Inroads of Power

by JG Learned

How many times have you heard someone say
   “If I had his money I'd do things my way”?
       But little they know that it's so hard to find
One rich man in ten with a satisfied mind.

                                               Satisfied Mind – The Byrds

What is poor? Laos is considered to be one of the very poorest of countries. This is a rather, if not entirely, misleading statement - judging something by an artificial standard. Per capita income doesn't tell us much about quality of life. Per capita income is a way to classify people and countries by a western standard – essentially, spending power. It imposes the standards of the rich upon the poor. It is the standard set by mercantile missionaries whose ultimate aim is to convert the ignorant, the heathen, into faithful consumers – to create a middle class. Ultimately, who benefits?

What is important in life? Food, clean water and air, family, love, respect for life, acceptance of the cycle of birth and death, the sense of contentment - or more things, more money, more to lose? Contentment is not the satisfaction of desire. It is a matter of acceptance and awareness of what is the essence of life, what is the heart of the matter.

Money is simply an abstract form of power. Commerce is the tool for attainment of that power. Laos is still rich - rich in nature, compassion and contentment. It will change quickly.

Traditionally rivers provided the slow arteries of trade throughout most of sparsely populated Laos. Today Laos is crawling with surveyors, road crews, dam builders, officials and NGOs in expensive SUVs, bringing electric power and progress, pipe fed water and indoor plumbing, further and further into the interior. Roads are bulldozed through the wilderness, steel pylons and poles sprout up, and cables are strung. Power lines require roads to move cement electric poles and lines and to provide maintenance. Roads provide a cheaper, faster, more reliable method of moving consumer goods from factory to countryside.

Not so slowly and very surely, traditional homemade foods, sweets and condiments begin to be replaced by factory-made confections in plastic wrappers and tins. Food previously wrapped in banana leaf and bamboo is now factory-made, vacuum-packed in non-biodegradable plastic. Through long habit it is tossed directly to the ground without a second thought. But unlike banana leaves plastic does not simply integrate back into the soil.

Power comes in and the money flows out. And what is electric power for today, in the idiom of progress, if not for having a television? For being connected, wired in. To tell people what they need – to sell things, artificial concepts of quality of life foremost.

It could be argued that as a single factor TV has perhaps been the most effective and insidious tool for the dissolution of tradition and the basic integrity of the social fabric. Babies are reared in front of it. Old people keep their failing eyes and dreams glued to it and society in general becomes more addicted to distraction and new desires, further removed from a simpler concept of reality and basic values. Imaginations, when stimulated, tend to wander in the direction of luxury rather than necessity, providing further momentum to the juggernaut of material desires and insecurities, creating new jealousies and attitudes of superiority.

Television sets, stereos and refrigerators, bought on installment, appear in tiny hamlets months before the power actually arrives. They sit conspicuously, covered with cloth, the centerpieces of bamboo and thatch houses, waiting patiently for the power. The Buddha and Spirit altars fade into the background, gathering dust behind the shiny TV.

In Laos, the ingress of TV has been slow, previously restricted to lowland areas along the Mekong where Thai television reception was possible and electricity available. TV is driving deeper into the interior daily. In a typical upcountry Lao village, it is dark and quiet after 9:00 pm. The sky at night is a river of stars. But when the power arrives, the lights stay on late and the stars seem fewer, not so bright and farther away, the village is no longer quiet after 9:00. The volume of the new karaoke-stereo will increase to compete with the sound of the TV next door. The animals under the houses at night are restless. Villagers go to sleep late, and dream restless dreams of things they've suddenly discovered they need.

Nobody wants to feel left behind. It's natural. Once fashion becomes an issue, nobody wants to wear last year's fashion and even last month's purchase, costing perhaps a half-month's wage, is no longer satisfactory. Just a few years ago Lao girls nearly all wore their traditional home-woven sarongs. There was no concept of ‘fashion crisis' and clothing competition. Neatness and cleanliness were the main issues: It was not important to look different from others, to follow western fashion. Now it's hip-hugging blue jeans and shoes that don't wear well on dirt roads.

But who does this all profit in the end? There is a pattern. The self-sustaining community begins to pay for electricity and appliances, factory-made food and clothing. Their material desires are increased. More and more money leaves the community making it necessary to rely on their entire crop as a market commodity. The prices roller-coaster with supply and demand. Farmers start to rely on usurious middlemen in order to borrow cash to buy chemical fertilizers and extra labor, necessary to squeeze every possible gram of produce from the ground. They fall behind on high-interest loan payments and pledge next year's crop as collateral. Ultimately, more and more lose their farms, their homes, their livelihood. Then it's time to work for wages on what was once their land, starve or move to a city slum; to put their children on the streets to beg, to work for next to nothing in a poisoned environment doing hard construction or factory labor, producing those very items which progress suddenly brought them.

But few truly want see the future. The lessons of all written and remembered history seem doomed to collect dust. The realistic philosophy of Buddhism fades away in the face of monetary need. Greed, anger and ignorance – the cardinal Buddhist sins – become the normal state of affairs. The villager has seen towns. The town people have seen cities. They could see what lies ahead – if they really wanted to. Ignorance, like most things, is largely a matter of choice.

People like - maybe need - to think, “It won't happen to us – can't happen here,” but any addiction starts like that. “I'm stronger than that – I can stop when I want.” But when you jump into the river of progress you are in its power. And progress won't stop. It will go on and the future will become the present and people will always talk about the good old days with less problems, heartbreaks and fears.

The western missionary zeal for improving the ‘third world' – is it really to help these ‘poor' people or to pull them into the system of consumerism so they can be more easily economically controlled? Does less child deaths per thousand do anything more than to increase populations, make more mouths to feed and the opportunity to sell more things? Are NGOs ultimately creating a middle class and more good consumers who lose the most basic concept of what richness in life is? I don't even wonder any more.

But everyone must learn these lessons for himself or herself – the lessons of history and even the future are not enough to teach us. That's just the way it is.

Post script: I'm sure that NGOs, like police, start their careers with high ideals. Some are honest enough to consider who benefits most from ‘progress'. What we bring is often not what we were hoping to leave behind.

One organization deserving a great deal of respect in Laos is the UXO program. Unexploded Ordinance. They are the largest single employer in Laos and they are trying to remedy the mistakes of the past, largely our mistakes.

The views expressed by the author are not necessarily those of North By North East Tours.