You are in > Opinions
Opinions
From Venezuela- Venezuelan! From the U.S.- USer? USed?
I didn’t do much writing while traveling but I did have a lot of time to think about my native country and the world.
While in Hartford, Connecticut, I had a chance to glance at the home of Mark Twain and to give a presentation to the Connecticut World Affairs Council at the Mark Twain Museum, a great honor for an old kid from Wyoming.
I like Mark Twain’s writings and have started re-reading The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, based on Twain’s childhood memories. I’ve also been thinking about The Adventures of Charlie Hardy, based on my memories in the United States. Both bring enjoyable thoughts to my mind.
I love my native country. I treasure my memories there. But somehow, something has changed. It is no longer the childhood world of Twain or of Hardy. I wish it were.
A problem arose in one of the first places I spoke. Was it in New York or in Massachusetts? I don’t remember. I was telling the audience that one day I was in a Venezuelan barrio translating a young man’s words from Spanish to English for a group of people from the United States. I had to stop and ask what do we call ourselves if we are from the U.S.? “Americans” truly isn’t proper since Venezuelans, Bolivians and Brazilians are Americans also. “North Americans” could mean Mexicans, Guatemalans or Canadians.
I therefore proposed “Unitedstatesans” or “Unitedstatesers.” Someone in the audience suggested, “USans.” And then—I think it was something of a collective effort—the idea of “USers” arose. “Users!”
From that moment on, I used the term “Users” in many of the more than fifty presentations that remained. I think it has some validity.
To the best of my knowledge, we in the U.S. use more of the world’s natural resources per capita than any other country. That would include using other people. Think of all the low cost labor we take advantage of throughout the world. Think of the foreigners who are fighting our wars with the promise of citizenship if they live long enough. I’m not going to go further with the list; these are just some examples to start us thinking.
I don’t think we want to be Users but we have been sold this addiction by big business and our governmental leaders.
Returning to Venezuela, I have come up with another adjective to describe us: “USeds.” Yes, we are also the Used! It blows my mind to think that there is more freedom in Venezuela than in the United States, less manipulation of ideas and more liberty. In spite of high crime rates, I even think there is less fear here than in the U.S.
Let me give you a few examples. When I go to board an airplane here, nobody makes me take off my shoes. Now you may say that’s not a very important thing. Yes, it is! In the U.S., I had to be sure when I dressed that my socks didn’t have holes in them. Sure I could have put on socks with holes in them, but I would have been embarrassed to walk in public that way. Who wants to start an airplane trip with other passengers laughing at you and pointing at your feet? It is as though the U.S. government is prohibiting me from wearing out my old socks! In Venezuela, I still can.
But to get permission to send my shoes through the x-ray machine, first I had to have (almost always) a foreign born U.S. citizen (I presume they were citizens) check my identification to see if I could travel within my native country. That hurt!
But it didn’t hurt so much that I lost my sanity. That, I feel, is a great accomplishment because walking through the airport security check points is as close to passing through an insane asylum as I can imagine. A man in front of me had a tube of toothpaste with about four globs of toothpaste in it. The security person said she would have to take it away.
“Why?” he asked. “I can carry three ounces.”
“The tube says “8.2 ounces.”
He protested. “But you can see it doesn’t have 8.2 ounces.”
She couldn’t see that. With her bifocals she was focused on “8.2 ounces.” It was asking too much for her to look at the situation from a holistic point of view. Do Useds realize that in other parts of the world, such as Venezuela, you can get on an airplane with a tube of toothpaste? Are we crazy here? Or are the Used right? I think the “Security Check” signs should be taken down throughout the U.S. Replace them with some thing like, “Welcome to the local George W. Bush Memorial Mental Hospital and Retirement Home.”
Look at the people working in the hospital, I mean the check points. I felt as though I was walking into an airport Wal-Mart. The senior-citizen “greeters” are now sitting there offering one-quart plastic bags. There are even signs explaining why they must be one-quart plastic bags. A reason not given is that it has helped the manufacturers of plastic bags make millions of dollars in additional sales. I wonder what Homeland Security pays for those one-quart bags they are giving away? But I also fear for the manufacturer who slips and produces a bag that holds 32.0001 ounces instead of 32.0000 ounces. And I fear even more for the passengers who should happen to buy such bags and get caught as they go through the security check point. (Unfortunately one-quart plastic bags are not given away in Venezuelan airports. That means I must still buy the ones I use in my kitchen).
