Socio-Economic Disparity

I'm reminded of an incident a few years ago when I was in Michigan. A visiting scholar from the International Affairs College in Beijing sat in on a human rights course I was taking. Afterwards, myself and a friend, who had spent a semester in Beijing, approached the visiting scholar and asked her if she would like to go out for coffee. She agreed, and we went to a Caribou Coffee near campus.

My friend asked, "So, what do you think so far?" as she had never been to the States before. The visiting scholar replied, "Oh, well, everyone here has so much money." My friend and I exchanged looks.

The woman had been picked up at the airport by a few professors and whisked away in a car down the high-walled highways that lead out of the airport and the slums of Detroit and straight into the plush, sprawling lawns and massive homes that populate Auburn Hills, MI. She was most likely housed on-campus, and spent all of her time being hand-led around the university. Even if there was any sort of mass-transit in Michigan, she didn't have a lot of time for exploration.

Silently, my friend and I decided it was necessary to expand on her statement. "You know," I began, "Not everyone here is wealthy. In fact, there are many Americans who are very poor." She looked at both of us, my friend nodded, and mentioned that just a stone's throw from campus was Pontiac, MI (generally considered to be more destitute and broken than Detroit, and compacted into a much smaller area). Then my friend smiled, "Would you like to see it?"

The visiting professor clearly was an intelligent person, and as any intelligent person would, she wanted to have an accurate picture of the country she was visiting. She agreed, and off we went, down I-59 into the heart of Pontiac. Even before we were in the heart of the city, she, looking around, let escape an, "...Oh." We drove aimlessly through neighborhoods with burnt-out, boarded up houses and rusted cars on blocks. We definitely made an impact on her, and her view of America. Apparently it got to the university's president, as well, who was less than thrilled.

All this aside, the buildings in Pontiac, condemned and rotting though they were, and their proximity to obsessively manicured lawns (and owners), could not begin to compare to that of the living conditions of some of the world's most poor, the less-than-a-dollar-a-day crowd.

I find it even more interesting that we can look at pictures like the ones in the link above, and not notice the disparity in our own surroundings; parallels within our own home countries go unnoticed because we're simply so used to them. Like staring at a blank wall, eventually the corners of your vision fade to black.

The solution? Move around.