…that there are more of them than there are of us?  The world’s tragically poor or unprivileged underclasses, I mean.

I’m at the moment in Cancun, one of the more well-known cities of Mexico.  As in many, maybe most or all, larger Latin American cities, the differences between the “wealthy” and everyone else is striking…and by local standards, virtually every American able to travel widely would be wealthy.

What is truly alarming is that, alongside the world’s poorest slums (in Haiti and India, for example, maybe even some inner cities in the States), even locals here are “wealthy.”  My question is, again, “How long before this great mass of poverty and hunger and deprivation finally realize their power in numbers?”  We’ve spoken in the States of the privileged one-percenters, and of the remaining 99 percent. On the world stage, I wonder if the poor don’t number even more than 99 to one?  Regardless, it means there are (at least) 99 of them for every one of us.

Consider that:  What happens when they realize that and somehow begin to act on it?  It is only one more reminder of the fragility of this protective bubble we so blithely call civilization.