From Puerto Vallarta to the Next War
By: Norman J. Olson
Monday, March 2, 2020, Mary and I walked one block down McKnight Road to where the 74 bus runs. We caught the bus around 8 am and made it to the airport to catch the direct flight from MSP to Puerto Vallarta… a good friend was getting married there on Friday, March 7, and we wanted to spend a few days enjoying the warm Mexican sun… we stayed at a small hotel near downtown that wound up being a lot of fun… it had lovely clean and well maintained rooms and a nice bathroom… the reviews on line said the beds were comfortable and breakfast was included, so in the morning before we left for the airport, we booked the hotel…
Puerto Vallarta is in the same time zone as MSP, even though it is on the Pacific coast of Mexico and flying in over the green and lush looking Sierra Madre mountains, the big jet swoops down over the coastal plane, over scattered squares of fields and lands at the smallish Puerto Vallarta airport… leaving the airport is a mad crush of people, nervous tourists, intense time share sales people, taxi touts, bus touts, and assorted waiting people… turning to the left from the airport building, it is just a five minute walk to the bus stop… for ten pesos (about $.50), the bus goes the short 4 or 5 miles, past the cruise port, past the fancy shopping mall, past Walmart and Sam’s club to the area where the fancy resort hotels start… and after a half hour or so of bumpy cobblestones, we got off the bus two blocks from our hotel… the hotel had a tiled lobby with a small reception desk… we got to our room with the help of an ancient bell person and found it very nice if a bit small, just as the reviews had said…
we strolled around the area a bit and looked at the shops on our way a couple blocks to Pepe’s Tacos which was said to have excellent tacos al pastor… we found Pepe’s to be a small unpretentious local eatery with a huge al pastor roll on a rotisserie in front of a fire and so, we got the tacos al pastor which were delicious along with a plate of onions grilled in a salty sauce (soy sauce??)… the young men serving were friendly and full of good humor and it was a super fun meal… we went back twice during our visit… as we have gotten older, travel sort of wears us out, so we were ready to sleep after our amazing dinner… the next day, we did some shopping and walked to the fancy hotel that we were moving to on Thursday, just to see what it was like… nobody seemed to care, so we spent the afternoon sitting in their beach chairs looking at the ocean…
in the downtown area, restaurants were everywhere and every one we tried was very good… Mexican food is one of the world’s great cuisine and even in modest restaurants, the Mexican people seem to enjoy making and sharing their specialized spicy and delicious dishes… one night, I had a lovely red snapper fresh caught and grilled over a wood fire with rice, vegetables and amazing fiery salsa… and we spent one evening on the Malecon which is a waterfront embarcadero that faces the sea and runs for about a mile across the front of the downtown area… locals and tourists mingle to watch the sunset and patronize the many bars and restaurants that look out over the beach…
on Thursday, we moved to a much larger and fancier resort hotel and our two daughters joined us… from the eighth floor room, we had a gorgeous view of the entire Bahia de Banderas which is a large semicircular bay bounded by blue green mountains with Puerto Vallarta in the middle… the fancy resort hotel was a large beige tile, open air lobby leading out to brick paths through the landscaped grounds of rich tropical plants and palm trees to an enormous sprawling series of swimming pools surrounded by very nice restaurants and bars and ending with a couple dozen large thatched umbrellas in a roped off area for residents (like me LOL) to lazy to do anything else, to sit in the shade, watch the surf roll in and read, or in my case work on drawings… I have been told that all of the beaches in Mexico are open to the public so that the hotels cannot have their roped off, private grounds extend closer that about 67 feet from the high water mark… so, as you sit there in the shade, there is a constant parade of people with all kinds of trinkets and souvenirs to sell… but they are not allowed on the hotel territory, so they walk along outside the ropes… many of them will have cases full of fake silver jewelry and you will see hawkers holding up all kinds of table cloths, blankets, sarongs and sombreros…
on Friday, we walked to the even fancier hotel where the wedding was… we had arranged a day pass so we could attend the wedding and hang out with our friends who were there… the wedding was beautiful, on a paved courtyard next to one of the swimming pools and looking over the beach… the bride was lovely in a creamy dress and the groom seemed calm in a blue guayabera shirt… we then had a nice dinner at the buffet topped off with tres leches wedding cake… the next day we also spent at that resort visiting with our friends although I actually slipped away to a shady spot on the beach to finish my drawings…
Sunday, we spent back at the resort where we were staying with a meal at another amazing restaurant just a few short blocks from the resort… on Monday, we flew back home…
this is a week where all the news in the US is about the spread of the Coronavirus… we did not see any sign of it during this trip… usually, I avoid political comments altogether… but, this pandemic seems to have such a large political dimension, that it requires comment… also, I worry about all of the workers in the US and around the world who are losing their incomes due to the spread of this disease and the lack of tourism which is the main income for people in many parts of the world…
whatever the outcome of this particular pandemic, it seems to me idiotic that it caught the United States so completely off guard that as a I write this, all the news is about how we are scrambling to get together materials and resources which we may need if the epidemic gets seriously worse in the United States… it seems to me that our governmental priorities are pretty much wrong and that a few simple changes would make this a much better place to live and vastly improve our ability to deal with threats to our health and well being… they say that you get the kind of government you want and deserve and neither party in the USA seems to me to be headed in the right direction…
if it is true that our public money is limited, as most politicians claim it is and must be, then the roll of our elected officials is mostly to determine what that limit is and then allocate the public money available to our prioritized needs… the United States’ military budget is in the neighborhood of eight hundred billion US Dollars per year… people seem to have no problem with spending this vast amount of money to see that we have an enormous military force available if we should need it… even though, generally, we do not need to use much of it and what we do use of it is often wasted on controversial and not very productive campaigns… forty million dollars of that military budget is now allocated to a space force, on the vague possibility that we are somehow militarily threatened from space…
I could do a long and detailed analysis to show that three fourths of this budget is totally unnecessary in today’s world and seems to exist for no other reason than to give military contractors big fat contracts… indeed, we spend more on military than most of the rest of the world put together…
presumably all of this military readiness is to protect us if a war should come… and we are willing to pay for it even if there is not a big war going on and hasn’t been one in seventy years because we somehow believe that this bloated military prevents war (I would argue that military spending leads to, if not big wars, at least endless small wars)…
anyway, I would suggest that most of this money wasted on the military be diverted to spending on domestic projects to make Americans happier and healthier… including a vastly upscaled medical establishment to provide extra capacity so that when we are again threatened by medical catastrophe, we will be able to mobilize a vast army of care givers to fight against disease and the privations disease causes around the world… we can do better and we should do better…
amidst the horror of a World War I battlefield, a poet named Wilfred Owen wrote a poem about the soldier’s acquaintance with death and finished on a hopeful note that I think we should take to heart…
Oh, Death was never enemy of ours!
We laughed at him, we leagued with him, old chum.
No soldier’s paid to kick against His powers.
We laughed, – knowing that better men would come,
And greater wars: when each proud fighter brags
He wars on Death, for lives; not men, for flags.
(Wilfred Owen was killed in action 7 days before the armistice that ended that horrible, brutal and unnecessary war) the “greater war” is here now… we have had 101 years to learn the lesson taught by Mr. Owen’s poem… can we rise to the challenge? can we put aside greed and fear and proudly fight together as human beings against our old enemy death “for lives, not men for flags…”