An American Rejection
I wrote the majority of this in Mexico City and Veracruz, intending to send to my parents to inform them I would not be returning with them back to the United States. I left them immediately before our flight back to Washington, D.C., and instead took a one-way bus to the coast alone; to Veracruz, Mexico.
July 19, 2018:
That ravenous, yearning, pleading of the soul has finally come to exalt me.
Now beyond the long years of uneasy trials and accidental achievements, late-night misery and minimal investment in the occupations that strangled my time, the distant suns have won, and I find myself on the brink of destiny, in Veracruz, Mexico. Mentally refreshed and geographically removed, I feel in the right place to analyze the life I am letting go: all the horrible, swallowing times…my demoralizing state…the savage USA. The bulk of my teenage years I lived like whipped by gravity, slung about and not in control. The years like a lunatic pirate-ship carnival ride. Flagellating, swaying, rhythmically hanging on for dear life, back, forth, between nullification and delirious overachievement. By this fact, I have been suffering a piercing dearth of the slow and steady inbetweens: No stability in my steps, no sense of time, belonging, obligation; no sincere idea of home, social hunger, quiet anger, no peace of mind. But through all the absurdity I’ve dealt myself, the brooding and the running amok, I’ve developed a strong grasp of who I am; my convictions and what I intend to do on this Earth. Yet only recently have I developed the ability to trust in my instincts, and act upon them. To give proper thanks to the faces and terrain I know so well in my called-upon pursuit of great strangeness, straying roads, inconceivable souls; the indigenous plea in me to foreign, foreign, foreign away. It is all this that makes clear to me: remaining abroad is only in my best interest. To establish long-overdue awareness, independence, self-reliance; to submerge myself in new struggles, new perspectives; to further my personal goals, and ultimately expand who I am as a man.
The spontaneity and radical nature of this decision can be diminuted by recognizing my age in the face of a lifetime. At the break of each day, early mornings, dulces madrugadas caribeñas, I awake to the caws of the gallinas. The sun, right from the start, begins to roast this ocean-crested city; chipping the paint off my old antiguo building, each day less and less blue. I roll out from my sheets and find in the mirror a face not a boy anymore, nor an adolescent, but a young adult of twenty. This, mind you, is still relatively young, but it is this age when an individual first begins to conceive of themselves as old, experienced, or even ancient. Already, I feel I’ve lived a million lives. Lived on both ends of the United States; hitchhiked the bitter and the dust under southwestern suns; catalyzed a fifty-thousand person demonstration against American gun violence; spoke in sober terms with Noam Chomsky for the cause of nuclear abolition; tried to start movements, tried to start movements; fallen in and out of love; almost brought life into the world, almost lost my own. And still somehow, in spite of all that, in spite the investment, the commitment, all the perished hours put in — I’ve come into my second decade on Earth as an escapist; lusting for each successive day only so long as they hold an element of surprise, so long as they do not lose their luster of change. Maybe to you this is wrong, not the ordained trajectory, the unorthodox way to go about things; but I can’t shake from me the escapist, and so I must act on it.
I should admit that this has been a long time coming. Through some inexorable course of events transpiring in my earliest years, I have struggled to amuse myself in my immediate surroundings and wanted always to go. In one of my earliest memories, I recall a late night in Phoenix crawling through the doggy-door of our kitchen and shuffling quietly across our backyard to climb on top of the alley wall. Looking down on both sides, ping-ponging in head: the unknown should I escape; the expectedness should I stay. I was seven years-old, maybe. Maybe it was intrinsic, maybe it was the books; whatever it was the pestering thought always lurked in the backgrounds of my mind. No fault of your parenting, or anything you did, you only wanted to protect us; but maybe I just had to know — from what?
