Poverty in Mexico had profound impact on me during trip

[Quixote1818]

I just spent a week down in Baja, Mexico and went as far down as Mulege and Conception Bay about 600 to 700 miles down. Baja is actually the wealthiest or second wealthiest state in Mexico but their is still a tremendous amount of poverty.


I just cant get this crazy old man on the beach out of my mind. He was walking back and fourth mumbling and yelling at a dog that was following him. He came right up to me and tried to talk to me. I could see so much pain and fear in his eyes. He tried to talk to this lady at the next car over and she shunned him away in a very rude manor. He left her putting his head down and his body language suggested he felt rejected by the woman. I thought about him the whole way back and his weathered face and how sad he looked when the woman shunned him away is still burned into my mind. The man had probably been treated poorly by people all his life.

I got back to America and saw all the wealth and perfectly manicured bushes and trees. The roads with four lanes with wide shoulders and everything looked clean and well kept. The forests were healthy having been clear cut on the Mexican side with so many Natural Resources depleted in the wild. I fell so lucky and depressed that I can't do more to help people like him. Today on Oprah she was talking about Child Slavery in Africa and everything I saw in Mexico just made it all so much more real. I feel guilty and extremely lucky for everything I have. The sunset tonight was beautiful but I felt empty inside looking at it. In the sunset I saw the crazy old man and wished he could enjoy it. I wondered what his life had been like. Was he born into extreme poverty? Did he have family that loved him? How hard had his life been? Did he ever love? Was he ever happy? What left him crazy on the beach? The only way I saw him was scavenging through the mass of garbage that had piled up along the bleak desert hillside. Hopefully once he was happy, young and handsome and vibrant.

I am glad I saw that old man. I hope he stays with me for the rest of my life. I plan to keep him in my mind to remind me of the billions of others who live in old shacks and bathe in dirty water. I will always think that I could have been that old man. If I was born into poverty in Mexico that old crazy man could have been me. I was lucky he was not and so it's my responsibility to help the less fortunate. I am not a religious person but the story's of Jesus being with the Poor bring tears to my eyes. That someone could actually go live around people like that crazy old man and love them and hug them and make them feel special again. Not shun them away as someone sub human. I hope there is someone who will hug that poor old man from time to time. Smile at him, hold his hand and cry when he dies. My biggest fear is that he wont have anyone and he will die on that beach among the scattered trash lonely and depressed and no one will cry for him.

[Catherine Vincent]

1. Beautiful and sad.

Thanks for being you.

[Quixote1818]

7. Thanks

:pals:

[knowbody0]

2. the contrast of life also impacted me in Mexico

it was 35 years ago, and it still haunts me. we need to acknowledge the suffering in this world.

[Quixote1818]

3. The amount of suffering in the world is stifling

:cry:

[Tsiyu]

15. kick n/t

[On the Road]

4. I Like the Way You Travel

a lot of Americans would go out of their way to avoid those sights.

On the other hand, I visited Venezuela last summer and went through a number of poor and working class areas. Although many of the people were poor by US standards, I never saw the sense of resignation and hopelessness that you report. On the contrary, people in all walks of life were neat, composed, friendly, dignified, going about their business. It was very impressive to me because it's not what I was expecting. That's what a socialist government will do.

[Quixote1818]

5. For the most part people in Baja do quite well

But their was definitely a tremendous amount of poverty too. I know in Juarez across from El Paso, Texas people live in dirty shacks with no running water. They get their water out of the Rio Grande. The poverty in most parts of Mexico is beyond belief but they are wealthy compared to people in Africa.

[On the Road]

9. I Was Prepared for Shantytowns in Venezuela

but the houses were generally cinder blocks and built along real streets with stairs, sidewalks, and runoff drains. Government-supported infrastructure. I've spent a little time in Mexico, and there seemed to be a real difference, especially in the spirit of ordinary people.

I think part of it might be that there seems to be both equality and opportunity at the working-class level in Venezuela. People have the idea that socialism and entrepreneurism are opposite ends of a coin, but I think if government lends a hand at the very lowest level, it can increase the efforts of the lower classes to contribute and raise themselves up.

[radwriter0555]

24. Comparing US standards of living to those in other countries doesn't

define POVERTY.

To most other nations a simple block house is considered doing very well. We americans impose artificial standards that aren't applicable everywhere else.

In Mexico a palapa hut can indeed be a luxurious home; home is what you make of it and who is in it, and more so, how happy you are.

Most people on the planet don't need a 4 bedroom ranch home on 1/4 acre with walmart down the street. They're perfectly content without the plastic siding and 32 barbie dolls and nintendo.

Americans far too often confuse poverty with differing standards of quality of life. Just because someone fishes for a living doesn't mean they're impoverished or poor. It just means they fish for a living.

