Some Thoughts on Veterans' Day

When some friends of mine invited me to collaborate on writing a science fiction space opera, they warned me that the character whose perspective I would be writing was a soldier in the military. They worried that might be hard for me, the raging antiwar activist, to sympathize with.

I was surprised. Just because I’m writing a character who’s in the military doesn’t mean I can’t sympathize with or like them, I said. They don’t have to be pro-war. Maybe they were drafted unwillingly. Maybe they were intending to tear down the system from within. Maybe they hoped they could make the world better from a position of power. Maybe they believed in a cause that turned out not to be what the war was really about. Maybe they were desperate and out of prospects.

Antiwar rhetoric can walk a dangerous line between decrying war itself--the lies, the death tolls, the profiteering, the Pentagon, the geopolitical and/or imperial motives--and assigning that blame as well to the people who served in those wars, as pawns if not agents in the games of war. If we cannot separate the people from the institutions, we risk erasing their stories while superimposing others. This can be done both by antiwar activists, as well as by those pro-war or simply patriotic people who seize Veterans’ Day to advance US imperial and national security rhetoric.

I think when I was younger, I did resent the soldiers. I saw people in uniform and scowled. I thought Veterans’ Day was just a diluted version of the Fourth of July, full of unearned, unthinking patriotism and militarism. I listened to my parents rail against Bush and the (second) Iraq war, and learned to associate everything camouflage-and-armed with atrocity and criminality.

I eventually unlearned this, as I came to hear and read the stories of veterans in the peace movement. In eighth grade, I was writing a story about a futuristic version of the United States in which my character was drafted unwillingly into a special ops arm of the military, where she then tried to foment a rebellion. I can’t say the story was all that good, but I remember a conversation with a friend of mine who claimed to want to join the Marines and was quite interested in the fact that my story was about the military. We were discussing how the rebellion would progress, and I said that I figured there would be protest within the military as well as the civilian world. Maybe some soldiers would desert and join the rebellion. My friend looked at me, seemed gratified, and said that it was good I wasn’t going to make all the soldiers just blindly go along with the government, that I wasn’t just going to portray them as part of the problem.

Believing that the common soldier is “part of the problem,” that they are worthy of scorn, obligated to shoulder the blame for the consequences of decisions or protocols their superiors make, is a damaging attitude (as is the attitude that members of the military should be held above reproach). Peace and justice movements are incomplete whenever they fail to recognize the experiences, the stories, the truths of the people who fought our wars. Theirs is a critical perspective. The soldiers are not the problem--oh, certainly, some of them are or become so, like those responsible the torture and other events at Abu Ghraib prison--but they are perhaps a victim, or a symptom, of it. And we must remember also that when soldiers were prosecuted for atrocities--from Vietnam to Iraq--it is the lower-ranking soldiers who take the fall, though their actions were not the result of their own mentality and policies, but ones handed down from on high.

Journalist Dahr Jamail has done, I think, an admirable job in representing and weaving together the narratives of “both sides,” as one might say, of wars (specifically the 2003-onward Iraq war). The first of his books that I read told the not-via-embedded-journalists story of the experiences of Iraqis during the US invasion and occupation, and it read with a simple, brutal clarity. Little sympathy for US soldiers was aroused through those stories, but Jamail’s next book focused singularly on the tradition of resistance to war within the US military, emphasizing the role of groups like Iraq Veterans Against the War and Veterans For Peace, as well as individual soldiers who left the military and spoke out against it.

Other books, like Ann Jones’s They Were Soldiers, helped me realize that soldiers experience several strange kinds of invisibility: they are praised and glorified as we are urged to do our patriotic duty and support them, whether or not we the civilians or the troops themselves even believe in the “cause” they are fighting for. When it’s convenient, we invoke our soldiers as emblems of US bravery and strength and integrity. We have created a narrative that has little to do with the facets of war that Dahr Jamail, and others, reveal. And then, when those soldiers whom we faithfully “supported” come home, our alleged support falls away. Let’s think about that. Think about stories of the VA’s dysfunction, think about how “the troops” exist in our cultural mindscape only when out of sight and mind, presumably overseas serving some greater good. When that service brings them home wounded or dead, they cease to exist in our cultural consciousness.

On Veterans’ Day we are impelled to “thank a veteran,” as a few teachers urged my classmates and me as we left school on Tuesday. But what are we thanking them for? This is a third kind of invisibility: not the invisibility of faraway deployments or postwar injury, but the erasure that comes of obsequiously “remembering” people who have sacrificed, and imposing our thanks without, perhaps, considering what we think we are grateful for or what experience that veteran really had with war. When we wave our flags, or just enjoy the day off if we have it, what story are we helping to tell? What does Veterans’ Day really have to do with the people who make up our military, as opposed to the triumphant story we are told about our finest fighting forces in the world?

Before we called November 11th Veterans’ Day, it was Armistice Day, and before its rechristening, it was supposed to be more of a time to reflect on peace, on attitudes much better displayed by soldiers like Aidan Delgado (author of The Sutras of Abu Ghraib) than American Sniper Chris Kyle. But there isn’t much room for reflections on peace in this time of endless war, and not much space in our militaristic national story to remember that what has become a day for refreshing our patriotism, paying lip service to the idea that we support our troops, was once a day for imagining a better, more peaceful world--a world that the Pentagon (not to be conflated with the everyday people in the military) has no ability nor intention to build. 

We Don't Ask Why

The other day, I was talking to a friend of mine about a political discussion club I was  working on forming. “We’ll talk about all the history the government and schools won’t teach us--what we’re supposed to forget,” I said. “Because if we don’t understand what we’ve done, we won’t have the context to understand what’s happening now.”

           My friend blinked in surprise. “I never thought about any of it that way.”

           Now, for all I mock my school and its severe privilege-bubble-insulation syndrome, this was a friend who is intelligent and decently aware of the world around her, who knows a bit about current events and took a government class with me last year. Yet it had not occurred to her that the history we are taught is insufficient to understand the world, that there are things we are deliberately not told or are misinformed about, and that this gap in knowledge can be dangerous.

         We as a nation seem to have a connect-the-dots problem. Any of us can diagnose a dozen problems in the world off the top of our heads, but we fail to see them as links in the same chain, as blowback from similar policies or effects of the same ideology. We do not have an intersectional outlook or grasp of history. Disasters like the rise of ISIS appear to be born and exist in a vacuum, where history is not taken into account. Therefore, the response is based on a short-term, blinders-on view of events, and we end up repeating our old mistakes or making surreally, almost laughably, poor-in-retrospect choices because we seem to have obliterated the context in which we make our decisions and understand their ramifications. In an article for TomDispatch, William Astore quotes a fictional character from the show Homeland to describe the ongoing war in Afghanistan: “So it hasn’t been a 14-year war we’ve been waging, but a one-year war waged 14 times.” This narrow lens belongs not only for the government and military, whose one-track-minded foreign policy--à la refusing to negotiate with other forces at play in Syria until Assad is gone--is driving us down ever less clear or sane paths, but applies as well to the general public. However, our lack of context is not necessarily deliberate.