If I dissect my own psychology it’s easy to understand how I internalized my frustrations and insufficiently developed the crucial ability to open up about them, let alone to admit them to myself. To a degree this is still the case; an innerving disconnect between the frantic thoughts, the discomfort and unrest in my head and the ability to synthesize them effectively for the outside world. I am still learning the lifesaving art of direct confrontation, to admit to the way things upset me, to refuse to accept things. It is easier to accept things as a child, but as I’ve grown up, I’ve found myself more and more stubborn. Upon reflection, I realize how I rejected my high school education, whether consciously or unconsciously. There came a point when the game didn’t seem worth the pain I put into it, and so I disinvested myself emotionally. I opted out. Now I find myself harboring this same sentiment towards the ‘real’ adult world. But only with twice as much rationale. In Boston, Phoenix, D.C., and in the faces I’ve talked to and found places I’ve been, it appears the ones who play by the rules have been falling further and further behind. Individuals such as friends and family who have ended up inundated with debt, mortgages; depressed, internalizing their conceived shortfalls not batting an eye at the universality of those same conceived shortfalls on the faces of their peers, coworkers, subway-crowders around 6:00 PM after a long days of work. Meanwhile, the ones who set the rules are reluctant to follow them themselves, or proudly skirt the law only to turn around and demand ‘law and order’ for low-level, blue-collar criminals. So I find now that I can no longer fold to fit the mold of ‘what twenty year-olds should be doing with their lives’, or acquiesce to valueless work making money for people with more than me, or to keep trying to cushion the blow of it all behind the rose-colored goggles of alcohol, psychedelics and marijuana. Like high school, I must eject myself from these institutions entirely, otherwise I am not just complicit in my own demise — but in the economic stratification, environmental devastation and global exploitation intrinsic in a capitalist framework set on a doomsday course.
I know all this now, but it has been many lonely, harrowing, hopeless valleys that have led me to these conclusions. Like anyone, my expectations of personal fulfillment and contentment were not met. In my adolescence they opened up in me an expanding emptiness, a low sense of self-worth, and indecision. This wound, left unhealed, undiscussed, led me to the violent acts of feigned helplessness and nullification. I fell victim to emotions I didn’t want to feel, expressions I could find no stage for; and would end up, late-nights, attempting to exorcize myself; take myself to the brink, and lose a sense of who I was. These moments were the horrible rejection of me, especially me, who can now admit that expression is my most natural form. But in the environment of my adolescence, what existed of it was deemed valueless and insufficient. Had I the strength at the time, I would have insisted to you that I live with Abuela and complete high school in Boston. Quiet, cosmopolitan but alienated DC only spelled sadness for a person like me. I demanded, among other things, the noise, the funk, the loudness of the world; that which says to me that humanity will forever remain raw humanity. The detached, partitioned pleasant lawns of Arlington seemed so unnatural to me, and I know I am not alone in believing this. I shiver at the massive, unending domesticity of ‘peace and quiet’ suburban USA; a martian-like, forced photo-negative of the truest natures of men. More a place of escape from the unsavory, poorly-designed elements of the inner-city — than a place in itself. Here now, in Veracruz, with the people more attuned to the Earth, no piercing silence, no downcast eyes, and with the viejos and their transistor radios blasting boleros down Mariano Escobedo, I feel in the rightful place of my existence; ready to make of myself an instrument to share in the cacophonous noise of the world. Music: The lone universal language of man. And my guitar my arm, and my words my weapon; I am ripe to play my part in bringing about that last ditch hope before the fall — Moral War.
But let me steer away from vague and unsure-sounding terms. I am secure in my journey forward, oddly confident about what I aim to bring about. Years like mine are for the trial and error and the expansion of knowledge. I am simply going about it the way that suits me. Now I am intent on going to school, and graduating from it; in learning of law, philosophy, nature, and applying my lessons to bring about large-scale systemic change. Where that can best be achieved, time will tell. Maybe Universidad de Guanajuato, UNAM, Universidad de la Habana, or somewhere else entirely. But I know for sure that these must be undertaken and achieved independent of any persuasion other than my own. It is impossible to claim myself a self-made man. I am only a conglomeration of the great knowledge, belief systems, and economic security you and those before you laid out for me. But a time has come in my life for my journey to not flow, but to be utterly fought for. To truly fight for something — anything — has never been necessitated by the breadth of my lifetime; it is a skill yet understood, that being said one I aim to understand. I am, by this decision, guaranteed to confront myriad struggles quite foreign to the recognizable bloodline which came before me. It will wound me, and disgrace me, and change me — and this is my whole intention; to be a man stronger than the man I am now.
