This is one of those ground-breaking blog entries that point out the obvious as if it were actually a reflection on the sapience of the blogger:

People have different perspectives.

It is easy to forget that there are a lot of people out there whose experiences in life are totally different from my own.

I came across this in a The Economist article "Where have all the people gone?"

Women now far outnumber men in Zimbabwe, and the very young and very old outnumber adults of working age. In a typical household in Pumula South, a township of Bulawayo, ten children gobble maize paste from plastic plates under a hot tin roof. Their various parents have been “out” for several months, says their grandmother.

That is, they are in Johannesburg, flipping steaks or working illegally in shops. Sometimes they send back a bag of flour with a few folded banknotes hidden inside. But only sometimes. In other townships, the story is the same. “Almost all my friends are in South Africa and my relatives are in Britain,” says a man in Nkulumane, also on the edge of Bulawayo.

The sentence in bold above is what really struck me. This morning, I was talking to my mom about how she could send me some money for a gift. We spent about 5 minutes deciding how to do this--Paypal? Check? Transfer into my savings? Give a check to my sister, have her deposit it, then Paypal me?

It never crossed our minds that she could put the money in a bag of flour and send it to me.

And it never crossed our minds that there are a lot of people in this world for whom receiving a bag of flour--and the promise of food that it brings--would have been a happy enough occasion without any money inside.

Looking back at this blog and my thoughts over the past few months, I realize that I'm focusing a lot on the process of things--the legal structures, what it means to live in a democracy, etc. It is easy to ponder these things when you have all of the comforts that I have.

There is virtually no chance that I am ever going to see the world from the same perspective as the guy "flipping steaks" in Johannesburg to send money back to kids in Zimbabwe. But it is still useful to remember that no matter how important or big I think my thoughts or actions are, there are many other ways of looking at the world.