Three Chopsticks

Three black chopsticks

I was in China recently. After traveling 5000 km -by train and bus and taxi in a week, after visiting a newly born private art-museum and its "First Biennial Exhibition" (build in the middle of "nothing") after visiting an "Inner Mongolia" tourist-trap (where the Chinese middle class is dressing up to play "Mongolians" and take pictures together with animals and peasants that the company sublets), after counting at least 40 brand new large cities all looking the same, all growing in every direction, I now have a clear image of the actual situation. I see us locked in a triangle made by three pairs of chopsticks. US's black chopsticks made by steel, Europe's pair of chopsticks carved on wood, China's plasticelectric chopsticks, are all closing on us. They are hard and fast and we are rice. They represent the Total North.

US is Total North's philosopher. Teaches that life is worthy only if spend in confusion and fear. That everything feels better only if it means nothing. That day-dreaming some future (any future) is now a "Better Now".

Europe is the philosopher's PR-agent.
It has spend a century already advertising the secret meanings of US's flat rhetoric. "There's beauty in pop consumerism, just turn your toilet seat the other side. "Try focus on it and re-discover it- Europe suggests-it's powerful, artistic, scientific and spiritual!"

Then there is China.

MotherWorker/Provider/BigCustomer, the experiment and the cave of experimentation, the body and its coffin. Outside of this terrifying triangle, the crazed Pac-man of the Muslim World is expanding-like a Chinese city-to every direction. Islam is copying (as it always did), the Worst of the West while suffocating the best of East. The only variety of life benefiting from this state of affairs are smartphones. Every new wall build in China, seams indeed designed by phones to proliferate their existence.

A simple mission
Try and hold back those chopsticks- for a bit at least- before they"ll close on us... Try and knock them down... I understand the absurdity of such a mission but I have a daughter and nothing to lose and maybe you too.

I am convinced that there's no way to try and do this directly in Europe or the US. As for China, apparently such efforts would be obliterated in a mini second. Anyway, I believe that each and every moment has its karma, I start writing this in 2016 and soon it will be 2019, all those years passing, each offering us 24 hours, every hour containing 60 minutes...

One could simply try and use one or more of those minutes to contain somehow "Development" . Myself I choose a very special territory, the country of Colombia. This land -I am convinced- holds the keys to the blockage of "El Desarollo". If we can stop it -or at least slowdown it-here then maybe we can stop it or slowdown it everywhere.

Colombia comes with a bit of everything the World is made of.. There's Gabriel Garcia Marquez's "Macondo", (still a virgin and mysterious place known as Aracataca, a tourist-free/luxury-free area. Exhausting enough to not be "magical" at all, its as seriously realistic as in the days little Gabriel was looking at it through the eyes of an impatient child.

In Colombia there's Guajira, where the Pacific Ocean encounters Sahara-style sand dunes and where Egyptians, Phoenicians and Gypsies still live and dream "the desert way" Maybe they are not entirely brain-damaged from the catastrophic mutation that the single-god meme start inducing into the population of the Mediterranean basin about 3000 years ago. Next to Guajira there's Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta. It's a better Tibet where NOT monks are NOT expecting a better re-incarnation. They don't spend their lifetime building magnificent temples for intimidating their bodies, they don't ask the government for better roads or schools but just for slower internet.

Close by it starts the Magdalena River, a mythical body of water that cuts down through the country carrying memories of Bolivar, (he traveled it the other way, from Bogota to Cartagena, escaping his own dark side. In Colombia there are weird places such as Macarena's Canyo Crystales, waters tinted by crazy colors that one would think existed only in SuperMario for Nintendo Cube. Until recently, such places were protected by the fear of the Farc guerrilla and their nemesis, the Paramilitares. The same happened to the many Paramo (unique holy-humid ecosystems that could be the brains of planet Earth). Now that the Farc have retired and the Paramilitares are moving to more legal-criminal business, what will keep these places safe from passion of highway planners, gold-miners and tourist agents?

The same apply to the Colombian Amazon, happily not-protected but simply taken care until now from Gaia Foundation and Martin von Hildebrand . In the 70's Von Hildebrand succeed convincing a tired "Presidente" that the best thing to do to avoid that the Indio communities support the Farc, is to let them in peace and even offer them some kind of "special status". Privileges instead of obligations...Until now, many indigenous communities are smartly choosing a very limited interaction with the white man. Although they agree to have some schools build in their territories, they say yes to some western medicine (mostly to take care of all the diseases we brought to them), they seam to refuse free-market, tourism and full-scale Christianity. Still, they are penetrated by the most imperialistic virus that "civilization" has ever produced: the fiction of spirituality.

Together with other really smart people-the Africans brought in South America as slaves- Colombian indigenous, in order of saving themselves from the Euro-maniacs, start accepting the wrong translations of their (crystal-clear) thinking. "If we don't tell them that we also believe in "gods" they will take us for beasts and kill us all -they must have thought.. Soon, very basic and mundane concepts and practices such as talking with animals and trees, communicating with one's inner self or absence of self, became "spirits" and "shamanism" and "religion". Societies organized in such perfect ways that they could survive very hostile environments, start acting like parrots. Generation after generation, they start believing in spiritual fictions themselves.. Sadly they begun subscribing to the descriptions White Man is sketching about them before even meeting them.

The Africans, living closer to the Whites tried to hide their logic into the craziest side of of the invaders gods. But Aristotle and Plato's mental weapons proved to be really effective.. Not only they provide a perfect excuse for start splitting the world apart (as if the world is just products that somehow mixed up in the delivery and you need divide again in order of start selling it) but they also provided mental space to start building a serious disagreement with reality.

After all, Greeks and especially the Greek men, the very few Greek men that were not slaves but "free", could afford it). When you permit to yourself such a disagreement, then it comes the lament and then you start searching for "help", hence the single God and/or His Son -hence Jesus, or/and His Prophet - hence Mohamed or his toy - hence Buddha. And all of this can fit very in 24 (more or less) letters that first are used to write down what people own you (so you can tax them), then the various Books of God, (so you can find an excuse to kill them), then the songs of Beatles

Miltos Manetas, September 2016-2018

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