someone made your six dollar sweater, and they didn't make six dollars.

a meditation on econimics, then. a maelstrom of have and have-not. im not sure if i've talked on this much yet but thailand is a world apart form the US. i just spent two hours or an hour and a half rapping to my new friend Japanese-American friend Larry from Wyoming about our situation as Haves in this world of Have-nots. and dramatically fitting young women selling silver jewelery kept apporaching us and trying to get some of our money, and i just couldn't resist--the first one, her little boy was with her, selling roses for ten baht a piece. i have no one to give a rose to in thailand! but he couldn't have been more than eight years old, working the streets at night... the next one, her child was on her back, he couldn't have been a year old, and she didn't say a word about him, didn't even show him til i'd bought a silver bracelet with thailand's elephants on it, when she bent down and wrapped him onto her back, and the third one (they all were young), she must have been nineteen, belly heavy with child, she was trying so hard to get a little bit of the money we make so easily as americans, and forutnately Larry helped her because i knew if i kept giving money more and more would come, and you can't solve the worlds problems by giving bits of money to victims of those problems, but at the same time each
separate
individual
case
of poverty and need is separetely individually heart-wrenching and demanding of your pity, of the one thing you, as a first-class citizen of the world, can surely do to rectify it: give money. i dont need the bracelets i bought tonight, i dont want them--i just thought it woudl be too humiliating and direct to refuse what these girls were offering and give them money directly... Larry gave the rose he bought from the little boy to his mother, and her face for a moment was a theater of conflicting emotions... i am sure that rose was on sale again-- what is the fine line between buying and charity? its a line thats walked and walked-upon in the night markets here. in the clink of loose baht in the cup of a man with no right leg, the eyes of the child laid behind the racks of t-shirts advertising beer and 'IM SHY--but ive got a big dick', the most crude decorations of a society these people know nothing about, aimed merely at the pocketbooks of those here for fun, for a few days or weeks in a tropical paradise they will then leave and forget--but this need is ever-present. its not something i solve with the patronage of silver bracelets or a few coins in the cup of a mother with no place to go with her two children, on a street thats not safe at night, her belly holding another-- how is it solved? i think you are like me, you are a citizen of the developed world, you have never had to beg for money on the street or go wtihout food for lack of money, or put off retirement becuase you cant financially plan next week much less the final years of your life--we are, and i really deeply want you to know this, financially rich. we're wealthy. we're loaded. we're every word available in several languages for rich. when I, as an American, imagine a poor person, what do i think of? an older house, a used car, a staticky television, TV dinners, spousal abuse. do poor Thai people have any but the last? do middle-class Cambodian people have those things? are we fucking rich? yes! we are fucking rich! does this make us happy? answer for yourself in your own heart. i wrote tonight in my journal about how much i feel i have to learn from these people, and how little i feel that i have to teach. what can i teach--English? they speak everything theyll need to know, and dont have time in teh day to give to studying more. philosophy? things are too simple to need that--one needs to survive, to provide the basics for living, before one can think of how best to live. the only thing i can think of is to spead the word about america as it is, or japan for that matter, about how life really feels in the richest countries, about how happy or unhappy people are there. about how meaningful or not our lives are. these things i think it woudl benefit Thai people to know, because all they know of our culture is the crass t-shirts they sell and the pirated music that comes from speakers in the night markets, and the overweight tourists who patronize their bars and young women. im sorry if this is direct, or negative, but its real. this is a learning experience for me, nad if you never get the chance to come here, id like you to have a taste of it. feel free to skip to the next journal entry if this is more self-examination than youre comfortable with, but im painfully in teh midst of it and want company. Larry was my company tonight, a Japanese-American from Wyoming, so close to ND/NE/wherever it is that im from, and we hashed and rehashed the whole issue over drinks, on teh corner of the night bazaar here, constantly being offered silver or silver-looking bracelets by girls with no choice other than to offer them, despite our best-practiced looks of disinterest. everything is cheap here, but it is their livlihood, it si cheap in the English language, in the first-world economic society, and not elsewhere. i met a guy today, Jade WangKlon, he's a painter. i think he has a delicate eye for color and line, and his paintings are better than almost everything i saw come from 30,000$ college training while i was in school. his 20x35 inch acrylics were 400baht apiece, the originals, or about eight dollars and fifty cents. i bought two. i asked him how long it took to make one, and he said a day or two. his easel was there, and itd obviously been the seat of many a painting... he said hed been painting for fifteen years. 400 baht a day-or-two. plus the time spent selling those paintings. youre talking about an income of 300 or 350baht a day, at best. thats 6.5o$ or 7$, around 700yen. thats nothing. i made that in my spare time at AEON, i spend that without second thought in any bar in any developed country in teh world. it is a day bent over an easel with an artist's touch to color and line for him, and more spent in midday heat in front of his paintings, hoping some tourist will feel theyre special enough to take home as a souvenir. strictly portraits of rural thai life and buddha images and the sort of thing youd want to remember as a tourist. there were no limbless beggars, there were no corrugated-roof houses. im sure if he has any artistic spirit under that technique, that the paintings he puts passion into never make his shelves, both because they wouldnt sell to foreigners and because he couldnt stomach selling them. but i bought a nice scene from rural thailand with some oxen and birds and mountains, and a well-balanced canvas of bamboo leaves at sunset... what is my point? im leaving you to draw it, friend. peoples lives are not the same worldwide. what we take for granted other people take at great labor from the hands of those who, like us, value it little. im not saying we are evil. im not saying they are pathetic. this is the situation. this is what the world looks like. is it what we want? is it beyond our control to repair? i absolutely say 'no' to the second. i told Larry, whos 60something, i'm too young to give up on it, to accept it as a damn shame, but one i can do nothing about. i can and i will do something about it, period. we can do something, as those in power. they cant do anything, they can scrounge and stretch whatever ability they have to the limit to try and inch up the ladder we're born miles higher on. they can do next to nothing. we can do something. will we? thats all for today folks. sleep well.