Perry Rod

She calls out to the man on the street, ‘Sir, can you help me?
It’s cold and I’ve nowhere to sleep, is there somewhere you can tell me?’

He walks on, doesn’t look back. He pretends he can’t hear her.
Starts to whistle as he crosses the street, seems embarrassed to be there.

Oh think twice, it’s another day for you and me in paradise.
Oh think twice, ’cause it’s just another day for you, you and me in paradise.

 

When I first heard Phil Collins’ song, “Another Day in Paradise,” I was mesmerized. How incredibly sad it was to think of the poor unfortunate people out there. How incredibly fortunate I felt not to be one of them!

At the time, I didn’t know that I was growing up in a low-income family. My parents were proud people and had always told my brother and I that we had every opportunity in the world they didn’t have. After all, we were born in America.

So I was stupidly optimistic about my prospects. I was completely unaware about my own disadvantages and misfortunes. I related with rich and powerful people that I would surely be one day. I declared myself a Republican, religiously embraced capitalism, and began my road to riches.

It worked!

Being focused on my advantages was essential. A little middle-eastern kid in a low-income family attending underperforming schools? Who’s that? I was a confident and highly curious young man of brilliant Persian heritage whose parents fought to be in the land of opportunity for their kids!

But the key wasn’t that I was just focusing on my advantages. The key was that the advantages I was focusing on… were significant, and often ignored by Americans.

Immigrants have a unique perspective in understanding the poverty outside Western borders. To them, a place like America is incredibly rich. That’s not just perspective. America is incredibly rich! Being low income in America is not like being low income elsewhere on Earth. For every hundred millionaires in the United States, there is only one in Indonesia, despite the fact that the populations of the United States and Indonesia are similar.

That means your poor American ass is a hundred times more likely to bump into a millionaire than a poor Indonesian. Poor Indonesians! How will they rip off a trust fund kid for a piece of the pie? How will they take the 1%, 5%, 15% or whatever cut from some transaction between rich and rich when there’s a hundred times less opportunity for that? Scrambling for the crumbs of the rich is literally a hundred times harder!

When most Americans do not appreciate these facts, it gives those few that do a competitive advantage. Low-income people in the United States are fat, sheltered, and well entertained. They are completely oblivious that the food they have comes from people working like slaves in other countries, that their shelter materials came from the labor of miserable people barely surviving elsewhere, that the luxuries of entertainment are much more limited across the globe. They have no clue that they live in what may one day be considered a dominating and even savage Empire.

These limitations of perspective are exactly why poor immigrants outperform poor natives in all the research. The majority do not appreciate or even understand the fact that they are benefiting from the struggles and oppression of millions – even billions – of humans across the Earth. The typical among us like to pretend that it is their intelligence and hard work that leads them to financial stability. They ignore the fact that the suffering all over the world is directly benefiting them. They don’t want to admit that we are all essentially slave owners!

How the fuck do basic middle-class anybodies think they have magical smart phones and all their amazing luxuries? While taking a dump on their toilet with an electric toothbrush in one hand and high definition Game of Thrones on their phone in the other hand, not for a minute are they thankful for where they are on this planet. Not for a minute do they look around and appreciate where all the stuff around them comes from. It’s off the backs of slaves whose countries they can’t even identify on a map!

It’s just another day in paradise in the United States thanks to our workers across the globe. Thank that little kid making your luxury gadgets in Bangladesh. How the fuck do you expect to get ahead if you have no idea or appreciation for who you employ? Closing your eyes doesn’t make it less real. It just makes you a blind fuck that makes it easier for someone with their eyes open to get ahead. Understand your position as a slave master and you will understand who and where you really are.