Rigoberta Menchu: Bag Lady or Presidential Candidate?

So what do you think? Well, obviously when given such a divergent set of choices you're going to go with the most unlikely right? So Bag Lady it is. What, you mean she's a Presidential Candidate? From where? She looks like someone out of a National Geographic photo carrying water back to her village? How could she be a candidate for the President of anything? I'm amazed she can even read? Alright, that was a bit hyperbolic. For those of you who don't know (don't feel bad I didn't) the above is a photo of Rigoberta Menchu. Ms. Menchu is a Nobel Peace Prize winning humanitarian activist, a Unesco goodwill amabassador and a candidate for the presidency of Guatemala. So why am I writing about her? Well, it seems that the staff at a hotel in Cancun, Mexico tried to throw Ms. Menchu out of the lobby of their hotel the other day, because they thought she was a bag lady. The real point of this little article is to ask any of my readers (and I am quite aware that there are at least a few of you out there), would you have known the difference? I'm not quite sure that I would have. I am well aware of the work the Ms. Menchu has done in Guatemala, I knew she was a Nobel Prize winner, I've read many excerpts from her autobiography (although not the book in it's entirety), but I don't believe that until today, I had ever seen a picture of her. So I wouldn't have recognized her anymore than I would recognize Muhammad Yunus or Grameen Bank (2006 Nobel Peace Prize Winners), Mohammed El Baradei (2005), Wangari Maathai (2004), or Shirin Ebadi (2003). I would however recognize the 2002 winner, Jimmy Carter. Why is it that our society as a whole is obsessed with celebrity, violence, drugs, wardrobe malfunctions, Britney's haircut, Paris' jail time, TomKat's baby, etc..., yet we never hear word one about people like Rigoberta Menchu who spend their entire lives dedicated to advancing the lives of others. Here's my opinion, our society doesn't give two shits about what is going on in Guatemala or Venezuela (where a dictator is destroying the country), the Ivory Coast, Sri Lanka, Burundi, Tajikistan, Andorra (not that anything ever happens in Andorra), Peru or any other third world country full of poor people. Our society cares only about things that directly impact our life, and third world poverty doesn't impact our lives, not on a daily basis anyways. Sure, we all feel bad when the Sally Struthers commercial comes on with pictures of starving children in Ethiopia, but it only lasts as long as the commercial (which most people skip over using their TIVO anyway.) Gone are the days of "there are people starving in China" being used to shame small children into finishing their dinner. Here to stay are dinnertime conversions about whether or not K-Fed is going to win custody away from Britney. Shit like this just makes me depressed. Sorry for the really long post.