Going up in smoke?
We hope you people out there aren't getting tired of our "is it normal or not"? theme (see Revelation). It's just that the appearance of normality is so striking.
Maybe we're still recovering from a dozen years of school where trends were spelled out in lectures and outlined in books, but it is startling, after reading alarmist articles about Argentina's collapse, to come here and find how hard it is to really "see" the problems. It's more than just the fortunate living in ignorance of the poor, although certainly that's part of it.
Maybe all I'm saying is that we're finding how hard it can be to sense what people are thinking and feeling, especially when you're a stranger. But if we are to expand our understanding of this country at all, we need to get a handle on the disconnect between the veneer of normality and what's going on underneath. So we think about it a lot. I imagine a foreigner in the US would have similar problems trying to get a feel for the trends he reads about in the paper when all people seem to do is work, drive, shop, watch TV etc. I remember walking down Madison Avenue on September 11, 2001, passing people window-shopping under a peaceful blue sky. Window-shopping? But a snapshop of the scene would have shown nothing out of the ordinary.
There's a lot inside people's heads here. Think about it. Anybody over 30 remembers awful things.
And yet some people tell us things are worse now. This week the government took steps to legalize the collection of re-sellable material from the trash. The (relatively) conservative daily La Nacion reported that 40,000 people a night sort through trash in Buenos Aires - an activity apparently known as cirujeo. Soon, these people may carry identification cards and wear gloves supplied by the government.
As I read today:
janitors hauled out the morning trash from a row of apartment buildings ... By eight-thirty, the scavengers were arriving - a man with the hand-painted horse cart, a father and son on foot - to paw through the barrels...
Most had traveled great distances by bus or bicycle, hoping to earn a few pesos. "There's so much competition now," commented one grimy man, tossing bottles and magazines into his horse cart. "Before, people only sorted glass and metal, but now even paper has become precious. I manage because certain janitors save things for me. Without friends in the jungle, you are lost."
Except this was describing Chile in 1989 (the quote is from A Nation of Enemies, p. 289 - read this book if you can).
Many of the problems of Chile in its recessions of a decade-plus ago - brought on in part by debt loads and accentuated by a currency that went too long without devaluation - seem to anticipate Argentina's problems of today. Yet these days Chile is a proud nation, a relatively prosperous nation, a stable nation. Does this mean there is hope for Argentina in the nearish future?
previously there was No Choices Fire
afterwards you have The first unglued.org excursion
comments
andrea
dear jeremy, i know that for foreigners it's quite difficult to understand what we don't understand very well. many times we also wonder if certain circumstances are normal and we end up adapting to the idea after a couple of days. living in this country you'll hear many times that argentinean people fail to remember important things, such as military government, some presidents, frauds (is it written correctly?), politicians concealing the truth about many subjects, etc, etc. in fact, there are many things we should remember so as not to make the same mistakes, but apparently, we seem to have a short term memory, and we only focus on recent past action. miraculously (again i wonder about spelling) farther past actions get better versions in our minds and thoughts (that explains why A LOT of people want the military governments to come back). "la distancia te hizo buena", says a well known song. from my point of view there isn't much hope today, but it doesn't matter, tomorrow i will have forgotten this feeling.
[submitted on 29 Jan 03]