WHY BELIZE? Reason #1.

A frequent question is "Why Belize" and after saying "They speak English", I used to give some of the stock answers you can find in the tourist promos.  The real reasons bear discussion.

One of my recent reads was an old Travis McGee novel.  John D. MacDonald always slips in some of his personal philosophies, and this one really rang true, even tho it was written in 1973.

(Meyer is an old economist, semi-retired, and Trav's best friend.)

        "Meyer made one of his surveys of the elderly couples in the Fort Lauderdale area, the ones being squeezed between the cost of living and their Social Security.  They were very bitter about it.  They were very accusatory about it.  Amurrica should give them the financial dignity they had earned.  Meyer's survey was in depth, relating income over the working years to the pattern of spending.  Meyer radiates compassion.  He is easy to talk to.  He ended his survey after forty couples chosen at random, because by then the pattern was all too clear.

        "He said 'I'll put it all into appropriate and acceptable jargon later, Travis, but the essence of it is that all too many of them were screwed by consumer advertising.  Spend, spend, spend.  Live for today.  So they lived out their lives up to their glottis in time payments.  They blew it all on boats and trailers and outboard motors, binoculars and hunting rifles and department store high fashion.  They lived life to the hilt, like the ads suggest.  Not to the hilt of pleasure, but to the hilt of spending.  They had bureau drawers full of movie cameras, closets full of record players and slide projectors.  Buy the wall-to-wall carpeting.  Buy the great big screen.  Visit all the national parks in America.  Funny thing.  They had all started to lay away some dollars for old-age income, but when the Social Security payments got bigger and the dollar started shrinking, they said the hell with it.  Blow it all.  Now their angry is directed outward, at society, because they don't dare look back and think of how pathetically vulnerable they were, how many thousands they blew on toys that broke before they were paid for, and how many thousands on the interest charges to buy those toys.  They don't know who screwed them.  They did what everybody else was doing.'"

       ---  John D. MacDonald. The Scarlet Ruse

The enemy is not us, as Pogo asserts.  It is the media.  The media drives our economy.  It is marvelous at doing what it's supposed to do - making us dissatisfied with what we have, and then with what we keep it in ("a place for our stuff"**) so that we wind up in a constantly escalating cycle of buying stuff, and houses, and newer cars.  It was going on in the 60's, and it's going on now in spades.  The economy is hot, and if you're young, and upwardly mobile, it's wonderful.  If you're 65, or 70, or 75, living on a fixed income, hording your savings for an medical emergency, it's totally frustrating.  

Leo, my missionary friend, tells me that when he first came down here in the early 60's, they had one telephone line into Belize; everything else was radios.  They had electric power, but no communications.  If Belize was still that primitive, we'd find people who are happy with what they've got.  In fact, it's 2000 and  they do have cable TV (see the listing) and they avidly watch the commercials, and now they're starting to want what every red-blooded American wants!  The reality is that they will never have these things.  A "new car" here is five years old.  Goods here are the goods that were turned in as defective in the US superstores and then reconditioned.  (They are sold as is, no guarantees.)  The per capita income is about $3500, compared to $31,500 in the US, and that just doesn't yield much discretionary income.  Belize is a poor country, and WalMart might as well be on the moon.  (In fact, there is a WalMart in Cancun, 200 miles away.)

As expats, we know that we can't realistically hope to get those things that we see, and that's one reason we're here.  If we were in the States, we would sit there, in the middle of that horn of plenty, constantly goaded by the media to buy new stuff.

Down here, our hopes are more realistic and our minimum needs are met with ease on the money we get from Social Security.  (see our budget.)  When I start pining for a new larger TV set, Charlotte reminds me that we dumped all that stuff in order to come down here.  She's right, and so I cool it.  The media has simply lost its grip on us.

Sr. Ric  

Belize, May 2000

Newer:  On YouTube, you can listen to George Carlin talk about "A place for my stuff."