What you see is what you get...

At least that is my conceit. I think of myself as sort of a blunt, not very subtle woman. If I don't like something, I say so. Some of you may recollect my relationship with my backpack when I was walking the Camino. I hated it and rarely missed an opportunity to say so. If I really like a person, I am apt to say, "I like you so much! You are wonderful."

But life is teaching me that things aren't always as they appear. 41 years ago for some very odd reasons that I won't go into, we ended up living in Battleground, Indiana,  USA. We were big old post hippie hippies. We rented with a friend. The straight laced yokels in the town thought we had something 'strange' going on because we had two men, one woman, and children. It was hard to find a rental because of our 'bizarre' arrangement. When we did finally rent the most prominent house in town at the top of the fancy street, I heard whispers.

The local redneck, right wing, born again people probably accepted us more than we did them. The biggest festival in Battleground was celebrating the Indian Massacre that happened there. I thought it was all pretty sick. But as these God fearing, jello making, Bible thumping church folks started accepting these grazed hippies, my husband started getting invited to basement booze and poker games where the crowning feature was showing and trading pornographic movies.

I was shocked. They probably would have shot me if I pulled out a joint, but guns, and prostitutes, and porn and Big Bibles were all fine. The KKK was still happy there then. The thing is that going to Southeast Asia and then to Nicaragua brings this all back...and more. Everywhere I have traveled people first try to figure out whether I have a connection with the CIA. Poor people in other countries know much more about the CIA than almost any US citizen unless that citizen has worked for the military or the 'secret agencies" or been a mercenary.

The stuff going on in Okinawa today with the residents trying to get the US military bases out of their Island brings this to light. We killed about 200,000 civilians in order to pacify Okinawa and we have had military bases there since WW11. The people who survived seem to be tired of the violence, rapes, murders, drugs, prostitution that we have imported for all this time. How can this be?

Daily in Nica, we hear whispers of troubles all the time. The whispers I hear are not about Nica problems but expat stuff. Tomorrow I'll tell you some of the stories that have me  befuddled. Right now I have to put my instinct to fairly heavy use to keep my feet on the ground. My natural instinct is to trust that people are who they say they are. What I am learning is take that with a grain of salt.