Stone Age Superstitions and Eating Contests

The BBC US Correspondent, Justin Webb, is returning home to the UK after 8 years. His parting thoughts are an insightful, and I think very fair, description of the US. And I must say, after 3 years away from DC, NYC and New England (all of which I consider home), being able to see your home from a bit of a distance is a learning experience which can’t be replicated. I have felt this keenly during the final Bush years; during the election of Obama; during the recent arrest of Henry Louis Gates; and during each of my visits home where the lights, the noise, the marketing, the size of the cars (and the children) become more and more noticeable. I have always said that I love the United States. And during difficult times, it would be very easy to pile on and criticize. More challenging is what Webb has done (and what I will continue trying to do) – recognize the contrasts; love the opportunity, the potential and the good things while being honest enough to hate the flaws.

By way of example, Webb describes the nearly unfathomable contrasts that exist in the US (i.e., the fact that, in the US someone like Judge Sotomayer can rise from rough circumstances in NYC to reach the Supreme Court AND a couple can pray over their daughter and watch her die in Wisconsin when an insulin shot likely would have saved her):

“….there must be something creating the drive, and part of that something is the poverty of the alternative, the discomfort of the ordinary lives that most Americans endure and the freedom that Americans have to go to hell if that is the decision they take. This is the atmosphere in which Nobel Prize winners are nurtured. A nation which will one day mass produce a cure for type one diabetes, could not, would not, save little Kara Neumann from the bovine idiocy of her religious parents.”

Read for yourself……..