Many ordinary citizens living in Europe, Asia, Africa, and South and Central America, have been fascinated with the United States forever. They have paid more attention to what happens here than Americans living here do, and, certainly, they pay far more attention to us than we have reciprocated. In fact, our nationalism and indifference toward them is one among many aspects they find especially fascinating. Why are we not as curious as they are? Why don’t we bother to learn other people’s languages? Why do we not even know where their countries are on the world map? And, why, they wonder, prefacing their question with a strained effort to be polite, are Americans so ignorant?
Americans do not have to travel to other countries to meet their citizens. They come here, and with or without our awareness, they walk among us every day and give us ample opportunity to meet them and engage in a conversation. Tourists, especially, seem eager to engage in conversations with their fellow ordinary citizens of the world. They love to know what Americans are thinking. In fact, it is likely that every time they read news about us they are asking themselves, “What are they thinking?” They earnestly want to know.
Of all the citizens from other nations of the world with whom I have had some great conversations, the one I remember and value the most was with Carlos, who, at the time, which was in 1975, was a college student at the University of San Jose, Costa Rica. I had been living in Bagaces Guanacaste, Costa Rica for several months as a foreign exchange student with a Costa Rican family before I met Carlos. I don’t even recall meeting Carlos before we had this conversation, but somehow I must have met him at a university event when I had made a brief visit to San Jose, which had been arranged by the foreign exchange program sponsoring me.
Back in 1975, most Americans had no clue where Costa Rica was on the world map. In fact, they had never even heard of Costa Rica, let alone the providence of Guanacaste, which was then mostly ranch land and rainforest. The town of Bagaces looked like a set for an old wild-west movie. It consisted of a few dirt roads, a handful of shops, a little café, and an outdoor school that had no textbooks. Students had to take notes from their teachers’ lectures and use their notes as their books. Some of the people in Bagaces lived in small and very modest homes, others lived just off the roads with homes made from cardboard walls and dirt floors. The family who had hosted my stay lived in the biggest house in town, with one bedroom and one bed to accommodate my four ‘sisters’ and me, one master bedroom for the father and mother of the home, and one bedroom for their only son. They had a kitchen, a dining room, and a sitting room with a TV. The kitchen had a cement floor, but the rest of the house had tile floors. The house also had a front porch furnished with a couple of rocking chairs. They had a bathroom, but, for the most part, we had to use the outhouse in the dirt “yard” at the back of the house because the toilet was not working. We used newspaper for toilet paper. This family was deemed the wealthiest living in Bagaces at the time. The family did own a large amount of ranch land, but their way of living would never meet any American standard of luxury.
Although Bagaces was not known in the United States, it was well-known in other places in Costa Rica. In fact, every person I had met in San Jose called the town “the ass of the world.” Even by their standards, Bagaces was a primitive place and not a place anyone would choose to visit. In addition it was a long bus ride from the capital city to Bagaces, about 10 hours, and on buses that were not well maintained, traveling through rural areas where there were no public bathrooms or rest stops, which made Carlos’s unexpected knock on our door an even bigger surprise.
Carlos greeted my host parents with utmost respect, and they let him in the house. They announced I had a visitor, and they would allow us to visit in the dining room, at a safe, no-touching range, with him at one end of the table and me at the other end. I should note here that my host mother had informed me that if I were ever to do as much as hold a man’s hand I would end up pregnant, hence the reason they had to make sure I was never near a man. By this time, I was conversationally fluent in Spanish, and I’m certain I heard that right.
Carlos, however, was more fluent in English than I was in Spanish, and he was determined to have a conversation in English. He had to introduce himself to me because I could not remember ever having met him before, and he politely explained we had a very brief encounter among many other students from the university, and he was not expecting I would remember him. He said that he had easily remembered me because I stood out as the only American there, and I had said something that caught his interest, and he wanted to learn more.
I remember Carlos vividly as though he were sitting with me in this moment. He was a man in his early 20s. He was of average height, with tanned skin and pitch-black hair, nearly reaching his shoulders. He wore a well-groomed mustache on his handsome face, but the most memorable of his features were his intensely serious and intelligent eyes. He was soft-spoken, and he asked endless questions. I’ve never known a better listener than Carlos. He listened to every word like someone who was listening to a suspenseful story and wanted to be sure he heard and understood every word.
Carlos informed me he identified as a Communist, and he wanted to know what I thought about the current affairs in the United States and what I thought of our government. At the time, the biggest current affair was Watergate, and what I thought was how remarkable it was that our government was holding even the president accountable for his crimes. Carlos nodded his head solemnly and pondered what I said in silence. Then he asked, “So, you think your government is working?” I answered thoughtfully and honestly about when the government works and when it does not. Carlos and I spoke for hours and hours, but there was never a dull moment. At the end, we had come to the same conclusion that the ideal government would be a blend of ideologies, primarily of both communism and democracy. Carlos thanked me profusely for such an interesting conversation when he got up to take his leave, and I thanked him as well. I never heard from him or saw him again. It didn’t occur to either of us to ask for a way to stay in touch. It was as though we both knew we were destined to learn from each other, but we had completed that mission. I like to think that today Costa Rica, and all the progress this nation has made in forming a better democracy, rising from the ashes of a third-world nation to a developed nation with universal healthcare for all, had been made possible by Carlos and his kindred spirits.
Ironically, however, that while people like Carlos have been improving living standards for their people, my people in the United States have been losing their democracy little by little since the 1980s. Now, the United States is becoming a third-world country. I think it’s fair to assume we could possibly have more working poor than Costa Rica, and our middle class has been defeated by the ever-growing income gap between the Wall Street elites and the rest of us, the ever lowering of wages coupled with the ever increasing cost of living, and the constant attacks on our human rights that had been so hard-earned with blood, sweat and tears.
Nearly every day, I ask myself, how did this happen? Why did it happen? Was it because we had become too complacent or too brain-washed into the idea of trickle-down economics? Did this happen because our education system let us down? Have we been so entrenched in classist, racist, and sexist attitudes that we cannot see beyond the color of our skin or our sexual identities? How did we become a nation that cares only about appearances and thinks nothing of substance or character? I know there are many reasons in play. There is no one contributing cause, but several.
However, I have noticed that one primary reason we have been defeated is we are out of balance in every way. A few of us have far too much money and power, and most of us have too little. Some of us have little to no empathy, and are therefore too selfish, while others have too much empathy and are therefore too selfless and will not stand up for themselves. The biggest trap of all, I believe, is our two-dimensional mindset, thinking in terms of all or nothing, black or white, and either-or. Rarely are we able to switch our thinking to be multidimensional, i.e., this and that, and a little of this idea and many others. We seem to have difficulty imagining more options or the possibility of integrating several ideas or to see even just a little bit of merit in each seemingly opposing idea. Americans as a whole seem to never understand the root cause of any issue because we don’t see all the layers to the problem and how they are interrelated. If we cannot do that, then how can we bring about the most effective solutions? I feel like we are chasing every issue like swatting every fly we see rather than ask ourselves why we have so many flies, and could it be because we have something rotten in the refrigerator that is drawing them? Maybe there is something beyond what is in front of our noses that needs to be addressed---maybe something beyond appearances.
And, maybe, we are out of balance because we don’t listen to each other anymore. We don’t sit down at a dining room table and talk for hours, with the sole intention of learning each other’s stories, listening without judgement and without any need to persuade, and with only one thing in common: an earnest desire to create a better, healthier, more equitable world for everyone. I wish everyone could sit down and talk with Carlos, which is why I strive to be more like him and think of him often as though he is still sitting with me now.
Photo Credit: Braden Jarvis
Comments