HOW BROAD IS YOUR SOCIAL CONSCIENCE?

What is a social conscience? I couldn't actually find a good simple explanation, when I googled on it the other day. But what I take it to be, and I think alot of others too, is that part of us that feels empathy and concern for other groups and kinds of people. Not just our family, relatives, church-members, business associates, etc. but complete strangers with different ways of life and belief systems.

It seems like the last eight years, but even more than that, since the late 1970s to early 1980s, this country has been ruled by people with very narrow social consciences. Which is why we see the economic meltdown, two wars of occupation in middle-eastern countries which will go the way that all imperial adventures in that region have in recorded history, and a very polarized election and nation at large.

For me, mine was shaped growing up in San Diego, CA in the 1970s, 15 miles from the border. Since my Mom liked latin cultures and spoke Spanish fluently, as children my siblings and I visited Tijuana and adjacent parts of Baja California frequently. I never could understand the frightening poverty there, and the difference just that line we crossed made. My parents tried to explain as best they could, but it made me realize that things were not all Happy Days and Fantasy Island out there, even just 15 miles away. We could see Tijuana from most of my schoolyards, in the far distance, and it's pall of air pollution especially. That always made me remember what things were really like there. My social conscience was further broadened by having friends of all races and cultures in high school and college, and by being in an inter-racial relationship several years ago, where I witnessed first-hand actual racism, that I had only in the past related to distantly.

This is why I am a "One-Worlder" as a conservative man called me disparagingly several years ago. I just happen to believe that all people, cultures, and countries, deserve to be able to create their own destinies, and live the way they prefer, so long as they aren't hurting other people, cultures, or countries. And that no one country, group, or belief system has a monopoly on spiritual truth at the expense of others, and hence all are in the greater sense, equal. I grew up on science fiction, in books and the usual t.v. shows and movies. One nice thing about most sci-fi, in these books and t.v. shows, is that in the future, it showed the human race in space, as a race, with all groups and cultures. Major problems like poverty and war were solved, and there was some form of effective world government. I've taken that to heart, and hope I will see that in my lifetime, wouldn't you?

All that said, The Alaska Progressive Review supports the historical election of the multi-racial man named Barack Obama as the president of the U.S. Granted, our staff voted for Nader, as we wanted our change faster, nonetheless, this does at least provide some hope for the future. Mainly because we see this man as having to have a much broader social conscience, than that ever seen in a U.S. President. Why? Because he spent time as a child in a third-world country, Indonesia, and got to see the poverty and political repression at the time there. And, as a non-white man, I guarantee you he has experienced direct racism in some form or other, in his lifetime. These two things would certainly pre-dispose him to think about the global political situation in broader terms, and to see the disasters that have befallen this country in the last 8 years as the result of a culture in power that has no empathy for others outside of a very narrow range. I give you this disturbing story from last year, http://www.buzzflash.com/articles/interviews/049, see what you think.

However, before we get too excited, it's time to send a little hard rain down on the parade. One of my favorite writers, usually on a very good website, http://www.counterpunch.org/, is Paul Craig Roberts. He was the Assistant Secretary of the Treasury during the Reagan Administration, who has since changed his views on many things, and is very outspoken. This article he wrote sums things up pretty well, http://counterpunch.org/roberts11102008.html. We need to remember, Obama's senate record was hardly all that liberal, and he received an unprecedented sum of campaign contributions from all the major corporate and Wall Street players. These power sources are not going to let him go astray very far from the current sorry picture of national and global political reality.