With shoes off, belt out, jacket off, computer out of my back pack, my teeny-weeny-tiny-tube of toothpaste in my one-quart plastic bag, holding my boarding pass and passport in hand and making sure that I didn’t touch the sides of the human scanner (or whatever I had to walk though), I waited and rejoiced that only once was I stopped and my carryon baggage manually searched. You won’t believe this: it was the Venezuelan chocolate that I bought at the duty-free shop in the Caracas airport that caught someone’s attention. Each of the three boxes was checked to see if it had been touched by gun powder! I think that’s why they rubbed a piece of paper on every side and then put the paper into a little machine to see it if lit up. I then knew that I truly had pure chocolate—thanks to Homeland Security. Not that I was worried about that.
Needless to say, having gone through all this I should have felt very secure as I took another step on the way to my flight. But what always gave me further assurance was seeing the Wal-mart greeters, I mean the Homeland Security greeters, who have passed the prime of life, moving magic wands over other senior citizens to see why they set off the beep when they walked through the scanner. I wanted to roar, to burst out in laugher, but I didn’t because I knew it could impair my continued movement toward my flight. Old people goosing old people in a public place! Little Mark Twain and little Charlie Hardy would never have dreamt when we were kids that adults would play games like this in public places—under orders from the U.S. government!. It is part of the federally financed program, “No Senior Citizen’s Left Behind nor Right Behind Left Behind—Just-in-Case.”
I truly believe that Parker Brothers should come up with an Airport Monopoly game. Think of all the opportunities they would have for “Return to Start. Miss your Flight. Wait one turn.”
I am waiting for Homeland Security to discover that someone can carry an explosive in their stomach (more than just flatulence). I can see us having to take a crap in public before the eyes of an inspector on toilets that were recycled and brought to the U.S. by Halliburton from buildings in Iraq that our country blew up. Possibly an easier way to take care of this danger would be to simply lock the bathrooms in airplanes so that no one could use them. Those insisting they needed to use the bathroom would be pushed out of the aircraft. After all, the first President Bush had the joy of freefalling from an airplane. Why can’t all true Users do the same?
This article is getting too long, but I can’t stop. Everywhere I went I saw signs and heard announcements that said to me: “If you see strange people or strange activities, please bring them to the attention of the police or to the airport security personnel.” And that type of announcement wasn’t limited to airports. I saw a similar sign before boarding a ferry to cross San Francisco Bay. Passing by the old Alcatraz and San Quentin prisons aren’t enough to make one be good anymore, you have to be careful that you don’t look strange or do anything strange that might attract the attention of a fellow passenger.
I don’t find that an easy thing to do. For example, I often tell children in the train that runs from concourse to concourse in the Denver airport that there are 5,280 propellers on the wall. That’s because Denver is officially 5,280 feet about sea level. Now that’s what I’ve been told. But what if some child thinks that I have actually counted each of those propellers? Does it mean that I have been in the tunnel longer than I should have been? Do I know more about the Denver airport than I should? What if the kid’s parents tell a policeperson or airport security person about me? Should I stop sharing that bit of information with kids?
By the way in the Atlanta airport, there is an incredible display of sculptures from Zimbabwe in the underground tunnel between concourses A and T. However, please don’t tell anyone that it was I who told you. I am afraid that saying anything positive about Zimbabwe might cause the U.S. government to investigate me.
If the U.S. government wants to win their “War on Terrorism,” all it has to do is stop terrorizing other nations throughout the world and maybe the world would call us with dignity “Unitedstatesans” and we could move through out airports with dignity and without fear. We could stop being Users and stop being Used by our government. Wouldn’t that be nice!
So, here I am once again in Venezuela, the home of the free. Oh, I know we do things here that might seem strange to people in the U.S. We go through red stop lights when there is no car coming from the cross street…and the police car behind us goes through it also without stopping us. It really doesn’t make much sense sitting and staring at a red light when no one else is around. And for some reason it seems to me that is what living is about: doing things that make sense.
Sorry. It doesn’t make sense throwing away a small glob of toothpaste because the tube says “8.2 ounces,” making me strip before I get onto an airplane, and telling me to be suspicious of everyone else in the country.
It is nice to be back in Venezuela.
A last thought: one law that is taken very serious here is that you should not take illegal drugs out of the country. The airports in Venezuela are full of signs to that effect and it seems to be the only concern of the National Guard at the airports. That is one sign that I haven’t seen in U.S. airports. Interesting. Think about it.
Why aren’t there signs in the U.S. saying you shouldn’t take drugs out of the country? I guess there’s no need for them—the United States is the country where the USers… and USeds live.
Charles Hardy is author of Cowboy in Caracas: A North American’s Memoir of Venezuela’s Democratic Revolution, published by Curbstone Press. Other essays by Hardy can be found on his personal blog Cowboyincaracas.com. You may write him at cowboyincaracas@yahoo.com.