France and the third-world idea

Interesting stuff the riots happening in France, huh? Although they've calmed down now, according to an MSNBC report I just read I still think it's interesting that a major Euro zone country could have riots for that long. Back in the '90s we only shut down Kingston for aout 3 days with the gas riots, and true metropolitan Paris was largely unaffected, but 1,000 cars torched? Schools, nurseries, homes burned? At least we only loot and block roads for the most part. There was even a report of an old woman on a bus being doused with an accelerant and set afire.

And these so-called first world countries like to look down on us here. Already the finger pointing has started. Immigrants. Arabs. Africans. People from low-income communities. People from the projects. I'm sure some of these people have been naturalised? Tempers can flare and riots can happen anywhere in the world. I'm just so tired of people ascribing things to 'third-world country behaviour', like that woman in the States who had to give birth during Katrina. She had the audacity to say that her birthing was under 'third-world conditions'. And then there's the man who heads the Red Cross for that area, saying that going into Biloxi, Mississippi was like going into a 'third-world country'.

Obviously, these people never got a glimpse of Bulbie's river-view mansion (complete with sattelite dish and three water tanks) in Clarendon. Maybe it's being lumped together that I'm fighting against. But I'm sure even in Africa, which most of these first-world country-ites seem to forget isn't just one big whopping country (as a side note, how many people know exactly how many countries there are on the African continent anyway?), there must be big houses, people driving big cars, living the life, I can attest to it. I haven't been there but one of my old housemates from Holland is from South Africa and I've seen pictures. So what's this third-world country thing about anyway?

Power.

When I was younger I once asked when Jamaica was going to step up and become a second-world country. The answer I got was that second-world countries are communist. Right. So apparently we'll never be first world (imagine us having a permanent seat on the UN Security Council for example?), so we're stuck in a category that even though it originated to describe political structures, is currently used to link us to being backward, lacking modern technological advacements, and generally just being in the stone ages.

Okay, sure, we do murder a lot of people here, and we do need to do something about the level of crime and violece. But it's not as if Jamaica is the only place in the world that murders take place? Is it? These so-called third-world country offences happen elsewhere as well, like riots, as the people of France can now attest. The world (more like the first-world) needs to just wake up and recognise. It's at your gates - suffering and loss from natural disasters, the fear of a car-bombing, riots - we're pretty much all on the same street now.

• Mood: hungry, dreading running my errands today
• Music: the hum of the laptop...