Hey Dad,
It’s so easy to give in to despair. Reading your last letter back, it seems the Gilbert family was forever changed upon coming back from Nepal.
You said “Lynn was an extremely positive person in those days and her spirit was infectious.”
Even to the point where she made an impact on Mom Mom and Pop Pop!
I have to say that after knowing both of them, that seems impossible—to be so infectiously positive that she made an impact on those two damaged souls.
It shows the true power of positivity.
After all these years, you remember this family—even after the relationship didn’t end well.
I don’t know what happened in Nepal, but I’m going to assume they saw some jarring things. They probably experienced some of the worst of humanity, and it might’ve corrupted them.
A faint flickering light in the darkness of the universe was wiped out.
I’ve lived in the Philippines and Mexico since 2018, and I visited Vietnam, Thailand, and Indonesia as well. The sheer full-frontal nudity of the depravity of mankind has reached my eyes on a few occasions.
(Don’t worry, not real full-frontal nudity)
Dalia told me about a Mexican politician named Javier Duarte. He was the Governor of Veracruz, her home state, and apparently he robbed somewhere close to $3 billion of public funds over the course of his career.
Mexican media outlets called him the worst robber in the history of Mexico. The theft was so extensive that Veracruz became the poorest state in Mexico for the next two or three generations.
Luckily he’s in jail.
I remember Dalia telling me that story and I was absolutely dumbfounded.
These things simply don’t happen in the United States. I know we have our own corruption here and that public funds get misused all the time, but one person robbing billions to the point that it cripples an entire state for generations? Yeah, that doesn’t really happen here.
It’s so easy to despair.
I look at the people here and I see tiredness in their eyes. I see a good bit of hopelessness, too. How would I react if I lived here all my life and was only able to make 1/20th of what I make now per month? Taking crowded buses and trains for hours just to go to and from work?
Being surrounded by the filth and the stray dogs and the trash?
That takes a massive toll on your psyche, and it’s something I’ll never fully understand, because I never lived it.
In the case of the Gilbert family, maybe living and working for 5 years in a developing country left a scar on them. It’s a whole other world. Until you live in a developing country, you can’t really understand how great we have it in the United States.
When I left for the Philippines in 2018, I was pissed off with my country. I, like many people my age, bought into the idea that we were an awful country. Then I landed in Mindanao, Philippines and was greeted by dirt roads, dust, trash, stray dogs, shanties, and people selling fried grasshoppers on the side of the road.
Talk about a wake up call.
But imagine living there for your entire life.
Surrounded by all that.
The Philippines is another country wrecked by theft. Some estimates say that Ferdinand Marcos, their dictator, stole $5 billion to $10 billion over the course of his illustrious career.
Now his son is their President.
It’s so deeply ironic that all you can do is shake your head at it.
I mean, I already touched on the depravity of mankind in the letter that kicked off our discussion on trauma. I don’t want to keep harping on this.
People are bad. We get it.
All I can say is that if the Gilbert family indeed changed because of what they experienced in Nepal, I get that, too.
I really do.
I talked about courage in letter #6. The courage to love and put yourself out there.
I want to talk about a different kind of courage now.
Victor Frankl published Man’s Search For Meaning in 1946, which details his experiences in a Nazi concentration camp in World War 2. I’ve not read the book yet, but I’ve read the words of many who have, and they say it’s one of the best books ever written.
Here’s a quote from the book that says everything you need to know:
“Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.”
The courage required to tell the world to eff off and that you’ll choose to stay positive despite the B.S. is astronomical.
Seeing all of the depravity of the world and keeping HOPE anyway is so impossible that to actually do so is a miracle.
I can sit up here and write all this crap from my ivory tower, but I know that if life really tested me day in and day out to the point that many poor people in Mexico have to endure for their whole life, I’d probably fold.
I’m just being honest.
I don’t think I would have the courage to choose hope in that situation.
And it sounds to me that that’s precisely what happened to the Gilberts. It sounds like their view of the world was shattered after going to Nepal. It robbed them of their positivity and hope, and it seems they never recovered.
The last few years I’ve come to terms with the fact that I’m so unbelievably privileged that my perspectives as a writer might be, for lack of a better word, stupid. The “problems” I talk about aren’t real problems.
They’re nothing compared to what many other people go through.
I’ve thought about why people should even listen to me in the first place.
I say this a lot, but I have way more respect for the person working 12 hour days here in Mexico sorting trash than pretty much anybody. They’re working for a handful of pesos every day. And they keep doing it.
Even you, Dad. You tell me that sometimes you have to work in raw sewage at the hospital. I got a mountain of respect for that.
I don’t want to keep being so negative in these letters. We’re talking about heavy subject matter, so it makes sense in a certain respect.
What I want to do is highlight the miracle of choice, and choosing to stay positive despite all of the bad.
The Philippines is a perfect country to talk about here. Many people call Filipinos the happiest people on earth, despite their tragic history.
Why?
Because they’re always smiling. They have a ridiculous sense of humor. They really like to laugh at pretty much everything. After speaking with many of them about this, the general sense I get is that they react this way because what else can they do besides laugh?
The powerlessness gives way to radical acceptance. If you can’t do anything to change the BS, you might as well accept it and embrace it. The strength required to do this is immense.
It is nothing short of a miracle.
And to see an entire country embrace this mentality is like watching a beam of light being shot up into a dark night sky. On the surface it looks inspiring, but I’d like to think theres’s an undercurrent of middle-fingery going on, too, that shouts something like “you can’t hurt me” to the universe.
When I was there I don’t think I appreciated this enough.
They are a truly incredible people.
And I see that here, too, in Mexico. The people are tired, but they’re fighting every day regardless. It is a country that is trying to improve, and I believe it is improving thanks to the hard work of millions of Mexicans who believe in good.
You liked that quote from the Dark Knight that I shared in a previous letter about madness being like gravity, and that all it takes is a little push.
The ending of that film is brilliant. Two ferry boats have bombs strapped to their hulls. One ferry is full of “dangerous” prisoners, and the other is full of innocent people. The Joker gives a detonator device to each ship, telling them that if they use the detonator, they’ll blow up the other ship before it can blow them up.
To up the ante, the Joker says each ship will blow in 30 minutes if neither detonator is used.
What ends up happening is that neither ship uses the detonator.
Humanity wins.
It’s then that Batman says this:
"This city just showed you that it's full of people ready to believe in good."
There’s a lot of awful people in this world. Power corrupts and makes us do unspeakable things. There are so many people who are victims of trauma and some turn around and initiate violence of their own, continuing the cycle.
But there is also an immense amount of people out there who are good. Who choose to flip the middle finger right back to the universe and live with a smile on their face despite the madness.
I’m just a privileged kid, so maybe my ignorance deceives me, but I choose to walk across the room and join those who are shining their light into the darkness of the universe.
I choose to believe in good.
Thanks Dad, for listening.
Thank you for the reminder of how blessed we are, despite all the problems we have. We must always keep believing, and keep lifting others up along the way!
I would highly recommend that you read Frankl's book. If you are up to it, I would also recommend Primo Levi, not his book on Auschwitz (which is good), but "The Periodic Table. Yes, it is a book on chemistry (Levi was a working chemist besides being a great writer), but so much more.