What's changed.. 22 thoughts about the world!

I have been in Latin America for most of the last 2 years.

I have met people from all over the continent all over the world along the way. My thoughts about the world have changed during this time. I started this trip because I suspected that something was wrong with the world. It had been something that always existed in me from the time when I learned that children are starving to death everyday. This knowledge left questions unanswered. The last 2 years and $15 000 or so that I have spent have taught me many things that I didn't come across or care to acknowledge in the first 23 years of my life.

While I enjoyed my travels immensly, went to beautiful places and met thousands of amazing people, what I saw also hurts. Meeting people who have been looking for a job for a year and a half who have kids to feed is common in Colombia, living in Chiapas with kids with distended bellies eating all day but staying skinny because of the parasites living inside them, knowing that the children I was teaching at school in Guatamala have almost all suffered a degree of stunted growth and clinical brain damage because malnutrition as babies. (50% of babies suffer from anemia in Chiapas.) Seeing disabled peope and people who need medical attention living in the streets all across the continent. All this hurts and has led me to understand the need to reject the current system. The first step to a better world.

Here are a few things I came across.

1. Poor people are not lazy. Generally they are working more hours for much less pay and complain a lot less about it than those at the other end of the scale. That means there is no justification for poverty.

2. Producing any raw material is only lucrative for massive companies. Producing coffee, corn or bananas is back breaking work that doesn't provide enough to eat well in most parts of Latin America. (In Chiapas Mexico its $3 a bag of coffee which is about 40kg an amount I was unable to pick in a days work and that people here pick in about 6 hours, when wages are raised to $10 like in Oaxaca (neighboring state) its no longer viable to pick!?

3. Forced economic migration is extremely destructive. People are seeping towards cities all over the world basically because of the above reason. When they get there they are cheap easily exploitable workers that generally have enough savings for the bus and a few days food. This phenomenon is destroying cultures, causing languages to disappear, making cities more dangerous and in themselves destructive places.

4. Education is not considered a right in most of the world. Nowhere is education of the poor anything like what it is for the rich. This phenomenon extends statistically though less drastically to all countries apart from Norway and maybe Sweden although there citizens say that they are embracing the "adjustments" needed for a "competitive economy" which will surely bring them back to the field in the coming years.

5. The rich world is wrong. This is one of the most important realizations of the trip. Many residents of the US are ready to defend there country or if they are "radicals" that believe in human rights they condemn it. Most Europeans don't have the same enlightenment. Germans think that they are doing well because they are one of the leaders in environmental reform in Europe. Western life in its very nature of consumerism is wrong. Its wrong because it cannot exist beyond the next 50 to 70 years. If I have kids the world will cease to exist during there lifetime.. pretty hard to give a pat on the back for that. Furthermore if the whole world were to live like Germans in would be more like 20 years.

6. We have too much stuff. Self imposed poverty has taught me.. we only need decent food and somewhere safe to sleep. There is nothing material beyond this that is really essential. Of course to provide health care and education will always use some resources but the disease of consumerism and consumer vanity to appear to be wealthy is the biggest problem the world faces today. Advertising and other propaganda has destroyed our ability to reason in terms of needs. This phenomenon has to change for the world to continue. I'm not talking about the desire for beauty because that will always exist but its what we decide is beautiful and how much of it that must change.

7. Action is not easy. Realizing many things that are wrong with the world has taken my mind to many places and many courses for action. History and present situations in many parts of Latin America say that if you start to do anything to achieve change in the areas I'm talking about you will be repressed. In Colombia and Mexico if you get any sort of importance in a political movement that isn't capitalist and what the ruling class want you are likely to be killed or at least threatened with death.

8. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights are Universally ignored. This abuse of human rights of almost the whole world is rarely acknowledged. The US, Israel and Colombia amongst other countries regularly break the rules of war with preemptive strikes and disproportionate acts against civilians. The fact that we don't know these laws generally is one of the greatest failures of our morally bankrupt education system. http://www.un.org/Overview/rights.html

9. Most justifications given for economic change, like privatization or removal of the right to strike and organize which has never existed in the poor world and is disappearing in the rich world is justified by inhuman factors and produce a decrease in quality of life for all but those changing the rules.

10. The need to be competitive is a lie and a competition for where in the world companies can find the cheapest way to get their job done. This pressure is literally destroying the world and forces factory lock-ins and repression of union leaders. Raul Reyes was a union organizer who joined the guerrilla in response to threats on his life for organizing as a nestle employee. The company which won the prize of most unscrupulous in the world for encouraging African women to stop breast feeding with free product to later charge them once their milk dried-up. Breast feeding is much better than any powder for the first 6 months to year of a babies life and often saves the life of children in situations where drinking water is not safe (like many parts of Africa).

11. Guilty don't feel guilty, they learn not to. *NOFX* Even those who make weapons to kill millions learn that it's OK.

12. Change is hard and takes time. The change we need to not live in a morally corrupt, war mongering, individualist, consumer driven world is massive. It starts with education and will not be a achieved quickly. We are all guilty of these flaws but all capable of change and improvement as people.

13. Advertising is destroying the world.

14. Movies and TV teach perceptions we are not even aware of. A harvard study associated with race proves its more difficult for US citizens to associate good with black people. Responses are slower. People like Coke for the advertising because in blind tests they chose pepsi. Image is everything. Protect your mind! TV installs thousands of these associations which are destructive.
I just did it and got a moderately favors white score.
https://implicit.harvard.edu/implicit/EndTask?tid=3
explains why..
http://www.thepreparedmind.com/pm/index.php/2006/02/01/understanding-clients-in-a-blink/

15. De-constructing learned prejudices is the most important thing that I think traveling has done for me.

16. Constructing a new educated reality is very slow and dificult. Teaching poor and rich not to base worth around posessions and superficial factors is an extremely difficult process that cannot be achieved by force. I think creating an economic, social, cultural and educative environment for development and individual emancipation is the path to a better world. This is not easy. We are very well programmed by the way we are taught to exist.

17. We are all hypocrites to some extent because even actions of pure intentions have a balance of positive and negative effects. We need to try to act according to our own truths. Acknowledge and understand weakness and failure without accepting it as truth.

18. Education of the rich is much more difficult. The poor generally have a much better understanding of the realities of the world and it's systems. They often can't articulate it with the vocabulary of the wealthy but the wealthy often describe fantasies of open markets and decreasing corruption as the paths to a better standard of living. The poor have learnt that these paths don't work.

19. Being white is easier. Not a good thing. Most people are more willing to help and have less learnt fears and prejudices about white travellers and are willing to help them more than fellow country men and women. Blacks and indigenous are often lumped into stereotypes of lazy and ignorant by those who holiday in Miami.

20. Poverty is misery. While poor communities often have higher degrees of social and family integration and may suffer less from depression, seeing your child die from malnutrition or diahroea is not something to envy. Distended bellies and lack of drinking water are all realities I have spent far too much time close to.

21. Trying to create change creates an opposite pole. As things change the oposite pole resists more. I think we saw this with things like workers rights in the 30's. But with persistence change can be accepted (like we have seen for the most part with the removal of rights like, free education, health, pensions etc.) This gives us hope for the opposite to one day be true.

22. Creating sporting and cultural spaces are equally important along with access to doctors and food. In Venezuela you can see these spaces being created and usedto create a more cooperative, better functioning society.

Change is possible but its very difficult. On an individual and organizational level its hard. It must happen.

Revolution starts with rebelion and needs to be followed by construction of a world that doesn't use money in the same way.

I hope the movements in Venezuela, Cuba, Ecuador, Bolivia, Nicaragua, Zapatista's in Chiapas and many other movements in Latin America can create a new reality and a world which we can be proud to exist in.