Just because people don't have 2 cars and televisions doesn't mean they're poor or deprived.

:)

[On the Road]

28. Right, I Think Part of it is Inequality

I get a much worse vibe from poor neighborhoods in America than I did in Venezuela. If everyone shares a similar lifestyle, people can put up with great hardship, such as happens during a war. Poverty in America is as much a problem of shame and despair as of physical want.

[RUMMYisFROSTED]

6. Mexican jail had a profound effect on me.

Observations from my multitudinous border crossings:

Some of the finest human beings on Earth. Lots of Mi casa es su casa.

Don't mess with the Federales.

And, most importantly, they have oligarchs, too. Destroying the masses quicker only because the pie is smaller.

[nadinbrzezinski]

8. I grew up in Mexico

and I worked for then years as a medic, in tijuana to be specific.. trust me, winters were the worst, betweeen the floods and the cold... we got to see the worst and the best that people can do.

Hey on the interesting story, I actually transported a veteran of the Mexican revolution, he rode with Villa, I was going, my god this is living history... my student EMT did not give a flying rats ass... I still remember him clearly and I wish I could have done a living history interview, insteand of a Medical Status interview

[rockymountaindem]

10. I felt the same way when I went to the US Virgin Islands a few years ago.

Moreover, I was doubly disappointed that such deep poverty could exist in a US administered territory. I was 14 at the time, and it was pretty harsh. We rode into town a few times in vans with hotel employees, who hopped off and walked into homes which barely amounted to shacks. I felt awful asking them to clean my room and serve my food etc. It really ruined my trip.

[Lexingtonian]

11. yes

Sadly, even for our relative wealth, our own mental health care system is bad and inadequate.

The answer that seems right to me about the dilemma of our difference in condition is that we all serve the great end in common in different ways. The world needs a lot of different things done, mighty and petty, to carry on and even more of them to progress.

Our wealth and leisure is ultimately excused by our using it to serve the world, or mankind, in a way commensurate with it. Cleaning up garbage and curing cancer and raising children and picking tomatos and new nuclear reactor designs and keeping landscaping companies running are all in their own ways important things. We cannot know which ones the future is most greatly built on, but any of them can be crucial, a thousand minor ones could matter in their sum. We cannot know what truly serves the future best, or who, or how. We must guess, follow desire, build as high as we can or dare and can afford.

Look at it- our President, in a fashion the most powerful man in the world, does a thousand things and yet we know they add up to nothing like he pretends- it's all small, mean, and miserable stuff, soon forgotten and much waste. A nun leaves her poverty stricken family of paupers in Albania in the 1930s for India and inspires much of a dark and fallen world at its most hopeless moment, in the early 1980s, as Mother Teresa.

We are not terribly efficient. After many billions of dollars, flashy conferences, and scientists' careers expended on cancer or mental illness we don't even have good theories of either. But it seems inevitable that we shall work it all out, and it will have been made possible by hundreds of millions of people paying what seems to them small amounts of wealth individually- and no other society ever has. Our other endeavors seem even less efficient- but we in a few decades have a society that will be the first functioning truly pluralistic Modern- deeply democratic- society ever. America will be the society on Earth defined by the way it saved much of the rest and created most of the healing power that science could yield to medicine.

As for structural poverty, that is much or most of the fight of the next era in politics after the transition to Modernity. Fighting structural and Third World poverty now will be like the first abolitions of slavery in this country- small beginnings which did not threaten the power structure based on it much. But we know how agonizing the fight about slavery got, and ruling elites will take us to the brink when the abolition of structural poverty becomes earnest.

The process of our liberation- redemption- is slow and full of troubles and suffering. And yet, it seems to add up to enough for us all to retain hope that is enduring.

[Tsiyu]

12. Tonight on Nightline

someone said it would take only eight billion dollars a year to send every child in the world to primary school.

Humans spend forty billion a year on golf.

[Quixote1818]

29. Wow! Great stat. nt

[FreedomAngel82]

13. What a beautiful post

:( I know how you feel. It's so heartbreaking not to be able to help people and there are times I too feel selfish when people are hurting and worse off then me. I know I'm lucky as well. I've been to Mexico (around the border in Texas) for a few hours and the town wasn't too bad but it wasn't great either. I remember when we were in Mexico we stopped at this little restaurant and got some french fries and a coke. It wasn't very much price wise. My dad used a $5 and had some change left over so instead of him using it (why would he need Mexican change?) he gave it to the man who was the cashier and his eyes lit up and he was really surprised and very happy. You could tell my dad made that guys day. I was very proud of that. :)

[UdoKier]

14. Weep for America. The Bushites are modeling our economy...

...on Mexico's.

