Do Nothing Useless

Recently, I have centered my life around one key concept: industry. It’s the ideas Benjamin Franklin laid before me, and I have taken a liking to them. That industriousness means I take no part in useless and inconsequential matters if I can help it. When you take on such a goal, you start to look at the world with a renewed pair of eyes. It’s like putting on glasses when you have poor eyesight. Everything sharpens up and focuses in with a new clarity.

What does it really mean to serve humanity? It means to do things that society will find useful whether it’s cleaning a hospital or playing music to pleasure the ears of those around me. All these things are useful. Where we go wrong is when we see them as work instead of as serving humanity.

Whatever I do, I have decided, I want it to have a purpose. For that reason, I have had to cut some things from my life while thinking of creative ways to make other things useful or meaningful. Nothing I do should have the stale odor of directionless hobbies—I have done enough of those.

When it comes to my own personal education, I have decided to hone in on the more practical side of things. Certainly there’s nothing wrong with knowing 14th century Italy was a collection of city-states, and mercenaries were a hated but necessary evil to the survival of each state. However, how are we going to make such knowledge useful? Admittedly, it’s bloody hard. I have not figured out how to do it yet, other than it’s a good story, and it’s the story of mankind. Still, in the coming year, I want to become a more practical learner and especially focus my learning efforts on practical affairs.

What About Fiction?

A practical education doesn’t mean I’ll be cutting out fictional novels or even stop learning about history. The ultimate goal behind industriousness is greater happiness for myself and bringing something of real value to serve humanity. However, I’m going to watch how much time I spend doing it, and get a whole lot more creative in how I make these things meaningful to my life. For example, I’ve been reading the Wheel of Time series since I first got to Nicaragua (I’m on book 3).

How will I make such a series useful to my life? First, I will use the story as inspiration for my own fictional novel Scarlet Sword, which I have been writing on and off for four years—doesn’t seem possible, but I haven’t worked hard at it. I will write detailed essays about the complex relationships within the story, and how the ideas might one day come up with my characters in Scarlet Sword.

Answer a question

With each reading, I might have a question, be it psychological, plot-based or otherwise where I try to come up with a viable answer and tailor an essay around it. For example, in Wheel of Time, I might talk about the friendship of the three main character, Rand Al’Thor, Matrim Cauthon and Perrin Aybara. I will answer it in essay form.

I might also explore the psychological makeup of each character and learn the lessons of each character. The goal is to either make it useful or make it deeply meaningful, and I think this is one of the ways that I can get away with doing it for fiction. In everything I do, however, my goal is to set a purpose to make it useful. Each interaction and everything I do, my goal will always be to either serve or create the circumstances where I could serve in the future.

 

Knowledge Rush: Constructing Your Understanding of a Language

The crane lifts the beams and the welders and construction workers build the tower of your understanding of a language. Years ago in High School Spanish class, we dug the foundations deep and laid the concrete of our first work with the skyscraper.

Possibly 8 to 10 years later, I returned to this old foundation and started building the base of my skyscraper through Anki flashcards. At the time, I had no idea of my future to come, and I built this tower because of my love for the knowledge. Later in July of 2016, I hopped a plane to Nicaragua and started building it higher.

You Know When You Have Reached a New Stage

The one thing I’ve learned about Spanish is how satisfying it can be to see myself move forward in the language.  Perhaps at one point, I’m finishing up the wiring of the current skyscraper. I KNOW when I’ve hit a new level. For example, it took me a long time before I realized there was a working structure (i.e. a first-person, second-person, and third-person structure to verbs) to Spanish, and in fact, I didn’t learn this until I came back to the States.

That was my first realization that I had hit a new stage in the construction process.  Recently, I have felt myself surging forward again as I realized how much of the words I can now, not only recognize, but I can “sometimes” put them together into something coherent. I have also learned how you sometimes use different Spanish constructions of the building of words than what you might for English. That was a big realization again, and it hit me today. To give an example, in Spanish, you might say, “Me duele la cabeza.” In Spanish, you arrange the word hurt first over, but in English, you say, “My head hurts.” I’m not yet sure on the mechanics of why this works, but to me, it looks a lot like how you switch the adverbs up in Spanish and English.

Every time I reach these new understandings, I feel one step stronger in my knowledge, and it gives me a great adrenaline rush to see myself move forward in this way.

Little by little, I’m building skyscrapers.

Worth it to Switch VoIP Services?

