Teeming Class, Teaming Class - Every day a hustle.

Maybe class conflict is what keeps all this moving. Strict resource limits against the ever striving human pursuit of more. For most of us the awareness of consciousness can't help but beg the question: "but, what else," and so we strive toward whatever struggle is next, wherever birth has placed us. 

My world view can be boiled down to the following: existence is the presence of conflict, non existence is the absence of conflict. By "conflict" I mean forces in opposition. The relationship of hunger to satiety, the play of growth and rest, the return of breath after the last escapes, beauty and ugliness, gratitude and desire; conflict is the string on which our experience of consciousness oscillates. 

Struggle seems essential. But, is suffering, or to what degree is suffering necessary for struggle? To what degree is suffering necessary to exist?

I’ve been thinking a lot about something that always comes up for me while traveling: the context of wealth, privilege, class, and more generally abundance, sustenance, and survival.

My friend’s brother is busy donating plasma in the States right now. It fits his schedule as a gig driver and supplements his military pension. He’s struggling because he’s helping his girlfriend with her medical bills as she battles what is almost certainly terminal cancer. She’s gone blind, has limited mobility and is otherwise languishing in the pietistic, sterilized, waiting room of death watching the debt clock roll helplessly beyond numbers that seem real. They can’t really afford food and they’re behind on rent.

It was my third time returning to the place I’ve been having breakfast this morning. Soft sweet curries with mango chutney, chicken that runs from the bone, crispy garlic, cold coffee, vanilla pudding: I could eat here for a lifetime. Several members of the staff chatted with me, helped me learn more Thai phrases and asked about where I was from. Happy, healthy, clean and calm. Their breakfast cost the equivalent of around $2 each day. I can’t imagine they make more than $1/patron in profit. There were at least 7 staff working and although they were busy, they close early for prayer and do not serve dinner. I doubt anyone in that room could afford plane tickets, but the women are dressed in fine and bright clothes and adorned with gold and jewels. One of the kids was attending to some form of higher education; nose deep in thick text books stacked next to the register. In US terms they were an upper middle class restaurant family. I can not, for the life of me, ever imagine recommending they relocate to the United States. But the myth persists and it is still very clearly a dream for so many. Longing was evident in their questions. Striving.

I know that there are opportunities available in the States that simply aren’t here. I’m not naïve to that. But if we’re measuring wealth as something closer to quality of life than a precise figure, the proportion of abundance to survival seems at worst close and more accurately far better here for the middle class.

There’s plenty of survival here. Ugly, brutal survival. At my last hostel I asked one of the staff how she was feeling and she sighed hard and said wearily, “every day a hustle, brother” and she meant it. Erika is in Pattaya right now and when she talks about the prostitutes and the seemingly intentional degradation of spirit by their Johns her voice folds into a sick, angry, bewilderment; rage drowning in helplessness.

Outside my hotel are a sea of tin-hut houses without electric and limited sewer access. Behind my hotel is a recycling facility where men bring hauls of recyclable goods they garbage pick all day for a few bhat.   

The actual gap of wealth between me and the guy hauling a stack of cardboard on his moped is not astronomical; it can be stated in real fathomable numbers. But the quality of life difference between us seems like an ocean. 

It is hard to justify the suffering that accompanies extreme poverty in the face of what is genuinely unfathomable wealth inequality. I have no quarrel with struggle, but I can't bear suffering - mine or others. And while struggle seems like a feature of inherent balance, suffering seems like a thing that can be either balanced, or unbalanced. 

A conservative might make the argument that the struggle of the poorest classes is an essential feature of our society's way of being, and they wouldn't be wrong. So long as class mobility is achievable, I might even agree with them. But using that idea to justify the unbalanced suffering of poverty is cruel apologist bull-shit. The unrestrained siphoning of wealth today is counter productive to class mobility and creates suffering. Making the middle class harder to achieve and easier to fall out of lays waste to any advantages of class struggle and explodes class misery. 

Wealth owns, in my mind, the blame for this era's radical imbalance of suffering and deserves every inch of destruction that pendulum will eventually level; when the poor team up.

Bangkok is pretty affluent. I don't feel terribly wealthy most of the time, but it would be impossible to feel that none of the time. Sometimes, I am just obviously living a lot better than the people I meet. In those moments it is hard to reconcile a feeling that wealth is a fundamentally immoral pursuit with the reality of my affluence. I really have to force myself to contextualize and remember that on the suffering scale, I stand with most of humanity surfing somewhere around the center.

I feel gratitude for every $2 meal. But I'm still hungry for the rich.