At least the cost of living in Mexico is reasonable. Most people I know spend more than half their income on rent or mortgage payments, and the price of groceries is through the roof....


And huge swaths of America are not as "wealthy and perfectly manicured" as San Diego...

Go visit Appalachia, where millions live in dire poverty, the smog is often worse than LA, and entire tops of mountains are being blown off to get at the coal in them.

Visit some of the squalid towns that ring Lake Okeechobee in Florida, where migrants work all day for pennies in the sugar cane fields.

The poverty you saw exists because Mexico's rich have felt entitled to give themselves the lion's share of the income and nothing to the peasantry since...since always. They would rather cover every window with wrought iron bars, build huge walls around their mansion, drive bulletproof SUV's to the Tiffany's store, than pay their workers a living wage.

Sound like anyone you know?


And have you noticed that rich Mexicans are usually at least several shades lighter than the poor, if not blonde and blue-eyed?


What you got was a glimpse of America's future. It's been happening for thirty years now, and there looks to be no stopping it...

[Melodybe]

16. Well Mexica might just elect the Mayor of Mexico as their new president

and he wants to change all that, I hear he is killing in the polls, something like 70% of Mexic wants to vote for him. With poverty like that people eventually rise up and overthrow those oppressing them.

Sure Bush is trying to do that to America, sure he is succeeding for the time being anyway. But they aren't going to take away the images of that old man. They aren't that powerful.

It was obviously a life changing experience, one that will make Quixote try and be better to people for the rest of his life. We should all hope to feel empathy on that level and still have the desire to want to change things and make them better.

Kick for a beautiful and inspiring post.

[UdoKier]

23. Not trying to take anything away from the Original Post.

It's a valid sentiment. But having grown up on the border of Juarez, Mexico, the poverty he talks of is hardly unfamiliar to me. My hometown, El Paso has an average income of about $19,000 - TODAY, and yet it still seems positively affluent compared to the sprawling shantytowns across the river.

But the idea that somehow this misery is "there" while we have it so good "here", struck me as a bit off. I suppose those of us who still have jobs can count ourselves lucky when compared to the average Mexican citizen, but isn't it sad that that's the comparison. Who will we have to compare ourselves with to feel fortunate in ten years - the Haitians?

When I first saw "Roger and Me", even then, I knew that Flint, Michigan was just the petri dish for what corporate America planned to do to the entire country. And I watched as two Bushes and Bill Clinton continued the process.

And yet repugs cite rising GDP numbers to tell us that everything is great, when it so obviously is not...

[Quixote1818]

27. I grew up in Las Cruces and went to Juarez from time to time

I agree the poverty is much worse in many places than Baja. If I had spent a week in Juarez the poverty would have started to sink in their. It was the fact that I saw it day after day after day. I have seen much worse poverty and I am sure many places in the US have it even worse than Baja but feeling like I was living their began to force me to really empathies.

The Amount of wealth in the US compared to Mexico is clear though. They don't even have enough tax money to but shoulders on their major highways. They had depleted all the forests just south of San Diego and simply by crossing the border it was amazing how different the environment seemed. On the US side their were thousands of healthy beautiful trees. Mexicans would not be flocking over the border if they could not find a better life in the US.

[Tactical Progressive]

17. I've grown so very cynical

I think just the way you do. People here have so much, and take it all for granted. And most everything we have is predicated on the sheer luck of being in this country, yet everybody thinks they've 'earned' it. Nobody realizes or cares that they could easily be that guy were circumstances different.

But I've become very jaundiced. Superimposed now on the emotion I have when I see things like that, and you don't have to leave this country for it, is the harsh realization that that guy, if he were born in America to easy, unearned opportunity, or in Mexico to unearned family wealth, or vice-versa, would probably be a right-winger who would:

1) sanctimoniously think he'd earned and deserved everything he had
2) think of poor people as bums who deserve what they get
3) think of you as a flat out commie thief for wanting to shelter the homeless or feed the starving
4) call you a traitor without hesitation because he believes it
5) be more than willing to hurt you and yours physically for your beliefs if he had the societal support to protect that kind of behavior

Inotherwords, feel sorry for the guy, but never forget that if he had the power there's an amazingly good chance that he'd be as big a piece of subhuman shit as any Republican you can think of.

Sorry to throw dirty water on such a spiritual moment of connection and reflection, but the whole 'there but for' thing cuts both ways - there but for the grace of god walked Sean Hannity on that beach.

[sweetheart]

18. Compassionate tears

There is a symbol of the compassion you describe with the buddha (which
means awakened one; as in "your awakened mind, externalized") and one
of the buddha's fingers touches the ground that despite the profound
lucidity of enlightenment, the suffering of all sentient beings is
all-present. And as well, there is a tear in the eye of the buddha,
often painted or engraved by the half closed eyes. It is the tears
your post empathizes, that compassion for those who suffer.

