bypass

{disclaimer: this is a long-winded rant. excessive carbon dioxide exposure can result in asphyxiation. stop reading if you feel faint.}


the vast majority of the native alaskan eskimos i have met have been very friendly and gracious people. i have worked alongside pilots, mechanics, rampers, and ticket agents who are quality human beings. i have also spent considerable time in other parts of the developing world. enough, i think, to form some thoughts about the evolution of and outsiders' interaction with these fringe societies.

most of all, i want to be fair here. i want my comments to pay homage to the native alaskans' dignity and humanity. i want my words to honor a proud culture that has been taken advantage of by more powerful players, like so many others.

things here are not good. the situation is bleak, and it is not something i was even aware of before i came to bethel. i have been blown away with what i've seen, and by what continues to happen to less fortunate people when the rest of the electronic world is too busy texting and sexting to notice or care.

with this in mind, i want to bear witness to a grave and ongoing injustice in modern day america, without being construed as racist or elitist.


******


when i first decided to fly the bush in alaska, i had lots of narcissistic fantasies about being the only link between villages and civilization. about people being dependent upon my skills to bring them the goods they needed to survive in harsh remote places.


back in may, this fantasy was crushed within a couple of days of arriving in emmonak. basically, i learned what was inside that box. confronted with the insane realities of life here on the tundra, my attitude began an unrecoverable nosedive. it was only a matter of time before i learned enough to feel that my personal level of moral dignity had been breached. an inevitable existential crisis followed.

i can no longer be a part of what i think is an embarrassment to america's ideals. i feel my job is counterproductive to these people's health, hope, and dignity. it has insane and unsustainable consequences for the environment and for federal taxpayers. and while it is likely to continue for some time with or without me, i personally cannot sleep at night knowing i am making money off of it. the problem is bypass mail.

bypass mail was an idea to help keep down the cost of living in rural alaska. the term refers to items that are shipped via u.s. mail but go directly from the distributor to the recipient on commercial operators. they bypass the united states postal service system. carriers like grant, everts air cargo, and alaska airlines provide the transportation, and are payed a generous special rate by the post office. the u.s.p.s. continues to charge the much lower parcel post rate for the shipment, while never actually handling the goods. these items' transport is effectively subsidized by federal taxpayers through the u.s.p.s., and the real cost of transportation (when things like jet fuel are factored in) is many times what is actually charged.

when you charge less than the real cost for something, someone along the line ends up taking a loss. in alaska, where a lack of roads mean goods must often be delivered by air, transportation costs can be outrageously high. but providing air mail service at ground mail rates causes the post office to hemorrhage around $100 million dollars per year. ultimately this becomes a federal taxpayer burden.

the program was conceived with good intentions, but like many things that begin this way, the potential for abuse was not realized or protected against. do-gooders and welfare architects probably thought it would help deliver staple foods such as milk, flour, and fruits & vegetables to areas where none of these items could be produced locally.

we don't fly these things. i have not seen any essential foodstuff item even once on my airplane. instead, we bring them wonderbread and mayonnaise, pepsi and cool ranch doritos.


spaghetti o's, kraft american singles, hotdogs, care bear fruit chewies and nacho cheese bugles.


pop, and more pop. ungodly amounts of soda in 70 pound boxes. thousands and thousands of pounds of it everyday.


we bring them these things because that's what they order. they have become addicted to all the high-fructose corn syrup-phosphoric acid-monosodium glutamate food-like-substances that so many love. unfortunately, it comprises the bulk of what they eat, it's what their children grow up on, and it leads inevitably toward the downward-spiraling lifetime of diabetes, obesity, and tooth decay.

perhaps the worst part is that young native children are held hostage by these lifestyle-caused diseases before they are even old enough to make educated food choices for themselves.

and you help pay for it.

meanwhile, aviation companies rake in thousands upon thousands of dollars every day in the biggest welfare scam i could ever imagine.

in the american tradition, everything comes in as much packaging as possible. and about a week after i drop all these things off, they end up here:


basically, my job is keeping the dumps full. delivering coronary bypass.


flying over the smoking trash piles, it looks like an aircraft has crashed:


and all of this is not even the tip of the goat-fuck.

alaska's former republican senator and convicted felon ted stevens helped set up many of these wasteful programs. as head of the senate appropriations committee, he was a professional reach-around artist. stevens packed away pork products like that speed-eating japanese hotdog kid. he secured hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars for his pet projects, which brought inflated and make-believe jobs to alaskans and made many companies very wealthy.

stevens was a pro at bypassing the system. i find it ironic that he died last week in a swath of aircraft wreckage spread across the tundra. his final resting place resembling the smoldering trash dumps of the insane and unsustainable system he helped create, and the way of life his policies helped destroy.

