Hey, there's a new theme park in the works! Better get your tickets now, because they're going like hotcakes!
"Backed by Habitat for Humanity, a Christian charity, it aims to teach wealthy Americans how the world's poor really live." Right. Because corporate CEOs making obscene amounts of money are going to want to "imagine children sleeping in shacks infested with scorpions or snakes" and "walk right into a slum" so they can "see the kind of pitiful living conditions so many people in the world have." They don't care about their employees, let alone millions of faceless people who have nothing to do with them.
And you couldn't pay me enough to spend a day in that theme park. I spend a good portion of my time avoiding poverty like the plague. I'm aware that poverty exists and I do my charitable part for it. It doesn't mean that I have to spend the day touring a slum and learning to make bricks in order to really understand what being poor means.
More to the point, I and the CEOs of the world can't possibly learn what it means to be poor by looking at a slum. Unless you live the life for an extended period of time, you can't possibly understand.
To me this just smacks of people having money they don't know what to do with. Instead of spending the money on those in poverty, money is being spent so I can go to the theme park and point at the shanty homes like they're in a zoo. And then I can go back to my nice clean home with full refrigerator and forget all about it.
Yep, this is the dumbest idea I've heard today.
Posted by Nicole at June 02, 2003 10:28 AM | TrackBackI think it's a reasonable idea, but calling it a "theme park" was probably unwise. It brings to mind images of water-slides and rollercoasters, whereas this sounds like a glorified diorama.
John fished on June 2, 2003 10:37 AMI've heard the themed hotel that goes along with it is really just a bunch of cardboard boxes with newspapers for beds.
Chari fished on June 2, 2003 12:25 PMMarie Antoinette had a "rustic village" built at Versailles, complete with thatched-roof huts, dirt paths and livestock, so she and her ladies-in-waiting could play at being peasant women whenever they felt like it. She knew and cared nothing for the peasant class really. The wealthy elite who spend "a day in the slums" don't strike me as being very dissimilar.
Katie fished on June 2, 2003 10:18 PM
