Forty-one percent of likely Republican primary voters say they favor Donald Trump. It appears that the penis-wagging businessman pledging to “Make America Great Again” has tapped into the ubiquitous groundswell of America’s working class discontent.
Of course people are pissed. The top beneficiaries of the “recovery” from the Great Recession have been large corporations and their shareholders. People’s wages are stagnant and they feel betrayed when the oft-promised “trickle down” benefits of supporting big business have failed to materialize. The top-earning 15 Americans have made $170 billion these past two years, more than the bottom 40 percent of our country combined. Politics aside, anyone with common sense can admit that this is an obscenity.
Enter the Trumpnado whose tremendous wealth and America-sized ego have apparently excused him from practicing human decency. And by the way, money has always been associated with Godliness in this country; I don’t care what anybody says. The meek will never inherit the earth because Americans are obsessed with rich people. Look at the roving cast of assholes which our viewership keeps afloat—the Hiltons, the Kardashians, My Super Sweet 16, The OC, Laguna Beach, Entertainment Tonight, The Real Housewives—all of that brain putty which makes us believe obscene wealth is glamorous and sublimely desirable. Trump has the tact of a petulant child, nay, the tact of a lumpy potato, but that doesn’t matter. People see Trump’s name on buildings. He’s on TV. He represents what poor Americans are told they can achieve if they just work hard enough. So he went out and bought the biggest braindead megaphone on the planet—his outrageous presidential campaign machine—and we can’t get enough of it.
He’s tapping into a longstanding American tradition to blame “the other.” Muslims and Mexicans are simply the current targets of our noxious stereotyping and rancor. How have we not outgrown these racist knee-jerk reactions while angry white men continue to stockpile guns in their basements, foaming at the mouths over Fox News’s latest indictment against minorities or women?
The thing is that we need to grow up. There was never meant to be a GREATEST COUNTRY IN THE WORLD. There’s only one planet and we haven’t been very good at sharing it. Historically, geographic areas in a position of privilege—the U.S., England, the Mongol Empire, the Roman Empire, etc.—have moved into other areas exploiting local people and resources. Most recently, it’s taken the form of economic exploitation, where materials and manufacturing corporations owned by people from one country move into less developed countries, plundering minerals, oil, verdant farmland, and cheap human capital in the name of “progress.” Wealth simply snowballs to favor the upper crust and capital is liquid, finding new homes when one becomes too expensive or politically hostile.
I appreciate Trump’s gargantuan ego for putting into focus one of the most serious issues we face: the intractable conflict of interest between the Public Good and the Corporate Good.
The Public Good is simple. It seeks a strong education for all; ample job opportunities for all; affordable healthcare for all; healthy food for all; clean, crime-free streets and parks for all; well-maintained electrical grids, water treatment plants, and sanitation centers for all; and plenty of social interaction with family and friends for all.
The Corporate Good is simple in its objective, but complicated in its means. The Corporate Good’s main goal is profit and it will do anything to ensure its own survival, lining its shareholders’ pockets at the expense of all else. It will create unaccredited diploma mills for which mainly poor citizens take out massive government loans for ultimately worthless degrees (e.g., Axact). It will make a man raise the price of a life-saving drug 1600 percent (e.g., Martin Shkreli).It will make cancer treatments, pharmaceuticals, and surgeries much more expensive than they need to be because of bloated insurance bureaucracies. It will elevate sugary, processed foods above healthier options through marketing and low pricing (e.g., Coca Cola, McDonalds). It will create misleading advertisements and TV shows preying on people’s fears, weaknesses, and rage. It will try and merge with companies in countries like Ireland which cater to the Corporate Good (e.g., Pfizer). It will spread harmful chemicals through pristine environments (e.g., Monsanto, BP). It will buy fancy football arenas to keep people placably entertained and aware of its products (e.g., Budweiser). It will create machines for mass-killing and sell them without regard for the Public Good (Lockheed Martin). It will pay attractive, well-spoken people to convince Congressmen to protect its interests. Most strikingly, the Corporate Good holds the reins of government since money—not policy proposals, character, shrewdness, or morality—is what puts our Congressmen and presidents into power. What else can account for the mysterious rise of a loathsome creature like Donald Trump?
“Humor plays close to the big hot fire that is truth.” E.B. White
An island of mottled redness rises from my skin, burning like hell’s fire. The constellation of hair follicles swells painfully with each beat of my heart. I run cool water over linty washcloths and apply them to the affected area—or areas, I suppose is more accurate. Left and right, to be exact. Say, have you ever met anyone who chemically burned her armpits with fresh chili pepper oils?
