How ironic, that Americans ‘flee’ to Jamaica to escape the perils of daily US life. To exchange waking up in a safe, ‘approved’ building, with your family, to go to your steady paying job, for a ‘break’… A ‘vacation’ if you will. This paradise ‘getaway’ for us is but a facade of what is faced by those who are bound to the island… Is it so far off to propose that trading places may be in order? I would put a pretty penny on the happenstance that a Jamaican would love to trade places with me because of his perspective on Jamaica in comparison to mine. I see just what Life and Debt told me I see, bananas, shoreline, crystal blue water, and tropical weather. I do not see the poverty and hardship faced by most of the country from the confines of my all inclusive resort… So why not trade places for my week? This is probably because if we had actually traded places, I would be in a shack in the slums, and he would be in my bedroom on Long Island.. Seems like an unfair trade right? Probably because the background of the whole exchange is unfair. While I barely have to compete with my countrymen for employment, as if I am struggling anyway, the average Jamaican has to compete with different countries just to exploit their most valuable exports, like bananas and milk and such.
While we lounge and relax on the beach, our Jamaican counterpart would probably be adamantly searching for employment and probably would be glad to take the hours I am too busy dicking around to take. This state of poverty in Jamaica is a result of globalization against its own will. A country’s freedom essentially taken away from them because of a debt they hadn’t put themselves in, but were prodded into.
So while I sit here in the sand sipping a Margarita out of a coconut through a straw, not to mention with a little umbrella thing in it, Raul can’t find a job to pay for his own living expenses…. It makes me wonder who are the one’s that are really living a life of debt..
Methinks it’s the one with the coconut beverage in hand, not the one who made it.
