Americans Away From Home

What moves you?  If you're a person who feels, who takes in information about other people and can imagine what they're going through, does that get through?

I hope you'll forgive me, in this election season of delegate-vote counting and misspeak and newly fertilized grassroots, if I write about two things back home that touch my soul.

The trouble is, reading the newspaper.  I just read two stories that scare, each having the possibility of reaching home.  Away From Home, Americans, I'm that.  I care.

Nicholas Kristof writes about revisiting a village in China that's haunted him for ten years.  The toxic effects of what China allows to happen there have been measured in California.  Despite some improvements, people are drinking water they fear and eating fish from water that kills fish.  Why?  As one says, "We have to eat."

Kristof points to a surprising fact: In its attempt to control pollution, China charges $7,000 for a license plate, which has effectively lowered the number of polluting cars in China.  Is that the world's highest registration fee?  Yet - a word that's hardly strong enough - yet, the economic and political might that is China's reality and potential comes at high cost, now, to the rest of us.  Do Californians, with the good fortune of air and breeze from proximity to an ocean, know this is happening?  If poisoned air is reaching California, how long till it soars just a bit further to where you live?  And where is our heart, for people stuck living in a place with so much incidence of chemically-caused retardation that it's referred to as the "village of dunces"?

Thomas Friedman rips sensibilities of the mind and heart, too, in his tale of a lottery in Maryland.  It's the American dream, but only for 80 of 300 children, though it's supposed to be open to all. 

Reminiscent of "with justice, and freedom, for all"?  Do all who come to say our pledge get justice?

Is that too harsh?  What do you feel about the justice system in America.  Is it fair?  I've argued so often that it's not, but that what we have in the U.S. is so much better than what goes on elsewhere.  Sometimes on reading the news, one wonders. 

Justice for all?  Freedom for all?  Education, quality education, for all?

It's Friedman's last words that haunt, predicting our need, echoing why "Change" so resonates. 

"There are so many good reasons to finish our nation-building in Iraq and resume our nation-building in America, but none more than this: There’s something wrong when so much of an American child’s future is riding on the bounce of a ping-pong ball." 
(Kristof story about China here).   (Friedman story about a Maryland school lottery here).

Carole