Because of the way we are taught history, people like my friend don’t have a full scaffold of history to reference when trying to explain the world. Reading Ralph Waldo Emerson in school recently, I was irritated by his assertion that we have nothing to learn from history and should stop looking backwards--not to mention that he encouraged flip-flopping and self-contradiction--but relying on a narrative of history that may contain little pertinent information cannot be a great improvement.

We cannot trace the origins of a problem back through history, because the historical record as we are taught it contains significant gaps. The dominant narratives of history leave as sidenotes events that would provide the context for the present that we so lack. What is emphasized in our school curriculums often has (or seems to have) little relevance to our day-to-day lives, while events like the Vietnam War are rarely covered (yet think how relevant and informative the Vietnam experience could be to our procedures in Iraq and Afghanistan, as we repeat those old mistakes that we’ve somehow remembered as good policy--go in with bravado, get stuck, perpetuate mass brutality, keep staying, keep applying flawed or disastrous solutions, keep hoping if we keep throwing weaponry at the problem, some will stick).

Even when certain aspects of our history are mentioned, they are likely glossed over. The sections on Latin America in my history textbooks may admit that the United States sabotaged or even invaded a country, but fail to mention the economic and political doctrines and atmospheres that propelled that, much less the aftereffects. As Howard Zinn has commented, to skim over pieces of history and dismiss them in a few sentences helps to construct a narrative that gives more weight to the story of the author than their victims. To emphasize the things we are supposed to know--how the US patriots beat the British; how the Union was protected and slavery neatly abolished in the Civil War; how the US saved the day in the World Wars--is to lessen the perceived impact of the things not mentioned--why the American Revolution really took place; how slavery didn’t go quietly; the imperial goals and atrocities of the US in those World Wars (especially the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings). Downplaying certain facets of history--especially the inglorious, the shameful, the failed--allows us to absorb a certain narrative of history that allows current events to appear alien and incomprehensible.

But despite the skewed narrative, we may think we know our history. We may even have a full grasp of what events occurred when, but we can still find ourselves at a loss for their significance today. In the history classes I’ve taken, history is almost always taught as a series of isolated events, occurring in a vacuum. We make cause-and-effect charts for the American and French Revolutions, but it is my observation that almost never are these links extended to the present day--except, notably, in a positive light, such as to emphasize how fantastic our Constitution is and how we can still see evidence of the checks-and-balances system working today.  

Another problem with the way history is taught--and I associate this with the historical-events-occurred-in-a-vacuum outlook--is related to the way kids at my school tend to think about politics in general. It’s boring. It’s irrelevant. It’s depressing. History is just another subject to pass, another list of dates and facts and words to swallow and keep down just long enough to pass the test, and then we can forget it. We are practicing “elective amnesia,” as the band Rise Against terms it, deliberately depriving ourselves of the understanding and context with which to parse this complex, volatile world.

Maybe it’s not a connect-the-dots problem we have, after all. It’s that the framework of history in which the government and military tend to connect those dots for us is arranged in such a way that the picture that emerges is what we want to see, not what the dots should really reveal. But we take that image as a given, truth from the powers that be, if we bother with it at all, and so we don’t wonder why the portrait we see looks so skewed and irrational. One could almost call it a Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell national mentality.

This Wasn't Meant to be Neutral: "Fashion Journalism" Essay

(Note: This is an essay I wrote for a Fashion Journalism writing contest on the Write The World website. I could have said a lot more, and the ending is perhaps more positive than my usual stance. But there was both a time and word limit, and I didn't feel like revising it too much. In any case, here it is.)

In eighth grade I bought an Anti-Flag t-shirt and my first leather jacket. It was my year of transformation from frightened, invisible chameleon to angry, cynical punk. I gravitated towards the hardcore look--studded jackets, combat boots, band t-shirts with political slogans, dyed hair and eyeliner--because I was angry, aware, and identified with the punk ethos, as well as with  political ideologies like anarchism. It was an informed statement I was determined to make.

In ninth grade, I started high school and drifted towards kids who dressed like me. They didn’t listen to Anti-Flag, Bad Religion, or Against Me, though; they listened to Fall Out Boy, Panic at the Disco, Pierce the Veil. They called themselves punk (I disagreed), decked out in black Converse or flowered combat boots, Hot Topic or Urban Outfitters shirts and torn jeans, leather jackets and colorful hair. If they shopped at thrift stores, it was to be trendy, not to resist the influence of globalized brands with horrific labor records. I realized that the message my chosen aesthetic communicated was not what I was aiming for. I was seen as a commercial rebel, an angsty privileged kid hating the world. Somewhere along the way, the style I used to communicate radical political sentiments had become mainstreamed. Whatever threat my anti-authority punk stance could have represented had become neutralized. My being different didn’t matter once different was in vogue.

Why did this happen? Why was a style meant to express disillusion, anger, and a fight-the-system-that’s-genuinely-screwing-us mindset, a sociopolitical subculture that takes its roots from hardcore music and the struggles of disenchanted youth, co-opted by mainstream brands and sold back to us, tamed and profitable?

It wasn’t a mistake. Nor was it that preppy kids decided spontaneously that combat boots were the new cute thing. It was a deliberate theft designed to take the bite out of movements or subcultures. Hip-hop culture (and its accompanying aesthetics stolen from the inner city and sold to suburbia) is another example of a deep-rooted lifestyle on which  major brands have capitalized. This clever maneuver creates fashion trends while simultaneously neutering the threat, anger, and voice of the communities that first created them. It’s a type of cultural appropriation--taking something meaningful from people who created it and selling it to others who won’t appreciate the history and don’t share the experiences from which their “trend” takes its roots. Making punk or hip-hop trendy, stealing from the underground, erasing its defiance--this deliberately destroys what these cultures meant to stand for. The statement I wanted to make by being “punk” was a political one. I was reading about war and climate change and neoliberalism. I was angry and I wanted to display my disenchantment with my country. I was not looking to be trendy or cool. My statement was not the implicit one made by some of my peers on how “hip” they are, or on how much money they spent to look so “punk” or “alternative.”

Although we may be force-fed these styles stripped of meaning, we are also choosing to buy them. As Naomi Klein writes in an article for The Guardian, we have a “preference for symbols over substance.” The symbols are appropriated and mass-marketed while the substance gets forgotten. She continues: “[B]ecause of [their] high-cost demands” to the established social structure, the movements co-opted by mainstream branding campaigns--from those of Nike to Urban Outfitters to Obama--“had not only committed followers but serious enemies.” To make those movements harmless, the corporate elites smooth them down and sell their images to the mainstream.  

But I can take heart in the fact that if these aesthetics and cultures appeal to the mainstream, then there is a niche for them outside of the places where they took root. They are sold stripped of their message, yes, but if we from whom these cultures are appropriated continually remind those who are buying them what they were actually stand for, the effort to erase our movements’ roots may fail, and could instead gain steam. At least, we may reclaim the narration of our cultures, freeing them from the status of “trends” so that the original, radical creators can take them back.

