The age of entitlement
In September 1977, I arrived at Howrah station in Kolkata (Calcutta) and took a rickshaw into the city. The route took us past the dozens of families for whom home was a dirty stretch of footpath under Howrah bridge; and I was held fast in the gaze of the children there, staring at me. Their faces were somehow both blank and intense, stares of incomprehension and poverty, eyes that bored through me. I was a young man of very modest means, but I had in my pocket, in a wad of travellers’ cheques, more money than anyone under that bridge would see in their lifetimes.
Our family had spent four years in North India during the mid-sixties, and I was used to beggars and over-population. But for some reason, the eyes of those children at that particular moment remain etched in my memory more than any other image.
According to agencies like WHO and Unicef, about 17,000 children under the age of 5 die each day of preventable causes. That’s about six million infants each year. The “good” news is that this statistic has halved since 1990. But clearly there is still plenty of bad news if you are a small child who has been careless with the circumstances of your birth.
Someone has borrowed/stolen my copy of The Narcissism Epidemic - Living in an Age of Entitlement, so I won’t quote from it. But the (really good) title sort of says it all, doesn’t it. This is the wealthy Western disease: feeling entitled to the good life, as if we had done something to deserve it. How can I put this politely: we aren’t and we haven’t. And if we think we deserve one iota of our good fortune we are just spoiled brats, gazing like Narcissus at our own reflections. Why was I not born in poverty in Myanmar, or Mali, or El Salvador? Luck - nothing more, nothing less.
All that stuff about “First World problems” is exactly right; we fret about shallow nonsense when for billions of people survival, and keeping their kids alive today, are the main issues on the agenda. Who do we think we are?
This week in the New Yorker I read one of the most obscenely selfish and entitled stories I have ever seen. Here’s the link, if you can read it without throwing up. http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/01/30/doomsday-prep-for-the-super-rich It’s about people with appalling amounts of money whose only thought is how to save their rotten skins if the apocalypse should come. And many of these repulsive individuals want to come here, to New Zealand. God help us.
Deep down most people know that clamouring for ourselves is no way to live. The simple principles that lie at the heart of any well-lived life are gift and grace, not self-absorption and insistence on rights and self-preservation at all costs. My life is a gift; the lives of my family are gifts; in the end, everything is a gift. Bernanos ends his Diary of a Country Priest with the words “Tout est grâce” - all is grace.
Maybe this would be a good mantra to recite each morning: “I am not entitled to wealth; I am not entitled to health; I am not entitled to a long life; I am not entitled to anything. All is gift. All is grace. May I be aware of the 34,000 parents who will lose a small child today because they don’t have enough food or medical care. May I remember those living under bridges and be thankful for a comfortable home. Now let me face today with reality and gratitude, and without self-pity.”
Have a good day.
