A "deal" that will live in infamy

First off, the Tweet of the Decade, brought to you by Rep. Emmanel Cleaver II (D-MO):

"This deal is a sugar-coated satan sandwich. If you lift the bun, you will not like what you see."

I don't have Twitter and I've never heard of the Representative before, but that's the best use of 140 characters to come out of Congress in the last decade. Referring to the deal as merely a "shit sandwich" (as MoJo's Kevin Drum just did), though accurate, doesn't hold a candle to that turn of phrase. But that's enough complimenting Congress for one day. On to the juicy stuff.

***

I woke up this morning feeling two unfamiliar and extremely disheartening things. First, I finally internalized last night in a way that I've never done before that my generation (and likely the next one) is the first to have been sentenced to live shorter, unhealthier, less-prosperous lives than our parents. And there is virtually nothing we can do about it: even if we instantly re-imagine our economic, agricultural, environmental and political systems such that starting this afternoon we live in a no-growth, happiness-based, organic-locavoric-flexitarian-slow food-eating, carbon-scrubbing, functionally-governing la-la land, I'm not sure we can beat the spread. Some of us -- namely us Hoyas who have money, time and leisure to watch TED talks, stay fit and eat organic/local/flexitarian/slow food -- will surely benefit, and we'd all be able to re-start the American dream for our kids. But can we safely assume that we could rescue all of today's kids, about a quarter of whom are overweight or obese before they can even vote, from the final destruction of the American dream as we knew it this past year?

Second, I awoke today deeply, deeply shamed and embarrassed to be an American. I'm not a blind believer in the exceptionalist gospel, I'm not much of an Americapologist and I've already noted in this space that I can admit that we as a nation are full of shit to about the same degree as everybody else. But this debt-ceiling crisis has left me profoundly disillusioned about our nation's ability and/or desire to be a global citizen. To a frightening degree, these past weeks have shown how unwilling or unable we and our elected Representatives are to acknowledge and accept that we do not exist in some kind of global vacuum. As a good little SFS-er, I've always been for engagement with the world, but after experiencing the wider world for myself in the way that only study abroad can do, the combination of Tea Party myopia and Obama's "lead from behind" doctrine in world affairs now appears so morally and politically broken to me I'm at a loss for words. Though we've enjoyed great security thanks to our relative physical isolation, it is obscene and shameful that we still entertain ideological and emotional isolationism in today's hyper-connected/"flat"/free-trade world. Especially given that the world economy is predicated on the U.S. serving as the global buyer of first and last resort, it is absolutely unconscionable to flirt with committing economic seppuku before the rest of the world's horrified gaze. These days, it's not just our own future we're sacrificing. It's theirs, too, and they've every right to be repulsed by our callousness.

I stand by yesterday's points regarding political grandstanding if the "sugar-coated satan sandwich" passes tonight (anyone who dares to pat him- or herself on the back for getting a deal done at the price of the American dream and American credibility should be pilloried). I'd also like to remind our jilted-lover-in-chief that he's not the only one feeling a little let down these days. You know something, Mr. President? Despite my cynicism and better instincts to the contrary, I decided to buy into your idealism, hope and change. You were the first president I voted for, and when you won, I thought "we'd" won. I ran down to the White House to celebrate your victory on election night. I stood in the freezing cold to catch a tiny glimpse of you at the pre-inaugural concert and at your historic inauguration. I actually thought that the country's first 21st-century "progressive" candidate might bring about a 21st-century progressive politics. Sorry for being so stupid. I've tried to cut you as much slack as I could over the past few years, but leading from behind while the crazies kill the American promise is neither hope, nor change, nor progress nor inspiration. As Paul Krugman wrote immediately after the "deal" was announced, you've "surrendered." And that's what I can't forgive. You can belay the sniffling press conferences already. Your time's already over. Mine's just beginning, and it's already stolen. Sorry it didn't work out between us, but you'll start drawing Social Security in just over a decade. Don't come crying to me about your raisin in the sun of a presidency.

