Friday, October 21, 2016

For Richer or for Poorer




What is it like to be so poor when one has absolutely nothing, when assets are down to zero? What is it like to have a billion dollars?  Or, can I imagine what is it like to be worth fifty billion?  But how can one’s life be reduced to the anonymity of the homeless, or life in a remote shack somewhere, anywhere, a forgotten patch at which there is no one else who care or anyone to care for.  That forgotten point could be in the middle of a city, under a bridge, in the seclusion of a dead end alley, but it might as well be in a forest in Guatemala or desert in Sudan, or a patch of cardboard in bustling Phnom Penh or Rio de Janeiro, or Manila.  What is it like to be so dimensionless or to be as invisible as a freckle on a tanned and wrinkled skin or when one occupies an area of nothingness?  What is it like to live in a twenty thousand square foot home and travel in your own plane?

It is difficult to imagine what it is like to have nothing.  Conversely, for the majority of the people, it is just as hard to imagine what it is like to have everything.  What is it like to wonder where the next meal will come when the last one was three days ago; on the flip side, what is it like to have everything one can ask for, underscored by a life of lavish parties and extravagant vacations, a yacht  and private jet?  To anyone who has nothing – zero – he or she can only think of an infinite number of ways to imagine what it is like to have something, or anything.  Zero to infinity is sometimes that easy to grasp.

The state of zero and infinity can sometimes be temporary.  One can even go from one to the other in a day, while for others there could be years of bliss or a very long period of utter misery.  From zero to infinity and every moment in between.  A teenage love would feel like an infinite rhapsody when a boy or girl could think of nothing else.  A romantic breakup can bring everything so infinitely joyous down to the abyss of sadness, sorrow and despair.  If love were the height of infinite euphoria, falling out of it can sometimes feel like swirling into a bottomless whirlpool of oblivion.  Infinity to zero is also that easy to understand.

How is it then that the world allows for there to be this duality of everything? There are countless places and conditions where we see why it is this or that but there is nothing that vexes our human nature than the concept of rich and poor.  When some of us go to faraway places for an exotic vacation we sometimes spoil it by second guessing why we didn’t book the higher priced hotel room with an ocean view; we wonder during flight what they serve in first class as we get our own at the economy section; why we were picked up by a crowded shuttle bus while some were whisked away in stretched limousines. Do we wonder though that the waiter in his starched white uniform smiling at us to take our order for a sumptuous lunch at the resort woke up that morning at four, leaving two sleeping children and a wife in a mildewed two bedroom apartment where his mother also lived, took a long bus ride after a hurried breakfast of bread and weak coffee, walked eight blocks more to get to work, for wages that are just barely enough to make their lives possible?  When we travel to these places we should remember to tip generously because what little the amount may mean relative to our vacation budget it could be huge enough to make life a little bit better for a family of five for a day.

When we were in Palawan, a resort island in the Philippines, our tour guide/server was a scrawny kid named O’neal.  I inquired about the name; he told me his father named him after Shaquille O’neal.  I recall as a kid that one of the young post war babies I grew up with was named Lockheed, after the fighter airplane manufacturer.  Then there is a cousin-in-law who named his eldest son Aldrin, of space faring fame.  I remember a boardinghouse mate whose name was Eisen (it was short for Eisenhower). He became a doctor.  I’d venture to say that such naming choices were a means, wishful or even wistful, to connect with what is rich, powerful, adventurous, and to a nation with technological leadership.  How is it that much of the world would look to another place from a distance and say, “That is where I and my family want to be”? Of course, we who live in that place take this for granted.  Not for any particular reason but for an awful loss of perspective – a sort of collective myopia.

While on a taxi to the airport leaving Barbados years ago (it was on company business), the driver told me that he had never left the postage-size island, all of his forty year life.  We may find that hard to imagine but I say that as many as perhaps over ninety per cent of the world’s population has never left their country of birth.  I asked the driver why or had he ever wondered what it was like to go visit another country?  He said, “I’m happy where I am and I’m not about to spoil it by finding out what I am missing”. He said further that many of his fellow “Badians” who had traveled abroad would sometimes come home a bit unhappy when they couldn’t get in Barbados what they saw were common place in another island like Puerto Rico, for example.  On the other hand, somewhere or anywhere in the U.S. a trip to Wal-Mart or Costco is considered a chore like doing the laundry or yard work.

No one wishes to be poor.  Politicians all throughout history had and continue to espouse war on poverty, and to quote Ronald Reagan, “… poverty won”, despite the billions of dollars poured into the program.  I am not about to politicize this issue.  In every civilization, from two thousand years ago to today there had always been the poor and poorest among people just as certain as there were very rich ones – all still very true today. The poor who think they have nothing must look to how infinitely vast the wealth some folks have.  Zero to infinity.  But that is not all there is, isn’t it?

One thing we must recognize is that in this world the book ends of life are the great equalizers.  We do begin with zero at birth and we are met with an infinite number of options to live our lives. A person who lived a life from austere origins, with zero chance of moving out of the project, or the shanty towns of squatter homes, or even drug ridden neighborhoods, but struggled to free himself or herself from the bondage of poverty through sheer will power and industry will have achieved an infinitely greater amount of wealth the moment he or she had enough to own a small home somewhere in a better neighborhood than someone who went to an Ivy League law school and went on to own a mansion in Beverly Hills.
 
This is all about, “Zero and Infinity”.

I contend that zero and infinity are related, or that at least there is something in common between the two.  They are the book ends of a universe we live in but I will not get into how I derived that conclusion here. In the stage we call life, the character we make of ourselves and of whom we know, care for and love, have shelf lives that fall neatly between those book ends. The book ends of our life are merely that.  It is the pages that were written in between that make up what’s between zero and infinity.  Our zero beginnings, whether born to abject destitution or wealth, for poorer or for richer, will be enriched infinitely by how well we live the one life we have.  In the end, both rich and poor will ultimately go to their final destination the same way they began.  Zero to infinity to zero.  That’s how much easier it is to comprehend.

From the idle mind wishing y’all the richness of infinite moments,




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