I SENT MY FRIEND WHO HAS LIVED IN VENEZUELA AND NOW IS A PROUD AMERICAN CITIZEN THIS THREAD AND HERE IS WHAT SHE RESPONDED:
I am sorry, but the majority of the comments are made by probably well intentioned folks out there who don’t know a thing about Latin America, Venezuela, the history of the Latin American countries and the relationship of the US with L.A. They have never been to Venezuela, nor have they ever witnessed what a real student protest looks like in this country.
Most of us in the comforts of our recliners have never seen military forces bomb or really beat the crap out of students, women, nuns, priests or innocent bystanders. Most of us have never witnessed what an “arrest” by 17 year old soldiers carrying sub-machine guns in the streets, schools, and buses look like. I have. Right smack in the middle of Caracas.
Slums? Our slums in the US look like country clubs compared to those surrounding the mountains of Caracas. This is a nation that once had Europeans immigrating TO Venezuela in the 40’s, 50’s and 60’s. During the petroleum boom years Venezuela was a prosperous country. The Bolivar money was stable for many years at 25 Bolivars to the dollar. Education for the youth is held in very high esteem. When the country nationalized the petroleum wells and took control from Standard Oil the nation began having serious economic and political problems.
The US took the oil buying business to the Middle East and we all know what happened over there since then. Inflation began to take a tight grip on this once prosperous and amazing nation. I had to help my family change their money from the Bolivar to the dollar in order for them to remain in the then shrinking middle class.
The illustrious Mr. Chavez arrived on the scene became a dictator for many years. Because of him inflation rose higher. He introduced the communist thugs from Cuba and vomited his daily schpiel on the benefits of socialism while he lived in absolute luxury. He completely allowed his country to disintegrate into an ecological mess. He GAVE AWAY oil to the paramilitary troops in Colombia (who were responsible for continuing their cocaine and crack trade into the US).
These are drugs that infest our people, our youth, our future. He allowed the once pristine Lake Maracaibo to become a veritable cesspool. He was a terrible, terrible man. Yet, we welcomed him in our country to give a speech in the UN. I don’t get this. So, as long as a Latin American nation is in our pocket and does what we tell it to we give them our hearts and pocketbooks. But once they buck we turn our backs and allow, sometimes enable and give money to criminals like Chavez.
Now what? Chavez is dead and Venezuela continues to disintegrate. Any Venezuelan with money long ago immigrated to the US. There is a neighborhood in south Florida called Weston. There are so many Venezuelans there that it is now called Weston-zuela. Lucky for us these people have education and money to contribute to our country.
The one comment about Venezuelans not resigning themselves to living like this any longer. You have no idea what people’s daily lives are like there. Resignation? Try protesting the lack of potable water, the slums, the lack of human dignity. It takes so much energy just to carry your drinkable water up a muddy, slippery, hill to the hovel that you call home. Try that several times a day and tell a Venezuelan about resignation.
I don’t mean to sound mean or like a know it all, but honestly I am astounded with how little traveling Americans do and how little they know about other countries.
And if mine was, “the one comment about Venezuelans not resigning themselves to living like this any longer,” then ours might simply be a misunderstanding, an unclear reference on my part, referring to the complex nature of mass movements and its best recruits.
I’ll have to stick to my point as to the stark choice still available to Venezuelans who see themselves as newly poor and then refer Proud American to Eric Hoffer’s “The True Believer,” Chapter V.
In that important and essential book, Hoffer made an important distinction between this category among "the poor" and those belonging among the “Abjectly Poor,” who are, indeed, largely exempt from this stark alternative, and about whom Proud American is definitely correct.
It is I who failed to communicate this distinction.
To better and more deeply illustrate, Hoffer wrote, with regard to “The Abjectly Poor,”
“The poor on the borderline of starvation live purposeful lives. To be engaged in a desperate struggle for food and shelter is to be wholly free from a sense of futility…Where people toil from sunrise to sunset for a bare living, they nurse no grievances and dream no dreams.”
“The intensity of discontent seems to be in inverse proportion to the distance from the object fervently desired. This is true whether we move toward or goal or away from it. It is true both of those who have just come within sight of the promised land, and of the disinherited who are still within sight of it; both of the about-to-be-rich, free, etc., and of the new poor and those recently enslaved.”
And to put the matter in better context, Hoffer wrote quite differently with regard to “The New Poor.”
“Not all who are poor are frustrated. Some of the poor, stagnating in the slums of the cities are smug in their decay. They shudder at the thought of life outside their familiar cesspool. Even the respectable poor, then their poverty is of long standing, remain inert. They are awed by the immutability of the order of things. It takes a cataclysm – an invasion, a plague or some other communal disaster – to open their eyes to the transitoriness of the “eternal order.”
“It is usually those whose poverty is relatively recent, the “new poor,” who throb with the ferment of frustration. The memory of better things is as fire in the veins. They are the disinherited and dispossessed who respond to every rising mass movement… So long as those who did the world’s work lived on a level of bare subsistence, they were looked upon and felt themselves as the traditionally poor. They felt poor in good times and bad. Depressions, however severe, were not seen as aberrations and enormities. But with the wide diffusion of a high standard of living, depressions and the unemployment they bring assumed a new aspect. The present-day workingman in the Western world feels unemployment as a degradation. He sees himself disinherited and injured by an unjust order of things, and is willing to listen who call for a new deal.”