By Will Cade

Before coming to Europe, I never had a passport. At 23, I applied for one, so I could make that great trip across the deep blue yonder. Once I got mine in the mail, I was rather pleased - so pleased, in fact, that when I saw a leather passport wallet with “Passport United States of America” written on it, I had to get it. Now, in Europe, not a day goes by that I don’t regret doing so.

To be honest, I’m scared to travel as an American, and I don’t want people being able to read my nationality every time I buy a sandwich. So far no one has found me out because of my wallet (although when a cashier in Italy saw “US Bank” on my credit card, she was rather surprised) but I have had to learn to say that I’m an American, but I don’t like George Bush, so can’t we all just get along?

Unfortunately, this approach doesn’t always work, or I don’t always have the time to say it. When I was traveling in Prague, about 2 days before Kosovo declared independence, I met two other Americans living there who offered to show me around the city. I usually preferred to hang out with non-Americans (because there are plenty of Americans in the U.S.) but I couldn’t say no to tour guides with local know-how.

One night, they brought me to a café with traditional Czech food, explained the different dishes, and even ordered for me. After the waiter left, a man in a shiny silver suit, yelling a conversation into his cell phone in a Slavic sounding language, sat down at the table next to us, avoiding the other tables in the mostly empty cafe. My new friends tried to carry on as usual, but I started to get a funny feeling about this guy.

He finished his call, and after a few minutes of listening to our conversation, he leaned over our table and asked, “Where are you?”

“I’m sorry?” my friend replied.

“Where are you?” he repeated.

“Where are we from?” my friend offered, and the man nodded.

“The U.S.,” my friend said.

“U.S.?” the man asked, confused.

“The U.S.A,” my friend clarified.

“U.S.A.?,” he questioned, before piecing it together and waving his finger at us disapprovingly, “I Serbia. In Serbia, they no like U.S.”

He commenced to list the death tolls from the Kosovo bombings in the 90s and explain to us why this was “big problem, big, big problem for U.S.” I started to think it might be best to go elsewhere for dinner, or not eat at all, if it meant we could get away from this guy, who didn’t seem to be getting any more cordial.

“I special police,” he then told us, “I shoot 12 Muslims, no problem.”

At this point, our food came, but my appetite had left me. I still picked up my silverware and tried to look normal, but for some reason my hands couldn’t work together to get the food onto my fork. The man started looking at my plate, and just I was starting to believe he could smell my fear and was preparing to attack, he leaned across our table, pointed his finger to within half a centimetre of my food, and excitedly said, “This, good dish. This very good dish. When I child, I eat 12 of these.”

“Oh, really?” I asked politely while crossing my fork and knife over my food to keep his hands away, a bit confused by his sudden change of mood.

“Serbian women… the best!” he continued, winking to us.

“I’m sure they are,” replied one of my friends, who seemed to be getting a kick out of this guy.

“What you do here?” he asked us shortly afterwards.

My friend explained that the two of them lived there, while I was just a tourist, and then asked our Serbian friend what he did.

“Me? I… I…” he responded, searching for his words (or his story), eventually gesturing something with his hands and saying “houses.”

“Oh, you build houses?” I offered.

“Yes,” he said, but I didn’t quite believe him.

As we finished our meal and made our way out, leaving our Serbian friend at his table, I told my friends that it was a little strange how he could carry on a conversation in broken English for almost an hour, but he didn’t even know his own profession, usually the first thing someone learns when they start to pick up a language.

My friends didn’t think too much of this, nor did they share my fear of him following us out of the restaurant. But, then again, they only had to catch a bus next to the café, while I had to walk back to my hostel by myself, fearfully looking down every alleyway (or refusing to look) in case the ex Serbian special police “house builder” dressed in a shiny silver suit decided he had a few more “big, big problems” he wanted to bring to my attention.

Then again, maybe I was overreacting. Maybe he was just a lively debater, and my creativity was getting the best of me, like it does at times. Maybe he saw a group of Americans and thought he could help open our eyes to the things our country had done. Or maybe he just wanted to mess with us, and he had never even held a gun before.

Or maybe my prediction was correct, and he was angry, incredibly angry, and he wanted to make us personally responsible for the horrible things he had seen in his life, because my passport read “United States of America.” If that was the case, I don’t quite agree with his approach, because I couldn’t even vote when the Kosovo bombings were taking place and didn’t have much political influence in grammar school.

After travel experiences like this, I wonder what European travel must be like for Americans who do have a direct and immediate influence on international affairs. It just so happens that George ‘Dubya’ is taking a European Tour at the moment, but I doubt he has had the type of experiences that I have had.

When Air Force One landed at Heathrow this week, it was accompanied by two other jumbo jets carrying a fleet of almost 30 limousines (surely bullet-proof) a Black Hawk surveillance chopper, and the presidential chopper, so the president could comfortably make his way about the city.

