obviously I have not left the first world – intellectually, emotionally, spatially, just floating in my bubble of 24K gold.

I was  so drastically yanked out of my dulled down, subdued, blindness that begins to cloud your vision when a person has been isolated in the first world for too long. There all these issues that Americans love to fill their minds with, fog their minds up with, and I had forgotten that I as well can succumb to this infection.

There are people throughout the world still suffering from “curable diseases”, food shortages, drought, tyrannical rulers, where there are no laws to report rape, where police must be bribed for any law enforcement, where the mere concept of freedom of religion can get you killed.

And here we are concerned with – in the mainstream:

rich people giving their rich friends money to get elected

facebook stocks lose value

a shooting at a movie theater

teachers sleeping with students

homophobia in a fast food joint

And then those who can see through these smoke screens – from the radical edge

the RICO strategies of banks as the same as the mafia

the conspiracy of college loans

the inequity in the tax rate

the benefits the insurance companies get from the new insurance law

who is really making money from the wars

facial recognition technology

BUT ALL OF THIS DEMONSTRATES EXTRAORDINARY PRIVILEGE

The simple act of reading is a right fought for by millions of people. The ability to express ones’ opinion, to question the government, to know about how the global financial world works. Besides the actual practical realities that we constantly take for granted – getting medicine at the local corner store, traffic lights that operate 24/7, schooling for all, supermarkets full of food – fuck if its organic -, clean water from our taps and showers, electricity for each and every desire. Hell at least here there is something to steal, millions of people live in places where their neighbors, stores, houses don’t contain anything worth stealing.

I think it is just too hard to dive into the desperation of how we have abandoned so much of the world, to voluntarily live with the knowledge of how our self-involvement and search for pleasure directly means we are comfortable letting people suffer. We are so fucking privileged that we don’t even have to donate our emotional or mental space to the realities of other people.

And I sure did feel like a fucking asshole and idiot for being so comfortably complicit in this horror.