Many small to medium-size businesses might be wondering if they should make the switch from PBX to VoIP? Are there benefits to a smaller company making a switch like this? For anyone starting a business, making sure you have a dependable phone connection can make or break your company. Network computers see tons of work going through, but most offices can’t do away with phones for the simple need of daily communication with customers. Here’s some other reasons a small to medium business might benefit from transitioning to VoIP.

Easy to Install, Maintain and Expand

VoIP phones require little technical knowledge when it comes to installation. Instead of having someone run phone wiring through a facility, you can set up the VoIP phone, which installs fast and requires little maintenance. In addition, as your company grows, the cost to add new users is minimal, and it doesn’t take much to scale your business up as it grows. Try that with a PBX, and your company will pay a lot more to install more phone lines. Over the next year, you don’t know how many phone lines you might need. With a traditional phone system, you have to exercise caution not to buy phone lines you might never use.

Better Flexibility: Follow Employees into the Field

Do you have employees who travel regularly for business? A VoIP phone system lets you access this web portal from anywhere at any time needed. You don’t have to keep everything organized with this system. You divert the phone calls through the cloud VoIP phone system, and you can reconfigure it at any point.

Plenty of Support for Call Features

VoIP phone systems have the full range of features you might expect from one of these systems. As a business, the highly desirable features include:

• Call transfers
• Call hunt
• Conference calling
• Call hold
• Find me/follow me
• Auto-attendant phone menu

Supports Older Technology

Intended specifically for businesses that send faxes, VoIP phone systems support virtual faxing. Even with instant messaging and email, you have instances where faxes remain necessary. You don’t need toner or paper, and you can receive or send faxes as needed with the use of the email account you have with the VoIP phone. For businesses dependent on faxes, this is good news.

Saves Money

A VoIP phone system saves money because the installation is simple and non-intrusive. Not to mention, you had to spend time with configuring the phone system with the old legacy system and the maintenance and repair to a phone could cost you quite a bit. VoIP lets you save on the cost of installation, and the calls you make will cost you less. For businesses that have customers overseas, a VoIP system offers you savings on international phone calls. Through this phone system, you can buy a great phone without dropping a huge chunk of cash into the investment.

Integrates with Other Business Systems

A shrewd business owner looks at how the new system will integrate with their business applications. The VoIP phone systems integrate easily, and you can do a variety of things like place an outbound call with Outlook, or you could bring up customer records of inbound phone calls.

Small to medium businesses should make the switch to the VoIP phones because it brings them the most recent and competitive technology without the bitter aftertaste. A VoIP phone keeps you competitive with some of the bigger corporation that have switched to this technology because it’s more cost-effective. With all the advantages of VoIP, it makes sense to use this technology. If you’d like to learn more about VoIP, contact us today to help get you started.

Are Foundation Contractors Covered under Insurance?

 

When cracks start to form on your slab concrete foundation, the damage can bring the structural integrity of your home into question. According to Fixr, the average cost to fix a foundation will be between $5,000 to $7,000. For those with the assumption their homeowner’s insurance will automatically eat the cost, you could face an unpleasant surprise.

What’s in Your Policy?

Soil expansion and poor construction, when listed as the cause of a cracked foundation, will typically be excluded from the average insurance policy. Most insurance providers call these conditions “avoidable” through home maintenance. Also, the control of conditions that lead to flooding or inadequate drainage play a key role.

What’s Covered?

The typical homeowner’s insurance policy will only cover you against specific and identified perils. If, for example, your foundation suffered damage because of an explosion, tornado or fire, your homeowner’s insurance policy could reimburse you for the costs that go up to your limits of coverage.

Foundation Repair: The Problem with Insurance

Foundations crack over time, which is one of the greatest problems with insurance covering this necessary repair. Because it happens over time, it can be a hard problem to prove that it was related to damage specific to the repair and covered under insurance.

For problems with the foundation, we recommend a proactive approach where you address the foundation as soon as cracks start to form. In this way, you pay $900 for a foundation problem instead of it snowballing into a $5,000 repair. For further information, give us a call today for an estimate.

 

 

Only Fools Hold a Grudge

I’ve heard Christians say forgiveness is for you, not the other person, and it’s true. When you hold a grudge, are you really hurting the other person? Or are you simply reliving what hurt you while the other person walks away thinking they got the best of you?  Let God deal your vengeance and walk away with peace of mind. When your own emotions come back to destroy you again and again, are you really getting the best of them with a grudge? They don’t feel the betrayal. You do. You might hurt me once, but you will by no means play me for a fool the second time. When you don’t forgive, you incur a double, triple or even quadruple insult by reliving the wrongdoing.

