Dan Quayle, while he was serving as vice-president under George "Poppy" Bush, once made a fool of himself. Uh, let me narrow that down to the particular time (among many) he made a fool of himself that I am interested in. There was a TV series on at the time called Murphy Brown, starring Candice Bergen. The lead character had discovered she was pregnant and decided to have the baby instead of aborting it. Great for the pro-lifers, right? Well, not for Mr. Quayle, who publicly criticized a FICTIONAL character for her out-of-wedlock pregnancy. Suddenly millions of Americans felt a wave of stark terror envelop them when they realized that this dude was only a heartbeat away from the presidency! Why do I mention this now? Only to reassure you dear readers that, although I may be about to commit a similar act of foolhardiness, I am in fact several steps lower than Dan Quayle was in the line of succession to be president of the good old USA. So here goes...
The cartoon series South Park is something that sharply divides the population: either you love it or hate it. I happen to be in the former category, although some episodes (and parts of episodes) were/are really seriously off-base. Well, that's satire, I suppose. Still, I have to take issue with an assumption expressed in the episode titled Raisins by Kyle, one of the main characters who often is the mouthpiece in the series for rational arguments.
In Raisins, Kyle is trying to convince his friend Stan, who is down in the dumps over his girlfriend dumping him for another boy, to leave the overly pessimistic Goth kids clique and get back to his normal life. One of the Goth kids tells Kyle how painful life is, which angers Kyle. He retorts to the Goth kid (and I'm paraphrasing) that he doesn't know what pain is and why doesn't he try living in a third world country to find out. The Goth kid comes back with a silly reply, and the impression is left that Kyle's premise of misery and pain being somehow justifiable in poor countries (and conversely UNjustifiable in the prosperous West) is simple, factual common sense truth. I say bull!
Whether one is talking about foreign missionaries, Peace Corps volunteers, Madonna/Angelina, or other do-gooders who presume that people in poorer nations are in the throes of misery (and inferiority), the fact remains that happiness (and unhappiness) is relative to the context that the person is living in. How would one of you "Westerners" like it if there suddenly was revealed to be a society somewhere that was much more technologically advanced than us? And that the people in that society came to dominate the international media and decided on their own that we were miserable in our relatively less prosperous lives and that they needed to send people over to our lands to make us more like them? Well, that's how some of us regard and treat those "third-worlders", with the same condescension (and possible prejudice). Sure, help people in need, especially if they request it. But don't assume that because of their circumstances they deserve to be less happy than us.
Conversely, being in Western society can raise up all sorts of factors contributing to emotional turmoil. Ever heard of the "rat race"? Well, it just keeps getting worse, folks. And we want to spread THAT to the rest of the world ???!!!
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