The Native Iowan

On January 11, 1981, I arrived for my first time in Solomon Islands.

Days before, at the tender age of 23yrs and 4months, I had “left” the USofA. Had become an “expatriated American”.

As a Peace Corps Volunteer I was an employee of the US Government, working directly for the Ministry of Education, S.I. I made $90.00-solomon-dollars-a-month plus housing. I taught manual arts at 2 very rural boarding schools. For a year at Siota, then at Choiseul Bay. I was a PCV for 5 full years.

As a long-haired liberal arts student, with the best do-Gooder intentions, I fit rather well into the Ex-Pat way of living. I got along with the islanders, and perhaps was entertaining to the other, more well-healed, less raggedy ExPats. I can only say that I was well treated by all I met.

An expatriate, or ex-pat, is an individual living and/or working in a country other than his or her country of citizenship, often temporarily and for work reasons. An expatriate can also be an individual who has relinquished citizenship in their home country to become a citizen of another.

One thing that I found confusing was this: The further away from living in America I got, the more patriotic I became. And the more intelligent I became about the USofA. More learned, perhaps… It was a sink or swim scenario…

I was young and learned quickly that Aussies and Britts, and others, loved to “take the piss” out of Yanks. I was not in Yank-Land. Guam and the North West Pacific is indeed Yank-Land. The Marianas, Kosarae. Not the Solomons. I was a target. All Yanks were targets. There were not vey many Yanks in residence.

And it could get a bit messy. Especially when meeting elder Ex-Pats with polished debating skills.

It was common to be called upon to defend the US “way of doing things”. It’d start with “…you Yanks…”, or “…your President…”.

These were the early days of Reagan. He was inaugurated shortly after I left the US. I found defending “Raygun”, The President, very difficult. But I could and did defend America. Poorly at first. And after a few communal embarrassments, not knowing what I was defending, I researched and studied the US Constitutional situation, v the Common Wealth/ Parliamentarian situation. I armed my self with knowledge and facts.

At that time I had, supposed, deep rooted ideals and beliefs. I was young… My ideals and arguments were poorly formed and inadequately articulated, I admit. Mostly I had inherited said ideals from my peers or consciously rejected those of my parents. Few had I seriously thought through.

I am a child of the 60s. A teen of the 70s. I protested and door knocked at a young age. Considered myself an activist. Rallied against nuclear energy without knowing what it was. Thought much of little, and little about much. I was a product of the system of the time, wore an old army shirt, buttons and badges and slogans and all. I considered myself “cool”.

I didn’t know my elbow from my asshole. I was uneducated and ignorant of the worldly-way of things.

I considered myself very wise and astute.

I got my butt kicked in verbal debates. For years, maybe a full decade.

For years I did not have the tools to “fence”, to compete with the more astute and experienced debaters.

So I did my home work. I always had a mini-reference library. In the days before internet and instant info, I’d collected a number of tomes. From Plutarch’s Lives, to a number of biographies, to those old two and three volume encyclopedias, some decades old. As the years went by I bought a set of Encyclopedia Britannica. I read and started to learn a lot about a lot. Read the Greatest Works of Western Man.

Most people know a little about a little. Few folks know a lot about a lot. Most know enough to make them dangerous.

But facts beat everything.

Or, at least, they used to…

I’m not going to go far here but I will raise the spectre of a young, I believe to be abused child, Greta Thunburg…

https://www.hitc.com/en-gb/2020/11/13/greta-thunberg-net-worth-climate-change-activist-i-am-greta/

Here we have a child who for some ungodly reason is paraded around, listened to, because she espouses utter bullshit with a huge amount of emotion.

Facts are meaningless, I guess, if a youngster is the bearer of politically correct bullshit.

All and many applaud and smile and support. Even though the “facts” according to Greta, being sung and praised, are unsustainable, flawed at best, hopelessly confused and often just plain wrong. She even got to make a race for the No-Ball Prize. With a gallery of buffoons and PC policemen clearing the road.

She didn’t win.

Yep, and I shall get kicked for saying this…

In our modern world the facts matter less than the modern accepted TRUTH.

