A New World? Are the Americas Returning to Old Problems?

By Jan LundiusSTOCKHOLM / ROME, Sep 12 2019 (IPS) When I in 1980 first arrived in America it was a new world to me. I went from New York to Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic and like so many visitors and migrants before me I was overwhelmed by both familiar and strange impressions. Familiar due to books I had read and movies I had seen, strange since I encountered unexpected things and new because both I and several of those I met compared themselves to the “old world”, i.e. Euroasia and parts of Africa. A sense of uniqueness, admiration for an assumed freshness and difference, can be discerned in the writing of several American writers. Particularly during the 19th century we encounter ideas about wide horizons and an urge to experience and subdue what was assumed to be a wilderness with hidden riches and alluring possibilities. A “Wild West” epitomized in Horace Greeley´s 1865 phrase “Go West, young man, and grow up with the country.” An abundance of examples of exuberant feelings may be found in Walt Whitman´s poetry: All the past we leave behind, We debouch upon a newer mightier world, a varied world, Fresh and strong the world we seize, world of labor and the march, Pioneers! O pioneers! 1 In the southern hemisphere, Walt Whitman has his equivalent in Pablo Neruda, who in a poem likened ”his” continent to a beloved woman: When I look at the shape of America on the map, my love, it is you I see: the heights of copper on your head, your slender w...
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