I find El Paso Texas.
People are not friendly.
There is a broad antipathy and hostility, a tendency toward distrust and
suspicion, typified by the signs in the buses warning us to look out for
suspicious behavior. Yes, let's all imagine a terrorist under every bed. That
will justify outrageous spending on weapons....
I suspect that people in this country have been oppressed so habitually, they do
not even recognize their downtrodden condition.
But it is not merely unfriendliness... There is simultaneously the false
friendliness one expects in the United States... bred I imagine by the
demands of employers who wish to increase their profits... and there
is something else, as well, something which I attribute to a deep
anti-democracy and authoritarianism in American society (a stream
or current) and a by-product of the military influence. (the local paper features
frequent stories about the great economic benefits of the increased
number of professional killers....)
This further piece of nastiness comes from a conviction that there must
be rules and everyone must follow the rules... a willingness to publicly
display one's willingness to follow the rules . . . combined with a puritanical
willingness to punish any deviants.
All of which is ludicrous in a country
where there is one set of rules for the rich and powerful and another set of rules for
everyone else....
Unfriendliness? Hostility? If I sit in my room trying to read and am assaulted
by booming--whether from a neighbor's house or a passing car doesn't matter--that
is very unfriendly. And that is a common occurrence.
Or, if, as a pedestrian I have learned to exercise extreme caution because cars
resent (or ignore) the presence of naked human beings (human beings not
enclosed in climate destroying glass and steel vehicles), then I have become
nervous and tense.
Of course, the very profile and dark windows of El Paso's numerous climate
criminal vehicles is designed to be unfriendly.....
All, in all, these features of my life did not exist in Europe. In a very real sense,
the United States of America is worse, a worse place to live, less civilized.
Riding the bus is an incredibly depressing experience. Either I wait in line
with thirty other people to board the bus, or I enter an already crowded space,
after proving my worthiness to the driver. The obligatory greeting ritual
mostly painful and false.... or worse, a driver's silence knocks against me
like a slap.... It feels like we are things being
prepared for transport. Cattle entering a cattle car. The bus is noisy.
The suspension is minimal. In some parts of the city the driver is unable
to negotiate turns without bouncing the bus up against the curb.
We have to prove that we have paid--an insult. Apparently the city is
very afraid that someone might ride without paying--a grotesque
case of hostility toward the poor. Heaven Forbid that one of the
Mexican day laborers who are exploited by the local population should
one day ride a bus without paying! That would be stealing!
Grotesque hypocrisy in light of the free ride enjoyed by
Wall Street and the Pentagon and the corrupt likes of Black Water or
Haliburton or Goldman Sachs-- The criminals at Goldman
Sachs are not only greedy, but they don't care if they cause people to starve:
People waiting in line are impatient and bump into me.
I am impatient too. I don't like being bumped. The heat is unpleasant.
It burns your skin.
Once we are inside the bus the cold will pierce my skin like needles. I may be able to read a bit, if the bus is not too crowded. Often people stand in the aisles. Many carry packages. It is not unusual for young children to scream.
I didn't mind the noisy babies in the Vienna U-bahn, so there must be some difference in the overall atmosphere. The feeling of deprivation, of belonging to an underclass, of being left out,
being unimportant, being someone who has to prove, at every step of the way, that I've
paid..... all the while knowing that whatever I pay or whatever I earn,
whatever I do, is grabbed up by someone else...
Degrading, depressing, discouraging. Ugly. At the receiving end of American class warfare.
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