Discuss amongst yourselves
Raise your hand if you remember that SNL skit!! Cawffee Tawk. And, time for Deep Thoughts…I was thinking earlier about the Great Depression and the hold that has over our public consciousness and national memory, and about what a difficult time that was for people, and then about how life during the Great Depression is like life in developing countries has been for a century (or two or three), only the GD was less destructive and lethal, minus the AIDS and malaria and TB and war and trafficking and severe corruption and open repression and exploitation. And it only lasted a decade; our country managed, with the help of WWII, to pull out of it. It begs the question, how can the human experience be so unbelievably and painfully different for so many people? For most people?
And what do we do about it? I have no idea. (Time to get started on Jeff Sach's The End of Poverty, it seems.) The disparity, randomness and (un)luck of birth and nationality has never been so clear to me. It’s something I knew but didn’t really feel until now. Every time you are in a car and you have to stop at a light several bone-thin children and blind burdened women and crippled men approach your windows asking for money. These people did nothing to deserve such a fate other than being born poor in a country, community, family that can (or will) spare no resources for them; many suffer from diseases we don’t even remember much less worry about catching, like leprosy and polio, as well as those we DO worry about, like HIV and hepatitis. Food stamps, welfare, free immunizations, Medicaid, or public school for their children, as inadequate as those services often are, are not even imaginable to them. Life does not hold hope or expectations; just bare and brutal survival. As someone who got her vaccinations at birth and at regular intervals along the way, along with a million and one privileges taken for granted and otherwise, I can’t say I’m able to find any justification in the facts of my existence any more than I can find acceptable reasons for their poverty, no matter what work I do and where I take my life’s efforts….
I can see why the concept of the meek inheriting the earth is an attractive one for some, as it removes the urgency of addressing the hell on earth that is their daily existence for now.
posted by Margot @ 6:17 AM
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