The Lights are On!

First World Problems

“You think the world begins and ends with you and your perfect little family and your perfect little life, and you think stress is finding the perfectly color-coordinated cushions for your new $10,000 sofa.”

Liane Moriarty (What Alice Forgot)

I've been reflecting on yesterday's post about my power being off for two days—it was finally repaired about mid-day yesterday. It was a major inconvenience, to be sure, but it was also a good example of a “first world problem.” Only the expectation of privilege would cause me to whine about having my power out for two days. As I lay in bed last night, in my warm house, I remembered the Mayan women I met in the mountains of Guatemala, who had no running water and no electricity; who lived in what we would call a lean-to, with a roof, but were otherwise open to the elements. They lived cheek-to-jowl with their animals and five generations of their kin. They cooked their food on a sheet of tin suspended over a fire. I remembered the people of Puerto Rico, who were accustomed to having electricity, but went without it for more than nine months. I thought about the women of Africa, who also cook on open fires and manage quite well without any power at all. They have no expectation of electricity, unlike myself, who considers it my “right” to have it at all times, without interruption.

I lived for a while in one of the up-scale, bedroom communities of Birmingham. Women there changed their home interiors like they changed last year's fashions. I sometimes wondered why their walls didn't collapse from the shear weight of the paint. I remember complaining to an Irish friend once about the age of my house, which was then about forty years old. She looked a little perplexed and said, “My family have been living in the same house in Dublin for four-hundred years.” We Americans take many things for granted; we have expectations of privilege. Unless we have passed through valleys in our lives when we could not afford to pay our utility bills and had those services cut off, we don't know what it is to have no expectation of electric lights and heat, of clean water and hot showers. And we do not know how to adapt—which is truly a first world problem.

We could learn a lot from Mayan and African women—how to survive without all the services we think of as “rights.” I have a collection of Foxfire books that teach everything from paper-making to cabin construction, how to grow your own food, how to make candles. I think it's time for some serious research on my part. And, some serious soul-searching on all our parts—about privilege, and rights.

                                                        In the Spirit,

                                                           Jane