Thoughts from a Train
Reflections on the American "Cultural Conversation" from a train to Jakarta
I’m on a train working its way from Yogyakarta to Jakarta in Indonesia. It cuts through small towns and rice paddies, and from my window I see laundry drying on the line and tanks collecting rainwater on rooftops, mosques and schools and people in conical hats working the fields. I’m in a leather seat, drinking tea, passing through.
I’m trying to reconcile what I see from my window with American cultural conversations. Here, in the villages, people my age look twenty years older and wear a life of back-breaking labor on their faces. Back home, somebody is insisting J.K. Rowling’s words are violence and that Twitter makes them feel unsafe; that books about queer families have no place in school libraries, or that the only solution to gun violence is for good guys to arm themselves.
Who’s a good guy? I don’t know. To the best of my observation, it’s the guy in the rice paddy who’s swinging the the plough and will live and die doing it to provide for the basic needs of his family.
A small-town station. Ruins and remnants of European colonization, decaying since 1945. The rain puddles on uneven concrete and reflects the blue-gray stucco.
America purports to be a land of equality. It does a mediocre job of it, which conservatives refute, but better than most places in the world, which liberals deny. In America, some people have access and privilege and generational wealth; others do not because America was never built to give them access or privilege or generational wealth. And yet, when I’m in a developing nation, I have a grinding notion that most Americans don’t understand equality at all—that if our nation had to share its wealth or stature or privilege with the people in the fields or villages of places like Indonesia, we’d balk as a people united.
“I have it hard enough without having to share my money. My time. My access. My privilege. My platform,” they’d say.
“Acknowledge your privilege, America,” I might reply, “what are you doing to make things better for them?”
You’d fast see the platitudes and the lip service and the promises to do better, but the quiet desire to keep things as they are. Privilege ensures a level of comfort and ease. Like an airport lounge, if everybody has access, it’s no different from the shitty waiting room where some guy is picking his toes and screaming kids race around an exhausted mom with a neck pillow.
Meanwhile, where are the people at the top? The crazy rich Asians who really do have the wealth and privilege? They’re not on my train car. Like the wealthy in America, they live out of sight, happy that members of the educated middle class “have difficult conversations” and leave them alone to fly on private jets and buy expensive shoes and art—happy they’re the envy of the poor and middle class and have funny movies made about them; happy that the torches and pitchforks remain stored for another day.
We scream at and blame and fight with people who listen. Nobody can access the rich to make them listen, so we scream at each other. When there's too much daylight between the two political camps, we scream at the members of our own tribe.
In liberal America, educated minorities ask educated white people to examine their privilege and stop centering themselves and step back and share access. Educated white liberals twist and navel-gaze, bow and scrape and try to solve the riddle of looking like allies while getting everything they want.
Meanwhile, Elon Musk. Meanwhile, Jeff Bezos. Meanwhile, Donald Trump. Meanwhile, companies run by educated millennials police preferred pronouns to pacify their activist workforce. But higher wages? Not a chance. Pronouns are free.
Here, there are no preferred pronouns and nobody spends time on what J.K. Rowling or Joyce Carol Oates says on Twitter. They don't spend hours debating who gets to write a story about whom and with what level of cultural competence. I can afford to buy my way out of the discomforts. I like it here. I want to stay.
Am I the bad guy? The good guy? The privileged? The marginalized? What if I don’t “use my voice” and “speak out” and simply do as much as I can with the resources I have like the farmer in the field, sometimes in the service of others, sometimes in the service of me and my family? What then?
We continue toward Jakarta. Here, the flatland disappears and the rice paddies become stepped; water runs off the crooked mountains in the distance.
Do the creeks flood? Does the land slide out from under the people here? Do they lose life and property? And if so, does anybody notice?