Road block

I've failed to write for some time now again. This is something that seems to happen again and again. This time it was a post that was in my head, but I could not get out of my head the way I wanted it to get out. I have written it countless times in my head, but it never felt right. Never good enough.

That is the most important thing here. It was never good enough. It was however never going to be good enough. Expectations too high. Lots of thoughts about too big a theme to be bundled into one post. Thus hindering creation. Hindering other ideas to become real. A road block.

So instead of writing the perfect piece of commentary I'll describe what the post should have been. It should have been a post posted the day after leaving the USA. A post about all the things that I found repulsive about this country. A stringent, stingy, hard look on a country that thinks so much of it self. It had to be whitty and fun and recogniseable.

I've been overwhelmed by the sheer size of the USA. The differences in ecological systems around. The time it takes to go from one place to another. In a sense I'm a Dutch guy traveling on a vast continent where distances are at a different scale than where I'm from. Even though Eurasia might have the same scale it does not feel like it, because I never think of the east of the continent to be the same continent for some weird reason. I don't feel connected to China or Mongolia or India via land. Maybe because it is not a route often traveled and hard to travel with unstable countries in between. Anyways the distances in Europe are so small that everything is close. Everything is only a short traveling distance away. The most interesting thing is that you feel more in a different country when you cross a border. The culture is different. The language is different. The buildings are different. In a matter of hours you are in a different place all together.

Not so when traveling North America. Or at least the USA. The landscapes differ going south or west or east. But the building style stays the same cheap it-will-last-maybe-15-years plywood walls with bad construction as if there are no building codes and carpenters are 10 year olds that just learned how to stack wooden stick in such a way it will stay erect. Cover that with some cheap thin layer of whatever stappled to the sticks so it looks stable. Most of the buildings are in disrepair. Look half abandoned and just dangerous to occupy. Most villages you cross have more than half of these buildings in shambles giving a feeling of eary abandon.

Trying to get decent food at a decent price has been almost impossible. Prices are so high we had to actively search for the cheapest things to get by and stay sort of within budget. The prices seem high by design not by necessity. A lot of the food is produced within the USA itself and most people we talked to were of the opinion that the prices were artifically kept that high. Pharmaceutical products where even worse. Something like vitamines or electrolites where 5-10 times what I expected and unreasonable. You start to wonder how most people live. The salaries are not high at all and most people, with the prices we saw could not afford to just buy groceries. It seems like most people just accepted to live in debt for normal gorceries.

Then of course there is the challenge of finding something healthy to eat. It is sheer impossible to find something that does not contain a high amount of high fructose corn syrup. That stuff is in everything. The only way you could get around this is by making everything yourself from basic ingredients. Which of course is impossible on a bike with a camping stove. But I hear you say you can buy fruits and veggies. Sure you can, but not within budget and also the quality was not very high. Organic produce was very hard to come by and well the rest just did not appeal too much. And small quantaties is not USA's forte.

The thing that shocked me the most, was the amount of poverty around in every place we rode through. Every village or small town had a number of homeless persons hanging around the only grocery store or supermarket. A decent amount of the buildings where in disrepair. Every major city had a camp of tents set somewhere in the center with homeless people living there. Actually in the big cities there are whole blocks 'occupied'. Clearly on drugs all the time providing a feeling of not wanting to stay around or leave your bike alone to go into a shop.

I've never seen so many homeless people camping or sleeping on the streets. It is one of the sadest things I've seen in years. I was expecting it in big cities like LA or Seatle, being warned about it. But it was everywhere. It was accepted. People just don't seem to really care. They warn you about things not being safe. That you should look out when this or that. Then getting in their car to drive of. Shutting the outside world out with the closing of the door. Safe in their small little bubble.

I say small. But that is way of saying. The cars are huge. Large pickup trucks with huge engines that are so loud it is very likely we have permanently gotten hearing damages from just cycling around. Those cars must use huge amounts of fuel. And everyone seems to no care at all. As if peak oil does not exist or does not count for USA citizens. They moan a bit about the prices fo gas being so high, but a smaller car that is more economical seems not to be an option. Giving up the status of a car seems to be the ultimate sin. Taking the bus or walking is for the poor and misfortunate. It is dangerous to take the bus...

This bubble of the car and its capability to shut out the rest of the world seems to be symbolic for the USA. The richest country on earth with the best democracy seems to not care at all about its own citizens. Money is the only thing that counts. And the poor are a reminder for working hard, so you will not fall back to that poor miserable way of living. Money is what counts and nothing else. If you have it you're off fine. If you don't have it shame on you and I don't want to know you even existed. I've seen more poverty in the richest country on earth than any other country I've been to. And I say shame on them. It seems deliberate and structural. There is no excuse for that when there is clearly enough money around.

The last things I'll mention about the USA are roads, destruction of nature and the quality of water. The roads are made for cars and cars only. Some cars seem to actively want to kill you. Cycling or even walking seems to not be in the cultural mind. Sure there are some towns with cycling infrastructure, but they are haphazard and not complete. And often dangerous. But most of all the car is king and does not want to allow anything else on their roads. Sidewalks are not meant for walking either. Often they are just slaps of contrete ill fitting. Not at all pleasant to walk on and not nearly spacious enough to walk leasurely together. That is if there is a sidewalk at all.

You see how humans are actively destroing nature everywhere. From monoculture in agriculture to just deforestation in such large degrees that nature can't recover. There are almost no insects around in places there should be and it seems like the new world has not learned anything from the errors of the past and is still solely focussed on maximizing profit in dollars for the short game. Not thinking about the real cost of what they are doing. The cost of extracting nutrients out of the soil in such a short amount that in a few years time nothing but shrubs will grow on now still fertile grounds.

The last thing was water. Something I've sort of taken for granted in developed countries to be available to just be drinkable out of the tap. And sure it is probably drinkable according to some standard, but you don't want to. It tastes of chorine in such a high degree that it feels bad for you. I would not be surprised if drinking it will actually make you sick over a prolonged period of drinking this 'clean' water. It does not taste good at all and nobody drinks it. You buy water in plastic bottles. There are water filtration stations everywhere where you can fill you 5 gallon plastic bottle. Stating all the filtration and active UV filtering they do. They use the same tap water you get at home... Surely it is cheaper and better to just have that quality out of the tap directly. Surely the richest country in the world can afford to provide its citizens with healthy tasty water for a low price out of every tap. I know it is possible, because I grew up with it.

Anyway this is a small portion of the things that baffled my in the USA. The natural diversity in this country is huge. It's beauty undeniable. But I've mostly been very dishearted about this strange country. I did not enjoy being there. It feels like a country on the brig of falling apart. A country on the brig of civil war. A country that puts an image outward that does not feel honest when you look inside. A country that is still very much devided and gets polarised more by the day. It feels like an old fashioned propagandy war machine that puts its own people against the rest of the world. And most people are just fine with that. It is scary and does not bode well for our world.