While Bush was leisurely strolling about, shaking hands with Gordon Brown and having tea with the Queen, a crowd of 2,500 was protesting in Parliament Square, trying to make their way past the police barricades at Whitehall onto Downing Street. Riot Police and Police on horseback arrived on the scene, beating the protesters back with batons.[1]

Some 25 protesters were arrested, but most have been released. Two men - aged 21 and 26 - are being charged with obstructing police, and a 61 year old woman, god bless her, is being charged with indecent exposure.

I’m not sure what’s stranger: a 61 year old woman “protesting” the best way she knows how; an American college student harassed for an event which happened before he even hit puberty; or 25 Brits being arrested for speaking their mind in a democratic country. Or, even more so, as all of this hoopla is being sorted out, George Bush is probably on Air Force One watching ESPN and making up his own ingenious commentary on the sports world, after wreaking havoc on the political world.

I’m still not sure which is stranger, but I won’t be so scared of my U.S. Passport once Bush no longer has the luxury of cruising across the globe in Air Force One, his destruction and chaos left in the jet stream.

War torn Pristina, Kosovo. 1999

By Will Cade

About 6 months after 9/11, before Iraq was even on the horizon, I went to Washington D.C. for a political exercise with other high-school students from across the country. We were divided into groups of 24 and then assigned positions within the U.S. military and government, starting with the president and working down the most important posts. I ended up with a worthless position, Ambassador to the UN in fact, while the lucky ones ended up being President or Secretary of Defense.

Each group was then given the same national crisis and a 48 hour period in which to develop a national strategy. The crisis ended up being an international oil-shortage, beginning with soaring prices at the stations and protests in the streets, followed by the threat of the transportation system crumbling, eventually ending with the industrialized world starving because the food couldn’t get from the farmers to the groceries.

We were given a dossier on possible solutions within the international political climate of the time. Then the exercise took place in “real-time” with political upheavals and shifting alliances, just to spice things up a bit.

My group thought of either drilling oil reserves in Alaska or building pipelines all over the place. I ended up proposing the idea to build one from Azerbaijan through Georgia (the country not the state) into the Black Sea, where there would be fewer restrictions on transportation. Granted, Russia wasn’t exactly peachy keen when western powers meddled with its ex-soviet satellite states, but I was pretty sure they wouldn’t go to war over it. And hell, we needed the oil.

Our advisor, a Harvard graduate, liked my idea, but thought it was a bit risky tempting Russia into war and assuming they would back down. But what did he know? It took him three tries just to get into Harvard. And before my father, all of the men in my family were either preachers or soldiers, so between God and the U.S. military, I thought we’d be well taken care of, at least in this exercise.

Once the allotted time was over, each President chose one aid from the group and went before opposing groups to defend their plan. Our President ended up choosing me, and together we stood before God and our fellow Americans. At one point, someone asked, “And how will Russia respond to this?”

In the best political manoeuvre of my life, I responded, “Due to the theoretical nature of this exercise, that information is unavailable,” and everyone nodded their head in agreement, slightly impressed with my adept bullshitting ability.

If international politics were only a game, I think I could win, in a very George Bush kind of way. As I look back on how the American government has acted between then and now, though, I can’t tell whether it is a game or not, but I am surprised at how much real life and this exercise have mimicked one another.

Even though history didn’t follow my plan perfectly (being that the U.S. invaded Iraq instead of building a pipeline through Georgia) many aspects of my little game strikingly resemble current affairs, especially the recent protests from the rising price of oil.

For the past week, a large minority of Spanish truck drivers have been protesting about high fuel prices. Many protesting truckers, who the Police have tried to stop, have attempted to converge on Madrid and have also prevented other truckers with normal runs from reaching the city. The missed deliveries - intentional and not - have caused food prices to soar, factories to slow almost to a halt, and gas stations to run out of fuel, both in Madrid and throughout Spain.

Monday three major associations representing the truckers called off the strike to prevent further damage to the transportation sector, while maintaining that the government must deal with this problem at its core. In regards to Spain, that refers to laws and agreements between the Spanish government, the drivers, and the associations which deal between the two. But is the that the real problem?[1]

Some say we’re not even running out of oil, it’s only oil speculators that create this sense of crisis on the oil markets to drive the price up. Others say we’ll run out soon, so we best seek out alternative energy sources. And then others say this is all liberal mumbo-jumbo that old hippies have made up, like the scientifically backed threat of Global Warming, just to scare good God-loving Americans. Even those wanting change sometimes say that the technology doesn’t exist, and even if it did, how could the world revamp its transportation systems and energy practices on such a massive scale?

Conservative or liberal, most everyone agrees that the industrialized world has become incredibly dependent on oil and that it will take a crisis of some sort to break it from its habit. If it receives the proper motivation, though, I believe the technology and logistics will take care of itself. After all, at the start of WWII, aviation technology consisted of a few adrenalin junky gear heads stumbling around in the sky shooting at each other, yet in under a decade jet fighters were engaging in spiraling dog fights almost at the speed of sound. I just hope this time a monetary squeeze will be enough motivation to change, so another War in Iraq (or worse still) won’t become necessary.

