As North Americans, we have a simple way to define wealth and poverty — wealth is what we are taught to aspire to, and poverty is what we work hard to avoid.

For us, the myth of American egalitarianism has a strong hold on our attitudes. Unless we live in Bel-Air, or in a slum in the bowels of the ghetto, we gauge the concepts by where we ourselves are — and even then, we try to twist ourselves to the middle. Whether we live on $20,000 or $200,000, the story is the same. Both the socialite in the mini-mansion and the man in the cold water flat insist that they are ‘comfortable’. One sees luxury as counted by her acreage, her cars, her Manolos, her house on the hill outfitted with a surround-sound home theater. The other sees another sort of luxury, different, but no less valid; that of a clean bed, a used television, and gas in his 25-year-old Ford.

As for many of us, we who occupy the middle, we experience the two extremes of the economic scale with our own peculiar luxury — the luxury of distance, of detachment. Our own televisions are usually the closest we’ll ever get to either polarity. We turn off our sets, and are left with the conflicting senses of contentment , and dissatisfaction, of security and unease.

If you ever came to visit Bob and me in San Diego, you would come to appreciate the world of contrast and tension with poverty and affluence we live in, and with. At the southernmost part of California, San Diego shares a border with Mexico, and the neighboring city of Tijuana. As you make the descent to our airport, before you take the shuttle to your comfortable hotel, you will see the twinkling lights of that city. The lights look almost like glitter, hovering above San Diego’s own skyline. From 15 miles away, it’s nothing less than beautiful, more beautiful, in fact, than the lights nearby. It harkens to something almost magical, something festive.

Taking the trolley down to the border, and walking the footpath that takes you into another country, you are hard-pressed to remember the anticipation, the magic the lights evoked. There, in the harsh light of day, you see what the lights and the distance conceal: a city that struggles to keep up with its richer cousin, a city where barefoot children clamor for the remains of the Quarter Pounder you picked up at the McDonalds’ on the other side of the fence. You see the rutted roads, smell the scent of raw sewage, and hurry past towards the tourist section, where you haggle with shopkeepers for the blankets and the silver jewelry you came down to buy. As you finger the fine wool of the hand-hooked rug, you consider your hard currency and tell yourself they should be grateful for whatever money you offer. As you leave the Mercado, you consider buying a taco at the stand on Avenida Revolucion, but think better of it, and consult the tour guide from the hotel for a restaurant that’s ‘safe’. As you eat your lobster, you look out the window, at the brown faces peering inside, and hurriedly turn your attention to your fellow dining patrons, all American or ‘Spanish’, light-skinned Mexicans, and gesture for the dark busboy to bring you another bottled water.

You leave the restaurant at the same time as a wealthy Mexican family. The daughter of the wealthy family is approached by another child, this one brown and dirty, selling chicle. The mother shoos off the poor child and hurries her own down the street. As you wait at the stoplight you see them in their large SUV, heading for the border for their own outing. They will shop at the Nordstroms and Jessop’s stores north of the border, and stay in their weekend home on the beach in the States.

Well fed yourself, with blankets and silver and cheap tequila, you head back for the border and the customs line that takes you back to your own country. You look up at the hills of Tijuana, at the grand casas surrounded by cardboard shacks, and shake your head in disgust. Your feet are tired from walking, and you’re tired of the endless beggars that have accosted you — and angry with the woman who pushed her toddler in your way with a dirty paper cup. You take a cab back to customs.

You wonder what to do with the annoyance, no, the anger, you feel, at both the grinding poverty and the wealthy Mexicans who don’t seem to care about their own people.

As you return north on the trolley, you’re still angry. So angry, you never noticed the contrasts that have surrounded you on your trip back to your hotel. As you get off at your stop, you hold your purse a little tighter as a man with a shopping cart passes you, and you hurry past the ‘developing’ part of downtown until you’re safely in the Gaslamp District, the chic oasis of shops, restaurants and hotels that tourists think constitutes the whole of downtown. You walk through the door held open by the doorman, and walk back to your room, where you take a three-dollar Coke from the mini-bar and call the front desk because the maid, who made the same trolley trip as you, traveling from a barrio just north of the border to her job at the hotel, forgot to give you extra towels. You decide against giving her the customary dollar tip tomorrow morning. After all, she didn’t earn it, did she?

When you return home from your visit, you phone your congressman about the squalid conditions you witnessed in Mexico, and support his hard line on immigration, as well as his stand opposing the minimum wage. You remember the rich Mexicans and feel more anger as you read about yet another aid package to their country. You write a letter to the editor about throwing dollars away to a country awash in corruption and greed. You make a salad with lettuce and tomatoes (only 49 cents a pound!) that a campensino picked. You go to bed glad your country isn’t anything like what you witnessed.

Before we can even begin to consider the questions surrounding wealth and affluence, we need to start with brutal candor. We are wealthy. To the rest of the world, our three-bedroom split level is the same as the mansions we ogle, our clean water as lavish as any French champagne. Our modest compact car is, to most of the world, as unattainable as a private jet would be to us.

And we are angry. At those who have less, as well as those who have more. As Christians, how do we begin to confront the questions while we still seethe? How do we show God’s love when we’re filled with resentment, contempt, or impotent pity? To begin, we need to tell ourselves the truth, over and over again, until it’s internalized. We are wealthy. We need to deconstruct that sentence until we are convinced of its truth. We need to repeat it, again and again, until the twin toxins of guilt and denial are burned away, and the essences of awareness and ownership remain. And we need to remind ourselves that our talk about the ‘middle’ is naïve at best and disingenuous and self serving at its worst.

Until we can see the humanity of both the wealthy and the poor, unless we can begin to view them as something other than either monsters who take more than they deserve, or animals who don’t deserve the bones we throw to them, we cannot allow ourselves the conceit of addressing the issue. As long as we see either group as caricatures or stereotypes, we see no need to see them as Jesus sees them. We have no reason to serve them, or to love them as Jesus does.

We are the rich. And we are the poor. The sooner we humbly acknowledge our own internal fences, our personal barriers and borders that block us, the sooner we can allow God’s grace to tear down the walls, and truly "let justice roll down like water, and rightousness like a mighty stream".

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Is it true that light skinned Mexicans be passed for Spanish or other white blood? I'm just wandering.
--Maribel ( Radicallyfun at hotmail dot com ) on 11/26/2004; 10:21:57 PM