TRUTH before facts. I think Saint Biden said that.

It’s happening as we speak. After numerous occasions, months of violence driven by the LEFT, federal buildings invaded, innocents killed, months of BLM BS, ANTIFA led disobedience and destruction… which was whitewashed, disregarded, misreported, ignored, said to be either a MYTH, or a SUMMER OF LOVE. Now, as the RIGHT acts-out, its sedition.

Treasonous.

Do not get me wrong. I hold no allegiance to any political party or individual. I think all and everything political is corrupt. Period. Plain and simple.

Violence is wrong. Almost never justified. Almost never.

So I watch now, as things like civil rights mean less and less. Lock downs and house arrest is a common occurrence. Been so now for about 8 months. Communities of millions, under house arrest, locked down, under law, enforced by – force. World wide.

And its getting worse!

I love the modern pussified-world ideal that everyone should have all their needs satisfied by the central Government. “I’m too weak and feeble to care for myself. So take care of me, please. But I want a nice bed, and a cool set of wheels, and daily rations of booze and tobacco and my drug(s) of preference, and, oh yeah, food, and medical care and education for my kids… here, you take the kids and raise them, you’ll do a better job. I’m busy.”

Its is a farce in more ways than one! There are too many accepted farces to talk about…

In this calendar year, 2021, noting I’ll publish this by the 11th – there have been well over 1 million abortions world wide.

https://www.worldometers.info/abortions/

According to WHO, every year in the world there are an estimated 40-50 million abortions. This corresponds to approximately 125,000 abortions per day. In the USA, where nearly half of pregnancies are unintended and four in 10 of these are terminated by abortion [1] , there are over 3,000 abortions per day. Twenty-two percent of all pregnancies in the USA (excluding miscarriages) end in abortion. [2]

Am I the only one that see this as a huge stain on our communal soul? I get well and truly roasted each time I raise this issue. I’m not suppose to have a say herein. I’m not a woman! But we cry because of the sins of our ancestors whist murdering our future. I simply do not get it.

Moving on…

I love it when the BS RACE CARD is pulled out and used, time and time again. The modern day ultimate putdown… You are Racist… I’ve been called it a lot. Yea, go figure…

Is RACE a major problem? I’m not so sure. My world is not racist. I hope your world is not. But if you take it upon yourself to seek out, find, name, ingest racism, it’s your call. Life is a mirror. Be a racist and you’ll sure as shit see racism. I don’t have that problem. I am most defiantly NOT Racist. I will get shouted down… For many, too many, racism is a big, big deal.

But we can fix it all… fix it with $$$$$… It can pay to be a VICTIM.

Reparations… The exchange of something of value for sins of the past. Almost Catholic in its concept…. The idea is of a systemic, societal, race driven evil that we all must atone for.

How far do we go back? Who gets compensated, and for what?

My grandmother’s people were dispossessed by the Ottoman Empire. They were Greeks in Turkey. They were sent “home”, maybe “ran for their lives” after living in the same place in Turkey for generations. They got off easy. They missed the genocide.

The Greek–Turkish population exchange came out of the Turkish military’s reaction against Christian minorities in the late days of the Ottoman Empire and its subsequent massacres of them: Adana massacre of 1909, Armenian Genocide of 1914–1923, and Greek genocide 1914–1922.

The Armenians got genocide. My Greek forbearers got to live but lost everything. Side note here… My maternal Grandfather and his brothers fought in the Greek-Turkey wars…

The Greco-Turkish War of 1919–1922 was fought between Greece and the Turkish National Movement during the partitioning of the Ottoman Empire in the aftermath of World War I, between May 1919 and October 1922.

Reparation… to repair something… The idea is simple, the Government of the day uses tax payer money to alleviate a moral wrong, a historic ill, a blot on our communal soul.

Pay the money and its all well. All ills gone. Positive and virtuous futures guaranteed for all…

????

In one word: FUCKOFF!

Why are we being so fucking stupid?

Moving on…

I love the corny concept of WHITE PRIVILEGE.

Just because I am “white” I have been privileged. And I should be ashamed. I owe someone something somewhere.

