pretty strings in the wind (1/4)

by cthurst6

the big, towering resorts stand with their pearly walls looming over the hunch-backed workers picking up and sorting through trash on the pavement. glowing lights highlight the Western and Russian and Chinese visitors’ faces walking by, holding hands, hurrying by, laughing, partying to their music, growing quiet and offering somber faces to hide their guilt or disgust as they avoid the vendors and trash men and women.
i work on, writing my novel, reading my books. Che Guevara’s early travel log and Count of Monte Cristo following Moby Dick; then Les Miserables and Hugo; Marx; the Life of Pi; a Clockwork Orange. i cannot stand people serving me. it brings only awkwardness to have others lift my things, bring my food, clean my clothes, my sheets, my bedding. sitting on the balcony of a restaurant, i realize that i am no better than those who i condemn simply for cheerfully walking. am i so calloused?
i look around. who can i blame? is there anyone? we are not our fathers, or our mothers. nor are we their parents. nor their parents’ parents. yet it is hard for me to reconcile the differences in the world that have accompanied the sins of past generations.
i check myself. is this naïve? ignorant? patronizing? every generation is simply heir to the mess that is mankind, handed down graciously to the new from the old, who themselves were once new and hapless. there is no right way. man is but beast after all, struggling to survive against the elements and himself. i think sometimes it’s easy to forget that in America. as champions in a sport, we forget how hard we toiled to achieve our position and do not notice the challengers in the corner frantically preparing.
there is no black and white then. there are no evil conquerors and noble savages. there are individuals in each category and between and chaos and dignity and denial within each. yet, how did we, the downtrodden revolutionaries of America, become the force under which and against whom so many others struggle to free themselves? this neo-colonialism, is it done? how can it be done? i cannot give all my money away, but then what?
others follow the West in industrialization. but the earth cannot handle that. too many are scrambling to get what only a few can have. the great experiment of the republic, of capitalism, of communism and socialism and the welfare state…it goes on. to what end? tempered by real life experiences, the idea of socialism has grown jaded for me. yet maybe..?
the bustling affairs of other countries concerns me. i ask America: what has happened America? why do you prop up your bloated empires of commerce and stifle the risky newcomers? what is that hesitancy in your step? why do you no longer yell into the night, reaching, striving if only to see what might lay there? where is your haste, your urgency? your pride? your sticky, never-ending, overtly optimistic heresy? is it still there? because i want your sex. i want your anger. your mixed, drunken disorder. throw at me Molotov cocktails and post-post-modern romanticism grown out of the asphalt. because over here it is chaos too, just like in Chicago, only with less guns. and maybe the guns are a metaphor for something. the lost innocence, the unchecked masculinity responding to feminism and recession-era economics. the country is on its knees, but be strong. be hopeful. there is strength yet in those tendons. when i return i believe i will see it. we must get up. get up i say! get up! show the world where to go, and in so doing earn for yourself some solace for past failures.