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Just about the time I was nosing around the Mayan ruins on my recent Cancun, Mexico, holiday, wondering if it was true that the lost Mayan population was taken up in an alien spacecraft in 1,000 CE, I became aware of some serious goings on back in the United States. U.S. authorities shot down three flying objects of unknown origins, leaving the world to wonder if the aliens finally grew bored of the Mayans, with their human sacrifices and clever use of cocoa beans, and came looking for a more secular lab rat to capture.
This is ancillary, but the Mayan tour guide told us that iguanas are considered the rats of Mexico. I don’t believe him. There are so many of them lying around in the sun pretending to be on vacation, but if you look really closely, you can see they’re scanning us in some kind of organized recon fashion. It wouldn’t surprise me to learn that iguanas are the real aliens, having infiltrated our universe before the Mayans disappeared.
But when you think about it, we all have a bit of alien in us. My presence in Mexico, for example, made me a legal alien of their country. Miriam Webster, my second-favorite dictionary behind the snobbery of the Oxford English, uses terms like strange, exotic and even bizarre to define alien and that certainly describes how Mexico felt to me. Strange in the way that mashed potatoes taste when they’re not made by your grandmother. Exotic with their palm trees and bold bikini choices daring you not to stare. (I stared.)
And bizarre as in waking up to an iguana staring through the hotel window, apparently recording your R.E.M. and blood pressure for the daily report back to the mother ship.
I noticed an American man at the cantina complaining that his Corona cost 5 USD. He kept waving a $1 bill in the air, shaking his head as if bewildered by the strangeness of it all.
“But it’s a Mexican beer,” he told his wife. “Yes dear, but Corona is owned by the Belgians,” I heard her say. We all feel a little scratchy when things feel foreign, or behave outside the way we expect them, too.
Our hotel maid, for example, never once washed out my teacup during cleaning service. She just left it sitting on the counter, a little brown tea ring circling the bottom. Once, she left the trash behind, which was overflowing to the point that she would have had to step over it to make the bed. This kind of thing would be outrageous in the States, but in Mexico, no es problemo.
And this idea of alien isn’t confined to international travel. Have you ever observed a Catholic attending his first Pentecostal service? A Northerner trying to order unsweetened ice tea in a Southern café?
I’ll bet most people felt a little strange and bizarre when attending their first major holiday at their in-laws. But that’s not how we do it their foreign brains kept telling them. And, rightfully, your way is stupid.
If the aliens really are coming, I hope they help us bridge the frustration we feel when someone outside our tribe, however we define that, behaves in a way that feels foreign to us. Foreign doesn’t mean wrong any more than familiar means right. Different isn’t an attack against sameness.
It seems humans need a “them” as a way to define the “us.” Meaning we define ourselves through negation. We identify as what we are not. Alien ships floating through our skies may force humans to become a collective us, and that might not be such a bad thing.
All these micro frictions and factions are becoming tiresome. We could benefit from a serious zoom out to remember that when we all crawled out of the primordial ooze, the iguanas were already watching.
And, if do get taken up, at least we know we can get our hands on some really good chocolate.
Abigail Blythe Batton is a staff correspondent for the Cherokee Scout. Her column runs every other week. Email her at ablythebatton@gmail.com or leave a message at 837-5122.