Wednesday, September 8, 2010

3 years on.

Today on the breezy bus to Rio Dulce I was ruminating that it is closing in on three years since I started this blog and my adventures to Central America.  It is hard to believe what started out as a dream, "man I wish someone would pay me to travel!" has turned into a reality.
These days things have seemed to melt into a sort of soup of memories and dreams.  My waking reality is so much like my dream time that I often find myself struggling to find the borders between memories and things I've dreamt up.
In that vein I just finished watching Apocalypse Now Redux which was a trippy experience to say the least.  The critical traveller eye in me wanted to know what dreamed up ruins Kurtz was hanging out in.  Another part of me was horrified to see such a familiar landscape under the damaging hand of war.  Watching these American soldiers thrashing around in the Vietnamese jungle fighting a senseless war dredged up some of my current thoughts on my Motherland.
As I spend more time out of the states I feel like I am getting a better understanding of how the rest of the world sees us.  This goes hand and hand with my slowly growing understanding of our history of forcing ourselves upon impoverished nations in the name of founding democracy while extracting huge economic benefits for ourselves.  How are we fooled over and over by this same story?  What happened during the last century in Asia and Latin America is playing out again in the Middle East.  It is hard to feel proud of a nation which values improving our economy over the lives of people.
None of this is meant to sound like arrogant rantings of an ex-pat. Ex-pats are generally overweight and have tanned themselves with in an inch of turning into leather so I'd generally like to avoid that classification.  Anyhow, sorry for the absolute random tangent that this blog entry has taken.  I blame all the deet I had to use yesterday in the jungles of tikal.

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