#163 conformity in over-consumed society

I left Ecuador and my scheduled flight was to New York, but I had connection in Miami first. They have these new machines similar to an ATM machine where every traveler entering the US will go enter his/her own information. The machine takes the picture of the visitor to the US along with his picture and scans the information on the traveler’s passport, and then gives out a receipt to confirm the transaction. It’s a very impressive technology, no human interaction or any officer who will ask any question, it’s just you and the machine. My first impression was this is amazing, everything here in the US is clean with the best technology in the world, comparing to some of the places I’ve been to in Latin America, you would think this is totally a different planet. I had only one backpack but I keep my little laptop and my documents in a little bag that can be very easily inserted inside the backpack, but I thought when I decided to check-in the backpack and take the little bag as a carry-on with me on the airplane. This way I would have more leg space. There was a long line waiting for the custom, but I was lucky or that what I thought 🙂 They took me off the long line to go through VIP, but it wasn’t VIP, it was for further screening, they only pulled 2 guys from the whole line and it was only two brown guys, what a coincidence 😉

When I arrived in New York City, I started to wait for my backpack, after everyone on that flight took their bags, mine didn’t come out. I went to the bag claim office and asked them to check where my bag was, they found out that the bag was scanned in Miami but wasn’t shipped out it was still in Miami. They told me it will arrive either on the next flight or the next day, I told them that I have a bus trip back to Canada that same night, and they told me they will ship it to Canada.
I wanted to leave the airport but I found it was -4 degrees Celsius and I am only wearing a short and my hoodie. It wasn’t very cold if I had some long clothes but cold enough especially when I went to New York City and started to walk around to find a new pair of jeans and a long sleeve shirt. I wore the new clothes at the store and went to the bus terminal to wait for my trip. While walking back I was seeing how people seemed to be in a hurry, impatient, and almost everyone is talking on the phone, and some seemed to be very angry while talking on the phones. Two in particular made me realize how sad this society is, one girl who was using heavy language to show her hate about a person she was describing on the phone. The other was a guy who was very upset with his girlfriend, he was sometimes speaking an accented French and sometimes in English, I noticed other people were also looking at him, because he was screaming so loud. And if someone look at you that way in New York City, you will know that this was really unusual even in New York standards of weirdness 🙂

I later took the bus to head back to Canada, but was reflecting on the day, how people here have everything and they seem not to be happy. I also thought about how many bus trips I took in Latin America, may be more than 20 trips and although they don’t have the latest technology and most of these countries are not safe I never lost my bag. Obviously it wasn’t the lack of technology that delayed my bag, but the humans who forgot to

When I arrived in downtown Toronto, the first thing I notice right next to the bus station was a long line. It was people waiting to buy cheesecake from a new restaurant that makes Japanese cheesecake. Every day I look or pass by that restaurant I see a long line of customers waiting to get their hands on these special cheesecake. No matter what the temperature was like, every day was the same. The line look like when you sometimes see on TV the United Nation trying to distribute some food assistance to some poor or war-torn country, when you see it on TV you feel sorry for people how they lost their dignity to stand in line to wait for food to eat. Then you see the same picture people waiting for an hour or two in very cold temperature waiting to buy some cheesecake and you feel sorry for them, you feel how much over consumption has taking over people life to make them look and feel weak as those who have nothing. It’s a crazy world, we’re over consumed by over consumption, and it’s taking over our lives. May be we need to reflect on the implications of our actions, and let go that fear of being left out.