..10.. progress

a gentle breeze swirls stray hairs out of my pony tail. sitting on the top deck, away from the bar & the gossiping, is refreshing. china is unimaginably beautiful. it's sad to see it growing so quickly, to see their incredible natural resources turned into tools for more quickly accumulating fancy cars and tiny cell phones. it feels selfish to wish for china to remain 'undeveloped', as 'development' has been taught to be a social good. and i'm not worldly enough to know what an 'undeveloped' lifestyle entails, or at least not in its entirety. but could it be that development trades one set of (quite tangible) problems for another set of more elusive ones? surely, people who are starving and diseased cannot be as happy as someone as comfortable as i am. but what about a successful farmer? is there not a way to live simply, perhaps 'underdeveloped', but happily? what makes progress a good thing? no, that's the wrong question. what is good about societally-defined progress? why can there not be a pervasive desire for spiritual and intellectual progress? are these types of progress too intangible to yearn for? does the human mind need an icon of progress, such as the dollar bill or the louis vuitton pattern, to simplify enough for quick processing?