To get away from this stress of the rapidly-changing national and global socio-political situation, the staff needed to take a ski break. One of the things cross-country skiers here in Interior Alaska like to do, is go on outings of a day or two, or longer, on winter trails that have cabins to stay in at night. The White Mountains, about 40 miles northeast of Fairbanks beckoned. The BLM here manages a trail system with cabins there, that you can rent out for 25.00 a night (My God, that sounds like socialism, privatize that quick!) My plan was to skate ski in 20 miles to a cabin on Beaver Creek, the Borealis-LeFevre cabin. But skate skiing is highly reliant on temperature, since you are using your skis as flat gliding sources, if you don't have the glide, it sucks. When the temperature gets below zero it's much slower, and below -10F, forget it, no wax works well. It had cleared out the night previous, so the valleys were about -15F, but the higher terrain, about +10. I set out hoping for the best, but as soon as I got 8 miles out and started descending into a large broad valley, reality set in. Skating another 12 miles out with 35 lbs. on at -15F on the narrow bumpy trail (there was only about 8" or so of snow on the ground so far) was going to suck bad. And then the next morning it would probably be even colder, so getting back out would be worse. So, we went back to Lee's cabin, just seven miles in, and hoped someone hadn't already reserved it. I got there in early afternoon, it was about zero there, a little above the valley. After exploring a little more, I had to spend 2 hours cutting and sectioning three small black spruce trees with a little handsaw for firewood, there was hardly any left there.

I got a meager fire started, since the wood wasn't fully cured, then a couple smokejumpers I knew from Alaska Fire Service showed up. Neat seeing them, but I had to go, so we just skated back to the car. There were a few other cabins within another 6-8 miles, but it was already 4pm, and getting colder, so we just headed back to the car and town. I didn't bring my winter tent, so wasn't planning on sleeping out. A good workout nonetheless, and much-needed.

This is what the White Mountains look like, in the distance from the trail. They are only 3500-5000 feet high, but since our timberline this far north is just 3000 ft., they seem higher.

While skiing back to the car, I remembered reading a speech MLK gave back in 1967, just a year ago to the day before his assasination. It was the one where he first publicly came out against the Vietnam War, our society's runaway militarism, and it's effect on poverty.

http://www.hartford-hwp.com/archives/45a/058.html This speech sealed his fate, and he knew it, that he had crossed the line. He said several times he was expecting to die soon during that year after the speech. Here are the parts I find truly profound, and unfortunately, more than ever a reality.

"In 1957 a sensitive American official overseas said that it seemed to him that our nation was on the wrong side of a world revolution. During the past ten years we have seen emerge a pattern of suppression which now has justified the presence of U.S. military "advisors" in Venezuela. This need to maintain social stability for our investments accounts for the counter-revolutionary action of American forces in Guatemala. It tells why American helicopters are being used against guerrillas in Colombia and why American napalm and green beret forces have already been active against rebels in Peru. It is with such activity in mind that the words of the late John F. Kennedy come back to haunt us. Five years ago he said, "Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable."
Increasingly, by choice or by accident, this is the role our nation has taken -- the role of those who make peaceful revolution impossible by refusing to give up the privileges and the pleasures that come from the immense profits of overseas investment.
I am convinced that if we are to get on the right side of the world revolution, we as a nation must undergo a radical revolution of values. We must rapidly begin the shift from a "thing-oriented" society to a "person-oriented" society. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered.
A true revolution of values will soon cause us to question the fairness and justice of many of our past and present policies. On the one hand we are called to play the good Samaritan on life's roadside; but that will be only an initial act. One day we must come to see that the whole Jericho road must be transformed so that men and women will not be constantly beaten and robbed as they make their journey on life's highway. True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar; it is not haphazard and superficial. It comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring. A true revolution of values will soon look uneasily on the glaring contrast of poverty and wealth. With righteous indignation, it will look across the seas and see individual capitalists of the West investing huge sums of money in Asia, Africa and South America, only to take the profits out with no concern for the social betterment of the countries, and say: "This is not just." It will look at our alliance with the landed gentry of Latin America and say: "This is not just." The Western arrogance of feeling that it has everything to teach others and nothing to learn from them is not just. A true revolution of values will lay hands on the world order and say of war: "This way of settling differences is not just." This business of burning human beings with napalm, of filling our nation's homes with orphans and widows, of injecting poisonous drugs of hate into veins of people normally humane, of sending men home from dark and bloody battlefields physically handicapped and psychologically deranged, cannot be reconciled with wisdom, justice and love. A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death. America, the richest and most powerful nation in the world, can well lead the way in this revolution of values. There is nothing, except a tragic death wish, to prevent us from reordering our priorities, so that the pursuit of peace will take precedence over the pursuit of war. There is nothing to keep us from molding a recalcitrant status quo with bruised hands until we have fashioned it into a brotherhood."

