Proyecto Visión 21

Francisco MiravalThere are times when stories, news, and information overlap in such a strange way that they present simultaneously two opposite extremes, from opulence to poverty and from gluttony to hunger, thus creating a confusing image of our reality and making it difficult to reconcile those mutually exclusive elements, all of them, of course, immersed in the same dialectics.For example, a recent report by Hunger Free Colorado (based on official statistics) suggest that low-income families in this state only have less than $1.50 per meal per person. In other words, a typical family of four will only have $6 for a breakfast, lunch, or dinner for the whole family. Clearly, that amount will prevent them from getting the meals in the quality and quantity they need for those meals to be nutritive. At the same time, a story published on June 7, 2014, by Yahoo Sports, indicates that rookie players of the Philadelphia Eagles, a NFL team, attended a dinner with a cost of almost $17,800. That’s the number seen in a restaurant tab published by one of the players in his social media site.According to the story, it is no clear if that the cost of the dinner for all the players (the actual number is not provided) or, perhaps and most probably, it is the cost of the dinner only for the player who posted the restaurant receipt online. By the way, the dinner included expensive steaks and other foods and even more expensive wine bottles. So, while some people only have $1.50 for his/her dinner, somebody else can spend 11,000 times more money in only one dinner. (Also, the amount of $17,800 that the player spent on only one meal is very close to the annual income of a family of three living just above the poverty level, according to federal guidelines.)In addition, according to Hunger Free Colorado, there are around 850,000 people in this state facing hunger or food insecurity. Amazingly, that number is quite similar to the number of people facing the same problems in Buenos Aires, Argentina, according to recent official statistics. The obvious difference is that, in Colorado, hunger and poverty affect 16 percent of the 5,3 million residents, while in Buenos Aires, hunger and poverty affect 28 percent of the almost 3 million people in that city. Clearly, the percentage of poor and hungry people in Colorado is lower than in Buenos Aires, but the number of people is the same in both places, in spite of the fact that the average personal annual income in Colorado is over $30,000 and in Buenos Aires is $7,700. One would expect a significantly lower number in Colorado, but that’s not the case. That mix of scarcity and waste, of just surviving and ostentation, of money security and hopelessness, is almost surrealist and makes me difficult to decide if that’s our reality, if that’s only an illusion covering the true reality (that could be better or worse), or if I am distorting reality.