... AND I WONDER

Passing through the poor villages of Laos, Thailand, India and Cambodia I had the chance to see so many skinny children playing around those dusty roads and paths.
Some running after an old bicycle tyre, others playing football with a makeshift ball, other trying to learn the art of Thai boxing and so many running barefoot in the fields or swimming in a pond.
All of them shouting, screaming, laughing and sharing happiness.
Common western perception would make us think:
“Poor kids they do not have anything, yet they are still happy with nothing!”

Now I am here in a Bangkok internet shop, crowded with many fat kids the same age as the ones described before playing noisy video games, shooting at the screen and killing virtual human beings, many of them wearing a headphone all playing on his own.
Mc Donald’s, Pizza Hut and KFC apparently reached them, at least judging from their obesity it can be only an affirmative answer!
Playstation and technology reached them right?
So are they supposed to be luckier than those poor country kids?

But I wonder … who has more and who has really nothing?

What define happiness?
Sharing a laugh and a simple game, a glass of beer if you are an adult, with your friends or having the latest electronic gadget and isolating ourselves with it?

The answer is there for us to see.
“Them” they want us to believe happiness is depending on what we have, on what we posses and what we buy but is so much false.
Happiness is only a glimpse, a moment, but is the simple act of sharing a moment with another human being.
Do not let “Them” fool us anymore, happiness is not depending on what we buy, is depending in who we are, and the simpler we live more chance we have to reach it, even for just a moment!
As we shall never forget that everything is impermanent in this world!

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Reading the newspapers is becoming a harder task every day, is so difficult to stomach some kind of news they are reporting.
At times I am so fed up to read about sick politics, corruption, war, killings, tortures and more awful things that happens around the world.
Then there are news such as this who one can only hope to be on some April’s fool edition but unfortunately are not.

On “The Nation”, 28th March 2006 edition, I had the chance to read about … space tourism!
Briefly it is reported that “… now the private sector is offering space travel, tailored to the super rich... Over the past few years, three tourists have paid a reported 20 million US dollars each to ride aboard a Russian rocket to the orbiting international space station”.

I am left really speechless, just I can think about the starving kids in Africa, the poor all over the world and I can only vomit reading such news.

Where the fuck the world is going? How could someone not be furious and angry after reading such bullshit?

Makes you sick, doesn’t it? But what it makes those “super rich” people themselves is this: detached from what the rest of us live in – the real world. What does it take to bring them back?
I would like really like to take all those “super rich” people and show them the reality of this world, how so many people are struggling to live without food, water and medicines.

I really want to cry and shout but I feel so much powerless, tired and fed up.
Is the world such a rotten hopeless place?

With the small energy that I still have I just wish is just a nightmare and that I could wake up tomorrow and find a beautiful and peaceful world without injustice!

Peace, love and freedom

Poor Planet Earth, April 5TH , 2549

© - copyright Claudio Romano