Do you think Obama has read this speech? I'm willing to bet he has. Our task is to remind him of this. He has actually said nothing new will happen, unless he receives pressure. FDR said the same thing in the early 1930s, before waves of violent strikes and the threat of socialism and communism making inroads, forced him to take action. It's up to progressive people to come forward and be outspoken, because time after time, polls show that a large majority of Americans favors progressive ideas, like universal health care, an end to the Iraq War/Occupation, and more help for the people swindled by unscrupulous and predatory lenders, instead of helping those self-same lenders.

Peru

Many friends and relatives expressed concern back in August and September when I told them I was traveling to Bolivia in October. And there had been political turmoil there in those months, with many fatalities. American Airlines, my carrier from Miami to La Paz, had even cancelled flights from Sept. 15 to Oct. 5. But these problems were in the lower elevation provinces, where dissatisfaction with the central government had been focused. Since I was going to stay in the higher areas to the west, I wasn’t worried. And in fact things went very smoothly during my entire stay in Bolivia, and everyone I met there was friendly. So, when my time to travel to Peru came, on the 22nd of October, I wasn’t expecting anything out of the ordinary to occur. Peru has a "centrist" government currently, not as "left-leaning" as Bolivia, Venezuela, or even Chile now, but more in-line with that seen in Brazil. And it has been relatively stable over the past several years, with only minor outbreaks of political disturbance in outlying areas.

My plan was to take a bus from La Paz to Cuzco, Peru on the 22nd, arriving there at 8pm. I had a train ticket and tour of Macchu Picchu scheduled the next day, starting at 0630. The bus left as planned at 0800 from La Paz, and we were on the eastern branch of the Pan American highway, the main arterial linking all the countries of South America. We went through the Peruvian border in the run-down and poverty-stricken town of Desaguadero; clearing Peruvian customs took us an hour, since there were several buses in addition to ours doing the same thing. We sailed through Puno, Peru, on the shore of sparkling blue Lago Titicaca, the highest navigable lake in the World, at 12,506 feet.

Puno was not an especially attractive city, but being on the lake certainly did add some appeal. One thing I noticed in Peru was that most of the houses and buildings looked unfinished. Re-bar and a layer or two of bricks stuck up from from most of them. My neighbor next to me on the bus, a Bolivian man from Cochabamba explained that in Peru, you get a property tax break if you declare your building to be under construction, hence, they all are!

After a refreshment stop in Puno, we hit the road again, and for a few hours traveled through the altiplano of Peru, amongst tiny villages with people engaged as they have for hundreds of years, herding their livestock and coaxing crops of potatoes, quinoa, and onions from the poor, meager soil at those high elevations. As we approached the small town of Sichuani, still about 150 miles from Cuzco, the bus lurched to a stop. After a minute, when we didn’t resume, all the passengers got up, and we went out of the bus. Ahead of us stretched a line of about a quarter-mile of blocked traffic, with the engines off. We had to investigate.

The first picture, above, is the view just in front of our bus, the line ahead of us, and some rocks on the road. What? So the driver, a few other tourists, and I walked down about a quarter mile, and came to this.

