Our cups runneth over

You know here in the United States our cups runneth over. It is really hard to forget how well we are doing when we are constantly inundated with the "reality" T.V. of Paris Hilton and MTV Cribs, but we are really doing pretty well for ourselves. Of course there is poverty in the United States, but not the same poverty that you see in other parts of the world.

In Brazil, people speak of the difference between pobreza and miseria. Pobreza is poverty. Miseria is complete and utter deprivation. We have pobreza. Too much of the world has miseria. In today's online New York Times there is a multi-media presentation by journalist Nicholas D. Kristof. He traveled to Swaziland in Africa to cover the devastation of the A.I.D.S. epidemic there. Swaziland was never what you'd call a rich country, but now fully 40% of the adult population is infected with the virus that causes A.I.D.S. He profiles several families now headed or soon to be headed by children, because all the adult members of the families have one by one died off, victims of this horrible disease.

These kids, eleven or twelve years old, living in mud huts, students in the 5th grade, have nursed dying parents, grandparents and aunts and now are the heads of households, caring for their younger brothers and sisters as best they can. They eat one meal a day at school. They have one tattered set of clothes. They have no shoes. They have faced cruel death after cruel death. They are "parents". They are 12. They are many.

In contrast, I read an article yesterday in the June 2006 issue of Texas Monthly called "The Gangtas of Godwin Park" about a wealthy teenager in Houston who in "a tragic tale of drugs, money, race, and MySpace" was gunned down in a prescription drug deal gone wrong. It is a cautionary tale for the rich kids I teach here in Austin, who escape the pressures of their expectations with drug use and risky behaviors and for the poor kids I teach here in Austin who must walk the halls next to kids whose lifestyles look to them too much like those depicted on MTV's My Super Sweet Sixteen and who want a piece of it. One of the kids now doing time for the death of the wealthy dealer is a poor kid who used to work at McDonald's but fell into a crowd who talked him out of getting it the "slow way" and into getting it the "fast way". Like the child-parents in the New York Times piece, this young man, Dontae Terrell Moore, had helped care for younger relatives at his aunt's crowded rented home not far from where the wealthy victim, Jonathan Finkelman, lived.

By all accounts, Dontae lived in pobreza, not in miseria, but living so close to the very wealthy and being exposed to a steady media diet of the obscenely rich, took its toll on basically a good kid. Jonathan was equally swept up in the weird psychological mix of high academic and social expectations, entitlement, youthful invulnerability and thrill seeking that is pressed on kids these days. They are emotionally immature and sheltered by their parents, but have access to a very fast lifestyle while being pressured to perform. I see it everyday. It leads to acting out at school, cheating on tests, drug and alcohol abuse and risky sexual behaviors. And too many parents are blind to what their "good kids" are doing. Most survive somehow. Some end up like Jonathan.

People should pay more attention to this cautionary tale and should look very closely at what their kids are up to. Problems are not always with "other people's children". People should also look very closely at the stories of the parentless families in Africa, the bleak lives of those in the northern Brazil, those displaced refugees living in torn tents all over the world, the isolated Pakistanis who froze in the mountain winter after last year's earthquake--all the people who live not in pobreza but in miseria. If we could only stop comparing ourselves to the miniscule number of Paris Hiltons and Kayne Wests in the world and take more frequent notice of the hundreds of millions of human beings struggling to maintain some dignity for themselves and their families with no food and no change of clothes and death at their door, we would see that our cup runneth over.

Of course, we should continue to push forward, to strive for a better life. It is part of the human spirit, but we should do it with a level of gratitude that fills us up rather than a jealousy that empties our souls.