After spending a couple weeks in SE Asia, I’m working hard on putting together an adjusted view of the concept of corruption, and how it effects the way we’re able to live our lives.
The first observation is that nearly all the “westerners†we met had a firm and preconceived notion of what corruption was, and how awful it is in SE Asia. For the most part, they came here prepared to be appalled at the level of corruption in the governments here, and the level of poverty of the people, and they were generally able to find ways to be appalled by exactly what they wanted to be appalled by. In most cases, I think their expectations were exceeded.
Because corruption is certainly evident and destructive over here. They don’t try too hard to hide it.
My second observation was that folks who lived here had the same view of government that most people all over the world have of their own government. That is, they think the government is corrupt, and that folks with money and power find ways to bilk the common folk from whatever they have in order to continue to line the pocketbooks of those who already have money and power. They think that the government is usually nothing more than a tool for those with the money and power.
Hard to disagree with that point of view.
I want to use the term “lifestyleâ€, but I want to define my use of it first. Most westerners see this word and think it means what kind of car a person drives, how big their house is, how expensive the restaurants are that a person eats at, how elaborate a person’s vacations are, etc. Because for most westerners, that’s how lifestyles are delineated.
But for most of the folks over here, the delineation is far wider than this. There is a wide gap between the masses of folks who work 7 days a week for $5/day if they’re lucky, and the very few who have all the power and wealth.
That said, I think the corruption over here is more offensive to us for two reasons:
- It seems so much more “wrong†to us that so many live lives of such poverty, while so few skim the bribes at their expense.
- The corruption is so evident – they don’t know how to hide it well.
I need to noodle on this for a while, and want to write about it. For now, I only want to say that the nature of this whole corruption thing feels a little different than I expected it to feel. It’s nasty and evil without a doubt. Beyond that, though, I’m not sure it stacking itself up in the nice neat little package I’ve been taught to observe.
Back to that Tall Ships post again – this doesn’t fit a pattern I have yet, and I need to noodle through it a bit to see if I can fathom the shapes I think I see out there…