Let me back up. You see, this would never have happened if I had a normal boyfriend—one who had no problem using fluoride-based toothpaste, non-organic vegetables, and easy-application corporate deodorant. No, Jon Miller insists on the superiority of his hippie solution, one which is so pure and aluminum-free—aluminum being the worrisome culprit in your traditional Old Spice, Lady Speed Stick, or Axe (if that’s your thing)—that you could eat the stuff. The thing is that I never saw anything wrong with aluminum-based deodorant, and chances are, you probably haven’t either.
Let’s just say that when you type “aluminum deodorant” into Google for the first time, it autofills with the following: “aluminum deodorant breast cancer,” “aluminum deodorant alzheimers,” and finally on down to what used to be my greatest concern about the white paste for your pits: “aluminum deodorant stains.”
Call me uninformed, but this was all news to me. I’d had similar revelations with Jon’s frequent polemics against BPA-laden store receipts and hormone-altering soy products. So his homemade deodorant was no surprise to me.
Here’s the recipe:
A good-sized dab of coconut oil
A sprinkle of baking soda
A few drops of tea tree oil
Some cornstarch
You heat up the mixture and pour it into some sort of receptacle. In lieu of a traditional deodorant dispenser, Jon uses a sharp-edged plastic jar—which (fun fact) historically held my boyfriend’s supplemental bee pollen—and it’s just small enough to scrape the back of your hand as you reach down into it. Currently there’s a low level of the product, so Jon wields the handle of his tongue-scraper to retrieve enough to apply to his armpits.
Last week, I ran out of my deodorant and decided to give it a try. Why not, right? The teatree oil smells fantastic and who cares if I need to apply the stuff with my fingers? I used the dull end of my tweezers and scraped some of the mucilaginous mixture from the razor-edged jar. Without thinking twice, I smeared it into my armpits.
I went outside to catch some sun and finish translating a poem in Spanish by Neruda (“Bacarole,” if you’re interested)—a morning routine I’ve taken up since moving to Argentina.
A slight tingle began to rise from the skin under my arms and I figured it was the usual culprit: razor irritation. Oh, the joys of being a woman. But this sensation continued to intensify, moving from tingle to singe to Sear to SCORCH and into a full-blown CONFLAGRATION under my arms which yanked me violently from my reading. I examined the skin which was just beginning to flush light pink, belying the intensity of the perceived scalding.
“Baby, does your hippie deodorant sometimes burn your armpits?” I inquired, the muscles in my eyes starting to strain from looking under my arm for too long.
“No, why?”
Then it hit me. I have a near pathological addiction to spicy food. I often eat meals as the Vietnamese do, taking bites of fresh chili peppers along with soups, stir-fries, stews, etc. I even muddle chili peppers in a tall glass with a blunt pestle and pour my beer on top of it. It is delicious. I also make my own hot sauce with fried garlic, lime juice, ginger, salt, and plenty of the skinny Thai-style peppers (or whatever’s available, wherever I happen to be living). Tabasco, Chulula, Frank’s, those artisan sauces from the Ferry Building in San Francisco—even my former mistress, Sriracha—really don’t do it for me anymore. I crave spice with everything.
That morning, I’d chopped up a slew of fresh Thai peppers. They’re my favorite and I used a lot of them, rinsing off my hands perfunctorily with a little water before finishing my morning routine, which included… applying deodorant with my fingers.
The resultant welts—chemically burned into my skin and further irritated with baking soda, cornstarch, tea tree oil, and coconut oil, the latter of which counterintuitively does not soothe, but serves to trap the heat—were indescribably painful, making me have a new respect for people who tattoo this very delicate area.
Whatever else I go on to accomplish in this world—whether it be authoring a Nobel Prize-winning novel which unites the world; whether it be discovering a global source of renewable energy; whether it be leading a grateful parade of kittens and puppies from a burning animal shelter and finding loving homes for them all—I may be the only person in the world who has chemically burned her armpits with fresh chili oil, and that’s something.
NOTE: If this has happened to you, the author would prefer not to hear about it. Please respect her wishes and keep her current, sole claim-to-fame in tact. She is much obliged.
Crack is whack! Above the influence! Use, and you lose! The echoes of childhood propaganda which tried to scare us straight.
We’re kids of the “Just Say No” generation, the abstinence-only approach to drug use trumpeted by then First Lady Nancy Reagan while her husband was busy slashing funds for vulnerable populations such as the poor and mentally ill.
Remember the sizzle of our eggy brains in the frying pan? Or the meth addict’s terrifying house-cleaning jingle? What about the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles cooly reminding us, “Drug dealers are dorks!”—a cartoon ironically spawned by heavy marijuana users, or at least individuals with highly dissociative thinking. The War on Drugs even coopted our beloved cast of Saved by the Bell—“There’s no hope with dope!”—after Jessie freaked out having ingested too many caffeine pills. We were continually reminded by everyone from our parents to the lovable Scruff McGruff—D.A.R.E.’s anti-drug cartoon canine—that drugs are baaaaad and we’d inevitably be sticking syringes in our little arms if we tried one puff of Mexican skunk weed.
