VDH: Upside Down World

"This is the 21st century, not the 19th. Those who makes $40,0000 or $80,000 or $1,000,000 per year all pretty much have hot water for their showers. Their tap water doesn’t sicken them, and they watch about the same TV shows and mostly have cell phones. Mass consumerism, easy credit, and technology have blurred the distinctions between wealth and poverty. That I buy a Wal-Mart sweat suit to ride a bike in the winter for $20 does not mean that I am any colder than the Manhattan exec who buys one with a designer label version for $150 at a boutique on Park Avenue. His $20 million-dollar penthouse apartment is no warmer or cooler than my Selma farmhouse. As far as the private jet, the yacht, the 5 homes, I’d prefer to fly commercial, rent a kayak, and have trouble enough keeping two toilets running and the hot water heater from silting up without worrying about either 50 of them or a staff of 5 to oversee them all.

So the advantages of wealth are more of a status thing and free choices of recreation or more leisure time than a vast difference in material conditions. For all the talk of the uninsured, one can buy catastrophic health insurance for $200-300 a month. And at the local rural health clinics in my area, many people, a year or two after arriving from the third word in Oaxaca, find good dental care, prenatal attention and major medical treatment pretty much free, something, for example, unheard of in rural Mexico."

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