The Luck of the Middle-Class

by Sophie Gell

I was lucky today, I was lucky yesterday, too. It rained and I had no umbrella, I stepped in a puddle, my metrocard wouldn't work, I burnt my finger, and a cat scratched me. And, I've lived those days a hundred times over, but I've been blindingly lucky my whole entire life. I was born into a modern world, a world where I can get a good education for free, a world where clean water comes endlessly out of a shining metal tube in my house, and a home where night can be as bright as day at the flick of a switch. I was born into a family that is able to take me the quarter mile to the doctor’s office, and that are able to pay for antibiotics when I get sick. If you are like me than you are very, very lucky. If you are like me, than you take your life and your luck for granted. We know that not everyone lives like we do. Unlike us, there are people that have everything, and also unlike us, there are people that have nothing. We consider ourselves the humble middle-class, the 99%. When we find a metrocard with some money left on it, or a parking meter with extra change we’ll use it for ourselves and feel like Robin Hood. We hate the rich but endlessly strive to join their ranks. We love the poor, but find ourselves annoyed when a man or woman shaking a cup full of change enters our peripheral view. We consider ourselves good, nice people. We’ll give a dollar when we don’t have to open our wallets to get to it. The trouble is, that’s not enough. We are the lucky ones. By coincidence, we were born into a world that is just a little bit friendlier to us, but that tiny coincidence is what makes it our job to have compassion and to do whatever we can for those people who are less fortunate, but still the same as us. We’re all humans. By lacking compassion for them, and saying that it's "not our problem", we're hurting everyone. We’re not much different than lots of gerbils in a big glass cage.

Imagine you,  all of the people you know, and every single person you've ever even seen, living in extreme poverty. Instead of seeing them on the subway on the way to their offices, you see them 

walking miles down a road to find work. Maybe you see them with the early signs of sickness, and then you never see them again. Imagine watching

Dr. Farmer and a young patient.
(Source: thepursuitofelegance.wordpress.com)

dozens of people you know succumb to the same diseases over and over again. Imagine giving birth to a child and knowing that there’s a good chance that they will die before they can have children of their own, It's not a small amount of people living like this, it's one fifth of the world. In one year, 10.6 million children died before they reached the age of 5, worldwide. UNICEF says that 22,000 children die each day due to extreme poverty. These diseases that people in developing countries are dying from, we have been vaccinated

against. The world has spent trillions of dollars to create cures for these diseases, and now we have them. So why is so much of our population still dying from them?

The book, Mountains Beyond Mountains, by Tracy Kidder, describes how poverty and disease plague billions of people across the world. It illustrates the true story of a man named Dr. Paul Farmer and his passion and need to help people suffering from treatable but lethal diseases in places like Haiti, Peru, and Russia. Paul Farmer tells the author when asked how many hours he sleeps, "I can't sleep. There's always someone not getting treatment. I can't stand that.", (24). Mountains Beyond Mountains, is such an important book because it’s about a man who feels that compassion and that guilt, that we all so vitally need to feel for the world to be a better place. He says he "feels ambivalent selling his services in a world where some can't buy them.", (24). The book emphasizes the fact that poverty and disease go hand in hand. In places without fresh, running water, bacteria grows in buckets of still water that whole families drink from. Close living quarters and lack of easily accessed medical care mean that families share homes and beds with relatives that are slowly wasting away from painful and contagious diseases. We have a middle-class mindset that lets us feel exempt from feeling guilt about the problems of the poor. We think we are the poor and act like the rich are doing us wrong, but really we are the rich. We're the people that have the ability to really help. The only way solve these problems, or lesser them in any way, is through the help of everyone. A few people or a few organizations isn't going to cut it. It's going to take all of us as a whole. Our luckiness doesn’t mean that we're better than these people, it means that we need to have the compassion and the guilt, that propels us to actually do something. As Dr. Farmer once said, "You can feel ambivalent about that [people living in poverty], because you should feel ambivalent.", (24).