Gossip

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An old memory, while my brother visits. Out of our youth. Standing on a cliff here in Mexico overlooking the ocean waves far below, and another cliff and other waves comes to mind for us. Our father saying, always remember this, and learn from it. Walky Walky Jump. That is the name the natives of this small island in the Ryukus off of Japan gave this cliff and its surroundings. The American soldiers pursued the village people out of their homes and when these people reached this cliff, they jumped, rather than face the soldiers and their guns. Mostly women and children and the old. Walky, walky, jump! A chilling feeling to stand in that spot, and chilling once again to think of it.

Disturbing thing, although I love my brother. Visits from the land of plenty, America. Two worlds, in many ways not to much similarity. In his, always a forward movement to gain more, in mine, just being in place and part of it. It is not good to see America thru an American's stories. Good and bad, they all seem to be an indication of its very rot. My peace believing brother's daughter, at 19, is taking off in life to live in Hawaii with a military man, a sergeant in the army, 25 years old. He has just reinlisted for more. A commando with 180 men to train and $7,ooo dollars a month to do it. She hates Bush, she hates war, she does not like his military side. Half Japanese, half Portuguese, his families first child born in America since many of their family moved from Hong Kong. Extremely rich and a major donator to the University in my brothers city. Her parents send her off with new computer, microwave, television, bedroom set, and all the appropriate clothes for the climate. An American farewell to a daughter. I have my doubts. But she is in love, so that is that.

My brother, his conversations are a constant display of the excess he lives with. He has brought me months supply worth of laundry soap. His new washing machine is so high tech it takes a special soap. Not long ago I inherited his families bed sheets. They all got the bigger fatter better mattresses and they take bigger better sheets. And a big box of door knobs, his wife decided that burnished copper had the better effect, compared to the polished copper. One must realize, these are important things in America. His car can start while he is in the house, when he presses a button on the key. The key lights up too. He made stations come in on my radio with just putting his 180 station, $12 a month satellite radio next to it. He took photos of my dogs on his phone to send his son. He downloaded all sorts of music on my computer from a mysterious little machine his daughter had. $500 dollars for his eye glasses, a simple prescription in a very simple frame. And near another hundred for his dark glasses, I don't know why. And now everything in showing off food seems to be raspberry. Raspberry beer and ale, salad, fish sauce and foot message oil. My head is full of it, I feel it going rank and stale there already.

And for all the rest of it that goes with what I have just revealed, I want it to just settle on out of my memory, too much nonsense. I won't think about comments like, And of course daddy had to have the $1,200 mirrors put on his new truck and the skylight with the moon roof was an extra, but it makes it so much nicer and the heated seats are really a necessity, even if it is a work truck.

These Americans, they talk like a price tag is attached to all they tell, telling the price of everything. It is one of their reasons for buying the most expensive they can, for the telling of the price. Not jeans at $12 dollars, but jeans at $120. Then to hear the stories of a family I seldom bother to think about except to wonder about Americans. A cousin, she receives $365 thousand every three months, an inheritance from her mother. The head librarian for a major American county for the Unified High School district, with an income that was so ridiculously high that I got confused on hearing it and forgot what it was. How much money does one really need? And that is little money compared to her husbands job of driving a crane often used to juggle around bombs for quiet military reasons. She shops in Paris for her clothes and Price Club for its bargains, like my brother does. They both agree you can save so much when you buy huge amounts. Like the paper plates he brought, so we did not have to wash lunch dishes that day, one thousand of them. I don't even use paper plates.
Such a list of petty complaints I have today, picking those nice Americans apart, I should be ashamed to stoop to collecting details like that to feed my anger at greed stricken America. But I am not, I am just very thankful I can see all this, and who and what these people are. I am also very thankful that I am not one of them by my own choosing. All these people are doing is adding to the number of Americans abusing the world and supporting a government that is the worst evil the world has yet encountered.

Are they good people living good lives doing good things, raising good children or are they the very mechanism that allows this disaster for mankind American government to force onwards? They think freedom means the right to anything and everything, more more more and more. And all the while not knowing that they have already drowned in the pool of their own excess and are like the walking dead, slaves to a system, loosing what it once was to be yourself and not a government plot.

Old memories, continuing stories, family, differences, realizations, conclusions.