And to the Republicans: at long, long last, have you no sense of decency, sirs and madams? I sincerely hope you are prepared to spend all eternity derided in the history books as the Hoovers of the future who killed the Dream for fear of looking weak. We still vilify Hoover today for feeding cattle while people starved as he doomed the country to the Great Depression. When the Great Recession and its fallout are in the history books, "Don't be John Boehner/Sara Palin/a Tea Partier!" will have replaced charges of Hoover-ism 80 years from now. I hope you all are satisfied with yourselves. And I hope you are secure in the knowledge that the Baby Boomers, offspring of the "Greatest Generation" and originators of the cultural revolution that was going to save the world, have betrayed both the legacy of your parents and the future of your children and your children's children. Look back on your words and actions in this time and know shame.

Deal or no deal?

Great conversation going on on CNN right now. Finally, finally, on the eve of a potential debt-ceiling deal passing through Congress, CNN's Ali Velshi is saying what has needed to be said throughout this process, and he's stridently challenging CNN's token Republican correspondent Alex Castellanos while he's at it. Maybe he (or others) have been saying this before and I haven't been picking up on it since I don't watch TV. What's he saying?

• It's the unemployment, stupid. As long as unemployment remains at 9.2%, all else is basically a moot point in the economic conversation. People who don't have jobs don't have money and don't spend the money they don't have on stuff they don't need, which is what we call "growth." (That's my dig on modern capitalism, not Velshi's, but it needs to be part of the conversation.) High unemployment = sucky economy = self-reinforcing economic death spiral. Simple as that. As long as unemployment remains mysteriously absent from the political debate, we're inherently talking band-aids at best, not real fixes.
• The debt-ceiling crisis is entirely self-imposed (by Republicans -- and we can't say that enough). Castellanos made a U.S.-Greece comparison, saying that we're spending ourselves into oblivion like Greece, and Velshi jumped in to say that's not it at all: Greece can't issue bonds; we have (deservedly or not) a AAA credit rating and can issue all the bonds we want. Apples and oranges. The Greeks spent themselves into oblivion, we put the gun to our own heads.
• The multiplier of government spending, and the un-economics of the cuts-only proposed deal: ostensibly, cuts and tax hikes have equal effects on the economy (they both take money out of citizens' hands and arguably reduce confidence/investment). As Velshi points out, though, government spending disproportionately affects the least-well-off citizens, who put most or all of the money they receive right back into the economy to purchase essentials. (I'd note that the implication is that essentials might be foregone if the government doesn't aid these people, but since they neither matter nor make themselves heard, I'd probably just be howling at the moon.) Anyway, tax cuts benefit the more-well-off, who don't spend every dollar they have (witness the record corporate cash holdings and CEO pay packages co-existing with the historically shitty economy). Bottom line: we'll see nearly 100% of money given to the neediest re-invested in the economy almost immediately, while money retained by the wealthiest will trickle into their trust funds and not "down" throughout the economy.
• Velshi's greatest hits: "I [speaking as the Republicans] just saved a life because I didn't kill somebody tonight." "We have now plugged the hole that we [Republicans]...shot into the bottom of the boat." "I don't understand how this [cuts-only deal] will create a single job."
  

These are all excellent, well-made points that are absolutely critical for the country to hear and understand. I might be a C+ student in economics, but since the Tea Party have clearly never taken economics, I'll take the liberty of running through a quick econ lesson here:

GDP = C + I + G + X, where GDP is the Gross Domestic Product (the most-used indicator of economic performance, the total value of all goods and services produced within a country in a given time), C is consumption (people and businesses buying stuff), I is investment, G is government spending and X is the export balance (value of exports minus value of imports). Pretty much since the Industrial Revolution, we've experienced the (completely unnatural) miracle of unceasing economic growth. That is, GDP has been steadily rising throughout the world (especially in the global North and West). Even with notable hiccups like the Great Depression, we're so conditioned to the false norm of perpetual growth after centuries of it that the economy is completely unprepared to confront the end of the party. Now, the music hasn't stopped, but C, I and X have taken huge downturns in the recession. That's pretty much what defines recessions: individual and corporate consumers lose confidence and/or disposable income, so they decrease spending, investment and export. To keep growth steady or increasing, the only option left is G: government spending. This is basic Keynesian economics, borne out by the Great Depression, New Deal and WWII: economy (C + I + X, GDP) crashed, FDR borrowed to increase G through the New Deal, then G finally went into overdrive to fight WWII. War and Depression over, C + I + X went way up as we all know. So did G, but the post-War "American Century" was fueled by private spending. Long story short: government spending is critical to picking up the slack in C + I + X during recessions (that's a lot of slack), and the only way to do so is to borrow. If the current stimulus has failed, it has thus failed through smallness, not over-largeness.

