Sweet home, Alabama?

In my initial few days after getting to Los Angeles, I thought everything looked fantastic, like how a rich country should. 

It didn't take me much to understand that I was using the old country as a frame of reference. 

After that red-pill experience happened, I could see problems everywhere.  Like how the one grocery store in the area was always crowded and it stank.  Or how apartment buildings were secured behind electric gates and intercoms.  How the sidewalks were not all even, and how sometimes there were no sidewalks.

Halfway through graduate school, a friend told me about a room that was vacant in his apartment complex.  A single unit, with a shared laundry in the building.  The rent that he quoted was phenomenally low.  I rushed there and signed the lease.

It was inexpensive for a reason.  For plenty of reasons, actually.  The water in the faucet ran brown sometimes.  The neighborhood, it turned out, had a drug business problem.

The nearly two years there was my only ever experience to have lived in near-poverty conditions.

I was now increasingly convinced that there was something seriously wrong with the image of America as a rich country.

Close to graduation, I went to New Orleans for a conference.  I wandered through without a map and accidentally ended up in neighborhoods that looked run down and anything unlike a rich landscape.  I worried about the country that I knew would be home to me.

A decade later, when Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans, and when a good chunk of the country and the world woke up to the reality, I was relieved that finally a lot more people were seeing the city that I had walked about.

I have often told students that my travels provide me a wonderful reality check---going to economically depressed areas in the US or in the rest of the world gives me a clear idea of the luxurious life that I lead, and going to affluent neighborhoods in affluent cities reminds me that I am nowhere near the upper echelons.

Often, even without traveling, I get my lessons.  Like when I read this essay in The New Yorker.  It is brutal depiction of the gross economic (and racial) injustice in a rich country.  An injustice when a community lacks a sewage treatment process, and when crap literally floods people's yards.  A sewage scene that the UN rapporteur said "was unlike anything else he had encountered in the developed world."

This was not in New Orleans though.  It was in Alabama.  It was in "one of the poorest counties in one of America’s poorest states."

I have seen enough, read enough, and watched enough to know that it is way past time that we addressed the economic and social injustice in my adopted home.  I hope that the new administration will be laser focused on these.