Reality check of the day

From the 4/18 New York Times:

In Haiti, where three-quarters of the population earns less than $2 a day and one in five children is chronically malnourished, the one business booming amid all the gloom is the selling of patties made of mud, oil and sugar, typically consumed only by the most destitute.

“It’s salty and it has butter and you don’t know you’re eating dirt,” said Olwich Louis Jeune, 24, who has taken to eating them more often in recent months. “It makes your stomach quiet down.”

An isolated incident?  Lindsey’s got a front-line look at what’s going on the Philippines:

“…Reports from the UN state that about 57 percent of Filipino households don’t get enough food daily.  Logic says that the number of families without enough to eat will only escalate now that their main staple [rice] is increasingly more expensive.  Specifically, the cost of rice has gone up 50 percent in the last two months, doubling since 2004.  Experts say it could rise an additional 40 percent.”

$4 gas a problem?  Depends.  Does it mean giving up going out to eat, or eating at all? 

Driving the Bus

 

 

I used to have a co-worker who, on the odd day, would come in to the classroom and state that he was “riding the hate bus.”  That usually meant a pretty bad day for his students but a decent one for us, as he had a tendency to get sarcastic when provoked.  The greatest danger on a “riding the hate bus day” was the possibility that someone would be embarrassed by laughing so hard that half chewed salad or yogurt would cause a coughing fit.  Some days, however, he’d announce that he was “driving” the hate bus, which meant it was a pretty good idea to leave him alone. 

 

I’ve been in one seat or another on that bus for, oh, a good two months now – maybe more.  It’s not a particularly efficient or fun mode of transportation.  It’s kind of like being stuck in a Twilight Zone episode, only instead of the man in the bad anthropomorphic suit on the wing of the plane, it’s kind of like he’s standing with his hand blocking the little machine that takes bills, and I don’t have exact change.  It has a certain nightmarish quality to it that’s hard to describe.  At the risk of pop culture overload, I told a lot of people that I felt like Gene Hackman’s character in The Birdcage when he said, “I feel like I’m insane.”  Not going insane – looking around and actually wondering if I was.  When you’re consumed with obsessing over what’s wrong, it’s almost impossible to see what is right, even if there is a lot of it. 

 

How did I end up there?  Some of it came from my students this last term, and the overwhelming sense of entitlement they radiated; some I’ll give to what is increasingly amounting to the prolonged Democratic presidential primaries that’s exposed some major problems in this country of which I had either been willfully or blissfully unaware; some I’ll blame on the physiological (hey, it’s biology, that’s still what I do;) some of it’s just my personality (I’m a dweller.)  All of these have contributed to my perception that an increasing number of Americans just don’t give a damn about anything but themselves. 

 

Honesty is a good thing, though, and a first step to healing.  So, like a Band-Aid, it comes off.   I’m tired of riding this bus – I’d rather walk.