Sure makes sense to me…

Again, in one word: FUCKOFF.

Explain to my emmigrant ancestors how privileged they were. Explain to the Irish that their centuries of subjugation by the English was privileged. Explain to the Jews and Roms and many other races that suffered under the hands of Hitler of their privilege.

Nope. FuckOff!

And we, adults, parents, grandparents, teachers, coaches and caregivers encourage our off spring to be virtuous and ignorant and compliant. To parrot the untruths of the masses, the PC masses. Just like poor little Greta Thunberg… she makes sense by not making sense. By being a symbol for that which is accepted as TRUTH, but remains false.

So much of our world revolves around untruths…

The beginning of slavery was something like 1669, and the first slaves were africans, enslaved by whites and taken to the Americas. All whites in America thus owe all blacks in America some form of reparation… ???… !!!

Should we talk about GLOBAL WARMING?

The sky is falling, the sky is falling.

Quick, we only have 91 months before the world ends… we must do something!

QUICK!!!!

Again, fuck the fuck off!

Seriously. In the known history of mankind we are currently better off, better fed, better housed, world wide, without exception things are better, easier, freer, safer, warmer, cooler, more prosperous, more long lived, more productive, more travelled, more educated… than in known history.

Sure, not everything is rosy. Starvation, plague, civil unrest, terribly corrupt leaderships are still a reality. But go back 100years. Where were we then? Are things now perfect, idyllic, better… Maybe not perfect but things today are sure as shit better than 100 years ago.

The Spanish flu, also known as the 1918 flu pandemic, was an unusually deadly influenza pandemic caused by the H1N1 influenza A virus. Lasting from February 1918 to April 1920, it infected 500 million people – about a third of the world’s population at the time – in four successive waves. The death toll is typically estimated to have been somewhere between 20 million and 50 million, although estimates range from a conservative 17 million to a possible high of 100 million, making it one of the deadliest pandemics in human history.^[3][4][5]

World War I (or the First World War, often abbreviated as WWI or WW1) was a global war originating in Europe that lasted from 28 July 1914 to 11 November 1918. Contemporaneously known as the Great War or “the war to end all wars“,^[7] it led to the mobilisation of more than 70 million military personnel, including 60 million Europeans, making it one of the largest wars in history.^[8][9] It is also one of the deadliest conflicts in history,^[10] with an estimated 9 million combatant deaths and 13 million civilian deaths as a direct result of the war,^[11]while resulting genocides and the related 1918 Spanish flu pandemic caused another 17–100 million deaths worldwide,^[12][13] including an estimated 2.64 million Spanish flu deaths in Europe and as many as 675,000 Spanish flu deaths in the United States.^[14]

All just a short century ago. And things, though getting better in 1921, had just gone through a terrible stretch.

Where am I… I do ramble about sometimes…

No I do not think racism systemic. No I do not think that spending billions of tax payer money fighting Global Warming is sensible. No I do not believe I am privileged by my birth. Nor do I believe others are cursed by their birth.

Of course there is, has always been, an Elite Class, one that looks down on the “average man”.

Is this class my enemy? Not sure they are my friend, but not too sure they are my enemy either. I don’t like the idea of having unknown enemies. Invisible entities that I fear and blame for all that is wrong in my world.

So, for 40 solid years I have been an expatriated American. And this shall not change. My luck has held out. Ive been absolutely and insanely lucky in my life. I grew up in a big house in rural Iowa, surrounded by a very large and loving family. I got to find the mythical Solomon’s Islands while still young and adventurous. My 30 years in the Solomons was one huge and enjoyable adventure including building my own family, learning the ways of the bush and the ocean, meeting and befriending many, many interesting folks along the way.

Ive ended up here in The Land Of Aus. A great place to be when old. Just as the Solomons was a great place to be when young.

I shall never call the USofA home again. I may never get back, noting the ways of the world and the state of travel and the confusion of crossing borders.

And thats OK.

One thing I have decided to be very conscience about… Be Happy Where You Are.

Smiles.

Big Smiles… Here’s to forty more years of ex-pat life.