Should You Forgive?

First identify your own role in the situation. Did you do anything wrong? The biggest question: If you did what you thought was right, why feel bad or upset when the wrongdoing was with them? If I stuck my neck out for someone because I thought so highly of them and they tried to play me for an idiot, they hurt themselves not me by showing a character of less than what they are capable of. They simply taught me a lesson about them, and they won’t fool me next time. The worst kind of fool is the one who stays a fool (forgiveness is not to be a fool twice), and the best kind of vengeance is to lick your wounds, learn from your mistakes and move on.

By someone else behaving badly, your character was not hindered, it was theirs. Let’s take the example of Dylann Roof who shot up the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church. I’ve heard some people say, “Don’t forgive Dylann Roof! Torture him!” they’ve clearly demonstrated they don’t understand forgiveness.

…Dylann Roof feels nothing for what he did and torture cannot change him, unless some divine intervention ever comes and I pray it will, I fully believe he will remain that way until his death sentence. He needs prayers, not condemnation because he doesn’t even care if you condemn him, and  his delusion has led him to believe he succeeded. Your anger towards him is not going to change him, but it will hurt you. If you torture him, then he gets the best of you by making you into a heartless monster, and you will experience all the bad emotions that go with it. Suddenly, you’re the one with the poor character by letting someone else’s poor character make you into a monster. Hate the sin, not the sinner. He’s simply a foolish boy who is the victim of destructive beliefs, and the real understanding of what he’s done is going to be the greatest vengeance. That he was so cowardly that he had to attack the worshipers of a church. What does that say about him? It says nothing about the victims, except their acceptance of him before he shot them.

These were innocent people who did nothing to him and even accepted him when he came there. Dylann Roof did not hurt their character or even hurt them when he shot them. They went to heaven’s gates, and what’s better than paradise for eternity? What harm did he really do except on his own head, where he now lives for the rest of his life in prison, and right now, he lives in a prison within his own mind where he has falsely made devils out of good people.

On top of that, you think God is going to look favorably on a man who was so cowardly that he felt he had to attack innocent people? Like I read he shot up a church because he was afraid those in the ghetto would shoot back. His real judgement has not even come yet if he refuses to repent, and he’s already hurt himself so greatly by losing his freedom for something so delusional.

Any lack of forgiveness you might have only give his act power over you because then he controls your emotions and makes you feel all these destructive and hurtful things. He wants you to feel hate. He said it himself. The same is true of any wrongdoing against you. Forgive and don’t let it sour your spirit. Even if they don’t feel it now, they will one day. If they sinned against you, it is not your worry. My character was not debased by their actions. The realization of how they hurt you, that in itself will be a judgment.

I have known people I thought highly of, and when they revealed the heart of their true intentions to try to make me a fool, I believed them. They didn’t hurt me, they hurt themselves because I no longer think so well of them.  I forgive because it doesn’t do me any good to hang onto that anger.

Curiosity Experiment: 1000 Daily Questions

Can you make yourself more curious by consciously asking hundreds of questions? I believe you can, and it’s a great philosophy to ignite the flames of your soul with an unquenchable thirst for knowledge. I feel more alive when I’m inquisitive about the world, and what’s interesting is how I’m sharper mentally when I’m curious about the things around me. For example, if I’m reading a novel, I love how I can see hidden and upcoming plots before they even arrived through questioning—it’s an interesting type of foresight. There’s a certain level of self satisfaction when I can understand what I wouldn’t otherwise grasp immediately through questions. That’s why I’m designing an experiment to ask as many questions as I possibly can.

To make knowledge meaningful in relation to yourself, that requires curiosity. Anyone can read a book and parrot back the facts like they teach in school, but how do you make it your own? I came across this discovery with making knowledge your own in Stoicism. How the great teachers like Epictetus, Marcus Aurelius and Diogenes (though he wasn’t a Stoic) spoke of how material goods were nothing, yet hearing it and deeply understanding this takes a little bit of questioning to arrive at real knowledge of it.

Why are material possessions less valuable than people think? Because at the end of your life, you take nothing with you other than your stories and experiences. Oh, you had your tomb encrusted in gold? So what… I’d rather be the poorest man in the world than the richest man in the graveyard. Look at any pharaoh of Egypt, how they were buried with immense treasures, and what good did it do them when the grave robbers came? Surely the only thing it did was to set vultures on him over the others. Even in death he has no sleep.