About a thirty foot section of the Pan American highway, the main travel and commercial link between all the countries in the lower half of the continent, covered in about 30 feet of boulders and pieces of metal. Guarded by about ten sharp-eyed youths with sling shots and rocks-in-hand. Off to the right side of the road were 10-20 more of them. After standing around for a few minutes, about 20-30 very angry bus and truck drivers, 8 Argentinian motorcyclists on a trans-continental trip, and a few tourists, myself included, milled around, pondering the situation. The drivers were having a heated discussion, no doubt trying to plan taking back the road, and it only took me a minute to size up the scene and come up with a plan myself. But, a female driver in the group kept pleading with the others not to do anything. This went on for almost an hour, by then it started getting dark, it was about 7pm, then it was too late. Probably for the best, as had there been an attempted take-back of the road, there would certainly have been injuries. Still, we were all angry, we all had plans, and there were many families with small children on the stopped buses. But there was nothing for it but to head back to them. At the time, we didn’t even know what these people were protesting, but I later found out that villagers in this area were angry at the provincial government because of plans to build a hydroelectric project that would inundate some of their grazing and farmland.
So we all went back to the bus and waited, and waited. Around 11pm, with no movement or engines running, my new friends Damon, a British tourist from Bristol, Richard, a Bolivian man traveling for his textile company, and I walked a quarter mile back to find a store. We were starving, and didn’t have a food supply. We found a tiny store open catering to all the stranded people and got some crackers and a beer. All of a sudden, as we were finishing our beer, we heard the distant sound of engines starting. Uh oh…not a good place or time to be left stranded. I was wearing the best shoes for fast movement, hiking boots, so I sprinted back as fast as I could, which proved interesting, at 14,000 feet, after having a large beer, and breathing concentrated diesel fumes. I pounded on our bus to slow down, which it did, I jumped on, and told the driver two more were coming. Damon and Richard jumped on a minute later, and we caught our breath, very relieved to have made it back in the nick of time.
It took us two more hours to get past the block site! All the traffic kept starting and stopping. Finally, as we slowly ground past, our bus was pelted with rocks! But tempered safety glass is very strong, so I wasn’t worried. We never did find out who cleared the block, was it the Army, or did the villagers relent? At no time did we ever see any police. Peru is in serious trouble if they can’t keep open their major highways. There were hundreds of buses, trucks, and other vehicles, blocked on both sides of the road.

We got in to Cuzco at 330 in the morning, 7 ½ hours later than expected. I had a hotel room reserved, fortunately, but Damon and Richard didn’t. So I let them camp out on the floor while I took the bed. For my two hours of sleep, since my Macchu Picchu tour was to start at 0630. I thought briefly of cancelling it and just sleeping in, then finding a flight back to La Paz, thinking that things could get worse, but I’m glad I didn’t. I caught a ride to the train station in Cuzco, and then got on the slow four-hour train ride to Macchu Picchu. Although I was dead-tired, and starving, not having had time for food, I stayed awake for most of the train ride, as it was very interesting. Cuzco is a little lower than La Paz, around 11,300 feet, but the train had to go over a 14,000 foot pass, then slowly wind down to the canyon of the Urubamba river, which it then followed to Macchu Picchu. This canyon was amazing, in some areas more than 10,000 feet deep, as glacier-clad peaks sometimes came in view through the clouds as we descended into the jungle. We arrived to the town of Aguas Calientes, the base village containing hotels, restaurants, and shops, at 1100. I was even more faint from hunger, and tired, but had to catch my bus up to the ruins, so couldn’t stop for a meal. The buses wind up a narrow dirt road about two thousand feet, on the side of cliffs. The terrain there is incredible, I’ve never seen such steep gorges and hills, all clad in thick, tropical vegetation. Two thousand people a day are allowed into the ruins, I was with a group that had an English-speaking guide, so after we cleared the ticket booth (it was almost like entering Disneyland!), we began our tour. My pictures don’t do justice to the incredible terrain here, and the scale of the ruins http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Machu_Picchu .

