The USA is the new Mexico

When I came back to USA last summer after a frantic trip to Canada trying to run away from Trump, I felt a sense of comfort seeing the I-Five sign as I crossed the border.  It was beat up, battered, missing paint, and standing a little crooked in the ground.

Flashback immediately to 1955, I'm a little girl on vacation going from L.A. to Mexico with my parents. We drive smoothly along the azure coast in a luxurious car past San Diego and then when we cross the border, everything changes, everything becomes shabbier, the signs have peeling paint and are leaning a little sideways in the ground. You lowered your standards as soon as you crossed the border. 

As I came from Canada into Washington last summer I knew it: The USA is the new Mexico.

And for some reason that realization made me relax.  It meant I could stop holding my stomach in when I walk, as I felt a need to do in Vancouver.  I could stop holding my hand over my mouth when I smile, because I'm now among my peers, all of us showing signs of decline and neglect. In Canada I felt inferior, because everyone there seemed so tended, well maintained, all with white straight teeth, not like us residents of USA today. 
*

My parents would tinkle the ice in their cocktails and laugh at the Mexicans for their “manana” attitude. "Everything takes so much longer in Mexico," my mom cackled and sipped her martini. "You ask when will my car be fixed, they say manana, and three weeks later they're still saying Manana Manana."  Laughter throughout the room and a refilling of glasses.

*
Last summer the town where I live started an ambitious project of replacing the sidewalks along the 3 miles or so from one end to the other, because now you have to pick your way through cracks and gouges in the concrete, and there are places where you're walking in dirt or walk out in the road to get to a bus stop or the post office. This town was already crappy BEFORE this Republican coup took over the USA draining whatever cash was left in our treasury into their pockets.

One of the reasons I did not move last spring was because the city made this promise of sidewalks, because I quit driving a few years ago.  
*
See, I quit driving because I'm unable not to hear the pleas of Mother Earth begging us to get the frigging cars off her surface, because they're killing her.

I walk a lot and take the bus and the lack of sidewalks in this town was having a bad impact on my life.  So hearing they would replace the sidewalks, I decided to stay here.

Now it will be three years before the sidewalks get to my part of town.

Because the USA is the new Mexico.  
*
In South Lake Tahoe last summer, we watched the construction guys who were building the sidewalks as they stood on the road and seemed to stare into space and worked what seemed like three hours for every three they were accomplishing nothing. They looked like construction workers along the road as we drove through Mexico in 1955. 

Tahoe residents last summer kept asking the city, when will the sidewalks be done. 
Finally we were told that what should be done in three months is actually going to take three years.  
Or maybe longer, 
Shrug, we'll know more manana.

Because the USA is the new Mexico.

*

My apartment building in South Lake Tahoe is having a plumbing crisis.  Several neighbors who've lived here longer than I have tell me that in order to avoid the issue, don’t put toilet paper down the toilet, keep a little bin next to the toilet-
like they do in Mexico.  

I learned this from the woman who was airing out her clothes and linens in the building courtyard to remove the bedbugs as her apartment a few doors away from mine is infested. I went inside and removed all the natural fabrics from my bed, hoping that would be enough to protect me. I already know to only buy foam mattresses, after bedbugs got into my cotton mattress when I lived in Chicago. 

*

Many people don’t realize, as Trump would say, that in Mexico, even today in 2017, you can't flush your toilet paper, you just can't, the plumbing just can't take it.

Now in South Lake Tahoe, you can't flush your toilet paper, you have to keep it in a tin next to the toilet and dispose of it a different way.
Just like in Mexico. 

*
So we might as well just relax and lower our standards and let our stomachs stick out and smile proudly with missing teeth, as this is going to be a bumpy ride from First World to Fourth World. And it's going to be dirty, with odors we have not smelled before. 
.
Yeah USA USA USA ain't it getting great?