Coming back to capitalism is like walking into a brick wall.  It’s like being hurled into the middle ages.  It’s like returning from the future to a place where everyone thinks it was just a dream you had and you say, “No really, I was in a country without advertising, where all the doctors are free and anyone who wants to can go to graduate school without going into debt, and people say ‘we’ a lot more than they say ‘I,’” and you keep feeling like you’re talking in a language no-one understands.  Coming back to capitalism after three months out from under is like walking into a horror movie.  In this country, my neighbor can spray pesticides in his back yard and even if it gives me seizures, the right to private property overrules my right to health, and the worst thing is that it seems self-evident to him that it should be so.  In this country my last ambulance ride costs twice as much as my rent.

Many years ago I heard an activist from another country, somewhere with dictators and soldiers in the streets, say that in the U.S. everyone lived in a fog of confusion, that they couldn’t see reality. It gave her the creeps. She would much rather, she said, be in her own country, where people knew what they were fighting for and against.  And that was 25 years ago.  Late stage capitalism has eroded people’s humanity, has trashed the quality of people’s lives so much that we’re become accustomed to livinginhell.  People in Cuba spoke to me with such compassion about Users.  They said, “We know how much the people of the US must suffer.  Is it true, “ they would ask, “that people don’t know their neighbors?  I heard that no one meets your eye when you walk down the street.  Is it really like that?” 

The first thing I saw when I passed through customs in Montreal, when I set foot on virtual US soil, was a dazzling array of merchandise, literally blinding.  I couldn’t see a way through, because of all the gleaming glass and precious metal, the duty free jewelry, perfume, alcohol, clothing all lit by spotlights, all reflecting back and forth in a dizzying shrine to consumerism.  It had taken me 24 hours to get through the ordeal of Air Canada’s horrific policies and attitudes about disabled travelers and only three minutes to say “I just came from Cuba, “ and be nodded through by an unruffled US customs agent.  I’m back in the land where people defend their right not to help you, where in fact an airline agent was reprimanded for picking up my water bottle when I dropped it (“She’s determined to show she can travel without an attendant, so she doesn’t get any help.)  Fast forward, please, past those excruciating hours trying to get on one flight after another because in spite of the fact that I was walking up and down in front of them, the head of customer relations said he couldn’t let me on a plane without a doctor’s letter saying I could walk.  So on a Sunday I had my father track down a doctor friend who has never laid eyes on me, to certify in writing that I could fly for an hour and a half unsupervised. 

Fast forward to the bed and breakfast in Cambridge where delighted employees take in my wheelchairless state and rejoice with me. Then my close friend Freda and I walk to Whole Foods and faced with the obscene overabundance of food, the shelves packed to the point of explosion with trivial, expensive, individually wrapped snacks, the towering piles of produce much of which will be thrown away, I feel sick, and dizzy and start sobbing right there in the aisle and I have to leave Freda to pay and go stand in the street to get air because it took Daysi three days to find chicken liver for the special meal she made us that cost all three days’ salary and we saw yogurt once at the grocery store, one glorious day, and then the case was ever after sparsely stocked with beer, and sometimes you have to go to four or five different stands to get an avocado, if you’re lucky and when I brought pizza for my farewell party at CIREN the therapists fell on it like starving piranhas, and forget toilet paper.  I am so angry and grief stricken at the same time.  I am filled with loathing for the blockade. 

It’s been over a month now and I am slowly growing a thicker skin, adapting to our particular brand of starvation, the lack of human connection.  I listen to the voice of my Cuban therapist saying “no te dejes llevar,” don’t let yourself be carried away, and try not to lose my balance in the face of my neighbor’s absolute determination to have his house be his castle and the hell with me and my body, in the face of the cynical pretense of health care reform, in the face of medical bills and indifference.  This is why I haven’t posted on my blog.  This is why I haven’t written my cascade of articles yet.  I’ve been in shock, trying to learn to breath polluted air again when my lungs had gotten used to inhaling a daily dose of solidarity. 

Next time I’ll tell you what got my respiration back on track.  I’ll tell you about Sins Invalid.