Contradictions

You can’t help noticing how right across from the ads for $279.00 serving spoons and $379.00 tins of 7 ounces of caviar and $539.00 a month Cadillacs and $175.00 cheese graters in the New York Times are stories about immigrant laborers in the Dominican Republic who earn less that $10.00 a day. Or locally, the guy selling Real Change newspapers for a buck a piece is standing in front of the Tiffany’s store where silver toothpicks cost 200 times that. Or here’s me on my twenty five hundred dollar bike riding past street kids who have no idea where their next meal is coming from.

How can this be just? How can it even be acceptable? But how can it be any different? If I could wave a magic wand and make everyone equal economically would I? And what difference would it make if we were?

I get to the point where it’s just too exhausting and complicated. You’d think that as well educated as I am, I’d have some sort of idea why it’s like this or what could be done to reduce the inequities.

But instead, I just sit at my computer, listening to the Steelers game on the internet, wondering how to milk 327 words out of my discontent. In a way, I don’t even want things to be any better because if they were, then I’d have to be better, too. As it is, I can wallow in self-pity and self-righteousness without having to do anything about it—beyond merely moaning.

It’s foggy outside today and that’s how I feel on the inside, too. My thoughts and emotions can’t quite see each other across the expanse within; there’s a certain cold comfort in this but it smacks as well of self-indulgence: I could make things clearer, but I’m too lazy to.

I guess I’m no different than the New York Times: on one side are the goodies, on the other, the truth.