Mind the Gap

Anyone who has ridden the Underground, London´s subway, knows the message. ¨Mind the gap,¨ says the soft recording of a woman´s voice. In ¨The Tube¨ that means mind the gap between the train and the platform (to not get your foot caught).

For the past two and a half weeks I have darted back and forth across the other gap, one that traps even more than a stray foot. It is the gap between poverty and affluence. Cochabamba and California. The Balkans and London. This gap blows me away every time I cross it.

So often in Bolivia I hear how people from the U.S. are blown away by that gap. People who have never before left the world´s bubble of affluence gasp, ¨My God, people are so poor.¨ They are shocked by houses with metal roofs held down by rocks. They can´t believe the fleet of 1980s vintage Toyotas that populate the streets. They are stunned by the site of people washing their laundry in a river and by Cochabamba´s version of Wal-Mart, a 25 square block open market, ¨la cancha.¨ Even their shopping realities are sent reeling (trying on clothes is done behind a held-up sheet).

My ¨wealth shock¨ runs the other way. After ten years in Bolivia I am well-accustomed to the man outside my office who spends his day selling ten varieties of nuts from a cart (try the sweetened almonds) and probably makes $5 on a good day. The children who sell gum on the street are my small friends (and seek me out to buy extra mint Beldent). I accept the fact that some of the buses that take me to work in the morning come complete with a hole in the floor so I can watch the rock paved street go by underneath.

I am not trying to romanticize poverty by any means. I am saying that after living in its midst for so long I see the life and joys that reside even in poverty´s midst. No, what takes my breath away and leaves me reeling is affluence, the avalanche of it in the U.S. and Western Europe.

Maybe it was paying a price for a tuna sandwich in London that would have fed seven people nicely in Cochabamba. Maybe it was the news piece on CNN about the new Rolls Royce convertible which costs $450,000 and can be finished with wood from the buyer´s favorite tree (If I win the lottery, does that include a Molle from Cochabamba?). Rolls Royce says the car is targeted to buyers with ´disposable incomes´ of at least $15 million per year. Don´t get me into what that would buy in Bolivia (you could take the entire country out to lunch, twice). Maybe it was the other rolling fortunes on four wheels that line up on the streets of London and West Los Angeles.

I guess it comes down to this. How should we feel about these twin facts? On the one hand there a boatload of people living on this Earth who have so much money that it is mind boggling -- so much that there are whole industries dedicated to conjuring up viciously expensive new toys to give them something to spend it on. On the other hand there are guys in Cochabamba working seven day shifts as tax drivers that barely keep the families they don´t get to see much of fed.

There is global charity, to be sure. On the subway in London (the Rolls drivers will have missed this) there is billboard for a charity that proclaims it has been feeding hungry children for 70 years. If you give them money one of these kids will send you a cartoon drawing of an animal like the one on the billboard. But charity doesn´t cut it. What cuts it is justice.

Here are the words I read from an Irish priest once. I think they were carved into a wall in a church in Dublin. ¨When I said we should help people who are poor they called me a saint. When I asked why the people are poor they called me a Communist.¨

There have been politicians, Huey Long for one, that called for confiscating all fortunes over a certain amount and taxing all high incomes in a similarly confiscatory way. I am not suggesting that. I think what I am suggesting is this as a start: Mind the gap.

It is a radical idea really. It is about putting out there the fact that while wealthy rock stars beckon us to ¨Make poverty history!¨ we might also need to talk about wealth and how fairly it is or isn´t earned. I sat for a long hour yesterday in Madrid´s Plaza Mayor. Much of the wealth of Spain´s golden age of empire came from the silver stolen from Bolivia´s ¨Cerro Rico¨ in Potosi. A few centuries later the theft is obvious, though unatoned, unless you count Spain´s recent import of Bolivian nannies, house cleaners and construction workers.

A few decades or centuries hence, when the gap between the rich and poor is likely to be even wider and guarded widely with new weapons, what robberies and injustices from this time will the world be willing to confess to?

Be a radical. Mind the gap. Notice it. Cross it. Object to it. Get your foot stuck in it. Do something about it.