My parents just left after visiting me here for nine days. We had a good time, hung out and ate at good restaurants and I tried to show them as much of the city as I could. It was weird being a guide, and showing a city that I only have known for three months, but it was good because I felt adjusted to my surroundings and like I really knew Buenos Aires. What a relief!
The first two months were hard, I can say now, since it has gotten easier, and now I don´t feel like such a martian. I am a lot less self-conscious in the streets, interacting with other people, perhaps this mainly because my Spanish has improved tremendously. I don´t think as much about how what I want to say, words come so much more easily.
When my parents were here, it was interesting to see their reactions to the culture, especially the poverty...being from San Francisco I thought they were used to the presence of homelessness, but the children who beg all over the city, you see every day, drive home the feeling of being in a poor country. We saw this seven year old girl toting an accordian, playing and asking for money, she walked like a middle aged woman. The children who beg in general walk and talk much older than they are.
I´ve thought a lot about the US here and it how we pride ourselves on our level of development, but goddamn, our country has so many poor people, and as the gap widens between rich and poor, our politicians still pretend to cater to the middle class. It feels like our society is on its way to becoming a lot like a one with a developing economy.
No one here really trusts the government, especially the vast middle class. As the presidential election nears, everyone accepts that the current president, Kirschner´s wife, Kristina will win. She has the most money and the most botox of all the candidates. It isn´t really clear what her values are, in this sense, the candidates don´t take platforms, her posters say ¨we know what we need, we can do it together...¨something like that, very vague.
This sounds a lot like a certain situation in our country: people accept that Hilary will win (although I haven´t) and why is it this way? And what does she believe anyway? What is she going to do for our messed up country? Somehow I just don´t know....nor can I trust her.
Can we be candid about the crooks, the corruption, or are we pretending as we lie in the hammock of comfortable capitalism...dreaming that we still have a true democracy (that we ever did)?
Being here, seeing how the people relate to their government (with a lot of trepidation), makes me more and more and more critical of my own government. Bush recently vetoed an iniciative that was going to provide for poor children! Poor children! No child left behind actually means the US could care less about poor children. Unbelievable. This war must end, this administration must change and my faith in America must be restored.