Meditations in Transit

I started at some point meditating while on the subway. The subway, how many hours have I wasted staring away into the nothingness of an ad, or at a subway map, my head resting on the car's walls where a grease stain had developed from so many riders. Staring at other straphangers, guessing what they'd been through, were they coming from work, a night out or were they just floating around from bench to bench. All the different shoes, the latest basketball kicks or speckled Red Wings, does the devil wear Prada or Payless? 

When I was at Art & Design (HS), I had to take the E every day at rush hour to 53rd & Lexington. That wasn't fun, lemme tell ya. I'd get on Jamaica Van Wyck and pray there was an empty seat. I'd scan the adjacent train cars, ready to leap into action. I once jumped into a desolate train car during rush hour at 53rd & Lex, a half-second before I entered wondering why it was so empty, how could that be? That was a half-second before I was hit in the face with the wicked waft of fermented bum on a humid train in mid-June. You would think I'd follow the rest of the folks that made a bee line for the doors at the end of the cars. Nope. I stayed on a full 45 minutes until Jamaica Van Wyck, happy to have a seat. 

Nowadays, I sometimes ride the tram here in Strasbourg. There are characters; the drunkard winding in with a beer can of 8,5% alcohol, the geriatric Alsatian couple shuffling onto seats, the young Arab kid with his fake Gucci murse and skinny Bayern Munich track pants. Le Ried the train stop, I think I'm in the hood (if I'm not mistaken, this hood is next to le Marais), this is supposed to the equivalent of East New York, where money and herb exchange hands like the Rastas used to do it by the McDonald's on Queens Bully and Jamaica Ave. And yet here I am, wearing my rojiblanco jersey, still rocking some Lululemon shorts from my stint there and blue flip-flops and I'm chillin', not a care in the world. Life here is easier, simpler, you can still get stuck up at knifepoint or assaulted but it doesn't happen with the same frequency. I also hardly take the tram, I have a bike and to get from one end of the city to the other can take 20 minutes, 30 if you're really on the outskirts. And so it's hard to meditate while riding my bike, my commute was a mere 10 min. So now those moments come when I travel, when I'm on a train heading to Paris or a bus on the way to Frankfurt. I have my writing book, a liner (because I hate ballpoint pens), a book to read and headphones. I think I'm ready for my journey.

The American Dream

Today, I was thinking about something my cousin (I'll let them remain unnamed out of respect for the backlash they may get) said to me, that black folks in the US need to learn from immigrants and fight for a better future. Now, on the one hand, I can see his point about striving for something better. On the other, I feel like he's not taking a macro approach to the issues that plague these communities, the institutionalized racism, the neglect and the despair you feel when you see nothing change, when your grandparents grew up in public housing like you did.

I got to thinking about this because I was thinking about my childhood. I was thinking about my parents and what their lives were like: my mom was a secretary at a North American firm in El Salvador, a great job for anyone living there at the time, and my maternal grandfather was a congressman. My dad was a college graduate (he has an architectural degree) but worked as a foreman and accountant at the same firm (IRCA, Intercontinental Railroad of Central America). My dad def grew up as more of a hic but he always punched above his weight and I think it's their middle-class ambitions that they passed on to us. My parents always valued a good education (both at home and at school) as well as creativity, I was always encouraged to read and draw as much as I wanted. My dad, not so secretly, wanted me to become an architect and live vicariously through me (and I know I probably let him down but after six months of architecture class at A & D, I knew it wasn't for me). The thing is, he wanted me to become an architect, not a mechanic, a plumber or construction worker, not that these aren't skilled or well-paying jobs but he wanted something more academic for me. 

To contrast that, I thought about this family that was described to me by my brother-in-law Ruddy. He recounted, after his business trip to India, how he was at a train station there, I think in New Delhi, and there was a family, like many at the station, sitting on the floor. There were three generations present, grandparents, the parents and a small child. The child was sitting on the ground when suddenly he passed himself, creating a puddle all around him. He then began playing in his piss, splashing it around and having fun in it while his parents and grandparents watched. Ruddy watched this unfold, horrified, and reflected on his own past (he told us how he used to pick tobacco at a local plantation when he was 8 just to make ends meet and now he's a mechanical engineer). He'd grown up in the Dominican Republic and thought that he knew what poverty was but, apparently, this is a whole other ballgame. Now, India truly another world, you have an entrenched caste system supported by the hindu belief of reincarnation. Is it right to compare this society to one like the US? I'd argue that you could. 

Let's start with the myth of the American dream. That's exactly what it is, it's an idea meant to prop up a system, to maintain the status quo. Ask yourself, has someone truly ever come from the gutter and become a millionaire or billionaire or have they inherited fortunes and make them greater? Take Carnegie, Rockefeller, these guys weren't exactly from aristocratic backgrounds but they also weren't from the lower classes. Take Trump, the so-called "self-made millionaire". Bullshit. His father was already a millionaire, having made his money in real estate and passing on his fortune to his son. Don't believe me? Pick up almost any biography written about him, I'd stay away from autobiographies in this case, and you'll see. And if what I'm saying is true, that the possibility of going from gutter rat to glitterati isn't possible, then why do we continue to propagate this myth? 

I can answer that question with a story. My cousin, the aforementioned one, once argued with me about increasing rich people's taxes. He was against it, something I found incredulous. What was his thinking? Well, he argued that it would suck if rich people had to pay more taxes because what if he became rich. Why should he have to pay more taxes just because he's more successful? Now, he just went from blue-collar worker to multimillionaire in a heartbeat and all to defend the millions that aren't in his bank account but in some rich asshole's pocket. And that's just it, that's how people think. That's the power of the American dream, that, even though you'll probably end up in the same class as your parents before them, you'll still defend the wealthy's privileges just in case you ever become one. Or just in case you ever reincarnate as one.