Generally speaking, my days aren't spent worrying about suicide bombers walking in to the bank as I take out money for my new $600 handbag, $400 shoes, or $100 dinner - my bags could feed a small village of children, but my mind isn't in Africa, India, or some other nation in need. My mind is on that that crisp python snake skin metallic Michael Kors tote that beckoned to me from the Soho showroom.
If I go to a restaurant, the worry about picking up a life threatening disease is close to null.
When we see airplanes in the sky, we hardly notice. We only look up if it's writing a message in the sky - an advertisement for beer, a proposal, a sports victory cheer. We don't worry that seeing an airplane will result in an airstrike.
There is poverty - but even that is sheltered poverty. I see the same "homeless" people on the streets everyday, with their cardboard signs, their dogs, and their cellphones. Note: If you have a cellphone, you have the ability to get a job.
Poverty anywhere else is children with transparent skin, empty eyes, and protruding bones. Begging mothers, angry men, and wailing babies.
That is poverty. That is fear.
Perhaps it's all relative. But sometimes it feels that we are truly blessed.
I can't help but wonder - why me? why them? Perhaps the more fortunate are here to help the less. Yet, the majority of us live in our little plastic castles under the sea - trivialities consume us, and only the really special (or maybe just really determined) make it to the surface of the fishbowl, gasping in the air of ailments, poverty, starvation, and war that is just above the surface, unable for most of us to see.
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