Back in the USA

Tracey called me this morning to complain about how ugly and lacking historic significance everything is, post-Prague. She was incensed by the lack of architectural magnificence surrounding us. Nothing but glass and modernism...

This got me thinking about how many people across the globe dream of American glass buildings and modernism. How they ache to come here and land that opportunity--ripe as opportunities are believed to be here, fresh fruit dangling within reach.

My family was one of these immigrant experiences--we pushed our way over here and we made it. We're a success story with a beginning like so many others. In fact, our ending is not all the different from others in the echelon of social hierarchy we fall into.

I knew no struggle growing up, and my mother tells me shew knew none either. But compared to me she did struggle--she had to husband picked out for her by her family, she had to live with the stigma of being a divorced woman in India--albeit briefly, she had to fight for her right to pursue medicine (the competition is stiff in a way that the Western world cannot grasp competitive instinct).

So struggle as I see it, is a concept that exists on a continuum...and on a continuum everything is relative. So yes, compared to starving children in Ethiopia she had it good (in India, we are told to finish what's on our plates by reminding us that there are starving children in Africa. I've heard that in America they are told of starving children in India--makes sense). And yes, compared to the girl who couldn't afford to go to college, I had it good.

But no one talks about that 1% waaaaay at the top, who have it better than the rest of us. Why doesn't that upward comparision come up? Is it because that would just be too depressing? Is it because there's no point to that comparison? Like apples and oranges...putting a round peg in a square hole--though you could probably put an apple and an orange in the same hole--mixing my metaphors and confusing myself.

This post is not meant to be an ethnocentric rant or my philosophy of life existing on a sliding scale...the truth is simple and while often realized, seldom truly understood: The grass is ALWAYS greener on the OTHER side.