Emma at the café

Posted by I'm the penguin | Posted in | Posted on Saturday, November 06, 2010

There was a discussion the other day, and while it kind of lacks transcendence, and ultimately a breaking point, I thought it was worth talking about.

SET:A café in a College Town, middle class
VOICE1: Social sciences student
VOICE2:Emma

VOICE 1: You know, it is quite amazing how we can lead our lives so carelessly in the upper middle class and upper classes, it's like we live in another world that drifts from the majority. We neglect the majority of people and instead praise the majority of acquisitive power, which rests in a scarce minority of people. There's so much inequity, and at the end of the day we do nothing about it, there's so many poor people in rural and urban contexts, just in front of the economic elite, and yet nobody does nothing. We can see a group of mansions and 2 miles away some cardboard houses, and nobody does a single thing for these people. It's preposterous how we can live and accept a system which forces the existence of a lower class, paying the social cost of the unsustainable consumerism of the upper class. We can't keep giving temporary responses to this structural issues.

EMMA: Psssht. Isn't this "temporary solutions for structural issues" the snobbiest thing we could possibly talk about? I mean seriously, you talk as if you were truly outraged by this injustices, but hell! Look at us buying overpriced coffee with tea in this sorry excuse for a café, I mean having the disposable income to do this sets us afar from your proposed problematic several economic sectors away. It's ridiculous we even speak about it, we've never suffered about any of that, if at all we're just some ruling class wannabes who after some sort of education, we think we could so easily solve it all the stupid problems our past generations have made. What could we possibly do? It's rather childish to think we can change an entire structure, there are too many things depending on the status quo... I think it's too easy to talk and hope.

VOICE 1: How can you say that? We cannot maintain this system anymore, look at the social, environmental and economic costs we're already suffering. We need to change the way we think, just saying this and that is snobby we're not doing anything. Talking about this makes it real, we can't just keep on ignoring.

EMMA: Talking about it won't make any more real the fact that more than 80 million people don't have what to eat everyday around the world. If any, it will only relieve your feudal lord guilt of being privileged enough to have a home with running water, gas and a TV, which makes you a minority already. I just think that unless you're doing something about it, it's only a casual plantation owner's talk to mention it.

VOICE1:Who says we're not doing something about it? And what do you suggest then? Ignoring it and leaving it for the people who are in the salvation army?

EMMA:I think that if treated academically it should not be taken out of it context and spoken of as it was some terrible war issue you read about in the National Geographic, because then your loosing the problem's true identity.

VOICE1:How much of that is it true and how much is it just an excuse to remain sited waiting for someone else to help?

EMMA:Pass the sugar.Please.

---
"And I asked myself about the present: how wide it was, how deep it was, how much was mine to keep.

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