There is a basic lack of culture—a coarseness about life itself—in El Paso, Texas. It is something wholly unnecessary, but omnipresent, a feature of daily experience.
Some parts of this coarseness must extend beyond EL Paso, Texas, but I leave it to the reader to decide that.
Yesterday I waited for over three hours (with my elderly parents) in a doctor’s office. Now, as it turned out, there was a very good reason for our wait. The doctor had been called to the hospital for an emergency, and I was informed of this.
However, I want to contrast the casual and after-the-fact way in which I was, individually, informed of that cause for inconvenience with the routine operating methods of the public transport system in Vienna.
In Vienna, if a train or tram is delayed, there is an announcement apologizing. Usually it is a recorded announcement and regular riders of the metro have memorized the words of these announcements. People even repeat them and make a joke of them.
Nonetheless, the messages are polite and apologetic, even if formulaic.
Yesterday, the “office manager” casually, and as it were, as a footnote, mentioned to me that the physician had been delayed in the hospital. She told me as I was leaving.
She did not apologize.
And, as I think of it now, I don’t see why she could not have entered the waiting room (full of people) and made an announcement, an official apology, much along the lines of the U-bahn message in Vienna. It could have been done hours earlier.
Why was this not done?
I put the difference down to lack of culture, a fundamental coarseness in the way people deal with one another in the USA. (I don't think it is merely an El Paso or a Texas phenomenon.)
And here is another example---not exactly an example of coarseness in manners, but coarseness in thought--an example of limited or blocked thinking.
In a conversation with a pair of ex-soldiers in what was, it seems, a roomful of ex-soldiers, I was (metaphorically speaking) slapped in the face, shocked by the coarseness of thought among the citizens of the USA. I came up against a brick wall, a block in their thought processes.
I have heard dancers speak of a block—the physical sensation that something is stuck, much like the sort of thing that causes heart attacks, but they mean something temporary, that one can work through. The kind of block I am talking about—though dangerous and deadly—is a failure in thinking captured by the word “profit”. This sort of block seems permanent and fatal.
Overhearing a conversation about the presence of USA soldiers in Iraq, I mentioned that work such as cooking was being done by non-USA citizens, brought to Iraq by independent companies, who had contracts with the US Army (military). This was news to my conversational partners.
I managed to convey the thought that people from such countries as the Phillipines were being paid much less than a North American would receive. And that point was met with the quick reply, made with the force of self-evidence, that the companies in question needed to make a “profit”. (As if that were sufficient explanation or justification. As if it were something obvious.)
But what is a profit? The USA government pays money to the companies. They provide a small share of it to people from the third world who are performing real work such as cooking and cleaning. (And those people do not work under conditions which would be considered standard.)
Is that right? What makes it right? Why should a Phillipino receive less than a Texan?
In fact, though I did not inform my conversational partners, it is also true that among the mercenaries in Iraq there are soldiers from such countries as the former Yugoslavia—and they receive less money than North American mercenaries.
“The companies need to make a profit.”—They do? Why?
What is a profit? This is what a profit is: Someone who has more money than they need invests it in a company. They demand a “profit”. The profit comes from the activities of the company---activities performed by people who have less money than they need, or maybe only just as much as they need.
That situation stinks. It’s not right and can’t be justified. And that’s what “profits” are. The man who has more money than he needs demands that the person with little or no money perform activities which increase the wealth of the man who is already wealthy.
It’s not a law of nature. It’s not universal to all human cultures at all times and all places. And it is a filthy rotten thing, but something which that guy yesterday took for granted as if it were a fact of life.
And so these people move through the world as if they were blind, bumping into one another, hurting themselves and others, not knowing why. It is as if a straw doll somehow came to life, unable to see with its eyes, unable to move normally upon its weak and wobbly legs, and it struggled to move, bumping into things, falling again and again. That is the sort of thing which they call "living" in this country which has more weapons than any other......