So I ask you: In the years since these PSAs hit the airwaves, what has happened to us Millennials?
Well, the ads worked (or something did—Roe v. Wade and less unwanted babies being born, perhaps?—a discussion beyond the scope of this article). Illicit drug use, alcohol abuse, cigarette smoking, and a slew of other negative social indicators (e.g., teenage pregnancy, crime rates, dropouts, etc.) among Millennials are much lower than in previous generations. Vocativ (2015)—pulling data from the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), the National Institute on Drug Abuse, and the Department of Justice—illustrates just how well-behaved our Generation Y has been:
So what’s the problem here?
Two things, actually. First, I believe that our understanding of addiction is flat and selectively demonizes groups with less power in society. Second, I think that PSAs have been targeting the wrong perpetrators, that over the past few decades, much more insidious drug-peddlers have hooked Americans across all generations. And these pushers don’t operate from the shadows, but rather sell their dope openly, on TV even. I’m talking about something that kills more people annually than car crashes, something that kills more people than all illicit drugs combined. I’m talking about good ol’ corporate, doctor-prescribed narcotics.
I’ll begin by qualifying my position. I worked as an addiction specialist for over two years at a non-profit methadone clinic in San Francisco. I managed a caseload of roughly 50 people who had been (or still were) heroin-users. Methadone—an opioid that occupies the same brain receptors as heroin but without the same sedation or euphoria—is the pharmaceutical equivalent of kicking the can down the road. In essence, it replaces one substance with another, but most importantly it allows people to live stable, normal lives. Without the threat of withdrawals, they can maintain jobs, take care of their families, and go on about their business.
I was struck by the fact that some of my clients were just like me—young, ambitious, from loving families—and were a far cry from the grotesque “Faces of Addiction” we’ve seen pop-up in our Facebook feeds. Where were the festering blisters on their faces? Where were the signs that they were not to be trusted under any circumstances? What was heartbreaking is that my clients—mainly respectful and civic-minded individuals—had an acute awareness of society’s appalling concept of an “addict” and were self-conscious about it. Many had done time in prison for the non-violent crime of having a disease, and the shame of having been addicted to heroin dripped from their stories, as if they were trying to atone for having fallen off one of society’s most jagged edges. It reminded me that our concept of addiction is weighed heavily against lower income groups such as the homeless and minorities, groups with comparatively less power in society.
Faces of Addiction
It’s incredibly ironic that the War on Drugs and the subsequent mass incarceration of non-violent offenders—a policy that continues to disproportionately affect poor and minority people—was ignited by President Nixon, a notorious alcoholic. And I wonder how we would view addiction differently if PSAs had been created in the image of the rich and powerful addict?
Here’s what I mean:
Show us the Wall Street executive snorting lines of uncut Columbian off his mahogany desk and believing he’s invincible before rolling the dice with your grandmother’s stock portfolio.
Show us the bored, bony, Bel Air housewife who exercises for three hours a day and spends her weekly allowance from her overworked, philandering husband on a daily bottle of Veuve Clicquot while Maria or Svetlana raises her kids.
Show us the flush-faced politician who writes scathing polemics about drug-users while nursing his OxyContin addiction in a gated community. (Ahem, Rush Limbaugh.)
Show us the 22-year-old marketing manager in New York who blacks out every weekend on $15 cosmos and can no longer achieve orgasm unless she’s on mollie.
Show us the lead engineer in the Silicon Valley tech firm who pops Ritalin to code all night and keep up with the increasing demands of his employer.
Show us the millions of Americans who turn to sugary, fatty, comfort food—treats that were marketed to them on TV—to iron out life’s little speed bumps and then ask their doctors about one-pill solutions to their subsequent obesity, high cholesterol, high blood pressure, acid reflux, and heart ailments.
The point is that there’s always been an element of privilege to our concept of addiction. Poor addicts provoke contempt and disgust, while hard-partying wealthy addicts inspire TV specials and book deals. It’s all very unfair as we’re sold the bogeyman of “the marginalized other”—the dirty, disgruntled addict—to distract us from our own troubling habits nurtured by powerful forces.
This phenomena is intimately connected with my second argument. I believe that the biggest perpetrators of addiction, disease, and death are not the drugs that PSAs warned us about, but rather legally prescribed medications.
It’s no secret that the U.S. government has a cozy relationship with Big Pharma. Time (2015) writes a telling exposé on the new Deputy Commissioner of the FDA, Dr. Robert Califf, who believes that the U.S. needs less regulation in the development of new drugs, including the loosening of the approval process and a slackening of the post-market oversight. Given the number of drugs and devices that are recalled annually after causing serious injuries and death (e.g., Vioxx, Phen-fen, Propulsid, Zyprexa), and given the number of multimillion (and multibillion) dollar lawsuits annually, how can one of the top regulators of the FDA—an organization meant to safeguard the public interest—believe in less regulation?
