Poverty for sale.

This morning i read a page-long newspaper article about poverty nowadays, which overtime had turned from a mere product of laziness into a product of government's ignorance into a product for display. Apparently, now in Jakarta, foreign tourists can find a particular tour service which offers them the remarkable, haunting visits to countless exhibitions of poverty all around the city. And by exhibitions i don't mean anything regarding museums or artwork. It's a real live exhibition, which means the tour guide will take them from one site where poverty exists to another. For example: the cramped cardboard-houses slums surrounding abandoned railroad tracks, the piles of city garbage where scavengers hunt for their survival, or the stinking area along the Ciliwung river on which immigrants make their below-the-poverty-line living.

This is like, sprinkling salt onto an open wound. The tourists get their chance of a second's pity, the tour guide gets his money, and the poor people on the showroom get their moment of degradation. I read that the tour's mission is to connect people from different backrounds together, but what is there to connect if the only thing the tourists do is watch and then maybe have a discussion with their fellows back home regarding how poor Indonesia is? It would be a different story if they decided to do something about the poverty they had just recently observed, but it's no guarentee that they're going to build some sort of foundation to diminish famine or such, rather than just paying cash to the immoral guide and then leave it at that. Obviously they do not need guide to watch poverty, since it's practically everywhere here.

I sincerely think that whoever created the tour service is depraved. What kind of creature would feed his stomach full by showing off other people's calamity? To be fair, i also read that almost half of the tour service's income is dedicated for the poor, so it's a give-back kind of thing. But still, it's not much - considering that the poors are being used up for some kind of advertisement - and also the tour service is profit-oriented isn't it? That's what I would call sucking up fortune out of the ill-fated, in other word, a parasite.

YES, it is true that Indonesia has a vast population of people living under the poverty line and NO, I am not trying to cover it up by opposing such imbecile behaviour of intentionally displaying it to the general public. My point is, if you megalomaniacs can't, in any way, offer some help to improve their condition, then why not just leave them alone? They deserve to have their own rights of not being the centerpiece of humiliation, because what happened to them is none other than just the turning of a wheel, and they're currently at the bottom. So my suggestion is, just let them be.

(The megalomaniacs i mentioned above also goes for political oportunists who, on their TV hugging-and-shaking-hands-with-victims-of-poverty campaigns, assured the protection and well-being of the poors, while looking from past experiences, there's a big chance that it's nothing but an empty promise, a feud. And also for creators of the high-rated reality shows where audiences can laugh at poor people shaking their hands off when some stranger randomly gives them money or offers to reconstruct their weathered houses)