Nuclear Weapons Speech

Two days ago I was at an anti-nuclear-weapons event, with powerful speakers, poetry, and music. I gave a speech on the outlook of my generation on nuclear weapons; I also talk about climate change. The speech is posted at Massachusetts Peace Action's website (http://masspeaceaction.org/8156), but I have reposted most of the text here too. I think it went well.

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I'm generally known at school as the kid who rants about politics. There’s not a huge amount of competition for that title, actually.

I grew up hearing my parents go on about the Bush administration and climate change, and so I learned to rant about those, too. Nuclear weapons did not have much of a presence in my political landscape–as a kid, I associated the word “atomic” with ski brands, not devastating weaponry. Then in ninth grade, I began to learn more about nuclear weapons–to learn that nuclear weapons, rather than a sidenote from cold war history, are the other most pressing and alarming threat to our world, along with climate change.

The two are actually quite similar, both in nature and in the way the government acts towards these threats. But especially for people my age, climate change is the one we’ll know more, or anything, about.

Like climate change, nuclear weapons are a threat that many people are able and comfortable to put out of their mind, deny, or downplay the dangers of. They are slow-moving problems, almost invisible until they’re not. But instead of learning from the suffering of people who’ve already experienced their impacts, we barge onward with the nuclear equivalent of business as usual: igniting tensions with Russia, flexing our nuclear muscles, threatening war. We can talk the talk about wishing the world were nuke-free, but if we don’t act to make it so, we can’t expect anyone else to either. Which is convenient, if you happen to be a defense contractor; if you happen to be a teenager who doesn’t like to imagine what her house would look like as a bomb crater, it’s not so convenient.

Also like climate change, the political discourse and course of action on nuclear weapons is riddled with hypocrisy and inaction–or, if action is taken, it’s the bad kind. Obama claims he’ll take action on climate change while supporting dangerous options like fracking, nuclear power, and permitting Shell to engage in arctic drilling–even while he makes speeches on the gravity of the climate situation in the rapidly melting arctic. Similarly, with nuclear weapons, he pledges to pursue the elimination of nuclear weapons, while spending a trillion dollars to modernize, not downsize, the stockpile we already have.

To my generation, when and if we think about it, climate change is a pressing threat. we are the next generations that will inherit this ruined earth and deal with the fallout. But nuclear weapons can’t be shunted to a next generation who will be left to worry about them–they are all of our problem, all of the time. The threat they pose did not end with the Cold War, but since my generation has not grown up under their shadow, we don’t really feel the destruction they threaten as so imminent. We aren’t denying that they’re a threat–we simply hardly know it’s there. That gulf of ignorance, at least, should be something we can–and need to–overcome. How can we be alert and involved, after all, if we’re not informed?

I can say that all my life I’ve grown up in fear of the future. I see the world becoming more and more volatile, and all around me people either wring their hands or close their eyes. But the wait-out-the-storm approach won’t help when our apathy itself worsens that storm. Kids my age tell me “I hate politics,” and I tell them, so do I–the world is depressing and infuriating and terrifying. But you can’t live in apathy just because the world looks prettier from there. Nothing will change if you don’t make it. Instead, trillions will keep being spent to fortify a structure that has no place in it for most of us, no place for the safe and sustainable ways of living we might otherwise build. We are not lacking in human resources. We are the future, and if we are the movement, we have to move. If we’re going to fight climate change, we can’t forget about one of the most potent antagonists of the earth–nuclear weapons. We have to take back our world, people my age must take back our future, and  organize it according to our needs–our need to live, not on borrowed time, not to the rhythm of ticking time bombs.

Dispatches From a Public School System Within a Privilege Bubble

However inconvenient it may be, however immature or shallow we may be seen as, today’s teenagers are the rising generation, standing on the cusp of the world we will inherit. We are the future. Provided that everyone else shapes up enough to make it possible for our lives to go on, it will be our responsibility to live precariously and deliberately, doing as little damage and undoing as much as possible. We are inheriting a cataclysm: the climate crisis, a volatile and splintering world plunging ever farther into war and chaos, eroding liberties and rights, nuclear arms on hair-trigger alert. On our shoulders will be the heaviest burdens of any generation. More is being asked of us than we can imagine.

But in my experience, the institutions that should be guiding and preparing us for what is really out there are instead programming us to react like trained seals, to balance on our noses the balls of standardized testing and whitewashed, watered-down US history, and the everyday inanity of attendance and dress codes. Our public schools are not safe places, and they are not teaching us all we need to learn. Kids are bullied and tormented and forgotten while the schools preach murky and toothless anti-bullying codes. Kids are taught to glorify and nostalgize what we once were, as if the present were a lost cause and the future nonexistent. We are taught to sit still and swallow information, keep it down just long enough to regurgitate it for standardized tests. We are fill-in-the-bubble children, prefabricated for a world far less predictable than we are being readied for.

The teachers are not by default the problem. I have had wonderful teachers, in both public and private schools (currently I am at a public one), who bucked their status of cogs in the machine and tried to teach us more than how to receive the demanded As or check marks. Teachers who taught about kindness, history as it really was, current events as they are. The teachers, on the whole, are not the problem, or at least, not the enemy. The enemy is the system that locks them into delivering the sort of worthless, classist, irrelevant education that will leave us unfit to handle the future for which we are the last chance. The fight for our planet and ourselves begins far before we enter the working world or even college. We cannot afford to put it off until after the SATs, after we can vote, after we have a college degree. Why do we delay the time when we will have to really think? We don’t need the badges of perfect show ponies in order to fight for our rights, our world, our fellow people, and our future.

High school students are in a particularly strange and claustrophobic cage. We are told to be responsible, to act like adults while we are treated like children--except, of course, in scenarios like the school-to-prison pipeline, in which kids are not treated like children, but like dangers to the public or public image that had better be kept out of sight and mind. My town, mind you, doesn’t devote much time to thinking about school-to-prison pipelines. Instead, we (and I use “we” as a general term; I’m well aware that not everyone here fits these stereotypes) are concerned about spending the summer “getting blonder.” We trade tips on how to get cheaper and lower-calorie frappucinos, and when asked on Facebook what their greatest struggles are, two girls responded that it’s that their dogs poop in the house. These are a few of the most incredulous snapshots from the inner workings of the privilege bubble.

In my town, we have been coddled and swept along almost since birth, groomed to always be one step ahead of the masses of this country--not the mention the world--who aren’t upper-middle-class. People move to my town explicitly for the school system, which is supposed to be excellent, and I agree: these schools are excellent at filling our minds with what the government or the textbook corporations think we ought to know. It is a school system from and for a specific social stratosphere, and it is excellent at churning out shiny graduates ready for a shiny career path. We pay thousands of dollars for expensive preschools, private tutors, music lessons, extracurriculars and sports, and then it’s on to high school, with SAT prep courses and summer programs at various name-brand colleges. The inequality gap starts before we are born, and the privilege bubbles only grow thicker over time, so that by the time we get to high school and are simperingly encouraged to “think for ourselves,” we don’t even know how to start.

