One World, Food, Money Perspective

As I reflect on my travels about the world and my feelings of culture shock, I am most often struck by the extreme wealth we take for granted in the USA. I don't see wealth and poverty as good and bad... in fact I don't even like the judgment associated with those terms. I think true wealth is enjoying life which means food, family, friends, health, shelter, and an attitude of peace or bliss. I don't think wealth and poverty can be measured in economic or physical terms. These things are hard to quantify.

I often think of the family I visited with in Sikkim. The extended family lived in a small compound of several houses and barrack like structures. Several Aunts, Uncles, some of their children and grandchildren lived there... along with the matriarch Grandmother. They lived in a small village among Temi Tea Garden, a large tea estate. Most of the village obtained some employment at the tea estate as pickers or managers etc. They had some small gardens and a few cows and calves and goats and kids. Grandma, one aunt, one 20 yo grandchild and another in his 20s with children tended to stay home during the day. The rest worked off the "farm". The two young men cut a few baskets of fresh fodder to feed the stock with. One of the Uncle's milked the cow before work. Grandma and the Aunts distributed fodder and cleaned the mangers. Overall the family seemed healthy. Their home seemed adequate... simple by western standards but moderate and comfortable by theirs. Built of local materials. A TV and phone were the modern appliances. The adults at home took care of the basic chores of walking the little tykes to school, cutting fodder and firewood, laundry done by hand, gardening, etc. The 20 yo boy said he wanted to make money and have luxury. They see such things on TV and hear of them from tourists. Overall the family seemed healthy. Overall they had a quality of life... friends, family, sufficiency, community, and free time, that is rare in the USA.

I see how much clutter and material things we have in our homes in the US. I wonder if our quality of life is any better than the family in Sikkim?

In contrast, in Bihar I saw families of what I consider poverty... poor health, squalorly shelters of plastic sheeting. In Leh, Ladakh, I saw a ghetto of apartments for unemployed, "educated workers" that were educated to live outside of the generation old, traditional agrarian system that sustained families in the past... before they were given electricity and a bill for it that demanded money of them and broke them out of their self sustaining way of life. Public schools took children off the farm where they'd been an integral part of sustaining the household, where they had learned and known how to build and create homes and farms that would sustain them in that climate. The schools left the families unable to work their land and grow their own food. The schools trained the children not about practical things for their homeland, but of industrial and urban life. The schools trained the children for college and jobs. Jobs that weren't available. Ladakh has an active Women's Collective that is trying to redevelop markets for their farms, bans plastic bags to try to save their land and cows from the toxicity of the bags, and strives to generate empowered and esteem building projects and endeavors for the women and families to become sustainable.

Its a world culture now. The children in Sikkim are treated to such western luxuries as World Wide Wrestling on satellite TV. They see the mass produced clothes of the tourists. It's getting so that the locals in the third world don cheap mass produced casual pants and button shirts... mainly hippie backpacker travelers, and a few hill tribes wear any amount of locally produced clothing. Electronic gadgets. They see cars and want them. They don't appreciate that they can live without the debt, pollution, and clutter of a car. That they can walk to their neighbors. That they can commune with their neighbors. They can walk to wherever they need to go for the items that they are not producing themselves. Or, that if necessary to travel further, they can go to the nearest road and catch a shared jeep or bus to the nearest town.

I wonder at the environmental impact of these billions of people donning plastic clothes, and having a few electronic gadgets with permanent clocks and lights draining away electricity.

I wonder at my country. I lived on $400/month as a tourist. Locals could probably live on half or quarter of that. I think of how easy it would be to feed a family in one of these countries. I wonder how many friends we would have in the world if we gave out some food instead of bombs... I often think of Afghanistan an 9/11 think that the few Afghani terrorists allegedly responsible for 9/11 would have been ousted by their countrymen if we'd sent food to the country and increased our friend base there. Instead we bombed Afghanistan, even though the terrorists on the planes in 9/11 were supposedly Saudi Arabian, and now created a country of enemies. It's like if we had bombed McVey's entire county after he did his bombing in OKC.

I was astounded to learn the amount of money we spend on war:
Ben Cohen explains the Federal Budget
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_sOIe5Ql0v8

As the Kinsey Sicks sing, "We Arm the World!"
Click here to see their performance.

I have long heard that money and food amounts are not the problem in the world... distribution of them is the problem. I wonder at World Bank policies of encouraging countries to abandon their relative self sufficiency in order to chase world money through cash crops. Ethiopia's drought I have heard is attributable to the monoculture of sugar cane they were encouraged to grown instead of their traditional self sustaining crops. The world economy and corporate money chasing leave us all victims to the changes as we become outsourced by the constantly changing most efficient and cheapest country. Increasingly, things are outsourced to the country with the least environmental regulations as well.

These thoughts, and judgments swirl through me. I try to keep outside of them. I try to focus on positive solutions, rather than dwell on problems.

I wish I could find the online video I saw a few years ago that showed the percentage of people in the world who have various "luxuries".