Survival

I've seen in movies people who have been ravaged by war and hardship seek refuge in cities with food and humane conditions. I've read in books about people coming from poor areas going into big cities hoping to find a job and a better life. I've heard stories of people with nothing, migrate to places with something, only to find, still, nothing. But they were always stories from another time or another place, sometimes both, far far away from my reality. The very very limited number of beggars, homeless indivduals, and dumpster excavators I have seen, I've been told to stay away. There's no empathy - there's hardly sympathy.  It's not because I'm superior or haughty; it's because I've never understood and was never asked to understand. These people, by my education and by my instinct, are from a different universe, one impossible for me to relate to.

Moving to Paris has started to make me realized how privileged I am. No, not because I get to live in Paris. The grandma on the street looking through the garbage bin got to move to Paris too, but as a refugee from a war-torn country and living in a squalor home provided by the French government. She hasn't had the education to allow her to find a job. The only thing she knows how to do is to scavenge through the junk and debris in order to find something she understands to be useful and could help her family, even though her family no longer needs to do that. The near middle-aged woman who lives in the metro station with a baby in her hand begging for change or ticket restaurant was privileged enough to stumble across Europe to Paris too, but she doesn't know how to look for a job and she doesn't understand why anyone would need a job if there are people on the street who can give her money. You can't even tell if that baby is hers or even real. The young man whose ancestors have been colonized and exploited by the French Colonial Empire speaks French in a thick accent has managed to illegally but luckily sneak his way into the city of lights and glamour. But he has been shunned to the suburbs of Paris looking for odd-end jobs to tie him over until he falls into the economy of crime. Yet, they are still privileged in relations to what might have been otherwise if they didn't come here. This is not the privilege I talk about.

Where I grew up, the couple of beggars at the train station seems physically disabled and you wonder who's taking care of them; that one homeless teen who lives next to the beer store in the neighbourhood plaza is considered lazy; and few trash digger you sometimes see downtown are probably crazy. I understood that if you work hard, you will succeed. And anything outside, beyond what is comprehensible, is therefore flawed. Except none of this is true - or maybe some of it might be. But it doesn't matter, does it? As long as you stay away from the crazies, far enough that they can't steal, rob, or hurt you and you study hard and you work hard, you will be someone and even something; everyone else is simply not putting in enough effort.

The privilege I am talking about, is the privilege to have ever thought this way and that I can, if I choose to, continue to think this way.  Everyone is born with tabula rasa and despite that we all somehow ended up in Paris, there are those who grew up with less than nothing and their goal in Paris is to survive, while mine is to live magnificently. This city is full of people who are here to survive. And it makes those of us who has never had to fight for survival unbearably hard to breathe. And that, in and of itself, is a privilege. I get it now.