In a recent assembly at my school, the contradictions were clear as they promised us that junior year won’t really be as bad as rumored, and that if we are very smart and responsible, we will make it through just fine. We traded eye rolls and sighs--we know how it works by now. Of course we can make it through fine, if we toe the line and play by the rules. And sure, maybe if we also give up sleep and stress ourselves past the breaking point. We won’t really be fine at the end--we’ll be worn down and confused and we’ll have no idea what we like to do or who we are, because all we know is how to do the repetitive, mindless tasks of the status quo really well. We are treated like high-performance machines with the on-paper intelligence of college kids and the individual intelligence of five-year-olds. We are not allowed to be in the hallways while classes are ongoing because there is “no supervision,” they tell us--scant moments after they’ve reminded us of the ubiquitous security cameras. We are educated in a police state, with surveillance cameras and armed, uniformed policemen patrolling the halls, but that isn’t enough supervision or intimidation to trust us alone in a hallway.

Next, they flashed the Honda logo on a screen, and a spokesperson walked out to tell us of a new initiative some coalition has cooked up to entice us to perform better in school: students with excellent grades and a strong commitment to the community--however they’ll measure that--will be entered to win prizes and possibly even a Honda car. Let me repeat: to encourage us to learn, we are being sold off to corporations that incentivize us to do well in school by offering us cars. Besides the obvious elitism and general ridiculousness, monetary incentives have been shown to have no effect on academic performance. What programs like this Honda-sponsored one do, instead, is entrench us ever more deeply into the mindset that the reason we should excel in school is to gain admission to the supposedly happy and desirable highest stratum of our capitalist society, lured by the cars that are supposed to symbolize everything we want and could be entitled to. By doing what? Spouting what we’re supposed to in order to get As, squeezing in volunteer hours to get that “good community citizen” badge, and always toeing the line, always smiling? What world are we being prepared for?

We are being prepared for a world that does not exist, one comprised of white picket fences, McMansions with golf-course lawns, and high walls, outside which there are occasional flickers of suffering people who probably don’t look like most of us. We develop a sickly sympathy for those worse off than us--when we aren’t decrying them for failing to be as smart or as driven as we were. Do we ever have a chance to be otherwise, if we don’t make a concerted effort to see through and beyond the illusion of our town and our schools? Our education is co-opted and sold off, which is counterproductive for our learning but very effective at teaching us the worship of and entitlement to money. We are taught that we can have everything, if only we work hard in the right way. If we fall, there should be money-padded safety nets, but we are not supposed to fall. 

But even in this shiny privilege bubble, where it seems like many of us have everything, we are not happy. We succeed, succeed, succeed, or else we fall through the cracks. We had three suicides in my town two years ago. Some of my friends hate our schools with all their hearts, disgusted, disillusioned, defeated. Some wonder how the hell we’re supposed to pay for college when all around us it’s a chorus of which Ivy Leagues we’ll apply to. Others wonder why we’re supposed to care at all, and wonder if there’s a future for us if we just don’t. Many of my friends struggle with mental health issues. Some are bored to death in lower-level classes because they cannot cope with the anxiety and workload of Honors or AP levels, even though those are the only classes that might ask them to actually think. Meanwhile, those high-level classes are full of people who have learned to play the game well, who are driven, neurotypical, wealthy, and stable enough to overachieve at the level demanded. Many of them aren't there to think or to learn--they are there because they are the sort of people who can succeed in this ableist system. We have learned how to win. We are puzzle pieces that fit. Honors and AP classes do not winnow out the students who are brightest. They winnow out the ones who can best fit in the hamster-wheel framework we have been strapped to. 

We are falling, failed by the scaffolds we’ve been climbing like trained monkeys. This system of elitism, ableism, and maniacal drive to the top has its costs even for those who might seem most comfortably swaddled in it. We are being steered since before we can remember through a system that doesn’t guarantee us anything except the pride of knowing that we succeeded at a game it would never have been conscionable for us to fail, because we were given everything and born into social strata that the majority of the population would only imagine. (I don’t think my town is actually the 1 percent, for the most part, but certainly comfortable middle-class, maybe top 10 or 15 percent.) And so even when we fall, we are carted to expensive therapists who try to fathom the psyche of these privileged failures. But we are not failures, and neither are we successes. 

We are casualties of this educational system, whether we win or lose. 

We will walk the plank with GPAs and SAT, PSAT, ACT and MCAS scores swimming before our eyes, wearing Abercrombie and Free People clothes as we meet the fate that isn’t nearly as pretty as we are led to believe. (Free People is an irony I do love, for probably neither the people who manufacture those clothes nor those who wear them are particularly free. Different ends of the class and global power spectrum, living in different cages to perpetuate the same shiny lie.)

But despite what feels like the no-exit speedway of privilege, we were born with agency. Privileges are tools. We have had that agency stifled and channeled towards top grades and most-accomplished-sheep awards, but in our hands is still power. We could be listened to, if we spoke. We could be respected, if we demanded it. That is our privilege. We have the benefit of the doubt in a conflict situation, we have the resources we will need, and we have the opportunities to change things. We can’t have a top-down revolution from the upper strata of privilege, but we can and must be present and active in one. In our hands are useful tools and knowledge, if we realized it. Our education system is not training us to be revolutionaries, but we are not lost unless we let ourselves be. We can step back and breathe, surround ourselves with people we care about and remember to observe the small, irrelevantly beautiful things--skies, trees, shadows, random strangers who smile or nod at you. We can extract the valuable things from our educational experience. We can educate ourselves and each other--we have so much information at our fingertips; there is no need to wait to be spoon-fed. We can break free. We can realize there is more than this competition, these glittery assemblies and pep talks, this mistrust and patronization and obsessive security, these capitalist bribes and fast track to another shiny bubble.

Last year, while all the seniors fretted over college and SATs and whatnot, one friend of mine calmly said he wasn’t planning on college just yet. When asked what he was going to do next year, he’d say easily, “I don’t know.” He’s now working at a local restaurant, saving money to go to Ireland and reevaluate from there, wandering and figuring out what he wants to do. He defied all our town’s expectations and is one of the most intelligent, happy, and free people I know. That is possible for more of us. We don’t have to be what they want or expect. We don’t have to be what we expect, either.

There is more to our lives than what we are taught and sold. We do not need to be offered cars in order to want to learn, to do well not necessarily in school but in learning. That phrase “do well in school” deserves a new translation, a stripping away of the layers of overachieving and competition and elite expectation that it has become shrouded in. To do well in school is not contingent on the number of As on your report card. Why not count the number of hours spent in therapy for the stress we put ourselves under? Why not count the number of books we read and hours of free time we have, in order to judge how well we’re doing? Why not cultivate the breadth of our imaginations and allow us to develop opinions based on experience, and to experience the world for a reason other than to add it to our college applications? We must learn and remember to think, not just on demand within a prefab rubric. We can take that car we’re offered, hop in, and get the hell out of here. 

