Snowed In and Other Reflections on Coming Home from the USA

I am sitting in the La Paz airport after having flown all night from the US and El Alto has turned into a "winter wonderland". Snow falls from the Andean sky and has painted the altiplano white. It has also managed to leave a fleet of grounded aircraft frosted like Bolivian wedding cakes and stuck on the ground. Looks like I will not spend Cochabamba day in Cochabamba.

A week in the US has left me worried about my home country. I also visited the US in the immediate aftermath of 9/11 four years ago, including a walk to ground zero. Then what I remembered was the outbreak of national identity – flags everywhere, volunteer message therapists from Ohio who flew to NY to give relief to relief workers, a sense of being-in-this-togetherism (which unfortunately got hijacked by GB II into a march to war on a lie in Iraq).

This time, in the aftermath of Katrina, what I found was a sense of holy-shit-I-am-all-by-myselfism. Folks in Los Angeles watching a whole lot of stranded people screaming for help in New Orleans, certainly had a whole new image of what life might be like if "the big one" took out southern California's freeway system. One person I know just fully stocked his big motor home (bought in part for just such a contingency) and last week added to the inventory a hefty firearm. In New Orleans people had their cars hijacked at gunpoint by others desperate to escape the rising tide. It was a scene taken directly out of the summer flick War of the Worlds. Space aliens, floods, and earthquakes, any one of them promises to drive Americans into the me-first zone.

Fear and insecurity are a powerful force in an individual. When it infects a whole country it is national identity at stake. The powers that be in the White House have not done a whole lot to make people feel any safer.

All this reminds me of a conversation I had long ago with my father when he was still alive. In the 1930s he was a boy and in his south central LA neighborhood of Jews, blacks and the lower middle class and he watched as one business after another (including my grandfather's) went belly up. "We thought we were licked," he told me. "I saw our neighbors picking garbage out of the trash cans looking for something to eat." He then told me, with tears in his eyes, of how much FDR's courage and optimism meant to people like that. He told the nation, we will try this and if it doesn't work we will try that. We will try everything we can until we put people back to work.

My home country is never at its best when it becomes the land of each one for himself. But that is the message behind almost everything this administration does. In Iraq each soldier needs to buy her own armored protection. At home each person on a New Orleans roof needs to find his or her way to safety. Today the policy is – we will try this and if it doesn’t work we will just keep doing it anyway.

It is corrosive this fear of being on one's own. The private acts of charity toward New Orleans, which I flew over yesterday en route home, show my country at its best. How long, however, will we wait before we have a government that does not seem so insistent, at home and abroad, from showing off my country at its worst?