Our guide led us around for two hours, explaining the history and purpose of the site, and it’s discovery in 1911, by Hiram Bingham, a Yale University archaeologist. Considering how thick the vegetation is there at 8000-9000 feet on the moist eastern side of the Andes, it’s amazing how thoroughly archaeologists and others were able to clear and restore the ruins. There are even more yet to be restored, sloping down on the side of that steep mountain. It is estimated that thousands of Incan people built the city over a period of 20-30 years, between 1430 and 1460, or so, before it was abandoned, for reasons unknown. The Spaniards never saw it during their conquest of the region 100 years later.

Although I was in near-desperate straights from hunger and lack of sleep, just being at this incredible place helped sustain me. After our tour, we had an hour to ourselves before having to get back on the bus down to Aguas Calientes. I just strolled through the ruins, trying to visualize the people that built the city, and how they lived there. I even made a new friend, she let me approach and pet her long furry neck for a minute, before resuming her meal of tasty green grass.

It started raining as my hour came to an end, so I headed back to the tour bus, on my last legs. I had my best meal during the whole trip at the base village soon after though, fresh sautéed trout from Lago Titicaca, which helped me regain some energy. I was able to sleep most of the way back on the train to Cuzco, which helped even more.

After a much-needed good night’s sleep in Cuzco, I had to re-assess my travel plans. I had a bus seat reserved to return to La Paz that afternoon, but I found out all the bus companies traveling that route were on strike, because of the roadblocks! I had to get back to La Paz as my flight back to Miami was on the 26th, and I had stored two of my bags at my hotel there, so I could travel lightly in Peru. I found a travel agent who spoke some English, and she got me a last-minute plane ticket from Cuzco, to Lima, then an overnight flight back to La Paz, and it wasn’t cheap! I then had two hours to kill before needing to get to the Cuzco airport, so I walked around the main plaza.

These beautiful old cathedrals date back to 1540, and inside (no photographs allowed), elaborate altars with intricate gilt-leaf inlays are present. A turbulent history in that area though, my guidebook listed several battles and assassinations having occurred there over the centuries.

My crowded flight to Lima (filled with stranded people like me) left in the afternoon. It was interesting watching the terrain become increasingly drier as we headed west, and the incredible shroud of air pollution covering bone-dry Lima, population roughly 8 million, which has an annual average precipitation total of less than two inches! Air pollution as bad or worse than any I’ve ever seen in Los Angeles. The Lima airport was also very interesting. I didn’t feel like exploring Lima, not wanting to take any chance of missing my flight back to La Paz, so I stayed in the airport for 8 hours, until my midnight flight. What was so interesting about the Lima airport was the affluence, after being immersed in the poverty of Bolivia and the rest of Peru. Most of it was very new and polished, and the prices for souvenirs, food, and everything else, were higher than I’ve seen anywhere in the U.S.! Obviously only a small fraction of the population of Peru could ever afford to fly, much less be allowed to set foot in that airport.

I noticed a few differences between what I saw in Peru, and experienced in Bolivia. First, prices are significantly higher for everything in Peru, though still cheaper than the U.S., for things like meals and lodging. Second, there were fewer "full-blooded" indigenous people in the areas of my travels in Peru, more people were Mestizo, the mix of indigenous and caucasian, and hence, lighter-skinned, and taller. And third, although the people in Peru were not rude, or hostile in any way, it just seemed like the majority of people I met in Bolivia were friendlier. I'm not sure why, perhaps because the tourist industry in Peru is much more developed, and the number of tourists much greater, that there is some resentment amongst the locals. Who knows...

The rest of my trip was uneventful, a nice restful day in La Paz after getting back in the early morning, then a smooth flight back to Miami, the next morning. All in all, I had a great time in both countries, most of the people were friendly, and though I didn’t get to summit Illimani, the view from 18,000 feet was well worth the hike. The alternating excitement and boredom of the Peruvian road-block experience was also interesting, and a good reminder for me how fortunate we are in the developed countries. I plan on going back to Bolivia some day, as well as to Venezuela, Colombia, Ecuador, more of Peru, Chile, Argentina, and Brazil too, I have developed a fondness for the people and culture of the parts of South America I’ve seen so far.