Today I watched the Superbowl, surrounded by foreigners, served by Thais.

Some days, being here is so disconcerting. I go about my day, and minus the heat, could almost forget that I am not at home, or even on my side of the planet. Then something, anything, jolts me, and I remember that I am rich, privileged, and spending my time wasting money on ideas and traveling halfway around the world, just because I can. Oh. Yeah. There's reality, welcoming me back via smack in the face. And we can sit around and tell ourselves that tourism is a viable and necessary part of the economy, but this has only grown to be because there are people who have such flourishing excesses as to make it a possibility.

Political scientists call this guilt I'm feeling "the white man's burden." Other travelers refer to it as culture shock. I'm just sitting here wondering what to do about it and how to reconcile it, in awe of the knowledge that I haven't even seen anything actually horrible yet (and probably won't during this entire trip).

I spent my weekend learning how to cook Thai food and (consequently) stuffing myself full of more food than I could ever want to eat in one sitting. It seems we find ourselves at a local bar almost every night of the week, blowing 3-5 meals worth of baht on a round of cocktails. And when we're not at the bar, we're at the market again eating more and buying more stuff than we really need or can use.

Then, we get up the next morning and go to Thai culture class, or Human Rights class, or to an NGO visit, and hear about people dying of AIDS for lack of retro-virals, or even simple anti-biotics to cure an opportunistic infection. About people being killed or chased out of their homeland by their own government. About how they have no rights or protections when they resettle afterward. We come back from class or the visit and read about people massacred by their government for being educated, wearing glasses, living in a city, playing an instrument, or writing a poem. And above all we hear about how neighboring countries and, more often, Western countries (who, honestly, are the ones with the resources) fail to care and fail to act. And some days it makes me a little sick.

I don't know if Asian culture has it completely right with the community over the individual (versus Western culture that places the individual over the community), but I feel like, at some point, you have to at least consider the disparity and do something to try to rectify it, at least partially. Like the Japanese idea that the CEO can't make so much more than the lowest paid employee. People shouldn't need to turn to child prostitution as a way to provide for their family. People shouldn't need to spend just as much money on water per day as they do on food, just because their government can't afford proper sewage treatment facilities. Someone's country of birth shouldn't so wholly determine if their basic needs are met. Should it?