historically, the eskimos were semi-nomadic; following the caribou migrations and fish runs before the white man's good-intentioned-and-ill-informed decisions to build schools and post offices tied them to a particular area. then the subsidies really began.


each of the 30+ villages that grant services in the southwest corner of alaska have had a runway built for us to land on. and when you live on permafrost tundra and swamps , this means that runway material has to be brought in. from far away. gravel has to be barged from hundreds of miles to the north. armies of dumptrucks and spreaders spend up to 6 years building and repacking runways until they have settled enough from the freeze-thaw cycles to be usable. it comes out to 20-30 million dollars per village. many villages have about 100 people in them.

most of the eskimos exist in one of the many prefab trailers that have been barged in to the treeless moonscape. they are barely insulated for the -40 temperatures of winter, so government heating oil is brought in. above-ground sewers and power plants and water treatment plants are built in areas that human beings have no business living permanently (just like phoenix). satellite tvs, high-powered rifles, four-wheelers and snowmobiles, all paid for by taxpayers, are doled out. aluminum fishing boats with brand new outboards.

nothing is maintained, because it's easy to get a free new one. this is one way the eskimos have excelled in integration: eagerly joining the throw-away american culture of consumerism.

there is no economy in the villages. people are sedentary and unmotivated. they are no longer subsisting in the great spirit of their ancestors. instead of paddling dug-out canoes and harpooning whales, now they leave their government trailers and get on their welfare-purchased fourwheeler or snowmobile with a high-powered rifle. this entire monstrosity exists under the guise of helping the natives continue to live off the land and maintain their traditions. it does none of these things in reality.

what it really does: dehumanizes people. further marginalizes them. treats them like pets, builds them hampster-tube boardwalk cities to play in and gets them addicted to high-fat low-fiber low-vitamin foods. drugs them into a dull, lethargic, high-fructose corn syrup induced compliance. the despair is palpable. domestic violence, alcoholism, vd, and suicide rates are out of control.

the natives are given bread and circuses, and left on the fringes. kids born into this cycle don't know any different. they don't have the example of hard working parents going out to earn their living each day. the checks just show up, like the fritos and shasta cola and four-wheelers and snowmobiles. sitting there, watching american idle.

these people need hope, motivation, and opportunity. not subsidized marginalization. but the answer is not to abandon them. if the plug was pulled, many could not survive. the rich traditions and subsistence skills of their ancestors are vanishing from the youngest kids as they continue into the great generational facebook disconnect. life, virtualized.

obviously sucking the government tit is a popular activity all over the world. it's tasty milk is addicting and creamy-white and life-sustaining, in a vegetative sort of way. but it never permanently fixes anything. in fact, it often just maintains the status quo, and lets the collective societal conscious feel good about itself for "helping."

why do i fly phosphoric acid sodas, but never toothpaste? pampers and huggies, but not condoms?

does it really make sense to build a $30 million dollar runway for daily shipments of thousands of pounds of pop for obese diabetics? the madness has to stop.

i'm sure these comments will offend many. they are of course made from my privileged healthy wealthy well-fed well-read perspective. but it's my damn blog and people need to know what's going on up here. the wrath is directed at the stupidity of the system, not at the gracious and friendly natives. i can't learn about these things and not take action, even if it is just a few poorly scripted words to try to increase awareness.

i don't have many solutions for any of this. it's enormously complex.

i don't think many of the eskimos would want to leave. if they were in a city, they probably wouldn't have a chance to integrate with other communities. i don't think society would let them. most would end up living in the projects of anchorage, in their own section of town, out of sight and out of mind.

for me, participating in the abuses of the bypass system only seems to make the future more bleak for these already repressed people, and it's financial and environmental costs to the planet represent a truly demented and unsustainable way of life.

we need to understand the real cost of things. we need to understand how goods get to us. we can't just keep on mindlessly consuming all day long.

i am as guilty as anyone else, and feel like a hypocrite. another environmental disaster: another north american. although someone will just take my place on the coca-cola express, i am not interested in profiting off of the destructive enabling going on up here. it's time to go.


******


many people are doing great work in the yk delta. lots of big-hearted nurses, dentists, and teachers are trying to provide the same opportunities that all american kids have. i really respect the heroic humanitarian efforts of these professionals and volunteers. they bring hope and possibility to a largely-forgotten people. they are the ones who will change the inertia, if it can ever be overcome. they are the ones who will help these people realize they are not trapped in their circumstances.

i guess i'm just someone who hopelessly sees things as they should be, and not as they are. someone who wants fairness and equality and meaning for everyone's existence. including here, in the land of the midnight sun.

something other than just being passed by.


something other than remaining.