Secondly, unemployment is a "lagging indicator:" it stays low as recessions develop (it still takes time to lay people off), but stays high even after recoveries (it takes a while for businesses to decide to hire and then do so). Thus, to claim that our despicably high unemployment rate is a direct failure of the Obama administration is wishful thinking at best: remember, the recession started under the Bush administration, and unemployment picked up under the Obama administration mostly because it took until after "01/20/09" for the "lag" to end. That unemployment hasn't been a higher (i.e. all-consuming) priority of the Obama administration is inexplicably crazy to me, but to simply assert -- as most Republicans do -- that it is somehow purely the fault of Obama and his agenda is fallacious and/or outright untrue.

And some points of my own:

• Let's unpack the oft-cited "family finances" argument trotted out by the Tea Party. They claim that the government needs to live within its means like families. First of all, plenty of families don't do that: they have credit cards, they have mortgages, they have home-equity credit, whatever. Second of all, it is definitely not how the government operates, nor how it's meant to. We actually started building our AAA credit by taking on more debt, not balancing the budget: Alexander Hamilton (one of those Founding Father types the Tea Party are so eager to talk about) consolidated all post-Revolutionary state debts into Federal debt as a way of enticing the states to hang together politically and support the Federal government. That it worked isn't justification for indiscriminately taking on debt, but it's worth noting. Next, it's vital to keep in mind that the money the administration is requesting now is needed simply to pay off our old obligations: in family terms, the mortgage, not the fancy vacation. Families in dire straights should think twice about going deep into debt to buy expensive trinkets in future, but ceasing payments on the mortgage just because they suddenly realized there was a money crunch is neither logical nor possible. Where were today's debt hawks when we were tax cutting and double-war-fighting our way from a budget surplus to the current deficit?
• What's really in the new "deal?" I haven't had a chance to fully read through it yet, but this is important stuff. In addition to putting the government on a certain path for the foreseeable future, it will also tell us what each party's agenda, non-negotiable and compromised points are. That said, consider the cuts in context: is cutting defense spending a good idea in the abstract? Yes. But in the middle of two still-unfunded wars? Probably not. Remember the "Pottery Barn rule?" ("You break it, you buy it.") Well, we invaded two countries and we now have a moral responsibility for the end game in each of them, as well as the continued material and financial support of the (precious few) men and women actually doing our fighting for us. If we suddenly decide to save money on armor and bullets in an IED- and enemy-rich environment, the country will have failed its troops. The NYT ran a poignant story the other day about soldiers and Marines asking Chairman Mullen about what would happen to their paychecks if the government defaults when the Chairman visited Afghanistan. How dare the Republicans, Tea Partiers and anyone else who wants to mess around with default keep wearing those obnoxious little flag pins and spouting "support the troops" and "God bless America?" You go drive the IED-infested roads in a thin-skinned Humvee with nothing but your lapel pin for body armor and no paychecks coming in.
• Even if we get an 11th-hour deal, it won't be good enough, no matter what's in it. Re-imagining the U.S. and global economies is far too big and important a task to cobble together in the nick of time. Let's say this deal passes (it's probably better than even money). Any representative, senator or administration official who grand-stands, photo-ops, signs autographs, sings their own praises or otherwise takes any more credit or draws any more attention to themselves than to hang their head in shame and apologize to the American people for the lunacy of the crisis deserves public shaming and no chance at re-election. If the deal passes, we will have loaded the gun, put the barrel in our own mouth, fired and somehow dodged the bullet (this time). That should be cause for sober, somber reflection, not self-congratulation. By the same token, any media outlet that runs a couple of days of triumphal headlines and then moves on to the next celebrity melt-down or crisis du jour deserves equal blame. We've done tremendous damage to ourselves domestically and internationally (yes, Tea Party, there really are 193 other countries in the world -- and they're watching us, even if you're not watching them) in this manufactured crisis, and if we accept anything less than sincere apologies and honest work going forward from our government, we will only have allowed ourselves to have been duped again. If this doesn't convince us to demand better, we have the government we deserve.
• On changing the terms of the debate: the Times ran an article yesterday on freshman Tea Party representatives discovering "the power of saying no." (No wuckin' fay, right?) Multiple Tea Partiers said with straight, pained faces, how hard it was to look Boehner in the eye and tell him "No, sir" in response to his order that the freshmen "get [their] ass in line." Think about that: the freshmen are on such a debt-jihad bender that when Boehner's inner professional politician starts getting really worried about default and starts demanding compromise, they still refuse!! And the president and the papers still tell us both parties are equally at fault and aren't that far apart on a deal. That's laying on the BS thicker than the speaker lays on the fake tan. And, "In an e-mail to Republican House members, Mr. Boehner noted that 'discussions are underway on legislation that will cut government spending more than it increases the debt limit, and advance the cause of the balanced budget amendment, without job-killing tax hikes.' " My emphasis, but note what he's doing. This is basic Big Lie tactics, people: the more you link little (not-very) subliminal messages like this in people's minds, the more they start to drink the Kool-Aid. (Oh, and the balanced budget amendment is a crock of shit: see the point on family vs. government finances above.)
• And, once more with feeling, what the hell are you doing, Mr. President? Not only is he neither educating nor leading the Congress or the country, but he's prepared to sacrifice some of the most important Democratic priorities (little bitty programs like Social Security, Medicaid and Medicare) to placate the Tea Party crazies. Not only is he way to the right of his base, he's to the right of even the majority of Republican voters! What gives? If he put Social Security on the table confident that Republicans would demand more anyway in order to show us how crazy they are, he needed to say something to that effect. That he didn't has me deeply worried that he's actually willing to horse-trade the Democrats' sacred cows (which happen to undergird the American social contract) so he can feel warm and fuzzy about making a compromise. Worse, we don't really have a say in this if he pulls it off. Thought One: what kind of raging Marxist Mau-Mau Muslim uber-socialist trades away Social Security and tax raises with hardly a whimper (i.e. when are the Republicans going to figure out they've actually got a fairly conservative President on their hands?)? Thought Two: what if (God forbid!) they do figure it out? How screwed are we going to be if and when the Tea Party realizes that, rather than a Mau Mau, they've finally got a Democrat in the White House who may very well give them what's left of the New Deal and the unions on a platter. Yes, entitlement programs need re-working, but run that through your mind...
• Finally, on the crime that is pledge-signing: when all but a handful (less than 10) congressional Republicans have signed anti-governing pledges, what are they doing in office (and why on Earth do we keep putting them there?)? Fifty years ago, the country worried that Jack Kennedy was going to be a tool of the Pope. Now, we actively encourage/demand that our elected representatives sign intransigence pledges saying, in essence, that they won't govern. People, what are we doing?! We should be more careful what we wish for, because we may get exactly that. And what do you know: farmers have come out against immigration reform, business and bank leaders have come out against the debt debacle, etc. Who's over-interpreting their mandate now?