Even in the imprecision, the lay of my life is well-understood; it has been for a long time now. My beliefs are subject to change, but well-structured. I am an ardent internationalist. I believe in the value of each and every human life; and would like to design institutions that empower human potential as opposed to poison and diminish them. I do not reject America, I am the very thinking, breathing embodiment of that notion America; but I do reject the government of the United States of America because it is the most destructive force the world has ever seen. It haunts the global south hungry for resources, for oil, for exploits. It degrades its own people as pawns, as products of the free-market, now less-regulated than ever before; leaving people without options, or time, but brimming with trauma and inadequacies and fearfulness and addiction because these are surefire ways to make more money off them. The United States is a nation of comforts. Enough patience and swear and every little whim or thing can be at reach. I am strongly apprehensive of this comfort and ease; of the affluence it harbors and how it sedates people and dulls urgencies. Boston represents all that comfort to me, and still how I suffered. No single purchasable thing can quell the emotional and philosophical poverty that has grappled the United States in my lifetime. It renders people with bitter complacency, makes it so easy to turn your head to the addled and the poor because why can’t they see opportunity is everywhere. Opportunity is everywhere, but something so much more essential, humanity, is filtering away.
I was born in a dying time. A world too-embroiled in senseless conflict, slashed by arbitrary lines, brewing in the civilization-ending sentiments of irreparable cultural division. To this, I hold responsible the sturdy, hard-working generations that preceded me. Those who participated in the great game of globalized capitalism with the faith that it would bring about some trickle-down economic security for them and those less fortunate than them. Although this game continues at a deranged rate, its foundational tenets have proven to be flagrantly untrue. As the Internet of Things has become ubiquitous, the traditional economy has imploded, leaving the majority of people with low-skill, low-paying jobs. From the ‘first-world’ on down, upwards mobility is grinding to a halt. Wealth is calcifying in the offshore banks, vacant skyscrapers, vaults and coffers of the global elite. Politics in this new age, due in large part to advertising incentives across the media, has centered on the most inflammatory, outrageous, belligerent voices. There are a multitude of factors responsible for this shift, but the driving emotion is fear. A fear in the American working class that there is less and less to keep. A fear in those up top that the veil is falling. A fear in everyone that the rules are changing, far too fast. And now the gears are stuttering, the machine is stalling, and whether inside or outside of the U.S., we’re trapped inside a global economic apparatus that makes unthinking drones out of human beings.
…And I am only a product of it all. Conditioned, consumed, surrounded by it at all turns, and still trying to escape it. At the very least I have ejected myself from the belly of the beast. It still dictates the way of things, even here in Veracruz where narcotraficantes murder and whisper in the ears of politicians, evade the federales, and push their supply to markets up north. But I am at least a language away from that very market, educating myself, preparing myself, plotting a course towards its very antithesis. I must thank you, not only for the years and the diapers and the patience, but for the knowledge you instilled in me, and making me the man I am. My love for you may be further away than ever but never has it felt so strong. I must thank Tata, and Abuela, and all those in the past who in their own little ways moved to bridge international chasms, tie nations closer together, and move ahead in optimism and in the faith in their fellow men. I look to their example, to your example, and aspire to do the same. But I know I cannot contain myself to my one shameless nation because the struggle of the impoverished in the United States is inextricably tied to the struggle of the impoverished anywhere. The world is more tangled than ever. Nothing exists in a vacuum. And so I am here on this Earth seeing all the hurt and sorrow and tracing the land to find the roots of its origin. To yank it out with all the might I got. And grow something new in its place.
Someday, should I carry on this rightful path and put in my fair fight, I will be exalted; for my children, your unknown grandchildren will know an Earth better than this. Not a paradise, or a utopia, but an honest world, a connected world, again a human world. One of our own creation, coming up, natural and fundamental and yet ready to conceive, entirely new.
