Some thinking

I'm currently reading "Breakfast of Champions" by Kurt Vonnegut. It's a great book. The part I read the other morning had this, when talking about the ills of the US:

As I approached my fiftieth birthday, I had become more and more enraged and mystified by the idiot decisions made by my countrymen. And then I had come suddenly to pity them, for I understood how innocent and natural it was for them to behave so abominably, and with such abominable results: They were doing their best to behave like people invented in story books. This was the reason Americans shot each other so often: It was a convenient literary device for ending short stories and books.

Why were so many Americans treated by their government as though their lives were as disposable as paper facial tissues? Because that was the way authors customarily treated bit-part players in their made-up tales.

And so on.

Once I understood what was making America such a dangerous, unhappy nation of people who had nothing to do with real life, I resolved to shun storytelling. I would write about life. Every person would be exactly as important as any other. All facts would also be given equal weightiness. Nothing would be left out. Let others bring order chaos. I would bring chaos to order, instead, which I think I have done.

It got me thinking. I haven't been to too many places outside of the United States, but from what I understand the ghettos in the US are pretty dangerous and are without a doubt places of high crime. At least I would say pretty dangerous for being in what is considered a world superpower country, and a first world place that people who don't live here want to come to to live. Of course it's foolish to think that the ghettos here in the US are more dangerous than other places, obviously there are dangerous places around the world, but there are also some extremely poor places that are, from what I understand, not dangerous or plagued with crime in the least.

Anyway, so what I was thinking was that poor and ghetto aren't necessarily synonomous. Or further to the point, a poor area doesn't necessarily have higher crime rates. So it got me thinking, and now I don't think this is a groundbreaking thought, but I think it's not "poverty" that breeds crime, rather it's "relative poverty," or disparity in living condition.

I don't really know what I'm getting at, but I guess the two points I want to make are:

1. It's sad to me that such a wonderful and powerful country can even have cities where someone like me can't walk down the street without fearing for my life, and

2. The book "Breakfast of Champions" so far puts words and a story to thoughts that pop in and out of my head. It is real a good book so far.