OVERABUNDANCE: too much!

We wanted to say "Thank You" to our hosts. Thanks for hospitality is something for which there is no real easy way to show gratitude. People have disrupted their lives, opened their privacy to invasion, and above all...have worked hard to make sure our comfort needs have been met. This was an exceptionally good experience for us; the sacrifices on our behalf have been visible.

To show our thanks we took the family out to dinner. We settled on a restaurant that our hosts had not frequented, but the reports were good. They turned out to be accurate. It was a fun place, filled with lots of appreciative customers, with a great bar, attractive surroundings, and filled with the smells of good food. Our noses didn't let us down. The food was excellent. Overall, it was a very successful evening...and the check was much less than we expected.

However...and this is a big however...the quantity of food served each of us was unbelievably excessive. We should have been suspicious when the appetizers came and they were the size of a small mountain. Great food, but way, way too much.

Then the entrees arrived and I began to look around to see who else would be joining us for dinner. My chicken parm could have fed three people. We all started laughing at the overabundance of food and the likelihood that Seamus, the family dog, was going to be the recipient of great "doggie boxes." In the end, the boxes we took back to the house were huge...enough meals for several days.

As we were packing the left-over food into the take home boxes, we commented that we wished we could ship it off to Haiti. It was not really as flippant a comment as you might expect. We in the group had some experience with poverty and disaster and knew that having this excess food from one meal was obscene when balanced against the needs of people in earthquake-ravaged Haiti. Of course the idea of sending it to Haiti was impossible, and served more as a comment than anything else. But there was a sense of guilt in all of our commentary.

Someone commented that Michelle Obama, who has just undertaken an initiative to address childhood obesity, would be horrified to think that someone might actually eat all the food that was served. The only children at the table were adult, professional children, but the point was not lost.

Opulence in a society takes many forms. Living into the overabundance of food without recognizing its destructive quality is one way in which opulence affects us with such ease. I'm not sure how we make that point without sounding sour and bitchy. Maybe a note in the mail to the management of the restaurant? A letter to the editor? A boycott of a great restaurant which may only need a comment to correct its practices?

The reality is that some people want that overabundance and may frequent that restaurant specifically because they want those "doggie boxes" at the end of the meal. I have to be careful about judgment. And this restaurant is not the focus of my comments. It is our society as a whole which lives into overabundance and the unhealthy, obscene results of it.

The bottom line about last night is that it was an enjoyable evening which, I believe, adequately expressed our thanks to the host family. We laughed at jokes, enjoyed the restaurant, and ended the evening with a feeling of well-being. My words this morning are just after-thoughts which needed to be spoken, probably to ease my guilt. Every good thing doesn't need a negative comment to balance it out. But it's hard these days not to be aware of the contrast between opulence and poverty.


Photo Credit:www.pdphoto.org/PictureDetail.php?mat=&pg=6924

HAITI: What to do?

The tremors have stopped, both the physical ones from the earthquake and the emotional ones from the people of the world. Haiti is rapidly settling into that despised period in human disasters when they no longer occupy the front page of the major newspapers and the prime stories on the network news. The crisis in Haiti is sliding into its place next to the New Orleans hurricane and the Indonesian tsunami. The story of the earthquake will occupy us in a more tangential way for a short period of time, and then will wait for the end of year articles about the most significant news events of the year.

But in Haiti, the tragedy continues. More bodies are found, more orphans are created, more violence and anger erupts, and more despair over the future grows. A country that has wallowed in poverty and poor government for decades seeks solutions to its current disaster in an atmosphere which is incapable of providing solutions.

I was intrigued by calls for the U.S. to "take over" Haiti...as in annex it. There is something to be said for that emotionally, but when reality sets in, there's no rational foundation for such a tactic. This is no time for empire building..

So what is Haiti to do? Is there a way to turn their "lemon" into "lemonade?" At first glance the answer is a resounding "no!" All that can be done is to patch up the mess and return to life in a nation with no future.

However, there is a possibility. It is a little far-fetched, but it is out there, no less. What if Haiti was able to do that which other countries or cities have talked about, but have never had the ability to undertake? What if Haiti were to trash Port-au-Prince and the other destroyed municipalities, remove the rubble to a massive landfill someplace, and build a new city...or a new country? Instead of trying to patch up the overwhelming mess that confronts the Haitians today, lay out a plan for the construction of a beautiful new city that might just signal a turn-around for the nation.

There would be millions of jobs available in a place where previously there were none. There could be beauty where previously there was ugliness. A new economy of tourism could emerge in a place that has a natural beauty which has been obscured by a poverty-stricken deterioration. Instead of despair on the part of Haitians there could be hope and promise of a brighter future.

Where is the money going to come from to do all this? Entrepreneurs and capital venturists from all over the world would be foolish not to invest. A Caribbean Dubai is not necessary...just a sparkling clean, fresh-painted and colorfully decorated city with hotels, restaurants, shops, and tourist-based industry. Instead of cruise ships sneaking into the beaches and pretending that Port-au-Prince didn't exist, there could be a cruise capital created on the site of the current rubble. Nations, industries, speculators, and others could be the backbone for a new industry which would create a new hope.

Not many places have the opportunity to undertake such a wild dream. And that is not to say "thank goodness for the earthquake!" No such thing. That's lousy theology. But there is something to be said for seeing the promise that this provides for a nation that may be without a vision.


Photo Credit: JONATHAN TORGOVNIK/REPORTAGE FOR CNN

ETHNICITY:

Identity with or membership in a particular racial, national, or cultural group and observance of that group's customs, beliefs, and language.

Watching the horror and chaos in Haiti over the past week has given me pause to think about the rich ethnicity which exists in our own country. It is often a source of negativity by some, but for me it is a richness which we too easily deny. It would appear that in places like Haiti there is a monochromatic population for the most part. In the U.S. we would be hard pressed to identify the singularity of ethnic background of even a tiny community.

At one point we lived just a few miles from Hamtramck, a tiny city which was known as a Polish city right smack in the middle of metropolitan Detroit. There was some truth to its origin and its ethnic purpose in carving itself out from the larger city. But the reality was that it, too, was a multi-ethnic city, in spite of its attempt to isolate itself as being "Polish." I was a part of a group placing immigrants from a variety of origins in Hamtramck, partly because they would find there a population familiar to them in their homelands. The myth of monochromatic ethnicity was just that...a myth.

My wife has a staff of forty people in the facility where she is the Director. Those forty people represent fifteen different countries of birth, ranging from Korea to the Dominican Republic. Six of those people are native to Haiti, incidentally. Her staff is a mosaic of language, skin color and tradition. In that sense, it is a microcosm of the United States.

I like to use the word mosaic to describe our country. It is an art form which utilizes different sizes, shapes, colors and hues of colors, placed side by side to form a beautiful, larger art image. Many people use the words melting pot to describe America. But have you ever thought about the color of molten metal in a melting pot? It is gray...and that isn't the most beautiful color I can imagine.

I love it when we can celebrate our multiple ethnicities in our country. But it bothers me deeply when I hear complaints and rants against people who are supposedly "different from us." Who the heck is "us?" Even in the earliest days of our nation's settlement by people of foreign nations we were never monochromatic...it just happened to be that northern Europeans were the ones writing the history books, and their selfish bias dominated the project.

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Definition Source:The American Heritage® New Dictionary of Cultural Literacy, Third Edition Copyright © 2005 by Houghton Mifflin Company.
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