Money and material possessions are not the root of all evil either. It only becomes evil when you don’t understand the principles behind it. Money can bring tremendous and incredible relief to others when used correctly, but at the same time, you shouldn’t be a fool about it either. Never let anyone take advantage of you.

Why Ask Questions?

For me, asking questions makes life a more personalized experience. I like being aware of the world and having curious experiments to understand things. Even if they’re meaningless experiments, they’re still fun in the grand scheme of things. I ask questions because it brings my level of understanding up to a higher plane. Leonardo da Vinci was deemed the most curious man who ever lived and look at all the great accomplishments and gifts he had. Is that possible for the rest of us? I think anything is possible. Back in the 1700s, most people didn’t believe the commoners could learn to read and write, and now look at how many people know how to read and write. Over 90 percent just in the US is literate. If he would only spread his wings and fly, he could have it.

Not to mention, I get this sense that he probably had a deep appreciation for his life. Questions sharpen a purpose to your life, and they bring out the best you can give. I have always enjoyed having these personal thought experiments. Why? Because it lets me discover more and to tune my life into new and differing directions. I will end this post with my current questions I’m contemplating. Here are some of the questions I have about life right now:

• Why can you see in dreams without eyes?
• Why do animals act differently?
• What causes the snow to fall?
• Is snow just frozen rain?
• Is there an ultimate truth?
• How big is the universe truly?
• Is time travel really possible?
• What can the world invent that we have never seen before?
• If you had to create the symbol for the values of the big picture of your life, what would it represent?
• Looking back on your life, what were some of the most meaningful moments?
• Who were some of the most treasured people in your life?
• What is the ultimate meaning of life?
• Can you hold two opposite ideas in your mind without giving into one of them?
• What’s the meaning of suffering?
• Why is man so cruel?
• Is man’s underlying nature sinful?
• Why are people so wildly different?
• What creates different cultures?

If I Died Tonight….

I was looking at my old Nicaraguan tour guide’s Facebook page, and words can’t express the compassion and gratitude I have towards this man. He ripped me off—true. And I’m not dumb or blind to that. But since I’ve left Nicaragua, all I remember are the wonderful memories I had that would’ve been nothing without his cheerful energy (Matagalpa, Esteli, Boaco, Ometepe and Granada…it would’ve been nothing without him). I was glad he was my tour guide. The one thing I have to say about Guillermo was how he always brought this happy and childlike energy to our tours. From his excitement, I almost felt like he was the one on tour…like he was seeing things for the first time with me. I have dozens of smile-inducing stories because he was my tour guide.

What if I were Killed Tonight?

Philosophically speaking, if I were killed tonight or any other night in the name of freedom or living my life, I know that for a moment in time in a far off country, I held real happiness that I never had here, and I lived life as it ought to be lived. Is it better to live in a cage your whole life, or to fly to the heavens and have your life cut short but to die in freedom? I have known both sides, and I’m glad I took this risk. I’m not reckless, however. What did you do with the time between? I’m glad I’ve had the happiness that I did and taken the risks I did. Even the most horrible ways it could’ve gone wrong, I still couldn’t regret it. My tour guide ripped me off and could’ve killed me, but all I feel is gratitude for this man and the memories he gave me.

I can’t look on any of those traveler’s memories without thinking, “Good choice, Squiggly, good choice…!” If I died tonight, I know that my life would not have been wasted because I had those experiences, and they have melded me into a human who can look beyond the immediate clouds and smile at the storm.

What Would Be My Last Thoughts Before Death?

Travel captured my heart in such a way that I think my final thoughts will hopefully return me to some of my best stories in Nicaragua and Mexico and to gratitude for having had these things. I am grateful and I pray that I will die grateful.

 

Experiment: Everything’s a Toy!

Way back in Junior High, I had shop teacher angrily tell my friend and I how, “Nothing is a toy!” as we were monkeying around in class. Now, I’m sure he had good intentions, but thinking back on that story is a long thought process on how I’ve slowly discovered how—everything’s a toy!

Fun: Medicine for Depression

I have fought with depression on and off for years, but this last dark season has stabbed me like a knife for the last several months on end. The thing I learned from the last time I got majorly depressed was how when I had fun, the process of having fun brought a joyous healing salve to my wounds. When you fly around like an airplane and dance like a nut, the lingering cloud of depression evaporates.