If the Oceans Don't Make It, Neither Will We: Thoughts and Reminiscences on the Value of Nature

(title is partly from the Jackson Browne song If I Could Be Anywhere)


The New York Times ran a recent story on the wildfires devouring the state of Washington, with an emphasis on the potential devastation this could wreak on people living nearby. Juxtapositioned with a picture of a house silhouetted against a flaming forest was another article, suggesting--or admitting--links between increasingly worse droughts and climate change.

Several things are missing from this picture, this mild portrait of disaster packaged as neutrally and blandly as possible. For one, it is a fallacy and a grave tactical error to merely suggest that these fierce droughts wracking the western states are a product of climate change--a fallacy because science tells us quite clearly that if we raise global temperatures and throw off the balance of forces in the atmosphere, rainfall is affected and therefore droughts--and by the same token, elsewhere extreme flooding--become more common and severe events. That is climate change. To pretend otherwise, or even to only grudgingly admit the links, is to deny climate change--if not its existence, then at least its already-visible and visceral effects. It is to play into the hands of those who are willing to let our planet quite literally burn because stopping that fire might be damaging to their way of life, ideologies, or profit margins.

Second, on the topic of these specific Washington forest fires--while every blaze is devastating, the ones that the New York Times chooses to showcase are those threatening large highly populated areas. Meanwhile, a barely-mentioned fire, dubbed Paradise Fire, is burning steadily through Washington's Olympic National Park. Not only is pristine forest going up in flames, but part of that forest is a rainforest, one of the few temperate rainforest zones. The rainforest is on fire--an unstoppable blaze, so it seems, due to the difficulty of spraying water through the dense canopy--but the New York Times and others have chosen to focus not on the fires incinerating protected land, ancient forests, and rare havens of biodiversity and healthy forest, but on the fires that threaten towns or cities. While it is admirable that the media does sometimes bother to worry about people living in the path of danger, it is an unnerving display of how little attention the destruction of nature alone warrants. It calls into contemplation the things and places we have given value to, and those we have not.

The temperate rainforest and the rest of Olympic National Park, like all areas under conservation, were clearly, at some time, awarded value--whether of an aesthetic, ecological, or cultural sort--since that area is indeed a protected national park. Logging interests and others opposed the creation of the park, but eventually conservationists prevailed. Yet now, that value is being traded away--in media attention, in public outcry and concern, and in firefighting focus--in favor of worrying about places where people and corporate profits more likely lie. The anthropocentric view of what parts of the world deserve prioritized saving, and which can be allowed to burn--not to mention the racist or classist views on which people in the world are judged worth saving, and which  worth abandoning--is unjust and bitterly sad. Our house is burning out of sight and mind, and so for now some of us can look away without feeling the flames.

I think now of other rainforests, and other places of value. What we value, what we disregard, what we sacrifice for monetary value, what we protect, what we forget. I think of Costa Rica, and wonder: if the rainforest burned there, in a tropical paradise, would it spark--so to speak--more alarm? Perhaps yes, but even while the rainforests remain rainy, a less smoke-and-sparks kind of destruction is creeping in there, too, threatening to leave a different kind of ashes.

          ~ ~ ~ ~

Costa Rica is a beautiful country. Stunning. The humidity, I thought wryly for my first days there, is also stunning, or perhaps just smothering. But the natural landscapes are fantastic: the supremely biodiverse flora and fauna of the mountains and valleys and beaches and forests are unparalleled; and for those of us who are the type to enjoy urban wandering as well as wilderness trekking, the colorful ramshackle houses and surrounding sprawl of the cities offer a tantalizing course for wanderlusters, desultory explorers, and photographers.

It reminded me of Chile, but with fewer upthrusts of industry and development to scar the land. Costa Rica was less concrete-laden, less oversized, and lacking this unquantifiable sense I had in Chile that this was a country not yet recovered from the "shock therapy" visited on them after 1973 by the CIA-backed dictatorship and economic restructuring. Something of the forced nature of that brutal economic transition remains in the way the building and development seem to hurtle mindlessly, frenetic, embracing recklessly what was force-fed so long ago. I know that Costa Rica had its own brushes with neoliberalism a few decades ago, but that experience was less bloody than Chile's, and left the country not so traumatized, less deeply paralyzed. Environmentally, Costa Rica seems like a paradise--25% of its land under conservation, much of the south stretching away in folds of what looks like pristinely undamaged land. The value of this extraordinarily biodiverse slice of the tropics has not been lost on the government, for the most part. But the ravages of the globalization era have not skipped over this paradise--indeed, industry has capitalized on exactly that: unironic signs sprinkled through the area in which I stayed read, in English, "We Sell Paradise."

The southern regions may look, or even be, largely pristine, but elsewhere in Costa Rica, development is taking its toll and the land is being compromised by the scourge of the resort hotels, sprawling compounds that devour land and livelihood, creating for tourists a snow-globe in which their every need is catered to by the tour company, allowing them to experience some of the aesthetic and geographic aspects of the country without really ever experiencing the country. Tourism is a profitable industry, but little of those profits ever reach the communities whose quality of life has been deemed less valuable than the opportunity of carting in foreign tourists and presenting to them the tour company's version of Costa Rica, comprised of 5-star hotels, shopping centers, luxury, private beaches, a perfect cross-section of paradise. An illusion, and a dangerous one. In the north--and probably elsewhere--perhaps the Chile phenomenon is not entirely absent: the country is rushing unthinkingly to keep up with what it has been taught its future must look like. Critical mangroves bulldozed and paved over to make way for glittering tourists reclining on beaches that sea turtles no longer feel safe returning to for spawning, people pushed off their lands and robbed of their water and livelihoods to help feed an illusion. Costa Rica is not a "developed" country, per se, but to plasticize and shellac a coastline to feed someone's bottom line has the country learning the cost of dragging a "third-world" nation into the global economy--the corporations profit while local people pay.

In the poorer, less industrialized southwest Osa Peninsula, this rush of development has the communities caught in transition--an awkward divide between some parts still old and rural, and others that sport rows of stores and advertisements. As former fishing towns transition to the tourism-driven economy, people must adapt their livelihoods, which every house seems to be trying to do, whether by hanging out tapestries for sale or offering drinks to passing tourists. The tourism scene seemed to be locally dominated and also generally environmentally sustainable, since the Osa Peninsula is not so "discovered" yet by the major industry. The overdevelopment and gargantuan resort complexes did not mar the land there; what development there is is human scale and not so destructive, which are tenets of the so-called ecotourism movement. But that gentler model of tourism is threatened as the multinationals begin trying to move in on the Osa Peninsula and start (over)developing here. The first step, if they get their way, will be to construct an international airport in this fragile, rural region, which will begin to funnel a stream of tourists to the area that is unsupportable by the small-scale local tourism. The people of the Osa have no intention of finding their land stolen or ruined by the same forces that have desecrated Guanacaste, in the north. But the fight is a long one still, and the industry has clout and teeth that governments may not be eager to stand up to, despite the prevalence of nationally protected land in the Osa. Like the Olympic National Park rainforest in Washington state, these are areas that the government once decided deserved special recognition and value, but may not actually rush to protect when destruction threatens.