By Will Cade

When I first came to Europe, the Presidential Election in the states was just beginning. I have always been skeptical of politics in general, and after Bush was reelected for his 2^nd term, I just about cried. Since that day, I haven’t wanted to have much to do with American politics, but as an American in Europe, a lot of people have asked me what I think.

I’ve had loads of conversations on the topic, but my favorite took place in Murcia this fall. I lived on a main street by the Ayuntamiento, and a group of African immigrants always hung out in front of my apartment building. For the first few months, I watched them with suspicion, because I assumed they were in the country illegally (although technically I never knew). They never really bothered me all that much, but at night they could get rather loud. Sometimes I couldn’t sleep, and other times I was just annoyed when I was smoking my last cigarette out on my balcony before bed.

One night when I was finishing my routine, they were particularly boisterous. I thought about calling the police for once, because I had class early the next morning, and I doubted they would stop anytime soon. I was still smoking my cigarette, so all I could think to do was glare down at them, hoping they would see I meant business.

I looked down and saw a skinny Caucasian guy with red hair right in the middle of them. After a second more, I realized that this was my Scottish friend Ron. What the hell is he doing down there, I thought, and yelled down to say hello. Ron, not knowing where this voice was coming from, looked to his left and to his right, swinging his beer in one hand and his cigarette in the other. Eventually one of the Africans saw me and pointed Ron up my way.

“Will, man, what are you doing up there?” he asked.

“I live here, dude.”

“Come on down then, join the party.” he said, and off I went.

I didn’t have much time to party, but I did want to say hello. When I came outside, Ron started introducing me to the different guys in the group, but he did all this in English, which surprised me. I had been in Murcia for a few months, and let’s just say trying to find an English speaker in the street had been like trying to find a store open during the siesta, yet here was this group of “illegal” immigrants speaking the best English I had heard outside of my university friends. They ended up being a pretty cool group of guys, but I had to go back up and get some sleep.

From that day on, I always said what’s up to them and chatted for a minute before going up to my apartment. During one such what’s up, one of them asked me what I thought about the elections.

“The Spanish elections?” I replied.

“No, the American ones.” he said.

I had learned by this point that if the topic of American politics came up, I needed to make it clear from the get go that I didn’t like George Bush. This statement usually disarmed people from hating me right off the bat, as it did in this case.

“So you like Obama or Hillary?” he asked.

“Obama” I said.

“It’s great, man. The United States will have a black man or a woman for the president.” he said, and I just chuckled to myself.

Now it looks like the U.S. might have a black man for president and a woman for vice president. To make things worse (for conservatives) this black man has a Muslim sounding name, and this woman’s husband spilt his seed in the oval office. Although I’m petrified of another Republican in the White House, I want to at least try to imagine how conservatives must feel.

I grew up in Nashville, TN, south of the Mason Dickson Line, and right within the border of the Bible belt. To give you an idea of the demographic, Tennessee is Al Gore’s home state, and he even lost it in the election to George Bush. Suffice it to say I know about racism, sexism, and religious extremism. I would love to be David right now with my trusty sling shot and do battle against the Republican Goliath. But it’s probably best if I let he who is free from sin cast the first stone, which sure as hell isn’t me (if I even believed in sin) because I’m no perfect angel when it comes to racism.

I always thought racism meant using racial slurs and telling racist jokes. I never thought it meant unconsciously judging people because of their ethnicity, without having a clue who they are or where they come from, as I did with my African immigrant friends. I’m learning, though, that I have these pre-conceptions, in large part because of where I grew up, but it still is my responsibility to recognize them and try to be open-minded. Of course, the old bugaboos will always reappear, sometimes momentarily in my head, and sometimes in the words that slip out of my mouth.

But I am not the only American who has to watch what slips out. Michelle Obama, Barack Obama’s wife, is currently receiving media attention for an alleged tape of her repeatedly referring to white people as “whitey.” Whether this tape exists or not is yet to be proven, but what interests me the most about this is how her husband is trying to remedy the situation.

Yesterday Obama launched the website www.fightthesmears.com, which will unite and empower his supporters in rebuking any unsubstantiated personal attacks against him, his family, or his campaign. He will post information on this website, allowing an unprecedented level of visibility into a politician’s personal life. The website currently has a picture of Obama’s birth certificate, stating he was in fact born in Honolulu, Hawaii, to refute allegations that he was not born in the U.S.[1]

Up until now, Obama has pledged to refrain from smear campaigns and instead has attempted to unify the country through hope and workable solutions. This is something I have never seen a presidential candidate attempt in the past. I can only remember rhetoric of one form or another, never having to do with something as intangible and powerful and hope.

For whatever reason, I believe him. This could be part of his plan, some type an anti-rhetoric rhetoric. But when I look at Obama, I see someone who carries with him an intuitive sense of hope. I cannot argue the validity of this before a court of law - but when I imagine what the U.S. will face in the next four years as it deals with the unstable international climate it has created for itself, I believe it needs hope more than anything else.