Privileged

This evening, after the art museum, after my hair cut and half-slice of "Chocolate Lovin' Spoonful Cake," I retreated to the hammock in an attempt to get through Tortillas, Beans, and M-16s. Content wise, the book offers a fascinating insight into the guerrilla war of El Salvador during the mid 1980s. The author is a photographer, not a writer. I have to drag myself through her writing style. Her attempts at deep understanding and platitude fall very short from the mark. And I hate her whiny white person attitude, but appreciate that she does not portray herself as a tireless saint. Those complaints out of the way, I love the personal, intimate encounters with poverty. Because the author of the book primarily set out to document the war through photojournalism, her writings detail the daily lives of people fighting and supporting the "compas.*" While I've learned a lot about the nature of this particular war, the book draws my attention for highlighting the abyssal gulf between American perceptions and reality.

Poverty not necessarily in the sense of abject lack compared to an American middle-class standard of living, but how that absolute absence shapes and defines an entire culture. I feel so utterly self-absorbed and unaware as I read. Firstly, I have never traveled outside of the United States. I have never felt a need to understand in great detail the political and military histories of any countries that weren't covered in Euro. Especially those in South and Central America, Asia, and Africa, which is roughly greater than 70% of the world I would imagine. Secondly, my sense of how poverty affects the human psyche has always been in the terms of the American poor. The fact that other countries have different cultures as a result of their economic standing never occurred to me. I had naively assumed it was the different histories and geographies. I'm sure those factors play some part, most likely because they are the cause of poverty.

For all of the information and wealth and privilege that has surrounded me since I was born, nothing has ever prompted me to think like this. No public school education. No parental guidance. No other book I've read, fiction or nonfiction. The only thing that even got close to this consideration was Jeff's voyage abroad, because he personally narrated stories of the differences. Being in the AP track, my historical education was solely Euro-centric. Sure, while I hold the belief that the majority of "cultural exposure" classes are hastily designed to satisfy some politically correct agenda, by God, how much more could my horizons have expanded if I'd known? Every mention of poverty in school seems to instill the idea, "Aren't you proud to live in America and not these horrible other places?" No, I'm not proud, I feel guilty now that by lottery of fate and genetics, I am here, writing in my interblog on my nice laptop in my swivel chair with running water, electricity, and a half-slice of "Chocolate Lovin' Spoonful Cake" left in the fridge. And that I will still do nothing about distant oppression.

I'll get over the guilt, it's a white person thing. Admittedly, I'll probably even forget my initial horror at how ignorant I was. Still, I wish this wasn't some revolutionary, adolescent discovery. I guess if every child was inducted at an early age to realize how precious and tenuous their life is, they'd be more satisfied with themselves. They wouldn't need to buy so much, and then maybe they'd have a little more money and a little more time to actually do something about the problem.

*compas is short for compañero/as, "friend" similar to comrade