The Centers for Disease Control (CDC) reports that since 2009, drug overdose deaths have overtaken those from motor vehicle crashes, and the trend has continued since then. In 2013, drug overdoses were the leading cause of injury death claiming 43,982 lives, nearly three times as many people as homicides. Of those drug-related deaths, 22,767 (51.8%) were from prescribed drugs, more deaths than from all illegal drugs combined.
A majority of these lives were lost due to two classes of medications: opioids, also known as painkillers (e.g., OxyContin, Vicodin), and benzodiazepines, a class of anti-anxiety drugs (e.g., Xanex, Valium, Ativan). Opioids are by far the biggest offender:
The CDC reveals that in the U.S., the cost of prescription opiate abuse was $55.7 billion, including lost workplace productivity, healthcare, and criminal justice
Opioids were involved in 71.3% of all prescription medication overdose deaths in 2013
Each day, 44 Americans die from painkiller overdoses, and in 2013, nearly two million Americans abused them
And yet, when asked about reasonable prescription limits in a PBS (2013) interview, a CDC representative reports that,
Very few states have laws requiring specific steps when exceeding daily dosage limits for all prescription painkillers…The existing limits do not place major constraints on prescribing.
Returning to the larger issue of high-volume prescriptions for all drug classes (not just painkillers), why is this happening? Two reasons: doctors are paid and patients are heavily marketed to.
First, between August 2013 and December 2014, doctors received $3.53 billion for consulting, speeches, travel, and meals from pharmaceutical companies, and this is only in disclosed payments. ProPublica’s “Dollars for Docs” (2015) project tracks not only how much Big Pharma is spending to woo doctors, but also calls out the greatest offenders:
Second, it’s interesting that since 1997, pharmaceutical companies have been able to hawk antidepressants, diuretics, antipsychotics, anesthetics, muscle relaxants, corticosteroids, antihistamines, and boner pills, among others, all on television and public billboards as if they were benign deodorant or salad dressing. This isn’t the way it should be. Europe has banned this practice—also referred to as direct-to-consumer advertising—and it’s easy to see why: it’s widely abused. As the old saying goes, “Don’t make the doctor your heir.” In a similar vein, why would we let entities that profit from our sickness—real or imagined—sell drugs to us? There’s a clear conflict of interest between private enterprise and public health. Companies rely on making money, not on making people well, and it’s in their financial interest to convince people to take drugs. Plain and simple.
Every once in a while, Big Pharma receives a slap on the wrist and a small, modest bite is taken from their profits. GlaxoSmithKline had to pay $3 billion in 2012 for false advertising, paying kickbacks to doctors, and making misleading statements on the label, among other charges. Pfizer, Johnson&Johnson, Abbott Laboratories, and Eli Lilly have all had to pay settlements of over $1 billion in recent years on similar charges (Source: Wikipedia).
Despite all of this, the industry remains defiant and committed to increasing their profits. Bloomberg (2015) reports that there were 63 million prescriptions for ADHD drugs last year, with adults taking 53% of them. Shire’s Vyvanse, an amphetamine-derivative approved to treat both children and adults, celebrated an 18% uptick in sales last year and CEO Flemming Ornskov noted gleefully that in 2017, this drug will be used to treat binge-eating! Ornskov adds that,“Sweden is one of [their] fastest uptick markets, even beating the benchmarks for the U.S.” The use of drugs should not involve a desired “expansion of markets” at all. Manufacturing an ever-increasing pool of pill-ready patients is not in the interest of public health.This is the problem.
I can go on about the racial and socioeconomic biases of American drug laws; the alarming explosion of Americans taking pills; the increasing power of drug cartels in the face of punitive attitudes toward substance (ab)use; and even why a more accepting attitude toward marijuana use has been good for society. Instead I’ll close with some glimmers of hope. Here are my recommendations to ameliorate some of the damage done by the misguided War on Drugs (WoD):
Decriminalize all drugs. Let’s take illegal drugs out of the shadows to disempower cartels, to save money on non-violent crime prosecution, and to get people with addictions the help they need. The Cato Institute has countless studies on the failed WoD, including an examination of the effects of decriminalization in Portugal, where drug use overall is decreasing, the government is saving money, and most importantly, people with substance abuse problems are treated as medical patients rather than social pariahs. There are countless indicators that the libertarian position on drugs is a strong one, and my clients at the non-profit clinic in San Francisco would have benefited greatly from time in treatment rather than time in prison.
Ban direct-to-consumer advertising for Big Pharma. The only people that should be telling us what to put into our bodies are doctors and nutritionists, not marketers.
