Relationship between the Muggle & the Wizarding World

[joym999 at aol.com]

No: HPFGUIDX 24223

I have to respond to Mindys post, but I want to start by saying that 
while I agree with a lot of what all the other people responding to 
her post have said, I wish that others responding, bitchboy in 
particular, had chosen to respond more politely.

> I don't understand
> how an entire POPULATION, an entire WORLD, can manage to always, 
always,
> keep their existence a secret.

Why not?  I think that the charm of JKRs writing is that it IS 
possible that wizards are doing just that, and in the back of all our 
little muggle minds is the haunting suspicion that maybe, just maybe, 
the HP books are NOT fiction.

> Do you mean to tell me, that the big government of
> England, for instance, has never noticed this huge unusual 
population? 
> Isnt' there a census or something? [snip]
> The government of England would know if a 'village'
> of such exists, [snip]

Well, then the government of England is a lot more organized than 
most, because my local government doesnt notice that the streets have 
potholes or that the children can not read, and the (U.S.) federal 
government doesnt even notice when their intelligence agencies have 
spies in them who take home millions of dollars in cash for years and 
years.

And, as other people have noted, there are already lots of people 
that a census doesnt count and that governments dont notice.  Seems 
to me it would be particularly easy to avoid notice if you could just 
hit the census taker with a Confundus Charm to make him think he had 
already counted you, or to put an Invisibility Spell on your house 
when the Building/Fire Inspector or other government official drops 
by.

>how do they wash their laundry without wash machines? 

Wave their wands and say Cleanemupus Goodandshinyus?

> Do they have their 'own' plumbers, so that
> they don't have to call the Muggle plumbers, etc.? [snip]

Obviously.

> Say for
> instance, that a nosy neighbor, or a meter reader, or a survey 
taker,
> knocks on their door. Doesn't a Muggle knocking on a Wizard's door,
> notice that this house is somehow different? No electricity, no 
lights?

Again, magic is real handy here.  Confundus Charms, Memory Charms, 
Invisibility, etc.

> Also, I dont' think it's legal to live with a telephone

I assume you mean "without," not "with."  This strikes me as a 
particularly ethnocentric and astonishingly unaware thing to say.  I 
live on Planet Earth (most of the time), and I assume you all do, 
too.  The vast majority of people who share our pretty little planet 
have NEVER MADE A PHONE CALL, never flown on an airplane, never even 
seen a computer, and do not even own cars or refrigerators, let alone 
any of the other electronic devices those of us talking here do.  
Half the people on Earth live on small farms in rural areas and earn 
less than $1000/year.  One-third of the people on Earth HAVE NO 
ELECTRICITY.  Even in places like the U.S./Europe/Japan there are 
lots and lots of people who have no phones -- just go to anyplace 
where there is a bank of payphones in a poor neighborhood and see how 
many people are lined up waiting to use them.

> Or are wizards so
> magical that they can worm their way out of any emergency -- fire,
> burglary, and illness

Again, I would have thought that that was pretty obvious.  Remember 
Hagrid saying "No car crash could have killed James and Lily Potter"?

> If they walk around dressed up in robes on the street
> all the time, aren't they immediately visible? Are they all in 
Muggle
> clothing when they go to the train station?

It is pretty clearly stated that the kids wear muggle clothes and 
change into their robes on the train.

> How do Wizards manage to marry Muggles if the Muggle world is so 
foreign
> and even contemptuous to Wizards? 

As has been pointed out, only some wizards are contemptous of 
muggles, and those wizards do not marry muggles because, like the 
Malfoys, they are concerned about maintaining "pure-blood."
> 
> Additionally, I don't know how the Muggle kids survive without the
> electronic pastimes out kids can't be without. No TV. No movies. No
> computers. No electronic games. No Nintendo. 

Again, the vast majority of kids in the world survive quite nicely 
without all that stuff.  There was no Nintendo or computers or 
electronic games when I was a kid, no TV when my parents were kids, 
and no movies when my grandparents were kids.  We all survived quite 
well, thank you, as did the human race for tens of thousands of years 
before any of that was invented.

Besides which, who needs Nintendo when there is magic to play with?

> Another question that perturbs me is the apparent pride of being 
wizard,
> and the knocking down of the Muggles. It smacks reminiscent of the 
Third
> Reich-- WE are the master race, and THEY, are just lowly Muggles. 

Again, it is only certain wizards, like the Malfoys, who think this 
way, and that is exactly the point JKR is trying to make.  Voldemort 
and his little Nazi-like supporters are bad, very bad, because they 
are bigoted and contemptuous of other ethnic groups (muggles, in this 
case) which they dont belong to.

> Another question I have, is how they manage to support themselves 
with
> only magical jobs. There are only so many people who can work for 
the
> Ministry, and only so many people who can have shops in Hogsmeade. 
What
> if someone wants to be a doctor? A lawyer? A scientist? 

This is a good question.  The details of the wizarding economy are 
very vague.  It is very unclear where their food comes from, how 
wizarding items are manufactured, etc.  But just because the details 
are vague doesnt mean it is not possible for them to develop a 
thriving economy.  Maybe the Malfoy fortune comes from using magic to 
extract salt from the sea, and selling it to Mortons Salt Company.  
Maybe the Potter fortune came from magical chicken farms, where the 
hens each lay 100 eggs a day.  Who knows?

It sounds to me like the mind-stretching, eye-opening aspects of the 
enchanting fantasy of the HP books have been lost on you, Mindy, and 
it is really too bad because, IMHO, that is one of the best things 
about these books.  Please, we would all be better off if we 
remembered more often that there are many, many realities out there 
-- our own personal one is not necessarily shared with anyone else.

--Joywitch