Friday, January 02, 2009

Flying While Brown

Jason and I have about the same conversation every time we fly. Just before boarding, I will make a ladies room run. He asks me why I can't go on the plane and I tell him that if the plane crashes, I don't want to be found dead in the head with my pants around my ankles.

Good thing I don't wear a scarf and that Jason is fair skinned and fair haired.

It just goes to prove that often people aren't suspicious of what you say, but how you look.

I have also made remarks on board about where the safest seats were located.

Difference? Oh yeah, I'm white and Americanized, not brownish and foreign looking.

Jason bought a book of photography the other day. It's called What Matters. I was struck by several photographs. One was of a filthy, balding three year old girl, her hands black from the labor she does at a battery recycling plant in Bangladesh, the other a three or four year old American girl at a day spa, getting her first mani/pedi.

There was another striking contrast in the photos of a young woman in India who was scavenging from a junk yard and a young American teen who was scavenging through the hundreds of articles of clothing strewn on her bedroom floor, looking for something to wear that day.

I know we can't undo all the injustices in the world. I like my luxuries also. But we, as a nation, need to really look and see how most of the world lives and stop being so wasteful and gluttonous and ignorant to the fact that thousands are dying every day for a want of the simplest things that we take for granted.

Like a glass of clean water to drink.

Like more than a mouthful of food a day.

Like more than a single scrap of clothing to wear.

Like not having our three year old daughters work cracking open batteries by hand so she can get a meal at the end of a 13 hour work day.

American pets live better than many children in this world.

We need to stop pretending, looking the other way, shrugging our shoulders and saying there is nothing we can do about it. We need figure out how to do something about it.

Poverty breeds desperation and desperation breeds anger and anger breeds terrorism.

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

Amen and AMEN!!!

Anonymous said...
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Anonymous said...
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Anonymous said...

Thank you.

(And I wonder why those other comments were removed. But I can live with the uncertainty.)

JanetLee said...

The comments were deleted because they had nothing to do with the post subject.

They both were extremely long descriptions of some atheletic event and had dozens of links to sites that were, to me, questionable, and did not have anything to do with the topic of the post.

I deleted them because I believed them to be some sort of spam.