Appoint impartial doctors and scientists to lead regulatory agencies such as the FDA, not corporate insiders. This is a no-brainer. We need independent-minded experts with a commitment to safeguarding public interest, those who won’t be swayed by “old friends” or the sparkling arsenal of lobbyist treats from Pfizer, Merck, and all the others.
Take care of your own mental and physical health and avoid relying on one-pill solutions.Of course there are medical conditions which warrant medication and surgery. I’m not Amish or a Scientologist, but I do believe that if Americans took more pride in being healthy, we’d all be better off. Less addicted, less sick, less judgmental, and happier.
San Martín de Los Andes—a remote village in Patagonia and my home for the past five months—defies description. I’ve puzzled over this opening sentence for the past 10-15 minutes, trying to pin down this place’s character and even in my native language, I’m like a stuttering teenage boy in the presence of divine beauty, afraid of assigning merely secular words to such majesty. And this is from someone who has lived on four continents and traveled throughout the world for the greater part of the last 10 years. There’s no denying I have a healthy basis of comparison, and there’s something ineffably special about this Swiss-style town replete with chocolate shops, cervecerias, and artisan craftworks embraced by an amphitheater of lushly forested mountains along the eastern finger of a beckoning lake. And that’s only the beginning.
San Martín de Los Andes, Thank you Google Maps
San Martín’s most prominent feature, the Lago Lácar, flouts categories of color. Like an iris, the lake sways from raincloud gray to milky turquoise depending on the light and the wind. The town bus terminal is one block away from the beach where men sweat through 5 v 5 soccer, and today, the water is donning her finest military blues. It seems a fitting tribute to José de San Martín—the Argentinian general from whom the village derives its namesake—a demigod who liberated much of South America from the Spanish colonizers in the 19th century. The sun ricochets off the water like stray bullets off a decorative shield, and it’s as hypnotizing as watching fire. Above Lácar rises a forested skyline—a voluptuous woman of trees laying in repose on her side—and even in the dead of this July winter, people fill the lakeside benches to talk, picnic, and sip on hot yerba mate.
It hasn’t all been Malbec and roses, though. I was here during a natural disaster that made international news.On the evening of April 22nd, 2015, the Calbuco Volcano erupted casting a thick plume of ash over San Martín from over 100 miles away.
Calbuco Volcano, April 2015
At 11:00 am the next morning, it was still pitch-black outside, and it was difficult to breathe. I checked all of our timekeeping devices thinking there must be some kind of glitch in the Matrix. How could the sun still not be up when it was nearing noon? In fact, all of the sun’s rays had been blocked out by an opaque cloud of particulate matter that was steadily blanketing everything in sight. In the words of my boyfriend, “This is some biblical, Armageddon shit!” Indeed it was, and it’s been the only day in my life that I feared the sun would never rise.
Before and after the Calbuco Volcano eruption, April 2015
The community, however, faced the challenge with aplomb and immediately began clearing ash from the streets. The volcanic substance, also referred to as tephra, is supremely absorbent and becomes so heavy with water that it’s been known to collapse houses. It’s important to clear it quickly, especially from vulnerable rooftops.
All of this was explained to me by the town’s many seasoned volcano professionals. I learned that in 2011, the Puyehue Volcano—this one much closer than Calbuco—erupted and suffocated the area in meters of ash…meters…forcing the closure of the area’s largest airport in Bariloche for over a year, a devastating blow given the area’s heavy dependence on tourism. Can you imagine wading through waist-high volcanic ash? In 2015 however, the sun did rise on April 23rd, and the townspeople filled the streets donning colorful bandanas over their noses and mouths, laughing at how mild this was compared to the last eruption.
Since this was my first brush with a volcano, I had no idea what to expect. Friends on Facebook witnessed the death of technicolor in my photos during those first few days, and lamented that, “All of the birds and animals are going die!!! So sad.”
Roses dusted with volcanic ash, April 2015
Well, I didn’t really believe that, actually. This was certainly no 79 A.D. Vesuvius, and although I was worried about the airport being open in time for my best friend to visit the following month, I remembered how other volcanically active regions not only survived eruptions (e.g., Hawaii, Indonesia, Naples), but thrived in their wake. To that point, it’s been nearly two months since Calbuco blew its impressive load, and new plant growth is everywhere, nourished by the fine minerals of the tephra which will continue to cultivate new life for years to come. Nature’s not-so-subtle changing of the scenes, this time with a happy ending.
Speaking of life, did I mention that this area is a bird-watcher’s wet dream? I learned that three biogeographic regions converge here—Andean forests, high mountains, and Patagonian steppes—each with distinct avian species. In fact, S.M. de Los Andes hosts the annual South American Bird Fair in November, the premier event of its kind on the continent. If you’re like me, you can identify maybe a handful of birds including common seagulls, pigeons, and pelicans, but let me tell you: there exist citizenries of strange, feathered creatures I’d never imagined. There are spring grass parrots with fire-engine red bellies which create jubilant flash-mobs of squawking;there are tall, gray and yellow birds with footlong beaks which irrigate verdant lawns with their worm-prodding; and there are brown sparrows the size of soccer balls which dig through trashcans and shriek when startled. I am no bird-watcher, but even I took notice of the chirping, trilling, twitter of the village’s omnipresent avian choir.
