My host and I have been having interesting conversations around two themes in particular: the difference between niceness and kindness, and the way that everyone seems to have to live and experience life through filtres. I think I have already covered the first topic elsewhere in these pages, but here we go again, Gentle Reader.
As I mentioned to Alonso, niceness is something anyone can lie their way through, but kindness, in order to not be mere niceness, has to come from the heart, from a genuine place, and I would say from the realest part of oneself. Kindness also seems to have been trending lately as a kind of feelgood buzzword, and I often wonder if a lot of people mistake kindness for niceness, and vice-versa. I also haven't been shy about shaming my own dear little Canada on the topic of niceness versus kindness, and for the simple reason that we are such a nation of hypocrites. People, or Canadians, anyway, often have time to be nice. It usually doesn't cost them anything. They're usually too busy to be kind. It's like people in church who tell me that they enjoy my singing (though I often wonder if they are lying), but a lot of them are usually less than likely to want to have coffee with me after the service. They say they're too busy. Uh-huh.
Of course, this is a trap we all fall in. And I sometimes wonder if it has even more to do with our feeling too powerless and overwhelmed to be able to reach out meaningfully to others. This seemed to be happening in Bogotá yesterday, as Alonso and I were driving through that city of ten million. twice, while stalled in traffic, a father carrying in his arms his young child approached the car, from my side, asking for money so they could feed their kid. We both tried to help with a small bit of cash. It hit me rather hard, and I was struggling to not let Alonso see that I was crying just afterward. Then I said something about the huge problem of need, inequality, hardship and misery is so overwhelming, in both our cities, Vancouver as well as Bogotá, that really all we can do is take small steps of kindness in the way we interact with others. Later, I also mentioned that in order to have a better world, we first have to become better people. But the million dollar question, of course, is going to be, how do we become better people?
Entering Bogotá for the first time in four years yesterday was itself an experience. First, the traffic. Bumper to bumper, with cyclists trying to wend their way among the cars. Very dangerous. Then there were some bikes that had two occupants, one balancing on the handlebars, and sometimes three including a small child, usually. There is an infrastructure of bike paths in Bogotá but as in Vancouver, there never seem to be enough. We did drive through some poor and very hardscrabble neighbourhoods for a while, but the cars and the traffic were the most overwhelming presence. Then loomed the other Bogotá with the tall and gleaming office towers that looked like a memorial to Ayn Rand (she was an American writer with apparently no conscience or moral compass at all, famous for novels glorifying ruthless capitalism and vilifying all those who get hurt by the rich.This theme really came alive for me again while Alonso and I were visiting a cafe in an upscale neighbourhood. Everyone was of course well dressed, but I couldn't help but sense the kind of hard and cruel arrogance that has made some Colombians, and Canadians, very wealthy, while keeping the rest of us more or less in a state of perpetual disenfranchisement. The feeling I was left with, is one of their laughing in the face of same poor that they are trampling underfoot.
There is also the matter of how inaccessible to the public are the green spaces in Bogotá. It seems that almost all of that land is privately owned. For example, the beautiful forested mountains on the eastern edge of Bogotá are largely inaccessible to the public, because a lot of that land is privately owned.
This is my third time in Colombia. And my first time here in four years. I guess this is why I am feeling so strongly the impact from witnessing the huge social inequality here. And also, because I am not in Canada, where I am more used to living among our own style of homelessness and marginalization, it's going to look all the more stark and ugly when I am seeing it in a different form. I had a conversation about this with a young man, I think maybe eighteen years old, yesterday. I was in a café working on a new drawing while waiting for Alonso who was in a meeting nearby. So, the kid took interest in my art, and we had a chat in both languages, since he also wanted to practice his English with me. He seemed very surprised when I told him that Canada isn't quite exactly the paradise we purport ourselves to be, and I alluded to some of our social problems and other state secrets that he was quite shocked to hear.
It'll never be a perfect world. And we should never be let off the hook for not trying.
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