive consumption of resources belonging to other nations, this is an ugly scene, a noisy scene, with little in it of humanity or civilization.

Those who discovered the laws of physics and engineering needed to create automobiles may have done something worthy, but the individual who merely purchases a car has done nothing.

I see nothing hopeful or beautiful in this land of brutal sunlight and omnipresent sand, glass, steel and perversion, aggression untamed by civilization...hopeless and ugly....