thoughts over lunch

wouldn't it be crazy if we actually came around to believing that hungry children in africa, or just old fashioned poor people in any old place where it's super normal to have, materially, nothing, deserve more than just the pennies of our pockets, a moment of our time? it's the tradition in commercials begging for 50 cents a day or something, some totally forgettable sum so that you can totally forget, because that's really all they can expect. maybe it'd be more effective if they came out and screamed, if they railed against the mind boggling absurdity of that which most every american is born into and the preposterous wretchedness taken for granted in many parts of the world, if they came out and demanded 30% of your income because, you swine, how dare you expect to have so much when so many have so little? in writing this i'm clearly not writing about the many poor people in the united states, but there are plenty for whom that'd be totally reasonable.

this ultimate not-giving-a-shit about people in other countries is at the bedrock of so much bad shit in the world, and even the most leftist people out there have a VERY hard time trying to think of a way to say we should have less because, COME ON, people over there have nothing and this is the only sane adjustment to make.

i read an article on black friday about how some shoppers were realizing what they were doing to the employees of some of these stores by coming in at 10pm or something, that they were party to the exploitation of the employees being made to work then, and that those employees were just like them. this stuff with other parts of the world having nothing compared to us is analogous, on a global scale. but how can we ever get over having cheap stuff and having as much as we think we deserve? it's monstrous stuff.