Besides the chimera of the tourism industry, whose impact is clear in the transformation and privatization of the northern regions, other, perhaps quieter menaces have Costa Rica in their crosshairs: climate change and ocean degradation. One morning we took a long walk along a beach; within the Marino Ballena National Park, it was void of beach homes, docks, marinas, and even many people. The unmarred vista reminded me of a tropical version of Norway's mountain villages nestled in fjords, but without the colossally oversized cruise ships or ocean liners. The walk was beautiful, with foggy mountains in the distance and flat sand streaked dark by snail trails. A tour guide told us about landmarks we passed, and what shocked me were the foundations of a collapsed stone building half-buried in sand. It was an old park rangers' station, and was supposed to have been built 50 meters back from the highest tides. Those highest tides now roll right up to the foundations of that now abandoned outpost, which stands at no remove at all from the beach itself. Sea level rise isn't a bad-case scenario prediction--it's happening now. It's eating up Costa Rica's beaches, not that soil or coastal erosion helps either. It's striking, and sickly, deeply alarming.

Another menace, plastic, also made its presence known on the beach. Perhaps it's a mark of eyes well-adjusted to the splatter of unnatural colors in the midst of a place we would call nature, but it took me a while to feel the wrongness of blue or yellow or pink flecks in the sand. Not shells, not the sparkle of sea glass or anything, but plastic. Plastic tossed and torn in the oceans so long that it has photodegraded to this: specks on what is at first sight a pristine beach.

I knew about the problems of ocean pollution, especially plastic--I'd read books like Moby-Duck by Donovan Hohn and I was eager to help do something about it. But despite living in a coastal state, I'd only rarely been to the beach, and back then I was certainly not scanning the sand for trash. When I did, I was almost surprised how easy it was in some areas--just turn in a circle, just watch. It's not always unsightly or even recognizable as plastic trash, but it's everywhere. Everywhere, including inside our bodies and our very DNA, since the plastic eaten by fish in the ocean moves up the food chain until it gets to us. We are becoming plastic. We are what we eat, and we reap what we sow.

We watched a video on plastic in the ocean, sobering while alarming. Midway through, it was almost numbingly depressing, and for better or for worse, the video's amelioration of that effect was to put a perhaps overly positive spin at the end, by telling us about a clothing company that is making clothes out of ocean plastic--melting and recombining and spinning collected trash into yarn. Although it's a start, and innovative and cool, as a broad solution it fell a bit short, especially since it was nearly the only positive development given much weight at the end of the video. That manufacturing process of plastic yarn must release a whole host of new, different chemicals, and not to mention, the plastics industry will fight tooth and nail to keep from losing an inch of space in the market to recycled ocean plastic. Although the video tried to hype up the capitalist potential of ocean plastic as a new lucrative resource for production of plastic commodities, presenting a disaster as a business opportunity is disturbingly reminiscent, though by a different manifestation, of what Naomi Klein calls precisely "disaster capitalism." Making money off of reusing ocean plastic doesn't have to be a bad thing, but capitalism/consumerism's response to capitalism/consumerism's problem is not going to undo the damage. We can't buy and sell our way out of an environmental catastrophe. Giving monetary value to the detritus we've thrown into our priceless oceans will not even the scales.

And there is so much on this earth to value, in a non-monetary capacity. So much to lose, but so much to cherish in the meantime. In Costa Rica we took a full-day expedition to the islands Corcovado and Caño to hike and swim, and the landscapes we passed through were inarticulably stunning. I couldn't absorb it fully, I thought; no matter how awed I was, my appreciation was not enough. Within sight of our boat, dolphins and whales--mothers and calves--surfaced and flipped, and I felt my mind so quickly turned it blasé: "Oh yeah, we saw beautiful creatures of the untamed deepest oceans, ho hum..." I took no pictures of those, which I didn't mind: photographs are a form of traveling by proxy, some breathtaking enough to be truly affecting, but the experience can be diluted from behind a camera lens. And if photographs are good enough to stand in for the real thing--though I'm not speaking for people who would never have the means to see the real thing--does that make us content to believe in the flashes of beauty and unsullied "wilderness," without ever concerning ourselves too much with whether those places are staying beautiful? Or does extraordinary photography make us more impelled to protect them?

The day of the islands trip, we woke at 5:30 in order to make it to the motorboats on time, and it was a pristinely gorgeous day--clear skies and not very humid. Something about whipping over teal oceans with wind and sun all around and Costa Rica's mainland fading into grey behind us--it put me in a very Jackson Browne mood, and I sang into the wind. My usual music of choice is angrier and harsher-sounding, but Jackson Browne's songs have a better tone and cadence for appreciation, for beauty, for reveling.

On the island Corcovado, a national park, we hiked in the rainforest. I try to compare it, well-hydrated and lush with life, to the temperate rainforests of Washington, struggling to imagine how desiccated and desolate those forests must be for the plants to become kindling. On Corcovado, scarlet macaws, monkeys, and coatis leaped and flashed around us, like denizens of my old rainforest jigsaw puzzle come to life. I saw hyacinth macaws a few weeks later, in a zoo in the US, and I was struck by how confined and dreary the birds' quarters were, despite their regal beauty and relatively good health. Any zoo will, by definition, mimic very poorly the open skies and towering trees of the rainforests in which macaws naturally make their homes. But that precious habitat is shrinking, thanks to human encroachment and environmental damage, and macaws are highly endangered. The value of the ecosystems and species of Corcovado is unquantifiable, and to be ensconced in the vivid, thriving color and life there made it surreally clear how lucky the animals there are, to live on protected, healthy land, and how lucky I was, too, to be there to bear witness.

We went snorkeling afterwards in the most perfect aquamarine swimming-pool-color water off Caño, and while I wouldn't bill myself as an expert snorkeler by any means, it was incredible--the fish flickering far below; the clarity and color of the water; the feeling of weightlessness--lying on the surface looking down, sandwiched like a piece of paper pressed flat between the expanses of ocean and sky.

On the way back to the mainland, the water/sky contrast was stunning: oxidized-copper water against slate-gray stormcloud sky. We started seeing lightning and waterspouts--little streams of what looks like tornadoes stretching down from the clouds. And we heard thunder, very close by; not a best-case scenario when in a little boat on the ocean in a tropical lightning storm. By the time we neared land, the waves were enormous and choppy, tossing us between peaks that rose like something was thrusting them up from beneath. The rain pummeling us felt like hail. I had noticed earlier how eerie it was when our boat was in the trough of a swell and suddenly the flat horizon line seemed to become undulating waves. But now it was like the ocean was really trying to buck us off, fling itself free of these little humans who dared to ride on it, by distorting all sense of space and direction. Floating on the surface or just under it, rocked lightly by the water, it's easy to feel like you're a small and content part of a greater, beautiful whole. But the storm we rode through was a reminder of the other overwhelming power of nature--how fierce it is, how untamed, how no matter how we fail to respect that, the oceans can still swallow us whole.

Later, we saw a TED talk by a marine photographer about global warming and species extinction. It lacked consistent connections to overarching problems like our economic systems, and it lacked even a target of its anger or much of a plan for a solution--but the photography was beautiful, and the facts were devastating. I thought I would cry. We are driving to extinction species we don'dt even know about, discarding untold beauty and importance in the face of commercial value. We are losing things we will never get back and never even understand, and their value will go unappreciated until it's too late.