Patagonian parrots, Downtown S.M. de Los Andes
Birds haven’t been the only ones to treat this area as a sanctuary. Before becoming San Martín, this area served as a winter refuge for the Puelches, an indigenous tribe that raised horses on the eastern slopes of the Andes. In 1898, it was taken over in a territorial dispute between Argentina and Chile, and various settlements and agriculture began to sprout along the lakeshore. In 1937, Lanín National Park was created, stymieing development and protecting the natural environment for generations to come. That early preservation of this region in Patagonia is the reason it still feels unadulterated more than a century after its founding.
I have yet to speak to the village’s most impressive feature: its societies. And I use the plural of the word intentionally. Sure, San Martín boasts impossibly friendly human inhabitants, but there are also roving gangs of healthy mutts and cats everywhere. It’s not uncommon to see a pack of five collarless dogs racing euphorically up and down the sandy lakeshore. I contrast this with what I witnessed in Mexico or Nepal, for instance, where ownerless animals were normally sickly, losing fur in patches, depressed, and malnourished. But not in this Patagonian Shangri La for domesticates. Here, the dogs and cats are affectionate, rock vibrant coats, and don’t live in need, even if some of the long-haired dogs have dreadlocks around their hindquarters which bob—rather adorably—as they frolic. The thing is that there’s abundant fresh water at the lake, kind people, and enough organic compost from Argentina’s legendary “asados” (barbecues) to feed them. I’d never lived in a place where salubrious dogs and cats roamed as free citizens.
Lago Lácar, one of the local canine citizens
And finally, the human society. Here’s a recent story which sums up the bonhomie of San Martín for me: a pair of Belgian filmmakers, Paulina and Damien, were here last month collecting footage of grassroots communities. They were on a budget, and decided to stay with our dear friend Daniel whom they’d found through Couchsurfer. Their first night in town, Daniel put together a dinner party and prepared “carne relleno,” a thick, tender steak wrapped around garlic and red peppers, salted and baked in a decadent red wine broth. The dinner party raged past 3:00 in the morning—as many dinner parties do here—and it slipped out that Damien’s 30th birthday was two days later. Wondering how we could make it special for our new friends, we rallied a group of 10 and hosted an epic asado to celebrate. Everyone played instruments and feasted on tender meats, fresh bread, and birthday cake from an awesome local bakery. Now that’s the type of community I want to be a part of: one where strangers can roll into town and have a barbecue thrown in their honor two days later, as if among old friends.
For me, a person who has lived wandering from country to country for years, it’s the first time I’ve really felt at home anywhere since fleeing my mother’s coop. The Argentinians have a phrase that sums up the kindness and warm cheer of the people here: “re buena onda,” or very good vibes. I’m grateful for the buena onda here and I’ll do my best to pay it forward.
Thank you, San Martín de Los Andes. You’re hard to leave and impossible to forget.
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What do people typically seek from their professional lives? You may hear responses such as “fulfillment” or “autonomy,” “meaning” or “personal satisfaction.” More often than not, the response pays thought not only to an individual’s talents, but to a larger aim as well—to do good in the world. As if by nature, most of us harbor an aching desire to make a difference, to leave our communities a little bit better than we found them. While the will to exact positive change is evident in the hearts of people, there is a troubling lack of benevolent careers that pay enough for someone to survive and raise a family. Why is there such a discrepancy?
Like many of my peers, I dipped my toes into several professions after graduating from college. My most rewarding jobs included being a teacher, a freelance writer, and an addiction specialist, but the compensation for these positions was severely lacking.Many jobs that are absolutely essential to society pay pauper-wages, careers in fields such as education, social work, home care, medical assistance, childcare, small farming, construction, and more. This decreases the number of people who go into these important lines of work and makes our infrastructure more tenuous. Without those who provide our food, shelter, medicine, childcare, and schooling, our society would collapse into disorder and desperation. And yet they receive next to nothing for this essential labor, which causes many to turn to public services such as food stamps and General Assistance (GA). Locked into this grueling treadmill of poverty, these people burn out, become sick, and in turn, aren’t able to raise healthy families.The cycle continues.
I hit my breaking point working as an underpaid addition specialist for two years in San Francisco. I was the valedictorian of my high school and I’d graduated summa cum laude from Berkeley with degrees in psychology and sociology. I had other job options, but I’d wanted to give back to a community of people in need, to do the right thing. I had a caseload of over 50 clients with a high turnover of colleagues. It quickly became clear that I’d either need to marry into money—how passé for a self-sufficient, well-educated woman—or seek a better-paying career. I chose the latter.
