Welcome to the world of Westernism! Come one, come all. Come ALL indeed. How can you improve your beauty, your home, your enjoyment, and your popularity? You can ride the wave of Western civilization for the low price of a piece of your soul. Listen to those voices that tell you to consume, to rid your home of pests, to read Avon. Become a civilized Westerner wherever you are in the world now!
They bought a new Samsung TV. They bought Directv. They bought a new bike. The baby rides on a plastic push-car while drinking Coca-Cola. The old TV and DVD player are now on the kitchen table and all the notebooks on the surface are Disney. The princess from Aladdin, Jasmin, is all the way in the back of the group of white princesses. They are a family, and I could give names, but the names wouldn’t mean anything to you. And they now eat in front of the TVs with wide eyes and dropped jaws. The house used to be short of electricity and cable TV for which candles would be lit and cards would be dealt. Even with electricity, this family would play the solitary DVD they owned over and over, or listen to music… Aaahhhhh… Music. There was a time when Ecuadorian music would fill the house and the children would do their homework to the sounds of wonder. The radio is obsolete, for what entertainment can sound bring that a television screen cannot? What are sounds, but the companion of sights? What can the radio station Canella provide that Barbie cannot? Barbie. The white girl with the perfect life that teaches the lesson: I’m perfect. Every problem will dissipate if you live like a Barbie doll, or Disney princess because they have everything in life. But there’s one lesson that isn’t prominent, even though it may seem obvious. It is all FICTION. Yet everyone who can afford the small items which brings them closer to Western Civilization, will buy, buy, buy. Keep consuming, everything will be fine.
Well, the music made a comeback one day as the television blasted flashes of mesmerizing, rainbows of hypnotism, and sound from the radio for one day that helped create an acid trip of a nightmare. Now, just weeks after a television with a satellite connection, a boy in that house yells as loud as he can at random intervals and acts out what he has seen inside that box; that mentally debilitating trap of a box. The trap that gives entertainment of a sort that enforces a culture which is destroying cultures worse than a cancerous cell destroys the healthiest of organs. The song, old McDonald has a farm repeats on the plastic car, over, and over, and over again. Well, who was Old McDonald, why did he have this farm, and what did he do to the animals that went oink oink, or moo moo? Did he pump the creatures with rBGH, slaughter them for a store that cares only for the low prices and not for the customers’ well-being? All the underlying questions of the happy cow which go unquestioned because the picture that is painted inside that rot-inducing box is the perfection of Westernism. And you are absolutely wrong to not believe in it, because the template of Western Civilization can only help you with everything you need.
I ran into a missionary from the states who fashions himself a new-age Jesus preaching to his disciples. No, really… He does. He stated, “the kids we teach spend more time with us then they do with their parents and they really don’t know right from wrong, so we get to teach them.” Little by little, spots of Westernism are appearing like colonies of mold in this country. Westernism is such a plague upon anything it touches. The house is flooded in fluorescent light, the TV is blazing bright, and slowly, these children are developing a disease I call The Western Influence (or Influenza, for what it’s worth). When asking one child, as he was watching TV, if he has seen something of mine, no reply came thereafter. Silence followed as I asked again, and finally a reply of, “Huh?” So, disgusted, I gave up and glanced at what he was watching. It’s an Ecuadorian Soap-opera of this woman, hands tied behind her back, struggling with this man holding a gun as her night gown is drifting up to reveal black-laced lingerie. But, look. All this rhetoric about putrid filth of Westernism is painting a picture of my views that are in essence very skewed and biased, so none of this may have any merit. But where is our world to end up if we allow ourselves to be trapped by this culture of self-destruction? Where are other cultures going to end up on this road? I know what a world shaped in the image of Disney and technological superiority of Google looks like. I’ve been to Disneyland, and I’ve been to Google headquarters. You know what they have in common? They are all cement, and “nature” is a small lot of land devoted to trimmed grass and shrubs. Disneyland even has a “jungle ride” complete with native savages that pretend to throw spears. But the really difficult thing is that I use Google, the internet, watch TV as well, and buy the same Coca-Cola the Kichwas do, so, who the hell am I to say anything? All I know is that I don’t want this beautiful culture to be assimilated into the Western wheel and slowly fade away. Why do we progress regressively, and where is our world to end up if we are trapping ourselves in boxes.
