My last post focused on my time in the Klong Toey Slum of Bangkok and the challenges of human trafficking and poverty. How to handle such complex problems?
Singapore at night.
Well, one way is to do what I did. Fly to Singapore and forget about it.
Envelope myself in luxury. Let the Raffles Hotel staff laugh at my stupid jokes and insist it’s their pleasure to wash my dirty socks. Lose count of the Italian super cars and shopping malls.
I’m writing this from the Writers Bar of the Raffles Hotel, where Somerset Maugham and Rudyard Kipling would sip drinks and write. It’s a small corner of the hotel where ghosts of brilliant colonial celebrities come alive.
Writers Bar, Raffles Hotel.
In my time in Singapore I’ve seen angels fly to get you a bottle of wine, a light show that must cost tens of thousands each night, some of the most beautifully dressed women on the planet, and architecture that has no equal in the world. It is Singapore, a truly global city of economic prosperity only known in the early 21st Century.
It is easy to wrap myself in this luxury and forget about Klong Toey. The people I met there would be extremely uncomfortable in this Singapore world of pampered luxury. They would idealize it — and want to watch it on television — but they could not imagine themselves living it.
Yet I can. I do.
My hotel room is nearly the size of the Barkers home in Klong Toey. For the cost of the coffee I bought at a restaurant near the marina, a slum family could eat for a week. Just one of the over twenty Ferraris I saw today would create enough micro-enterprise projects to employ thousands.
World’s Largest Ferris Wheel.
Yet the people here in Singapore seem not to mind the disparity and seem very happy in the midst of luxury. Children run and laugh as adoring parents chase them around the hotel lobby. Well-dressed people flock to an Anglican service, or heed the Muslim call to prayer, or sit stoically to meditate at the Buddhist pagoda. Teenage Japanese tourists laugh, Chinese businessmen get drunk. Young locals text friends as they browse the malls. The Yves Saint Laurent saleswoman smiles at me as if she could not wait to serve a badly dressed American with a camera slung over his shoulder. Tourists chat as they stand in line for the world’s largest Ferris Wheel. People gather to hear a strings quartet playing Mozart at the waters edge.
We are suffocating from the luxury. And it is a joyous, wondrous, extremely pleasant way to die.
I’m not condemning luxury. I’m in the midst of it and loving it. I do not feel guilty (well, not too much anyway).
Light show at the Marina Bay Hotel.
But when we separate ourselves from the poor and live in this kind of opulence we create the illusion wealth is normal. We forget the poor. It’s not that we don’t care for the poor, or that we want to exploit the poor. We just simply forget them.
The poor don’t exist in this plush world. They are an abrupt reminder of reality, so they are banned. Even the minimum wage earning people all around me are given strict orders to smile, please, serve. Otherwise they are tossed out of this little slice of heaven.
Ah, such a wonderfully simple world it would be if we could just run from the problems of the poor. But memories of Ash, Anji and Carter persist. Images of dilapidated shacks and filthy homeless men haunt the nether regions of my memory. I can ban them from my world. I cannot ban them from my heart.
We all know the passage where Jesus says, “God so loved the world.” But the same author, John, wrote, “Do not love the world.” It’s always seemed like a contradiction to me. If we are to imitate the love of God, shouldn’t we also love the world as God loved the world?
Ferrari store. Yes, a Ferrari store.
Well, no. It is too dangerous to love the world. God is Holy and will not fall for the trappings of the world. But we are weak — the world can be a dangerous place for us.
Falling in love with Singapore is like that. I could easily avoid flying back to Thailand and not submit myself to seeing poverty again. I could easily stay in love with the world of fast cars, beautiful people, safe streets, and a whole staff dedicated to my whims.
But that would be falling in love with the world.
No, it’s back to Thailand I go. To see what God has in store for me there. I choose not to love the world. I choose to love those whom God loves. I choose to love the poor.
God help me.