      ~ ~ ~ ~

A couple weeks after I landed back in the States, I found myself at a beach on Cape Cod--I don't go to beaches very often, but since I was there, I thought I might as well do some beach cleanup work, continuing the work I'd done in Costa Rica. Massachusetts isn't, so far as I know, a key hotspot for ocean trash, and I didn't find anything dramatic or well-traveled; most of the trash I found--and I found three shopping bags' worth in only an hour and a half or so--was clearly dumped by visitors of that very beach. The most popular brands were Budweiser and Dunkin Donuts, although miniature alcohol bottles made a good showing--of those, I found five vodka bottles, three of rum, and three of cinnamon whiskey. I found myself eyeing the other beachgoers--Did you drop this? Would you? Would you even think twice? Are you watching me now, wondering what that kid is doing, hacking through thickets of beach grasses to pluck out a Red Bull can? Would you ever consider joining me, or is it good enough for you that people have at least thrown their trash in the bushes, not in plain sight? In the part of Costa Rica where I stayed, trash collection services only began in 2007, and litter in the community is a significant problem. You might think, from looking at this beach, that trash cans were a new phenomenon in Cape Cod, too. Every thirty feet or so is a trash can, and still people have to toss--or hide?--their balled-up diapers and beer bottles and half-drunk coffees among the reeds. Out of sight, but not out of reach of the ocean.

Trash isn't a problem we're unfamiliar with, but our eyes are too often set to avert. In Boston, everyone seems to stalk down the streets facing forward and avoiding each other's eyes; no one looks behind them, looks back, looks down to see what we might be leaving behind. It's a phenomenon that translates well to elsewhere in life. At an open-air concert along the Charles River, I imagined the state of the park after the people had gone, imagined the river groaning as it receives more detritus. I watched the sky and wished thoughts at people in passing airplanes, tried to make out the stars as a blanket of darkness and light pollution settled over the city. These parks and streets are Boston's responsibility to keep clean, but the sky, like the ocean, belongs to all of us, if it belongs to anyone at all. National airspace borders notwithstanding, the atmosphere is part of the global commons. The sky I looked up at in Costa Rica is the sister of the sky I see here. There are kids in China who have never seen stars, who don't go outside because the air is too toxic, but it is not the sky that is failing them. It's us.

I am reminded of a line from Bob Dylan's Blowin' in the Wind: how many times must a man look up before he can see the sky? I ask us now: how many times must you look up before you see the sky? How long can we look at rainforests burning, oceans filling up with poisons and plastic, and the global commons turning into a trash disposal, without seeing it? How long, to quote Jackson Browne, will it be till we've turned to the tasks and the skills that we'll have to have learned if we're going to find our place in the future, and have something to offer where this planet's concerned? How long before we remember why we must treasure this earth, and decide whether the invisible, unmeasurable value of the places we love--as well as the places we've never given a second thought to--is something we are going to protect?

On Voluntourism

*Note: This piece is one of hopefully several that I intend to write about a recent trip to Costa Rica, each discussing specific aspects or themes or whatnot. This one centers around voluntourism, my thoughts and experiences.*

    Back in June, I began to have serious misgivings about my summer plans: namely, an environmental service trip to Costa Rica. A beautiful country, a chance to practice Spanish, and the opportunity to make a difference in protecting the environment and the oceans--it sounded like everything I could want. But as my takeoff date grew closer, I started to resent locking myself into what I feared would be exactly the sort of do-gooder trip that I myself was known to mockingly refer to as a ‘white savior’ program.

    I didn't want to be a savior. I wanted to do something besides sign petitions and read articles,or sit in a nonprofit office making up Twitter newsflashes to encourage other people to sign those petitions or read those articles. One of my favorite observations by Noam Chomsky, which I'm liable to quote or paraphrase in any situation, is that in the US, people will ask him frequently ‘What should we do?’, while in countries we might relegate to the ‘oppressed’ bin, people don't ask him what to do--they tell him what they're already doing. That half-step between knowledge and action is one that I've always felt eludes me, and I hoped this upcoming trip would be a concrete antidote to that feeling of uselessnesss.

    But by the same token, I didn't want to be one of those privileged white kids who swoops down on a so-called third world country and returns home to put on their resume that they have Helped People. The closer I got to leaving for Costa Rica, the more wary I became about this voluntourism gig.

    Ambling through the airports the day I left, I relaxed into the feeling of travel and rootlessness, consoling myself that no matter how this trip ended up, I was sure to have some fascinating experiences and at least sate my wanderlust for a couple of weeks. This mellow attitude lasted all the way to Costa Rica, and I let myself be swept up in admiring my surroundings, making small talk with the other kids in the program, and trying to determine what I could anticipate for our activities in the coming days.

    I had imagined the people who would sign up for an environmental work trip to be kindred spirits, globally aware or concerned kids who were invested in discussing problems and making a difference. Sometime before the trip began, I had gotten a sinking feeling that maybe my anticipations had been misguided or over-optimistic. I conceded quickly that most of the kids who signed up were generally well-intentioned towards the ‘service’ component of the program but weren’t explicitly environmentalists. At one point, we each declared our reasons for joining this trip, and I was disappointed that several people said ‘surfing,’ and that some were only there because their relatives had sent them, or because they needed community service hours and thought Costa Rica would be a cool place to get them.

    I’ve had mixed feelings on schools having mandatory community service requirements (which my school does not): on one hand, there could be benefits to ensuring that everyone must break out of the little bubble from which they likely hail, in order to do some volunteering that they probably would never have engaged in otherwise, and it might enlighten such kids as to the value of the necessary and hopefully meaningful work they are doing; on the other hand, ‘forcing’ kids to ‘perform’ community service makes it seem like a pointless duty, a grudgingly fulfilled obligation, or an opportunity to ‘perform’ good deeds, as if there should be an audience on hand to applaud you for your actions (or your acting/playacting, perhaps, as you assume the role of a do-gooder who may do good not even out of a desire to feel helpful but a desire to accrue enough service points to go to college). My main quibble with requiring community service hours is that by framing it as something mandatory and inescapable, something to be endured and withstood, it will produce more of the second type of response than the first. The perceived nature of community service--something to be dreaded or groaned over--is what I think pushes kids who haven’t racked up the hours to search for more ‘enjoyable’ ways to get them, such as heading for a tropical country in which they can hope to work on their tans, go surfing, and have a vacation at the same time as they help some poor people over there.

    This assessment may be unduly harsh, and I do realize that if a school--like mine--does not require community service, then students may not ever do any. And I admit that I have partaken in fewer local volunteering efforts than I should or could have, to be able to stand on my high horse and call everyone out. But I think the markers are as follows for judging whether community service is effective and not detrimental (or just useless) within the communities supposedly being served: who is getting more out of it? Are the presumably fairly privileged kids who show up to ‘serve’ benefiting more--in terms of school credits, college application brownie points, or self-righteousness--than the people to whose aid they are presumably coming? Do we, as the ones on a service trip, give back as much as we get out of it?

