My wife is from Mexico. When I first met her, I told her I was a poor American. After she came to visit me in USA, she was surprised and said “you’re not poor! You eat fast food all the time, you own your own car, you have a refrigerator and cupboard full of food. You have air-conditioning, etc. etc. You are RICH. I AM poor in Mexico!”
After we had been married a few years, we traveled to India on a mission trip. After she saw the conditions the people lived in there she said “I always thought I was poor in Mexico, but now I see that I was rich! At least I always had a roof over my head and knew that I would at least have beans to eat. These people are poor!”
There was a poignant piece of film on The Travel Channel where they went to the city garbage dump in Managua, Nicaragua.
There was a group of homeless children (there was a specific Spanish name for them which I don’t recall) who would wait around the periphery of the dump for the next trucks to arrive, and then descend on them with fury to dig through the newly arrived trash for something to eat.
THAT is poverty. We don’t HAVE poverty in this country.
Thanks for sharing. Poor is totally relative.
Ditto. Experienced the same thing with my wife (also from Mexico).
It’s easy and all to common for us to feel sorry for ourselves when we live in world where we have everything we need but not everything we want.
It’s all relative isn’t it?
Every single person in the USA is in the 1%