USA. A Mexican restaurant. We had not yet ordered anything, and the food was already arriving.
Chips. Salsa. Unrequested. Free.
I stopped the waiter. "We have not earned these."
"They just come with the table, man."
They come with the TABLE. In my land, hospitality is a debt. Every gift creates an obligation, weighed carefully, returned in the proper season with interest of feeling. Here, the gift arrives before you have even proven you can pay for dinner.
This is not an appetizer. This is a declaration: we trust you. Eat.
I ate with the gravity the moment deserved. And then — I must report this calmly — the basket emptied, and a new one appeared.
"Did we…?"
"Refill," the waiter said. "It's bottomless."
Bottomless. They have wells of salsa. The supply lines of this nation are beyond anything my ancestors imagined.
My friend warned me. "Don't fill up on chips, dude."
Too late. I had accepted three baskets. Honor demanded each one be finished — an unfinished gift is an insult. By the time my actual food arrived, I was a ruined man.
I was not hungry. I was not comfortable. I had been defeated by a courtesy.
Generosity that arrives before the request cannot be repaid. It can only be survived.
I know the rule now. I have made my peace with the basket. One basket. Two at the most.
Who am I deceiving. There is no number of baskets I would refuse. The trust of a nation is in that salsa, and I intend to honor all of it.
Indianapolis, the largest city in a state with a metro population of 2.2 million, gets just three trains per week, yet that same state is willing to spend $1 billion on a football stadium for 8 events a year.
Artificial intelligences do not undergo experiences, do not possess a body, do not feel joy or pain, do not mature through relationships, and do not know from within what love, work, friendship or responsibility mean. Nor do they have a moral conscience, since they do not judge good and evil, grasp the ultimate meaning of situations, or bear responsibility for consequences. They may imitate or even simulate, but they do not understand what they produce, for they lack the affective, relational, and spiritual perspective through which human beings grow in wisdom. #MagnificaHumanitas
BREAKING: U.S. Military veterans are occupying the Cannon building in the nation’s Capitol to protest the US’s war on Iran and Israel’s genocide on Gaza.
I will be boycotting the Turning Point halftime show as @KidRock is an illegal immigrant from Canada. I, like all true patriots, will be watching the real halftime show performed by an American citizen in Bad Bunny.
this is making me cry. he could cure cancer, he could cure fucking cancer and spare millions the agony of the disease and he has to beg on TV for funds instead of gold falling right into his lap.
My grandfather died from pancreatic cancer.
He got diagnosed and I watched his body decline rapidly within 4 months. He literally looked like a skeleton before he died.
So bravo to this man and his team.
Bignetti a Gangsta out there mayne!!! Great win! They can change the Heisman trophy to Mendoza stretching across the goal line! Why him and Coach look like they can star in their own version of Goodfellas?! I fwi