This is becoming more of a travel blog than I had originally intended. But, what can I do? I have been experiencing things that make me think, and then I write about them and publish them to the internet in order to force the clarification of my own thought. Today’s topic is specifically public buses, and more generally the subtle beauty that material limitations instill within culture.

Although the above picture is of a Guatemalan chicken bus (so called because it’s not unusual to see locals using the bus to transport a few chickens), I first had this thought while on a Belizean chicken bus, as this was the first place on my trip where taking buses of this sort was the only option. I would watch, day after day, as mothers taking children to school, old folks, young students, and even little kids all by themselves would commute wherever they needed to get by way of these local buses. Often it was a rather crammed affair, which added an ethical dimension to the ride. You needed to be paying attention to what seats were open, and if none were available when an old person or pregnant woman boarded the bus, it may fall to you to give up your seat and stand the rest of the ride. In one particular instance, I watched a few rows ahead of me as an old woman boarded the bus and was clearly looking for a seat where none were to be found. A young boy, probably 13 or 14 years old, was the clear candidate to abdicate his spot in her favor, but he failed to do so because, being a young boy, those things aren’t always clear. To the community of adults around him, however, it was abundantly clear what needed to happen, and they made it known to him. I watched as a pair of middle-aged women pulled on his shirtsleeve and nearly yanked him out of the seat, laughing the whole time as they gave him the softest ethical reproach imaginable, and abashedly he stood up with a blush, like an unsure private under military inspection, and took to standing in the aisle with head bowed in a cute shame.

And so what all happened in that moment? Although it was something so small, I can’t help but look deeply into it. Maybe what stood out to me the most about it was that the two women who so assuredly taught him that lesson were clearly not his relatives nor close family friends. They had not acknowledged each other at all before prompting him to give up his seat, and they didn’t say anything to him afterwards. I’m sure they recognized the boy——I was traveling through a really small, close-knit coastal town. They probably knew his mother, and perhaps they’d watched him grow up from afar. I don’t want to do too much speculating for fear of misinterpreting what took place, but it felt important to me that they were clearly not closely bonded, and yet still didn’t hesitate a moment to teach this young man how to behave within his community. Something about it felt so healthy to me——so real. I feel as if I saw a respectful and empathetic young man being shaped before my eyes, in a sort of community feedback process.

All of this was only possible in the framework of the public bus. If far higher wages were to come to these Belizeans, they would almost certainly buy personal vehicles and commute wherever they needed in the solitary, atomized manner so prevalent amongst us Americans. Our American fortune has been applied to crafting incredibly solitary lives. We don’t grow up amongst a tightly tangled web of community members, commuting together through the years, forced to learn tolerance, respect, and empathy. I am therefore unsurprised that it is the American young man who stands so often behind the gun in the horrific shootings that have become our society’s new standard of living. Our wealth has given the ugliest parts of ourselves fertile ground to flourish. No doubt all humans desire privacy to some extent, but in America we could afford to extinguish every last non-private ritual from our lives. And after a few generations of such extreme atomization, our children grow up perhaps a little less aware of the reality of other’s thoughts and feelings——a little less tied into the tangled mass of those around us.

In an attempt to explain why suicide rates in the U.S. have continued to rise in white communities over recent decades, while staying nearly flat across black and latino communities, Tony Dokoupil of CBS suggested that “The life-saving power of belonging may help explain why, in America, blacks and Hispanics have long had much lower suicide rates than white people. They are more likely to be lashed together by poverty, and more enduringly tied by the bonds of faith and family”. This lashing together by poverty is a fascinating idea, and I feel it in large part explains so much of what I’ve been seeing across Latin America. Although this entry only cites a particular, tiny instance, there have been thousands of other such moments that I could write about. I keep traversing incredibly poor areas, and yet am seeing incredibly intact and vibrant families and communities. (Which begs the obvious question…) What does this tell us about the entire project of modernization? What have we been after in the States, in east Asia, and in northern Europe? What are we chasing, and what do the people left behind in the dust of modernization have to show for their “lack” of what we’ve “gained?” There is no doubt poverty of a purely, and singly miserable nature. But most of what I’ve been finding tells me that to some extent the material limitations placed upon us can cultivate rather than debilitate culture. The whole history of our species has been a creative response to material limitations. All of culture is the ornate answer to that question which the natural world asks: how might humankind respond when placed onto this or that patch of earth or sea? To begin with, we have said: “It’s going to take us a long time to give you a solid answer, but to begin walking forward we know only that we must do so together, holding each other tightly.”

In each other’s arms we spread out across the fecund planet, forged sled tracks into the Greenland ice and named the stars over Tierra del Fuego. It is this initial intuition——that where we go we must do so together——which the western world has begun to deny to its own detriment in the last few generations, thanks in large part to the car. Perhaps some part of all of us would prefer the morning commute in the silence of our own mind, or, more likely, entertained by the media of our individual choosing. But perhaps this is not a liberty we should be embracing; Belize, and now Guatemala, have shown me otherwise——have shown me the beauty of the crowded bus. For it is then when the school day truly begins, and when some of the first critical lessons are taught.