Buenos Aires is Beautiful

[ElQueso]

And to be even more sincere, there is beauty in poverty too. It s more than just exotism When you dont own, you dont need to play social games, care about your image, you can afford to be true, you have (almost) nothing to loose. You time is not that "precious", you can give it without feeling stolen. It s the privilege of the very poor...and the very rich.

Their ability to stay simple, humble and natural makes them highly beautiful.

Do you not see the pain behind their eyes? Pain can be beautiful, perhaps, when you think that the only other possibility is death.

The poor are human. Do you not think they have ther own social games? Do you think that the social games they play are less restrictive and cannot be as humiliating than other, richer stratas of societies? Do you think, honestly, that they don't care about their images? Among themselves it is fierce - to think of the rich their image gives them verguenza.

The poor have no inbred nobility that the rest of the human race isn't born with. They are not all that often "true" as they scramble for the scraps that the rich in their country leave them, where there is not enough for everyone, and they will do what they have to do to survive.

They consider their lives much more valuable than you would think, because it often IS all they have. Their time is wrapped up in surviving, finding the next coin to pay the next meal, and working ungodly hours in crappy situations to do it. Their time not precious? Heh. All they have is their time and often not enough of that in a day. Tell a 30-year old woman who looks sixty and may only have another 10 or 20 years to live that her time is not precious.

Perhaps you see them as humble and natural, and in that is beauty, but many of the poor are humble because they have been misused and abused for a LONG time. Their humilty is not the humbleness of a person who understands the way of the world and has chosen to live as they do, but comes from ignorance and the deep-rooted certainty that their lot in life is what it is and nothing can ever change that.

Fifi, dude, I understand kind of what you were trying to say, but it is obviously said by one who does not really understand poverty. One day I'd love for you to come out to the house and sit down with my wife and her family, who are truly poor, who truly struggle every freaking day to stay alive.

Who know with a certainty in their heart that they will never live any better than their neighbors. And that those same neighbors will do what they can to ensure that.

Who know with that same certainty that the same people who have been exploiting them for the last several hundred years will continue to exploit them and that that is the natural way of the world.

There is no beauty in that to me. It disgusts me and I want to fight it tooth and nail.

 

[fifilafiloche]

Dear Fromage,

I will try to answer without offending you.

I have been to Paraguay and saw the villa miseria in front of the Parliament in Asuncion. I think your reaction is also somewhat influenced by your upbringing but living here for a while, i think you are capable to understand the culture better and its dramatic sense of fatalism.

I of course knew that this statement was not politically correct, but it depicts faithfully what i m feeling. You regard poverty as being somewhat submissive to your fate and coming from an environment with another philosophy, you find this unacceptable. I understand this very well. But, just like for driving insecurity, you wont change the reality just because you can hope for more confortable conditions for their inhabitants. All you can do is compare the reality in different environments and choose where you want to live.

Pain is everybody s burden, that s part of life. May be emotional pain was what motivated you to find a partner from another culture and move down here, i dont know your personal story. You found your emotional beauty here you couldnt find there.

I have to stick to my statement that there is beauty in poverty, and i m sorry if i m hurting some feelings here, because i would be dishonest with myself if i stated anything else. May be we have different understandings of beauty. I feel beauty from what emanates from a person, not necessarily from her physical harmony. Your 30 yo lady looking 60 is certainly more beautiful to me than a fashion model totally centered on hersef, uncapable to smile and monomaniacly obsessed by her body. Both can possibly accidently die for alimentary reasons, the one from anorexia, the other from hunger. Who will ultimatly have lived happier? I ll let you answer that question. But the poor one will have given much more of herself to others than the "rich" one. Happiness is much more related to what you give to others than what you take.

I hope i helped you understand my angle of vision which I accept to be regarded as marginal and desorienting. That s the risk to take when you want to be sincere.

PS : May Brittany Murphy rest in peace. She was not poor, nor anonymous, and died at the age of 31. On the picture below, you can see that even tho she just passed her 20s, she already felt too old, and needed plastic surgery.