Tilting at Windmills

Tilting at Windmills

No amo mi patria – su fulgor abstracto es inasible.
-Jose Emilio Pacheco

I think helping your fellow human being is a value that has fallen by the wayside in this day and age we live in. Smothering us from every angle are the Snookis, the Rush Limbaughs, the homophobes, the Fred Phelps’, the SATs, the GREs, the layoffs, the Bernie Madoffs of the world. We live in an age of rat-races; of apathy, ambivalence, dispiritedness; of sheepishness. We’re fitting the mold like cliff-bound lemmings.
We live in a land of competition and cut throats; cutthroats and identity thefts, of banana clips and stray .50 caliber bullets; of Zoloft, Ambien, Lamictal, Ativan, and a million other kinds of chalky, adult Pez to make the problems into fog.
Every single day, a broken-down school in a broken down neighborhood is visited by a team of military recruiters who promise college and self-sufficiency and golden dreams in exchange for avoiding bullets in arid climates. They promise exultance and Horatio Alger fantasies to go lie in a culvert in Fallujah or bleed in the poppy fields of the Swat Valley. They promise it to them with a straight face; the young men in uniform making the promises might really believe it, too. This would never happen in the overpriviledged, platinum spoon-fed suburban theme park I grew up in. I feel like I just drew the lucky straw.
We worry about our grades; about how our beer belly looks in this shirt; our witty comments, our rapport with the people. We worry about our glances sitting right, our smirks not seeming unsolicited, our stride striking the ground firmly, and our half-windsors not creasing out too crooked. We worry about run-on sentences and artistic merit; of truth and relative justice; of righteous indignation and judgmental backroom whispers. We worry about egg on our faces; of seeming cliché, of in vogue ridicule and dismissal.
I fear being alone (which is a different thing than being lonely and I have learned that it is valid to fear fear itself, despite all the admonitions to the contrary. I also fear being surrounded, medicated, jaded, conflated, and juxtaposed. I am afraid of having nothing to say; of nothing anyone wants to hear; of nothing that I want to hear.
But I don’t feel cold cylindrical steel on the back of my head and I don’t feel the creeping death dagger in the small of my back, so I don’t really have the time to be preoccupied for any of the right reasons. I don’t have time to write between my crossed eyes, but maybe my glasses are dirty.
I don’t love my fatherland because it’s abstract luster is inaccessible. It’s in a museum somewhere, behind plates of glass and laser tripwires and banana clips and well-intentioned .50 caliber bullets and angry eyes and shouted judgments and closed oak-paneled doors.
No amo mi patria.