In the winter of 2001, my wife and I journeyed to Beijing to stand on The Great Wall; a barrier long ago conquered, broken into segments by the erosion of time and neglect. We wandered in awe through majestic ancient courtyards of a former royal extravagance, sipping tea at the Summer Palace and Forbidden City; excessive testaments to reasons why servitude revolts exponentially violent to such displays of indifference. We walked the length of Tiananmen Square several times; another tourist attraction promoting bronzed sculptured heroes of The State that inconspicuously doubles as a place where authority and brute force once melded like the perfect fit it is.

We had our expectations, our preconceived notions tweaked by our own culturally biased talking heads and the usual promoted fear and loathing of ill-informed idealist as to why ‘those’ people are the way they are, why we are better, and how careful we needed to be. It wasn’t until conversation took place outside the professional drivel of others’ most likely paid perceptions, that we found glimpses of truth and via a medium neither printed nor broadcasted. This truth was transmitted by the presentation of food; food harvested, procured, and prepared with the delight of a sharing host, and eaten with the delight of gratitude of a guest. Sustenance, the ultimate ancient pursuit to negotiate for, to war over, to leverage, and now it is something else; oil, market share, maybe the ego of influence. This enlightenment was our spontaneous moment of collective consciousness. This was our awareness. This was our stone soup.

As we ate, we found a lust for conversational English at each pause, our suspicions heightened as our personal space was constantly bombarded. That was our problem. We found a transformation of minimal survivalist mercantilism towards a burgeoning middleclass and streets full of the art of the dicker where we bartered as ugly Americans do, looking for that trophy buy and bragging rights to our prowess for getting something for nothing. That was our arrogance. We found a six-foot genetically suspect Mongolian guard complete with an automatic weapon standing stoically emotionless in a packed MacDonald’s. We found jazz. We found a young idealist who thought North Korea is the epitome of a pure socialist state. We blinked. He argued that Tiananmen was nothing but a protest against bureaucratic corruption and now all is well. We smiled. We found a dancing midget in eighteenth century garb promoting geisha-looking escorts in front of a suspect looking bath house. We found Starbucks.

We discovered an old woman living in a soon to be dismantled ghetto called a Houton, a place where capitalistic momentums were needing space for concrete and steel expansion and we asked her questions, knowing she had survived the communist and cultural revolutions, periods of mass starvation, the social cleansings and re-education. She replied that the reason her skin was so smooth at the age of seventy-three was because she only washed her face with cold water. She said she liked Americans, but feared our country because we have no one but our nuclear powerful selves to hold us accountable.

Our stay was all too short. We left Beijing with understanding, many of the dots connected, and yet quite fearful of environmental, economic, and thus politically charged reactions to a massive populace awakening with explosive consumption. Governments lie and manipulate. Institutions sell an agenda whether product or ideal twisting verbiage and history, elevating themselves at others’ expense. We folk, our global brothers and sisters, can choose to be shepherds or sheep at any given emotionally vulnerable moment. We can choose to be collectively manipulated by fear and loathing or irrational exuberance. Or we can transcend all of this by something as simple as the creative expression of sharing versus summits of positioning. We can break bread and teach our leaders to do the same. We just need to get out more often.

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Peace.