Barack Obama

Going out to the smoking area in Miami, having lost my lighter to a cult of security in Trinidad and Tobago (who probably have a shrine of lighters that they have found), I bummed a light from an American Airlines employee named Geovanni. So we start talking - something the healthier and less social non-smokers wouldn't understand. We talked about all sorts of things; he on his break and myself awaiting a connecting flight while drinking coffee and trying to singlehandedly decrease the percentage of damage that bovine flatulence does to the climate of the planet.

We talked about Trinidad and Tobago, Cuba (where he was from), Panama, Nicaragua, Colombia, and many other things. We talked about how people can never simply get along. We laughed about life, smoked our cigarettes and blew smoke at the universe. We spoke of places we'd been, people we've met - be they Palestinians in Greece or Jews in Miami or Barack Obama or Fidel Castro. We agreed that the world made less sense than people generally thought it did because when you peek under the soft lace that the media dresses many things in... it's naked. And naked, despite what testerone powered adolescents may think, is not always good. But to see the world naked is a passion for some of us, and by pure chance and addiction to nicotine, we sat there and talked for about an hour. An hour passed idly between strangers at an airport discussing the world, the people of the world, and so forth.

He was a teenager when he left Cuba; he tells me the first 10 years in the United States were hard but that his dream was being fulfilled: by working with American Airlines and the nature of his work, he traveled the world. He and I are alike in that we don't stay on the beaten paths - we want to see how people live, how they think, what they think and why they think it. The world is an open ended question.

Tourists visit islands all the time; travel brochures show them as wonderful places that manufacture drinks served with umbrellas. Beaches with views. A place to escape to. For a slice of time, they plan to come and relax - indulge themselves.

The last time I shared that perspective, I was 9 years old in Dayton, Ohio with my father asking me about moving to Trinidad and Tobago. That was very exciting at the time. An Adventure. Little did I know that it would be a few years before I swore to get off the island. I did. Then I came back after traveling more than most people do in their lives - but this isn't about my traveling. It's about an island.

Take the Caribbean, an island chain made up of many islands. On these islands there are people that do not exist in tourist brochures; the vast majority may never see the inside of a tourist resort. The vast majority see the world through the looking glass of television - and if they can afford it, cable television piped in with all manner of advertising that is almost always designed to get people to buy things that are not available on the island. Newspapers echo Associated Press articles about the rest of the world; on an island the circulation of a newspaper does not support international reporting. Magazines cater to the people who can afford them and show what the demographic wants, thus catering for the upper class of the Caribbean - or blissfully showing off what the tourist demographic wants to see.

I have to start this off by saying that Barack Obama's win has cleared some dust from my soul. The last time I was so proud of the country of my birth was between 17 and 20 years ago, perhaps because I was looking at a nation I had longed for through my teenage years. The years in uniform and afterward did not have that feel; surrounded by a sea of fellow young people 'on the college program' did little to maintain that feeling.

Tonight, that changed in a very fundamental way. It changed in a way that astounded me. And really, it has very little to do with Barack Obama himself as much as a new trust in the democratic system which I have been revisiting through Alexis de Tocqueville. Where I once was jaded by my former understanding that the United States ran on lobbyists and fickle voting procedures and machines, I became even more jaded over the last 8 years. I could not explain to myself, I could not rationalize, I could make no sense of why my former brothers-in-arms not only risked life and limb but lost them. I could not explain how I could have worked with navigation systems that should have been accurate and how there was so much 'collateral damage'. It made no sense, unless one connects the dots in a way that makes locking one's tapioca pudding in a refrigerator sensible.

And that's uncomfortable.

When Barry Became Barack is an interesting article, and it is the first article that I've linked to on any site that has something to do with a possible future President of the United States. But that isn't why I've linked to it, and it also isn't the misspelling of 'reluctant' within the very first paragraph (come on people - spell check!).

The reason I'm linking to it is quite simple. I can sort of relate to it. Being of multiple cultures makes for some interesting times, and the fact that a human can't be striped has its own penances. For me, I was thought to be:

• Mexican in Texas
• Cuban or Puerto Rican in Florida - even being refused gas at one place in the Panhandle once.
• Cuban/Puerto Rican/Dominican Republic/Colombian in New York
• Filipino in Japan
• Mixed Samoan in Hawaii
• 'Red', 'White' or Venezualan in Trinidad and Tobago

Identity is simply something you either have or you don't - it isn't something that other people give to you, but as a younger man traveling around I quickly learned to use what other people thought of me to my advantage where possible. I've been called a greaser, spic, howlie and many other things. Over time, I learned that wherever I went, I was a minority in numbers - and because of my own weak personal identity at times, I wasn't respected here and there. What was worse was that the minorities I was identified with didn't see me as a part of the whole. A very odd existence.