To those who say, change can only start at home...

Many people, such as many of my family members, criticize people like me, people with the privelege to travel around the world to see the damage that my country has done without my knowledge and permission, people who spend a few years observing and then go back to their comfortable lives. They say that there is poverty and injustice at home, and a true activist would challenge that, would not travel thousands of miles to teach other priveleged people about injustice that is seemingly disconnected from their everyday lives.

I do not reject such criticism.

But for me, it's all about building connections: the imperialism of the US (and transnational corporations, which may or may not be from the US) around the world is the same machine that affects US politics, that requires that (how many million now?) 40 or so million people are without health care, because, oh, well we need money for innovation. It's the same machine that tears families apart and destroys communities in order to imprison millions for using drugs that kills millions in this neck of the woods for cultivating said drugs; the same machine that pushes unattainable empty dreams on millions of people in order to sell products that goes to wherever they can pay workers fewer cents per hour to make the supposed gold that fuels massive blind consumption.

I guess I respond so fiercely because I have the same fears.