Slumming

This weeks reading was somewhat confusing to me. "Poverty, is the new wealth. Anonymity is the new fame." It was shocking to me that this was what one of Mrs. Keyes friends, Inky, said. A wealthy woman who ran Vogue magazine sitting on a bench dressed in dirty clothes and wearing a terrible plastic grey wig, partaking in indecent activities with another wealthy man who was also dressed as a bum drinking a mixture of mouthwash, cough syrup, and Old Spice cologne. Why would these high class millionaires want to live the life of a homeless person on the streets when they could have litereally anything they could ever want? Simply because when they looked at their lives they were not satisfied. Their lifestyle of having banquests, fundraisers, and charities where they wrote thousands of dollars in checks for donations to help others became routine and boring.

Inky also says, "Think of it as a kind of poverty sorbet." "A nice little window of misery that helps you enjoy your real life." That almost seems ridiculous for someone to say. That you need to pretend that you are poor and homeless to appreciate the things you have, but at the same time gaining joy from this pretend lifestyle. I feel that if an actual homeless person could see what these people were doing they would probably be offended and find these people very ignorant.

What seemed like just a fun little game of make believe for the wealthy to get away from their actual lifestyle actually started becoming reality when Mr. and Mrs. Keyes saw a car pull up with a kidnapped girl who was trying to escape and begging for any bit of help like just catching the license plate. But they did not. They saw the newspaper headlines of the missing girl but they felt that they would be no help any only be ridiculed for what they were doing in the nighttime. Then they heard that the girl had been found dead. After that Mrs. Keyes decided to stop partaking in these outings. Except her husband kept going to protect Inky. But one night Mrs. Keyes got a call from the two and they were being chased by someone and couldn't contact the police. Then the next day she saw the headlines in the newspaper that they had been stabbed to death, and numerous headlines of the same sort that a killer was continuing to stalk the homeless.

Personally I think that all of the things that happened to the Keyes and their friends could have been avoided. Simply by not taking their wealth and lifestyle for granted and finding another less dangerous way to show them how to appreciate what they had.