Many times we talk about when the race is over we are going to go back to the real world. It seemed logical. We are going back to the world we know.
But the other day a fellow racer said something really profound. “The real world? This is the real world. The world we live in is the fantasyland!” I kind of blew it off at first but it got me to thinking. Not always a good thing, but this time it was. Well I think it was. You be the judge.
Over the course of the trip we have traveled all the way around the planet. When we flew through America we actually went a few hundred miles south of where I started the race. I couldn’t have imagined most of what I have seen on this trip. This coming from a guy that thinks National Geographic Magazine and the Discovery Channel are two of the greatest things man ever came up with. They rank right up there with sliced bread and Space flight. And yet even with all my reading and studying over the course of my life, it did nothing to prepare me for the realities of the “Real World”.
The majority of the six billion people on the planet don’t live anything like we do in America. Do you
have a car? A place to live? A job? What about food of any kind? How about parents? Or people to help you when things aren’t going your way? What about safety? Do you fear for your life when you go to bed? Do you have a bed? If you have ANY of these things you have so much more than MOST of the hundreds of people I came in contact with this year, and most of the six billion others I didn’t get to talk to live the same way.
The smells, the filth, the lack of personal space. It’s a much different world. The lack of regard, for what I was taught to be universally accepted- human rights. They are not universal. In Cambodia they massacred a third of their population, millions of people, in the last 50 years in the name of progress. This is the reality of the real world. Not the tree lined streets in suburbia that most of us live on in America.
All of this brings me back to the statement that started me on this little thought. America is like a
fantasyland. As I was milling all this over my mind took this one step farther. To the rest of the world America is like the ultimate fantasyland, Disney Land. Disney has the most famous amusement parks in the world. Their parks are clean, beautiful, and fun. Everyone is happy and nothing bad ever happens. All their characters always live happily ever after and the evenings are always filled with fireworks to end a perfect day. This description could fit America as far as much of the rest of the world is concerned.
But you’re probably saying, “That isn’t the world I live in! My world is hard. I had to work to get everything I have.” I’m not trying to discount the fact that we work hard in America. I’m only trying to point out the fact that the people in the rest of the world work just as hard or harder for the next to nothing they earn. I once heard that the cost of living in other countries is much lower so it evens out. This is such a western mindset. It makes us feel better about ourselves. One country we lived in you could buy food for a month for the fifty bucks I spent on my iPod shuffle. Guess what, an iPod shuffle costs there? Yep $50.00. We complain when they want seven dollars for a funnel cake or two bucks for a coke at Disney. But we pay it. Why? Because we want it and we can have it. By the way that three bucks you just spent at Starbucks could have bought about five meals for a struggling college student in China who is trying to get through school but has very little hope of getting a job, even with a degree.
Just to set your mind at ease I am not anti-America. I plan on kissing the ground when I get back to the States—something you wouldn’t want to do in China. Any time I see our flag or our embassy I get a little misty eyed. No, really. I guess what I’m trying to say is that I’m not the person I once was. Yes I still desire the comforts of home. But what are those comforts? Is it bad to have a nice house or car? I want to have those things again someday. I just don’t want these things to have me, or you.
Over the course of the trip I have done my best to tell you and show you what we have experienced. But the harder I try to express what I see and hear and feel, the more I realize the hard facts. If you don’t come out here and hold the orphan dying of AIDS or talk to the girl trapped in prostitution or visit the old man living in a stick house with raw sewage running through it, you just aren’t going to truly get it.
I do hope that all of our blogs have opened up your eyes at least a bit to the Real World outside the theme park we call America. Thanks for listening to one man’s opinion.