How to Have Fun

Learning how to raise the banner of joy, smiles and fun has been the hardest thing about this experiment. As a kid, you lived in your imagination, and you did science experiments all the time. For some reason as an adult, it’s just not the same. It’s hard to live that same way as an adult.

Now you could do what most adults do to have fun, and that’s to go drink alcohol or take drugs. I don’t believe in that though, and thankfully, my somewhat sheltered and Christian upbringing has made me view that as a bad thing. I do, however, want to learn how to have fun in wholesome ways. From what I can tell so far, that means full engagement of the mind, and it’s what most adults seek even though they’re doing it through alcohol and riddling their brain with dangerous drugs.

Play Spaces

Play spaces are what we find joyful in life. They’re the things we keep going back to because we enjoy them. For the sake of the future, I’m going to call these play spaces. They are places we go to play. For me, I used to experience immeasurable joy from video games, but in recent years, I’ve grown more distant from this previous channel of joy. Here are some of the play spaces I have recently taken a liking to and play spaces I want to build up:

• Reading 9 out of 10
• World Building 4 out 10
• Writing 6 out of 10
• History 9 out of 10
• Violin 2 out of 10
• Programming 5 out of 10

The advantage of a play space is how where one channel of joy works, you can add elements of that channel to the other play space to make it more fun. When you bring play to your work space, you improve the satisfaction you get from your work.

In reading from now on, I think I will create playful and imaginative essays on historic figures from history in the books I’ve read—right now I’m reading about Mexico. What counts most, however, is the imagination, but the facts will also be an important challenge in these writing. Either that or I will write on imagined characters who lived through these time periods. I think that’d be a blast to recreate these historic moments in history and experience them from the eyes of those who were there. For violin, I may start to write my own music to bring back the joy I once felt when I played this mysterious instrument.

Playfulness, however you can find it, is not to deny the joys you experience from life, but to dive even deeper into those joys. That’s what you should get out of the experience. In short, everything’s a toy. I want to get joy from absolutely everything I do because I believe that is the meaning of life. The people that I’ve really admired the most (the Nicaraguans seem to have this beautiful playful spirit that embodies happiness and playfulness) were always really happy people. That’s what I want to become myself.

 

Shields Up—Squiggly Rides, Sword to the Sun: The Scam That Made Me Stronger

Any time a problem’s foot blows the door off the hinges and enters my life forcefully without asking, I have learned to explode with a banzai-like hurricane equal or greater to the problem which I face. Let the sword go right through the skull of the problem and let him die screaming on sharpened metal. Any time I face a problem, I have a history of donning cavalry armor of hard-fought character and riding to battle in a heroic all-out, fateful charge against an evil horde of slaughtering orcs who want nothing more than to pull me off my horse and tear me limb from limb.

The most recent problem to invade upon my mental peace was when I bought a useless $750 Dell laptop. What happened? Unfortunately, it worked for four days, and after that, told me to jump off a tall, tall bridge into a pond infested with man-eating gators. Productivity ground to a standstill because I had to take this piece of garbage in for repair 30 miles away to make good on a useless warranty…$750…seemingly wasted….

Life Asks Me, “You Mad, Bro?” I respond, “Nah…”

I’m not mad because I’m empowered! The stoic life hands the sword to me, and life’s problems hope I’ll turn that sword inwards and let it rip my heart out like a weakling coward, but I can direct that blade outwards and let it rip out the heart of my enemies one by one.

I’m going to swan dive off that tall, tall bridge into that man-eating gator pond, and I’m going to step on the head of every one of them man-eating gators, not once, but twice! Just to show I can, and I’m not afraid of their little baby gator teeth. Because whether I lose $750 or not from a lying, cheating, no-good, scamming laptop company, I’m going to use this as an unforgettable lesson in how to exercise good judgment that was clearly lacking on my part, and I’m going to use it to build my character up like no other.

I will use this loss like a lit match in a room full of black gunpowder to blow the roof off my potential. I was earning about $40 a day comfortably, but now, I got every reason in the world to earn back every dollar I lost on that garbage laptop, and just to spit in the face of this problem—I’m going to come out a better man—I’m going to earn back four times what I paid for this valuable life lesson, pay off my credit card debts and put the rest in my floundering bank account. Instead of $40 a day, I declare that I shall earn $120+ every single day. From the moment my feet hit the carpet, I’m going to smile, sing a little tune, open my laptop into the sunshine and say, “What you got for me to write today, Textbroker?”

