That’s a rock joke. If you are not familiar with rock music of the previous century it may be meaningless to you. And that’s okay (and that’s a reference to sen. Al Franken’s old day job) but I digress. As usual. So where to start, I paid my first visit to the other hemisphere’s so-called "developing world" over the past week and a half. I’m still recalibrating my digestive tract. But it’s given me a lot to think about. One of the things is that there’s nothing romantic or noble about poverty, which I knew already having some experience with it, but seeing where people pay the cost of our lifestyles sort of drives it home. Nobody wants to be poor, really. Unable to get clean water to drink. Treated like shit by obnoxious white tourists. Children dying all around of preventable diseases which are the direct result of arbitrary political factors such as poverty, which is a direct result of capitalism. Y’know, stuff like that. But you also see how normal it is to live a simple life because the majority of people in the world live that way, and the sick, insane way we live over here is really thrown into stark relief. And yet again, a powerful realization of that does not take away a concurrent realization of the beauty of this place, just as noticing the suffering there did nothing to take away from the beauty. America really is beautiful. Not because of anything we did, or did to deserve it.
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