Be the Ball
© Laurence B. Winn
In the spring of 2001, the marketing director of a small, privately held U.S. manufacturing firm lost his way on the streets of Caracas, Venezuela. He had been taking his usual morning walk on the advice of his cardiologist. Accustomed to the grid-like layout of cities in Minnesota, he was unprepared for the organic urban arrangement in which four right turns do not necessarily return you to the portal of your hotel. Instead, he was forced to practice his scant language skills on suspicious and heavily-armed police guarding the street corners.
The necessity to read the terrain awakened him to his surroundings, and he was treated to the spectacle of fortified wealth protected from the proletariat of the mud huts by guns, dogs and concertina wire. None of it is unique to Caracas. It is not so different from what you see in Mexico City, where the homes of wealthy residents have yards decorated with razor wire and dogs.
On the Ecuadorean mainland, increasing poverty has created a surge in the human population of the environmentally sensitive Galapagos Islands, where intensive fishing activity is driving some marine life to extinction. The trade in delicacies like lobster, destined for the United States, and sea cucumbers and shark fins, prized in Asia, can only be compared in profitability to drug trafficking. Shark fins, taken illegally, go for $50 a pound. Restrictions on fishing and government patrols affect mainly the small fishermen, who react with resentment. They say it's strange how, at night, they can see the lights of industrial ships taking away tons of fish while, somehow, the authorities can't. They seem to think suitcases full of money are involved.
On his return from Venezuela, the American marketing director thanked his good fortune, clean living and right thinking for the happy circumstance of his residing in America, where such things as he saw in Caracas never happen. But in the upscale subdivisions of Long Island, New York, houses are set ablaze by amateur arsonists to "Stop urban sprawl", as their graffiti claims, promising "If you build it, we will burn it". More ominously, and probably more representative of genuine sentiments, they have left the spray-painted message, "Burn the rich."
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