The One Percent

Four women and I are working on a project here in Papa. It's a ton of work, so one evening several of us went out to dinner together to  enjoy each others' company rather that doing comparative analysis of widgets and website editors. We're on the walking street in the centrum (pron: tsentrum), dressed for a girls' night out, speaking English, walking between dinner and a strong spiked coffee before heading home. Also on the street, three young men from Papa. They're dressed like most teens in Europe these days, the fashion rage being a re-hash of 1980s soft core punk.

"Fucking Bitches."

My first thought is, "So, that was excellent pronunciation." Because, you see, I've been called names on the street before, and it's getting a little boring. We walk on, ignoring them for a few steps, as women do the world over when harassed on the street. I failed in my allegiance to HollaBack here. The cell phone was in the bottom of my bag, but at about step four, I turned and looked at them, sternly, for a long time. My second thought was that teenage boys the world over need a few lessons in manners, but my Hungarian is not yet strong enough to have said, "That insult was delivered with perfect pronunciation. I congratulate you, little man, on your linguistic skill, but not on your courage. Were you alone, you would not have braved the reprisals four women. Iwill not even begin to imagine for you the frustration you will experience in the sexist life you appear prepared to live. And, just so you can be certain, I am a fucking bitch of what to you are extra-epistemological proportions." What I can actually say in Hungarian in this situation is, "Jo estet" ( pron: yo eshtate -- good evening). This does not pack the high handed diction of the classy version of "fuck you little boy."

I am, however, the international queen of The Withering Glare, which did its job here as effectively as in other locations.

But, then I had some conversations, made some connections. So, some anecdotes.

Papa is a smallish town in provincial Hungary. Descended upon it, all at once three years ago, came an international consortium in the form of a heavy air lift wing. Lots of people who spoke no Hungarian, lots of people needing homes. Homes became available. Other people's homes, homes rented at about 75% higher rates than any real estate agent had ever imagined here. Of course, this process inflated rental and home prices across Papa and in surrounding villages. Restaurant staff and store owners started learning English, or more English, toute suite. Partly, this was a bit of innate cultural generosity: Hungarians are often among the most generous of people, and they know that their language is a labyrinthine mine field for most others. Partly, this was good business sense: There are, relatively speaking, pots and pots of money to made from these foreigners.

In Papa, we are, I am, The One Percent.

That means the same thing here that it means in the US right now. It means that I am grudgingly tolerated. It means that many of Papa's citizens feel helpless in the face of changes to their world wrought by me and on my behalf. It means that I am part of a system that makes me, by analogy, Paris Hilton, and that creates fewer jobs for Hungarians than she does for Americans outside the paparazzi industry. In the US, I am a member of the middle class, or the upper middle class, really. I'm not upside down on my house, and my income (when I had one) was higher than that of 50% of my fellow and sister citizens. Here, I am Paris Hilton. I have a level of freedom, power, and social access that's embarrassing. I went to listen to the USAFE Band the other night, and I was ushered to the reserved seats for the fancy people.

One news report from the US recently informed me that over 900,000 people applied for 62,000 jobs at McDonalds, most of them floor jobs, literally the McJob of middle class high school days and working class everydays. 900,000 Americans would have been happy to get paid minimum wage with no benefits. In Hungary, it's been normal for people with magnificent educations, who speak 5 languages, play the violin, and can do higher math to make $500 per month.

Here, people don't garden because they want to be organic localvores. Here, people garden so that they can eat at all. A rooster crows every morning, just three houses over from my house. Two houses over, a man keeps a flock of pigeons. He feeds them, maintains a wonderful coop for them, and eats them.

I applied for a loyalty card to a local grocery store and the application was full of the usual marketing questions: gross income, number of kids, blah blah blah. The income brackets were defined monthly, per person in the household, and ranged from 10,000 HUF to 200,000 HUF. That's from $50 to $1000.

My rent is 400,000 HUF. Almost all the rents in this charming, crumbly, provincial town are $2000/month, for a house, for a two room apartment. A rent scale wildly out of proportion for this location, and that is creating some very difficult burdens for the people of Papa. For instance, there's a women's shelter here that I've come to volunteer for as they need me. When a woman moves out of the shelter, she usually stays in Papa, gets a job, an apartment ... and because the heavy airlift wing is here jacking up the local economy, she's up against some pretty stiff rental rates, and winds up living in a crappy apartment built in the 1960s by the Soviets. ... Not the local dream home.

I've heard a rumor that some people here are beginning to believe that the Hungarian government, not the most prosperous in Europe, is paying our rent for us, for all of us foreigners. This is preposterous, and dangerous, and hence testy teenage boys trying out their English on me.

For all kinds of reasons both linguistic (on which I'm working), and political and legal (about which I can do fuck-all), these flowing tensions are hard for me, for us, to address.

But, I get it, little Hungarian man, I get it.

So, Dear the One Percent of the United States:

There are reasons both real and imaginary that we don't like you. You would do well to address them. Then, you could come out and live among us, outside your gated and guarded communities, without fear of being called a Fucking Bitch.

Dear FIDESZ,

We could be following some priorities out here that would make life for your citizens in Papa hurt a LOT less in the wake of this wing's arrival. It would be lovely to discuss those with you, and to work together to create some decent interactions in this community. Because, you know, you have truck loads of money coming from this consortium, and not much of it is benefiting the people here who are discomfited by our presence and effects. Developing some real, not just showy, lines of relation and some real benefits to the people of Papa would be, well, the right thing to do. Any room in your new constitution for that?

No? Too busy making life hard for women and gays and ethnic minorities, unbalancing the balance of powers, enshrining the Christian roots of the Hungarian plutocracy? Knock yourself out.