If everyone looks for the exotic, what do you get when you find it? Yourself. It implies the ocular contortion of watching Friends as something exotic, because it's the exoticism of the object of your exoticism.
What you learn by trying to escape is that it's impossible. Why then do you study abroad?
And in the pairing of those two ideas lies a an immense web of irresolvable painful implications.
Every act of an United Statesian leaving the States for a Latin American country is interpretable as an assertion of hegemony.
If only it were that simple, if I could just blame the US government; if I could just blame us; just blame me.
perhaps the pain itself, when attended to, with conscious presence, can lead one/you/us/me/it/they/them into a deeper connection with the solution to the unsolvable problem of power struggles, domination/subordination, hegemony/self-determination.
ReplyDeleteAn unflinching, naked look at power, which to most people and nations means dominance/subordination.
What if the way out is to have the wisdom to see the limitations of living this way, which is unsustainable to the earth and destructive of life?
What if the way through the pain is for individuals and nations to be empowered, which can only be accomplished by mutuality?
This is the basis of sustainable living, in any arena: ecological, political, civic, economic, interpersonal. Even Darwin's primary emphasis was not on cutthroat competition but on symbiosis.
We have King, Ghandi, the Dali Lama as a few examples, countless more obscure folks who live from these principles. What else is there? People are crazy. Life is crazy. We are all crazy. It can't be fixed. Once we accept that and stop trying to fix it, then we can live.