I’ll Be Back!

Hey, Everyone!

Hope all is supercalifragilisticallyexpealidocious in your lives. 🙂

(Hang on – here’s the English version!)

As for me, life is preparing to twirl me around the globe for a bit – and I couldn’t be more thrilled!

My glutes have been glued to the seat of a desk of academia far longer than my inner gypsy can handle. She is squirming, clawing, crying out for physical FREEDOM!

Luckily, a hefty helping of research-related travel has plopped onto my plate & I’m about to stuff my gut with it.

Soooo…

Will be MIA for the next several months, depending upon a myriad of travel & research-related factors.

My travel, as always, will be to remote regions where life does not depend upon the internet. Accordingly, I will not be posting until my return. I will so miss our interaction while I’m gone, but look forward to resuming our exchanges when I’m back home.

If you’re subscribed to my blog, you will receive the first blog post upon my return. If you’re not a subscriber, subscribe now to be notified about my return to the blogosphere.

Because I’ll be back!

There’s no shutting me up for long – too much going on in the world, so much to say about it, and can’t wait to hear what you guys think about it all!

Have a wonderful next few months. Will miss you loads & toads!

Sylver Blaque 

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Diary of an American Girl’s Journeys to the Forbidden Land (Excerpt 30)

“It makes the water come to my mouth when I think of the State of Cuba as one in our family.”

— 1895 An American politician & financier

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“Cuba remained hostage to the United States, while U.S. companies and investors took control of the major sectors of Cuba’s economy. By 1905, 60% of Cuba’s rural land was owned by U.S. citizens or companies. U.S. investors also controlled 90% of Cuba’s tobacco trade, the country’s iron, copper, and nickel mines, its railroads, and its electricity and telephone systems.” — Historian & Author Aviva Chomsky

So, as we are wont to do, we occupied a nation & called it “freedom.”

We hijacked Cuba’s postal service and customs, in order to control what came and went, and make sure anything valuable found its way into our own government coffers.

And in 1903, we allowed Cubans to draft a Constitution.

But we wrote it.

Diary of an American Girl’s Journeys to the Forbidden Land (Excerpt 29)

I learned a lot from that Israeli encounter.

And from the reactions of other foreigners to our 9/11 tragedy. I mean, I just always assumed that everyone everywhere felt the way we Americans do about it.

I guess I’m learning the value in seeing how others see you.

Because, the truth is, you can never really see yourself objectively.

Yet, even this awakening I’m experiencing here – this dirty view of us through foreign eyes – only makes me feel more determined to fight to right the wrongs. I mean, you have to fight for what you love. And I love my country. In spite of everything I’m learning, that will never change. It’s like how I love my family; no matter what they do, they’re still my blood & always will be. And you don’t give up on family. If they’re broken, you fight for them, fight to fix them, fight to save them.

I told Karli & Dana tonight about the Israeli airport encounter, and they didn’t seem surprised. Karli told me about similar 9/11 conversations she’s had with foreigners in other countries. Dana’s view is that those foreigners are just jealous of America. But Karli thinks, as I do, that it has a lot more to do with our foreign policy, the things we’ve done and continue to do to other countries.

Crashing bees’ nests for honey…

Why do we need all that honey? And why are we so okay with spilling their blood to get it? According to those Israelis, spilling foreign blood means our blood will follow. Are generations of our blood worth spilling for honey?

But, I mean, what are we citizens supposed to do about that?

Most of us, like me, don’t even know what our government is doing. We only know what the news tells us. We don’t even know who’s controlling our news. We think our news is democratic & objective, you know, because we live in a democracy. We think we’re getting the whole story. So we don’t dig any deeper than the most convenient American news sound bite because, hey, if it’s on the news, it must be true.

And who has time to dig, anyway? We have jobs, families, a social life.

But even when we do find out horrendous stuff about our country, patriotism (or the fear of being called unpatriotic) propels us to justify our atrocities. Or we retreat into denial. Or defensiveness. Like in the museo today, when the Whites in our group became so defensive about American benevolence, even in the face of our racist destruction of a Brown nation.

Or like how I just wanted to run away…   

Diary of an American Girl’s Journeys to the Forbidden Land (Excerpt 28)

What happened next involved shouting, shoving & airport security.

I think the only reason it didn’t involve blood was because the other American girl & I jumped in front our raging fellow American, and talked him down.

Well, that and the fact that he realized he was outnumbered by a group of actual bee-crushing Israelis. And airport security.

In hindsight, I think those Israelis were trying to communicate with us in a direct way which agitated our American play-nice sensibilities. We Americans rarely express anything that directly, so we were pissed off by the Israelis’ bluntness. We’re used to p.c. phrasing accompanied by smiles & all kinds of other make-niceties that many foreign cultures just don’t engage in.

So, we definitely do not see ourselves as “tyrants.”

