What World is This?

The Difference Between the US and Less Developed Countries

We feel so superior to others. We disdain them as less sophisticated than us, or call them “backwards” or “peasants” when we read their stories. We shake our heads knowingly and feel a superior pity towards them.

And we think how awful for those people.

We see a post on Facebook or a segment on the evening news in which nutters from (insert country in strife here) are shouting hateful epithets and beliefs so foreign in concept, we believe them absurd. They wave homemade signs, and they look crazy.

And we think how awful for those people.

Someone sends us a blog post profiling some folks in a faraway land who can’t get a fair shake because their government is so corrupt, so hopelessly broken that it has ground to a halt. Perhaps there’s even a picture of their leader, some grinning despot with eyes lacking humanity.

And we think how awful for those people.

We slide past posts of their environmental disasters as fast as we can because we just can’t read one….single….more story, our guts contracting, and a pervasive sense of futility and helplessness washing over us.

And we think how awful for those people.

We Haven’t Come As Far As We Thought

After spending a Saturday morning perusing the News app on my iPhone, I encountered each scenario above and others that were once-in-a-blue-moon news reports, and I came to the conclusion I don’t understand this world anymore.

Hell, I don’t even recognize it.

They (whomever they are) changed it. They chipped away at it, eroded it bit by bit, these tiny bites not even registering. This pale imitator doesn’t even look like the one I grew up in. I’m not talking about romanticizing your childhood. I’m talking about it’s allllll fucking changed, a world lacking in integrity, compassion, decorum, and some goddamn common courtesy.

We used to do what was right not because we had to but because it was how we were built. We were fair. We respected and upheld the laws. We believed in things.

Not Some Third World Country

I read the news.
I read the stories.
They were sad.
They were infuriating.
They were relentless in their numbers.

And they weren’t about some backwards, easily dismissed country, they were about America.

• We’ve held prisoners in jail for decades without ever charging them with a crime. They are treated roughly receiving broken bones, concussions, etc. and they’ve NEVER even been charged with a crime much less convicted of one. I hate bad guys too, believe me I do, but I believe in the tenets of our laws and justice system more. You don’t get to keep people in jail forever.
• Pedophiles and sexual harassers are put up for or are elected to office with impunity. Worse yet is that persons of faith, especially prominent celebrity ministers, publicly excuse or ludicrously explain away this behavior.
• Our government is in complete disarray with opposite sides warring with each other.
• The rich get richer. The poor get poorer. The middle class pays for it all.
• Anger crazed, wide-eyed hate protestors make the news regularly. Our children watch these reports on tv.
• There is another mass shooting every week.
• Our environment is an ecological nightmare, a fact hastened along with current federal government roll backs of our hard fought for protections.

And I think how awful for us.