Dirt and family, sea foam and fate

"On the back side of the small resort island Caye Caulker, offshore from Belize City, Belize, is a beached two-man sailing vessel which has been lying on its side in the Caribbean sun and winds for fifty years. That was a long time ago, yet the poor Black Carib people who occupy the back side of the caye ("bakkatown," the Black Caribs call it), the ones who wait on the tables of the rich and pilot their fishing boats, still fondly remember the man who once sailed that old wooden boat. "He wah English, a man of da watah an de soul," one old bakka town fisherman recalled to the younger ones, who invariably ask, sometime in the course of their lives, about the old boat resting so prominently there at the end of the sandy road leading to the lagoon.

"Today I was fortunate enough to receive a letter from a similar soul, a seafaring man from Nova Scotia. As to the letter writer's question, Why can't media and political figures form genuine sentiment or thought? My suspicion is this: Those who grow up in the childrens' wading pools of America, entranced by their toys and watched over by nanny capitalism in suburbia or Gotham, never glimpse the deep waters, and therefore live out their lives as children, capable only of childish perception. And in dispensing their perceptions as reality from their positions of power, they further infantilize our entire nation. "

-- Joe Bageant

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