In recent years, I doubled my salary when I became an SEO manager at an online marketing company. I wrote and edited online articles with the purpose of driving people to morally dubious, for-profit education clients, entities that have contributed to the explosion of student loan debt. I justified this to myself on the grounds that it was for education, so it couldn’t have been all bad, right? My desire to “make it” economically pulled the wool over my eyes and I felt spiritually bankrupt in the process. To my old company’s credit, they gave me free reign to create research-backed infographics that told the truth about wealth or gender inequalities, that explored careers in clean energy or medicine. These messages didn’t exactly align with the company’s desire to attract new students for client “diploma mills,” but they let me have my virtual soapbox to air all manner of issues important to me. For that, I am very thankful. They let me be me, even if I did get laid off one month after receiving a perfect performance review.
C’est la vie.
As a freelance writer, I still occasionally write articles for online marketing companies. Why? Because I love to write and I need to eat. These are the people who pay for my work. Plain and simple.
So why does our society offer such limited options for those with big hearts who don’t want to live in poverty? Are the astronomical salaries of defense contractors, corporate lawyers, investment bankers, lobbyists, and other ethically unsavory professions a reflection of our priorities as people, or is this simply a case of historical Wealth and Power protecting their elevated status, an ossification of the status quo?
I’ve seen evidence for both sides.
First, American priorities seem entirely out of whack. A handful of people in the U.S. have more wealth than the entire GDP of impoverished nations such as Sierra Leone, Ecuador, and Liberia. Our annual defense budget ($637 billion projected for 2015) is more than enough to feed and educate every child on earth, and yet our government callously fills the coffers of our defense contractors without addressing the real root of our nebulous War on Terror: a lack of access to opportunities in developing countries. Take care of basic needs for people, and the scourges of modern society seem to clear themselves up.
If we had a real interest in curbing violence around the world, we would have stopped building weapons which further escalate conflict and started investing in the hearts and minds of our purported enemies. This is not to neglect the countless non-profit organizations and other groups supporting infrastructural projects across the world. The issue is that a disproportionate share of the wealth is funneled into militaristic as opposed to humanistic ends. We should be paying people to do something better than shooting a gun. A majority of civilians on both sides of the conflict recognizes that building schools and providing basic services is better than building weapons or military bases, and yet we’re manipulated into believing that occupying other countries against their will is somehow for our protection and their benefit. It’s shameful.
We can’t continue pursuing the same militant strategies which have only fueled the flames of anti-Americanism in the Middle East and around the world. Our interest in other countries has been justified on the grounds of “freeing the people” from oppressive regimes or spreading democracy. It’s curious that we only pursue these “noble efforts” in countries that are of strategic interest to us for resources (e.g., oil reserves in the Middle East), corporate development (e.g., United Fruit Company in Central America), or otherwise. Where are our strides to end tyranny against the North Korean or the Nigerian regimes? The horrors of these countries are well-documented, but we do nothing. And then the American government goes and shakes hands with the oil-rich Saudi Princes, the leaders of a country where women still can’t drive and there are regular beheadings stemming from a misuse of Islamic law.
Another problem is that many Americans, likely exhausted from mind-numbing careers, seem to value entertainment above edification. We pay our actors, pop musicians, and athletes exorbitant sums for delighting us in the Coliseum of Mass Media while our schoolteachers and caretakers struggle to save for retirement.
There is ample evidence that American priorities are somewhat misguided, and it’s not entirely our fault. In fact, we’re behaving very rationally given the system into which we’re born: one where life’s meaning can be artificially constructed by the amassing of goods and power.
To that point, Wealth and Power have a history of safeguarding privileges for themselves and for their heirs. There are more millionaires in the Kangaroo Court of our country, the United States Congress, than ever before, and there are countless examples of people jumping between public service and private companies to bestow benefits on the other. Companies can pay for the election of representatives of their choosing, especially in the wake of Citizen’s United which enables businessmen to unleash unlimited campaign contributions. Our “public servants,” on the other hand, continue to pass legislation which protects incredibly low capital gains and corporate taxes for society’s most entitled people. There are some well-meaning politicians who strive to serve the larger public, but they are increasingly rare as Wealth becomes more and more politically prescriptive in the outcomes of elections.
So how do we change a society embroiled in political pseudo-conflicts, Republican versus Democrat, which always leaves the same wealthy entities in power? Grassroots movements such as Occupy Wall Street have the murmurings of creating change, but the lack of leadership in orchestrating demands extinguished the flames of revolt too quickly. What is the tipping point of a revolution? When will enough people stop watching the hypnotic shadows on cave walls and become privy to the real forces directing their lives?
