how do i fix it?

I stood online waiting to check my bag for my flight. It was taking a very long time, as things often do in Latin America, and I felt a shiver go down my spine as I thought of a man in need of charity. Earlier that day I had not intended to come home, and here I was, headed back to the giant head of the snake that is imperialism. And as I stood there, waiting for someone to weigh my bag I thought of a man I had seen on the street that day in La Paz. His feet were swollen, and he wore sandals that were breaking in the frozen winter nights of the city. His eyes were squinted shut and he bumped into things as he waddled from one point to the other. Life was clearly punishing him, life had decided that this old man in his years of old age would suffer, and be tortured by the evils of inopportunity. This mans crime? He was born a slave, one of the people who are captive to the corruption of their own government and the government of the United States. This mans crime, is that he is not important enough for anyone to give a shit. This man will be cold tonight, his shoes could not protect his broken and infected feet, and I was going back to the death star, the head of the snake, the country that is exploiting and ignoring this man.

I have been home for a few days now and I am having some trouble rationalizing why the amount of wealth in the world is spread so thin in some places and yet layered so thick in others. The butter that is wealth has failed to melt into a more even layer. It is as if we do not understand that the world has globalized, but we are so connected. We speak something like 5 or 6 languages all over the world; we listen to Katy Perry and Pitbull all over the world. Everyone knows who Obama is, everyone knows who Kanye West is. The world does not exist as a place separated by oceans or mountains anymore; we exist as one globe, as one people. We must forget the labels we have clung to for centuries in order to remember that we are connected. Let labels like, black or white or native die, let labels like man and woman die, we must remember something that I think we all have forgotten, we are all one people, human people.

The CIA assassinated Che Guevara in 1967, do you know who Che Guevara is? You may have seen him on a t-shirt, you may have seen him painted on a wall and you may not have known it was an image of freedom and equality. You may own something with him on it and be apart of the disease he tried so hard to fight off. “The powerful of the earth should take heed: deep inside that t-shirt where we have tried to trap him, the eyes of Che Guevara are still burning with impatience” –Ariel Dorfman. The CIA assassinated Che in 1967 in Bolivia; do you know why? Because he tried to fight for the man without shoes, because he wanted the United States of America to stop exploiting the people of the world. He wanted them to stop using the human brothers and sisters from places like the Congo or Cuba in a game with the soviets. He wanted the people of the rest of America to have a fighting shot at a good life. and we killed him. we killed him and hid his body in a ditch with many other men. We killed a good man, who only wanted to change the world. And do you know what he said when the men came to kill him? “shoot, coward, your only going to kill a man.” Maybe Che’s revolution is over, but he is not truly dead, and hope remains.

The American dream, the American disease. You will never be happy until you own all the stuff in the world. Capitalism, an economic system of greed that will never buy you happiness. The world is an unfair place, and our government wont allow for the world to improve. The government is supposed to be by the people, for the people, but the people are enslaved. The citizens of the empire are enslaved, enslaved by media, enslaved by greed; they are so enslaved that they cannot see any of the richness in their lives. The people of the world are enslaved, they are enslaved because they spend all year growing fruit for the people in the north and they get two cents for it, meanwhile your at whole foods paying someone 8 dollars for it. The system is broken, the man’s feet are broken, and maybe we cannot fix it, but Che believed we could. “I am not a liberator. Liberators do not exist. The people liberate themselves.” –El Che So I faced a choice, as I stood online going home, a choice that I will face again soon, what do I do? How do I reconcile where I come from and where I have been? How do I fix it?