The case for not being clueless

I read the NYPOST today. It is my morning routine--red bull and "the post." There is an interesting story about a lady named lori berenson who decided to drop out of MIT and go to Peru to help leftist rebels. The rebels are called the tupac amaru revolution. (no relation to the late rapper) The tupac army killed roughly 70,000 people. This led to her arrest---She was initially handed life but then had it dropped to 20 years. By all accounts Peruvian jails are a not exactly club med. This leads me to the following question..Why is it always the privileged white people who go off and do such things? A bunch of trust funders from San Fran go hiking in Iraq and now they are rotting in an Iranian Jail. The stories are endless. You are going to MIT, one of the top schools in the world, a school a million poor genius' would sell there thumbs to go to and you drop out to fight a cause that has about as much to do with you personally as I have to do with the fluctuations in the price of pork belly futures. Street kids and minorities dont seem to fall for such fools errands, they are too busy doing a thing called survival to entertain a good brisk hike through the hills of Iran. They are worried about life, keeping the lights on, maybe finding a safe home. Adversity builds character and privilege can often dumb a person down to the intellectual level of a toadstool. Street smarts are sometimes 10,000 miles away from book smarts and often the twain never meet. I dont have white guilt, I dont have rich guilt. The only thing I rebel against are modern art, stupidity and my own laziness.  My favorite cause is painting for myself  (and occasionally ronald mcdonald house) I have seen too much in this world and come too far to waste my butt in some jail because my rich ass hiked over an invisible border into hostile territory. I like my morning redbull and my NY Post (both of which may be scarce in an Iranian jail, methinks) I guess these people mean well but they are misguided and their good intentions have paved their own road to hell. One of the best ways to squeeze the toothpaste of idiocy and cluelessness out of your tube is to have the big boot of life stomp it out of you. This smartens a man up, it gives you a sense of the bigger picture. I once knew a girl from long island who decided to go live in communist yugoslavia (If I remember) the next month communism collapsed in the very same country and she returned to her parents large/ safe house with a swimming pool. My best Friend grew up in bulgaria...He had no toys---they made their own toys out of wood and string-- he lived under hyperinflation (and communism). We used to drink wine and laugh about such clueless people. He is like me, he has the thousand yard stare. He is nobody's fool. I come from the Ayn Rand school of selfishness. My paintings are more important than your cause and I dont feel a damn bit of guilt about it.