NOTE: Scroll down to the last three paragraphs if you’re pressed for time and want to know why Argentina does medical care better than the United States. If you’re interested in the arresting tale of this bloody shirt, enjoy the ride.
Last Saturday, Jon and I went to El Catedral de Almagro, a dimly-lit warehouse with antique furniture, high ceilings, and abstract artwork. The corrugated tin walls, barrel tables, and huge papier-mâché human heart suspended above the bar lent the space a unique vibe, and the tango-savvy crowd felt right at home. Every night, El Catedral invites people for lessons in the national dance of Argentina. Jon had promised that we’d learn before leaving Buenos Aires, and we’d loosened up our limbs with a couple of cheap bottles of wine before hitting the dance floor.
A live band complete with an upright bass, a cello, an accordion, several guitars, and a piano took the stage just after 1:00 am. Parties in Argentina don’t get going until the early hours of the morning, as people are prone to eating dinner around 10:00 or 11:00 pm. Jon and I conversed with travelers from Switzerland and Germany, and the crowd began to thin out after the band finished around 2:15.
We were across town from our apartment in Belgrano, but we had our bikes for us waiting outside. Traffic was sparse at this late hour and it was a balmy 80 degrees.
We didn’t realize it at the time, but we started heading out in the wrong direction, and before long, Jon had gotten too far ahead of me on Rivadavia Avenue, a relatively busy thoroughfare with no bike lanes. I accepted that I was completely lost and figured I’d just meet Jon at home, asking passersby the general direction of Palermo, a neighborhood with which I was more familiar and felt confident I could navigate. After about 25 minutes of following the advice of these kind, inebriated strangers, I’d found a familiar path which I took all the way northwest, back to our Belgrano apartment.
I walked in expecting to see Jon with his feet propped up on the table, maybe enjoying an episode of M*A*S*H* or a TED Talk on paranormal activity. To my surprise, the apartment was dark and empty. It was 3:15 am.
I took a quick shower as relief from the heat and sticky exercise, and when I emerged, there was still no sign of Jon. The clock hit 3:45. I walked out onto our balcony to look up the street, and checked on a baby pigeon in a nest to the left of our bike storage area. As usual, the neighbor’s cat was eyeing the little bird, but had never mustered the courage to jump the gap which was two stories above the sidewalks below. I tried to read, but my mind kept drifting as I looked up and down the streets. By 4:30, I decided to check out the route from El Catedral on Google Maps. I’d figured he’d probably gotten a flat tire and had to walk the rest of the way. Once I determined that the entire journey was projected to take less than two hours on foot—and this was by the hypothetical “Google walker” who was no match for Jon’s rapid ambulation—I began to get worried. Ok, not just worried. I panicked. It was 5:15 and the sky was starting to get light, and there was still no sign of Jon.
I ran downstairs to speak with the security guard of our building who tried to assuage my fears. We jointly made a plan to call the police at 7:00 am if Jon still hadn’t turned up.
It was 6:10 and the sky was brightening. My imagination visited all of the usual dark places of an ambiguously bereaved (and hysterical) girlfriend. Accident. Robbery. Kidnapping. Senseless beating or murder. Leaning over the banister, I finally spotted a figure making haste toward our building. He was tall, wearing a blood-spattered white shirt, and walking a bike. I ran downstairs to meet him.
Here’s what happened: after we’d gotten separated on the journey home, Jon had hit a pothole on his bike which threw him over the handlebars. His chin, taking the brunt of the impact, had split open as he hit the ground, and he also sprained his right wrist. His arms were covered with nasty cuts and contusions. Two witnesses called an ambulance which drove him to the hospital. When he arrived, medical staff asked for only two things: his name and his age. They stitched up his chin and treated his wounds for free. In the United States, this treatment could have cost him over $3,000. According to the New York Times, it can be over $2,000 for three stitches and around $1,000 for a short ambulance trip, a ride that was free 30 years ago, even when wounds aren’t life-threatening. In fact, if we were at home, I would have considered taking a needle and thread to him myself, or calling one of my friends who’s a doctor.
The thing is that medical treatment is free in many countries, developed and developing. A friend shared with me recently that in his home country of Brazil, medical staff won’t allow people to leave before they receive the treatment they need, free of charge. It’s a proactive view of health that makes people more likely to get the care that keeps them healthy and productive. Many Americans can attest that in any medical situation, emergency or not, even the case of the insured, the first question isn’t, “How can we get this person the treatment they need immediately?” The first question is often, “What will this cost and will my insurance cover it?”
That is not the kind of country we should be.
Solution: This is a no-brainer. Medical care is something that everyone needs in their lives and shouldn’t be performed for outrageous profits. If a hospital in Argentina can give a man an ambulance ride and medical treatment for free, emergency rooms in the U.S. should be able to do the same. This isn’t a radical idea. It’s the humane thing to do.