    Judging by the code-of-conduct lecture we received, I think the program I joined has had its share of problematic experiences with the local community, and we are aware that we are treading a line between helpful and not-altogether-welcome. And the leaders did try to make it clear: we were not there to save or help poor little people here--we were there to learn and work because our interests align. As far as these programs go, this one was certainly aware of the pitfalls and preconceptions of a ‘service’ trip, regardless of the attitudes or motives of its participants. This program was also cognizant of the problematic aspects of the tourism industry, and actively avoids contributing to them, emphasizing sustainable ecotourism as an alternative. We talked about development and economics and the damage such ‘development’ has done to Costa Rica. And it was reiterated frequently that ‘service’ to others or the environment does not just consist of two weeks of enlivened thinking and the community service hours you get for them: to make a difference, you must use what you’ve learned to take action back at home, so that voluntourism may not only succeed in the local communities it aspires to support, but also may act as a stepping-off point towards a life of being an engaged, thoughtful, and powerful global citizen. Cynical as I am, I am not sure who will follow through with more environmentally aware personal habits or with larger-scale activism, but I was glad that the message was emphasized.

Something else I noticed is that one of the criteria for sustainable tourism listed by the program leaders was that it helps ‘promote democracy and human rights in local communities.’ That alone was the criterion I believe the program meets in perhaps only a limited capacity. Supporting local economies and not aiding in the destruction of people’s livelihoods and water rights could be construed as promoting human rights, but to me that criterion sounded like more than that: ‘promote,’ rather than just ‘don’t trample,’ implies more direct involvement or investment in politics and advocacy. The environmental work we support in this community may help foster democratic action and cooperative processes, but whether my program can actually say it locally promotes human rights and democracy--as in the end, its position here is a little tenuous, it did not originate as a project of the local community, and its contributions do not necessarily affect the political climate--still seems like an open question. However, the stricter the better, most likely, for criteria of what is acceptable in terms of tourism and what is crossing the line. That my program fulfilled so many is very commendable, I would say. The effort to present the program as apolitical or nonpartisan may be what gives me pause with that one criterion, since it seems to me that an apolitical stance (not that it was especially apolitical, except perhaps nominally) hinders--I would think, logically--political agency.

I was concerned at first that for all development was criticized and we were made to think about what the natural world is worth, climate change didn’t enter the discussion. We spoke of preserving Costa Rica’s incredible biodiversity for future generations, but didn’t mention that it may be lost even if we curtail the tourism industry and maintain or expand the national parks. I supposed the idea was to come at environmental issues sideways--or again, appear apolitical--and not scare anyone off by going straight to climate change, but it felt like an awfully large part of the equation is missing. Conservation is not enough, if what we are struggling to conserve now will be underwater at the end of this century.

Later, the leaders did mention climate change, if briefly. They also said that usually people spent much more time on the environmental discussions and such, but my group didn’t have that vibe and more just wanted to have fun. The leaders and the conversations I had with them made all the difference in this program, though, and the presentations or videos we saw were on the whole excellent. We discussed them less than we could have, unfortunately--a handful of the kids weren’t inclined to pay attention and some thought the videos were boring. What alternate universe, I wrote at the time, do these kids live in that they think this is not a burden whose responsibility they bear, a literally trashed world which they will inherit?

Despite the distances we'd all traveled to get to Costa Rica, I had the impression that many of us hadn’t really left the US in terms of mentality, and were comfortable to apply with impunity the same rules and cultural framework that work for us back home. My group received a hefty dose of lectures for breaking or misusing things or for being messy or rude; part of me wanted to declare that collective punishment is a war crime and besides, it won't change the mindset of kids who clearly don't care how their actions reflect on the whole group, but partly I just felt aggravated and guilty, even though I wasn't involved in the incidents. The day we left, the mentors were not in the best of moods on account of our group having broken a bed as a final destructive coup de grace, but the perpetrators and others alike would only complain about the unfairness of how terrible and angry everyone was, since breaking the bed had been an accident. By the end of two weeks of having your careless behavior criticized, an ‘accident’ is no longer a good excuse. I hated the word disrespectful for years, thanks to its overuse by patronizing or hypocritical elementary school teachers, but that was honestly all that could be applied here. At the base level, we were really there to be helpful and respectful--by my aforementioned litmus test, we should have been trying to give back to the community at least as much as we were getting, and being culturally insensitive or just generally rude or careless means you risk sabotaging that fragile balance between a person who does good in the world and an obliviously detrimental "do-gooder." Actions that may feel insignificant aren’t. Your things, your actions, the very environment here--it's not disposable. Not that a comfortably affluent US suburb or what-have-you is disposable, but what might be a no-brainer or have little significance there has more of an impact here. You are not special, not exempt from the ways of the locals just because you're not one. You don't live here, but other people do. Respect that. Respect them.

Midway through the program, I was concerned that many of my fellow voluntourists wouldn’t take away anything much deeper than that they had fun here. The number of times I heard lines like “Honestly, I just don’t give a shit about [politics, community service]” or “I really don’t feel like protecting the Pacific today”--it makes me fear for my generation. If a program as impressive as this one, which I thought genuinely tried to conduct a voluntourism trip with authenticity and respect, still can’t open people’s eyes, are those eyes doomed to stay shuttered forever? I suppose that the people who are going to be real change makers and battle to mend what is wrong in the world won’t have needed to go on expensive exposure-and-help programs in order to learn how. There was a man interviewing people in the program about our voluntourism experiences, particularly the experiences of kids who already went on one of these programs, and it was a little disturbing to me how little they were inspired to try to effect change at home after their experiences. They may have--probably had--learned a lot and returned home more aware, but the work they'd done while on their trips didn't translate to activism at home. A greater understanding of the world does not equate to action. If not actual apathy, informed citizens can still wrap themselves in alarming inertia.

One of the most uplifting moments of the trip, however, came shortly after my consternation about its lack of lasting impact. Near the end of the program, the people from the voluntourism survey interviewed us in groups about what we'd learned and what we planned to do about it, and I found myself honestly impressed with the detail and depth of the responses--clearly the plastic-in-the-oceans videos and all did get through. Kids remembered specific phrases--‘gill nets,’ ‘bycatch’--and statistics. Cynically, I have to wonder how long this awareness and concern will last, but I am heartened that it surfaced at all, given how flippantly I had been writing people off as flitty and shallow. Just goes to show me--I judge too quickly sometimes, too pessimistically.

I resolved, again, that I could talk the talk all I like, but I had to keep up the concrete action after the trip ended--run beach cleanups or an ocean awareness club, or just involve myself more in local environmental activism. I can’t know what the other kids will take away as lasting lessons from this program, but on that last plane flight home, I scrawled furiously in my notebook, brimming with the energy and knowledge and appreciation and desperation I accrued in Costa Rica. I intend to use it. When I left, I said I will come back, but before I do, I have work to do in the here and the now. The future is terrifying, but the present is still a gift. It is.