As a child growing up in the 1980s in Washington, DC, Christmas was a time when the usual monotony of my Catholic school existence gave way to an indescribable magic. It was not so much the presents as the sense that reality had been temporarily suspended and replaced by something far more invigorating – which I suppose is part of the reason I insisted on believing in Santa Claus until I was 10 years old.
Of course, mine was a relatively privileged childhood in the United States capital, an imperial headquarters that continues to this day to embody the racism and socioeconomic inequality that governs life in the so-called “land of the free.” While I knew vaguely of such domestic issues growing up, I knew even less of my country’s contributions to global suffering; in my birth year of 1982, for example, Washington had greenlit the Israeli invasion of Lebanon that killed tens of thousands of people.
Closer to home, the decade of the 1980s was characterised by US backing for mass right-wing slaughter in Central America, all in the noble pursuit of making the world safe for capitalism. That the tedium of Catholic school was my greatest earthly complaint meant that I was doing much better than a whole lot of folks – something that became even clearer when I abandoned the US in 2003, at the age of 21, in favour of an itinerant lifestyle that brought me into contact with the fallout of US misdeeds from Colombia to Vietnam. READ MORE AT AL JAZEERA ENGLISH.