Yet the buddha's eyes are half closed, realizing that the truth in life
is not of the senses or the ephemeral world. No matter the beauty
or the tragedy, experiences will all come and go, and we will all die
and eventually no one will cry for us either.

[scarletlib]

19. Poverty in US as well:

In Sept. 2004 I visited San Francisco for a long weekend. I was shocked at the number of homeless living on the streets. Signs were posted telling the tourists not to give them money--as if they were just worthless pests, like bears, that if you fed them or gave them money, it would just make things worse. Many of them appeared to be mentally ill.

Now I lived in Nashville, TN and now in Palm Beach County so I have seen homeless on the streets and worked with the poor most of my life.

But the situation in San Francisco absolutely shocked me. I did not enjoy my weekend there. I felt terrible being there to enjoy myself when so many were suffering.

I was in the hotel in the early evening and looking out the window. I saw an elderly woman who could hardly stand. She was very frail and shaking. At first, I thought she was waiting for her ride, a relative, taxi or bus to pick her up. Then I realized she was begging passerbys for money. Everyone just ignored her. You really have to wonder what happened in her life that she is on the street begging for money. I will never forget that. I think it could so easily be me or others of my age in the coming future if things don't change in this country.

[slaveplanet]

20. Don't know why-

but yout story reminds me of this


Losing It



The writer stare with glassy eyes
Defies the empty page
His beard is white, his face is lined

And streaked with tears of rage

Thirty years ago, how the words would flow
With passion and precision
But now his mind is dark and dulled
By sickness and indecision

And he stares out the kitchen door
Where the sun will rise no more...

Some are born to move the world
To live their fantasies
But most of us just dream about
The things we'd like to be
Sadder still to watch it die
Than never to have known it
For you, the blind who once could see
The bell tolls for thee...

Peart



The lyrics refer to author Ernest Hemingway and 2 of his novels: The Sun Also Rises and For Whom the Bell Tolls.

[luvLLB]

21. I live in San Antonio, about 2 hours from the boarder town of

Nueva Larado, let me say that the diffrence is absolutly shocking. The poverty of a third world country just down the street from my nice warm, safe home is hard to describe. I also know a lot of Mexicans who have come here to work, and support their family back home. I dont blame them one bit for being here. Sometimes it is literally a matter of life and death.

[radwriter0555]

22. He was mentally ill. We have that here in Los Angeles, thousands of them

down on skid row.

Baja isn't representative of real Mexico. Baja is just an americanized mexican branch of California with a few who have stayed to make money from the Americanos.

You seem to think that to be mentally ill one has to be poor, or vis versa... I'm glad you believe you've been exposed to poverty, but a man who's lost his mind on a beach in Mexico is in far, far better considitions than the thousands on Skid Row in Los Angeles. His chances of being killed and left to die on that beach are a million to 1, whereas in downtown Los Angeles, he'll be lucky to live the night.

You didn't see Mexico. You saw the affects of the American tourist industry on Mexico... and you didn't really see much in the way of poverty, you just saw a mentally ill fellow on a beach.

You didn't see Mexico, the jungles of the Yucatan, the Colonial City of Colors of Merida; the Pirate city of Campeche, the Mayan huts along the roads in the Yucatan, the gorgeous cemeteries that combine the glorious cultures of the Mayan and the Mexicans... MOST of Mexico is NOT awash in poverty. Most of mexico is lovely, clean, fairly prosperous and content. Trust me, the wealthy Mexicans don't move to the USA.

The poverty here in the USA is far, far worse than the poverty in Mexico. It's shameful for a nation such as ours to have 12,000 homeless on the streets of Los Angeles every night. I'd way rather be poor in Mexico than poor in the USA.

[Quixote1818]

30. It doesn't matter where the man was it's the personal experience

The purpose of my original post was not to compare poverty in Mexico and the US or any place. It was just to talk of a personal experience that could have happened any place but happened to happen in Baja. You could take out Baja and put in East LA and the story would have the same meaning.

However the American tourist industry does not impact places like Mulege much. It's 600 miles from San Diego and 400 miles from Cabo. We were the only people on the beach. It's economy is based on fishing mostly.

[Tsiyu]

25. kick

:kick:

[Cleita]

26. I used to have the same reaction you did, when I

traveled in South America, especially with the children. However, thanks to St. Raygun, I saw homeless on the streets of America, that I had never seen before. Now, twenty five years later, it has become institutionalized. If the neo-cons aren't stopped, we can have the same economic structure as Mexico. Mark my words.