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0 of 3 Premium Clicks used this month SUBSCRIBE Print + Online Subscriber Activation | Register x Forgot Password | Need an Account? subscribe | newsletter | deals Classifieds Jobs Autos Real Estate FEATURED » NEWS NOW Our View: Cajoling City Hall ... Jeffrey Gillespie: The demise of Cecil the lion ... Ashland Calendar, Friday, Aug. 7 ... Our View: Cajoling City Hall ... Jeffrey Gillespie: The demise of Cecil the lion ... Ashland Calendar, Friday, Aug. 7 ... COMMENTARY Chris Honoré: Our good fortune in the First World Comment By Chris Honoré DailyTidings.com By Chris Honoré Posted Jun. 15, 2015 at 12:01 AM By Chris Honoré Posted Jun. 15, 2015 at 12:01 AM » Social News   We in the First World give little thought to the texture and quality of our lives. We raise our children, go to work, find happiness where we can and hope for the best. On occasion, we gaze up at the night sky and consider the enormity and the mystery of it all. We shop in grocery stores filled with an abundance that can only be imagined by others. Unthinking, we lean over a sink and fill a glass, or stand in a sluicing shower, the water free of bacteria that could prove fatal were we somewhere else. By a quirk of fate or an accident of birth, billions find themselves struggling to fashion lives defined by an unrelenting poverty and deprivation. Their world is the Third World (as we refer to it, for want of a better term). The difference that exists between us, the chasm that separates us, is so vast as to be all but incomprehensible. We in the first have won the lottery. We live here, in America, in this singular, extraordinary place, one so remarkable that words cannot fully express our good fortune. I was in the Peace Corps. I spent two years in Colombia. I met people so poor, so destitute that I felt a wrenching, overwhelming helplessness, which, in the dead of night, washed over me and caused me to wonder how I could do anything that would make a difference. Through an elaborate Peace Corps grapevine, however, I heard about volunteers serving in India. Some were assigned to New Delhi. There are levels of chronic, human misery in the Third World that astonish, that defy comprehension. Delhi is such a place. It exists on the edge of a precipice of profound want and need, many of its inhabitants so damaged they are beyond help of any kind. Some of the volunteers that arrived in Delhi and environs found it intolerable, suffered what we called culture shock and soon returned stateside. Colombia, of course, was also a riptide of stark, Third-World currents. But India stood alone. At least that’s what we heard. In a recent New York Times article, journalist Gardiner Harris, who just completed a three-year assignment in Delhi where he covered South Asia for the newspaper, described his experience. Harris arrived with his wife and two young sons. The family initially anticipated an experience that, from a distance, had the promise of being an exotic and cultural adventure. They were prepared for the insistent beggars, rushing rivers of people, dengue fever and summertime temperatures approaching 120 degrees. What Harris and his wife were not prepared for was the inherent risk of living for any length of time in Delhi. Especially for their children. “We gradually learned that Delhi’s true menace came from its air, water, food and flies. These perils sicken, disable and kill millions in India annually making for one of the worst public health disasters in the world.” Delhi, as they soon discovered, is among the most populous, polluted, unsanitary and bacterially unsafe cities on earth. As a result, he and his wife struggled with the grim reality that they were putting their own children in harm’s way. Living in Delhi has the potential to cause irreversible lung damage (to his two boys as well as half of the 4.4 million children living there). In fact, current research found that “pollution can lower children’s I.Q. ... increase the risk of autism, epilepsy, diabetes and adult onset of multiple sclerosis.” Harris finally realized that it isn’t just the air. “At least 600 million Indians, half the total population, defecate outdoors, and most of the effluent ... is dumped untreated into the rivers and streams. For much of the year, the Yamuna River would have almost no flow through Delhi if not for raw sewage. Add in packs of stray dogs, monkeys and cattle, even in the urban areas, and fresh excretions are nearly ubiquitous.” The point is, we in the First World are profoundly insulated from how most of the Third World lives. The exigencies of their daily lives are and will remain beyond our understanding. That is our truth. A tangential point: Pollution in India will continue to grow unless India stems coal production. Prime Minister Narendra Modi has pledged to double it by 2020. Chris Honoré lives in Ashland. By Chris Honoré DailyTidings.com By Chris Honoré Posted Jun. 15, 2015 at 12:01 AM » Comment or view comments Reader Reaction » STAY INFORMED Email NewsLetter Sign Up Today Sign up for our newsletter and have the top headlines from your community delivered right to your inbox. Southern Oregon Directory Featured Businesses Loading... 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