"First world problems" are a terror upon developed nations.
I hate getting up at 9 a.m. for my 10:30 a.m. class. I got a Snapchat notification but not an actual Snapchat. I hate it when I want to go on Tumblr on the Barrett Lawn and the Wi-Fi doesn't work.
These things clearly aren't really problems, but people still complain about them.
In October 2012, the charitable organization Water Is Life released a video featuring impoverished "third world" children reading out a list of "first world" problems. The video shows a "third world" scene with each child dirty and pigs eating in the gutters.
This completely misses the mark. It "otherizes" the people of Africa, Asia and South America. Most of the world lives in these places, and we (those with Internet connection, computers and YouTube accounts) are trained to think of developing nations as places of utter despair and unhappiness.
How do we know that these people are unhappy?
While billions struggle to find clean water, reproductive rights and a job, not everyone in Cambodia lives in abject poverty. We need to look at what problems people in the first world have. Some people in the U.S. don't have things, from water to abortion rights, and there aren't any videos made in support of them.
We cannot keep lecturing at and moralizing these places when we never look at ourselves.
We pollute. We are superficial. Our perspective of the world revolves around an iPhone. The problems of the first world are as bad as the problems in the third world. We may be materially rich, but we are certainly spiritually poor.
Everywhere in the world, people have problems. People in Kenya have iPhones, people in Burma have to wait for the browser to buffer before "Mad Men" loads, and children in China have to read "Othello" even though they want to go to a concert.
These problems occur in the reverse, as well. People in the U.S. need clean water, and sometimes they can't get it. We could learn from development efforts in Ethiopia. We could learn from community building in Iran. There isn't a good reason that problems could not be solved in a global framework.
People in the U.S. got used to being in power and in charge of the world. We think we can walk softly and carry a big stick. More recently, we've been singing our own praises, and our stick has withered.
By realizing that other countries may be smarter than us, we can learn from them. Hubris on the national scale that we have achieved shows our ignorance of issues. The U.S. does not transcend global problems, and we shouldn't pretend that our problems are so different from anyone else.
Reach the columnist at peter.northfelt@asu.edu or follow him at @peternorthfelt
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