When we look into our national mirror, we see the good guys. We see ourselves as the victim of tyrants. When we war, we’re only fighting back.

Diary of an American Girl’s Journeys to the Forbidden Land (Excerpt 27)

The American dude was pissed.

His face darkened, his body language was confrontational, and I’m pretty sure his aura was a deadly shade of black & blue…

Another of the Israelis chimed in calmly, as if nothing was amiss, nobody’s American blood was boiling, no Israeli was about to get his teeth smashed in. Just a friendly group of travelers, shooting the international sh*t.

“When you crash a bee’s nest, and destroy the bees to get to their honey,” this Israeli began patiently. “Those bees will fill with hatred for you. They will buzz to their children the stories of how you demolished their homes, their families, their lives, their country. And those children will come. They will come to avenge their ancestors. Generation after generation. Because you continue to crash their nests.”

Another of the Israelis looked right at us Americans. “September 11th will happen again,” he said. “It will happen to you, and it will happen to us. Because our countries think ‘why’ doesn’t matter.”

Diary of an American Girl’s Journeys to the Forbidden Land (Excerpt 26)

Our racist policies didn’t work in Cuba.

At least not in the way it worked back home.

Because while Americans were all for hanging Blacks out to dry, Cubans were fervently against it.

Cubans — Black & White — rose up in unified, adamant protest against our racist policies on their island.

But a lot of good it did them; we reluctantly responded by allowing a minimal number of Blacks back into the sectors of society we had originally ousted them from — but we reinstated those Blacks in a segregated format.

Brown cops had to be separated from White cops, Brown soldiers could not share barracks with White soldiers, etc. Wherever we gave in to Cuban outcry against the banning of Blacks, our reinstatement condition was always that Blacks be separated from Whites.

Circa 1920. The Texas Restaurant Association posted these signs at the entrances and exits to all restaurants in the state.

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Hence, the U.S. was responsible for the re-introduction of segregation onto the island of Cuba. Victor said the effects of our systemic racism still exist here today – just as it does back home.

Which, of course, we’re all in denial of.

Well, all except minorities.

But Victor said we did good things in Cuba, too. And I noticed that where the Browns in our group had been riveted by Victor’s history lesson from word one, it wasn’t until this part of the lesson that the Whites in our group began listening intently.  

Friday Blaque List 26

What I’m…

READING

My travel journals from various countries.

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WHY

Because I haven’t traveled in a while, and the gypsy in me is clawing her way to the surface after dormant semesters of academic imprisonment behind desks that don’t fly.

Diary of an American Girl’s Journeys to the Forbidden Land (Excerpt 25)

Why would we not let Cubans fly their own flag in Cuba?

Their island. Their flag.

I don’t get it…

Anyway, we declared Cuba a free nation. Or not.

Whatever. We beat Spain and took over.

Cubans, newly free from Spanish colonists, had new colonists to oppress them.

Americans.

We staged public ‘elections’ for Cubans to ‘vote’ for our choices of dictator puppet presidents who would cow-tow to U.S. interests on the island…presidents who would not interfere with our control over the island, who would in no way prevent us from doing whatever we damn well pleased on their island — regardless of Cuban outcry against it.

The first thing we did, of course, was to impose laws of segregation.

We needed to undo the damage Maceo & Martí had done by uniting Blacks & Whites. We needed to restore our American value system of White supremacy.

To that end, Cuba — in a mirror image of America — became a sea of “WHITES ONLY” signs.

Diary of an American Girl’s Journeys to the Forbidden Land (Excerpt 24)

I wonder if Spaniardophobia bled across our country back then the way Islamophobia is doing right now…?

It must have.

Because Spainiards wouldn’t have been America’s idea of White back then. Spainiards were, like, a hair’s breath away from being the world’s palest tint of brown, weren’t they?

And, as deeply racist as we Americans were, our brown-dar was probably fine-tuned to within an inch of White life.

But Victor said something else really interesting about this Spanish-American War.

He said our president was against it.

Our president then, McKinley, had been a major general or something in our country’s Civil War. He knew what war was like. Victor said McKinley’s view of war was: ‘Been there, done that. Hated it then, hate it now.’

But Hearst & Pulitzer’s victim soup media war had inflamed American anger into a fire that would not be quenched by anything but a good, Spanish ass-whipping. When President McKinley tried to hold off on war, Theodore Roosevelt — who was then a leader in our Navy —  called McKinley a wuss.

That would sell a lotta papers. 🙂

Immoral Airline Fees: Fractured Families

Booking a flight for a family vacation?

Want to sit next to your kids?

That may cost you.

Extra.

As reported in The Atlantic, an airline “crime against customer service” now charges additional “family fees” for parents who want to sit next to their children.

Whaaaa???

Yes, many airlines are now tacking on “preferred seating” fees for parents who want to sit beside their children.