And furthermore! I’m going to hit that coveted and seemingly impossible to get level five spot because I’m Squiggly and I’m a ferocious dog on every level! I’m biting, I’m throwing fists, I’m scratching, I’m using every weapon at my disposal.

In fact, I’m no longer Squiggly. Today, I’m graduating to MadDog Squiggly because what most people would see as a disheartening problem, I see as a stoic tool of diehard optimism and never-ending empowerment. Good night!

United States of America: Cruel Eyes behind the Pretty Mask

Before I flew to Nicaragua, I had always blindly believed, like many Americans, that on some level what the United States did was all for the greater good—that was your upbringing as you grew up to be patriotic to your country. I had read a book about Cambodia and how US backing of the Khmer Rouge had a caused the deaths of 1.5 million Cambodians in that corner of the globe, simply for the sake of US vengeance over what happened in Vietnam, but I never saw the real affects of it until I went to Nicaragua, another country that cried tears because of US influence. A book can only take you so far—for everything else, experience is the mother of all wisdom. My views changed when I went to Nicaragua and experienced firsthand the country’s hardships.

Revolution Festival ’16

I went to Revoluccion Festival in Managua, Nicaragua, and I saw the Nicaraguan President, Daniel Ortega, give a speech next to the Venezuelan President and the First Lady of Nicaragua. I had only been in Nicaragua for about two weeks at that point, and it lit my world. What really stood out, however, and still stands out to me today is the two drunks I met there, rather than the president, which is why I decided to write a post.

They were very conversational and spoke English well, but we got on the topic of what Revolution Festival was about, which was overcoming the US-backed Contras and the oppressive dictator Samoza. I remember him saying in our last words, “F*** the US President! He is an a*****!” but as bad that sounds, the dude never actually took it out on me (thank God), and was very friendly and likable otherwise(like most Nicaraguans), but admittedly, I felt a little offended and uncomfortable at the time.

Truck Ride back to My Friend’s House

It did not really hit me that these were real people who suffered because of US influence, and that man, in my opinion today, had a righteous anger over what had happened. He was not taking it out on me but on those who had destabilized his country and supported an oppressive government. Wouldn’t I feel the same if it were my country and someone had done the same? I told my friend Marta about the experience, and she told me about how her dad had been a child soldier during the revolution, and how he had almost died during the war. How Samoza had shot and killed 6,000 young people in Managua and unceremoniously threw them in Lake Nicaragua. He killed them because the youth were the people most likely to up rise against the regime, so to stay in power, he had them slaughtered like cattle.

And this is who the United States backed? I had seen it in the history books how the Nazis commanded blind allegiance through so-called patriotism when all they were doing was committing  sins against  humanity under the cloak of righteousness(i.e. the Jews are evil!), and here is the United States getting on their high horse calling the Germans terrible as they’re committing their own hushed sins behind closed doors and pretending to be the better country the whole time. Downplaying their evil deeds, which is the same thing the Nazis did. I’m not anti-American by any means, but I also don’t subscribe to blind allegiance and patriotism because that leaves the door open to tyranny and separation from the brotherhood of man. That it is okay to abuse one person because I don’t belong to that group.

Comparing the US to the Third Reich might not be a perfect comparison, but it goes to show every country has its skeletons. If you wanted to look at some of the darker things the US has done and downplayed, here’s a list of just the things I’m aware of that the US has done:

• Caused a genocide in Cambodia—1.5 million deaths from a population of 8 million
• Backed an oppressive government in Nicaragua
• Overthrew the stable government in Iraq
• Genocide of the American Indian—estimates of death up to 50 million people
• War on Vietnam (why again were we there?)

Where was the apology on any of these things, and why do they always seem to tell the story like it was just something that happened?

I Don’t Speak Your Language but I Call You Friend

I had an awesome friendship with my friend’s dad that transcended the limitations of the human language. I think, in part, that is why I stopped seeing the US as so perfect after I had seen how my friend’s dad suffered during this turmoil. It was amazing how we could not completely understand each other and still be super good friends. Never once did he speak a word of English, but we got along so well even though we couldn’t always understand each other. If there were one solid reason to learn Spanish, it would be so that I could speak Spanish with Marta and her family and fully understand and have a good conversation with such good people.

The warm hospitality, kindness and sense of humor of the Nicaraguan people always really impressed me and made me think why did we oppress these wonderful people? Traveling was an experience that has never left my heart. I’m not anti-American in my returning home, but I’m also not a supporter of some of the things they have done in the name of avaricious profits. I would never, however, speak down to anyone who served in the military, and I respect their service for this country.