Weekend Edition

Following up on the last post, weekend links

A couple of important posts from the professional opinion world:

• With "The Centrist Cop-Out," Paul Krugman has produced yet another simple, easy-to-digest case for what's really wrong with American politics today: we have met the enemy, and he is the GOP. In Krugman's words, "making nebulous calls for centrism, like writing news reports that always place equal blame on both parties, is a big cop-out — a cop-out that only encourages more bad behavior. The problem with American politics right now is Republican extremism, and if you’re not willing to say that, you’re helping make that problem worse." Couldn't have said it any better myself.
• Timothy Egan follows up with "A Madman and his Manifesto," detailing Rightist European and American responses to the Breivik attacks in Norway. If you listen to that lot, Breivik sold himself short: the world understood his actions in days, not decades. From this side of the Atlantic: "The bodies of those Norwegian children slaughtered by a terrorist had yet to be fully recovered, let alone buried, when Glenn Beck compared the victims to Nazis. The summer camp were the children of the Norwegian Labor Party went for soccer, swimming, political debates and lectures 'sounds a little like, you know, the Hitler Youth,' Beck said in his national radio broadcast." Excuse me?! True to form, Beck's disciples piled on. The first comment on Beck's site Tuesday in reaction to the news that Breivik's attorney described his client as "insane" was "I really feel for the guy. He loves his country so much that to see his own culture eroded away by multicultures that the govt is letting in, drove him to this heinous act." God forbid American patriotism take the same turn. Oh, wait... Meanwhile, things don't look much better in Europe: Mario Borghezio, member of the European Parliament (!) and Italy's xenophobic Northern League, said in a radio interview, "Some of the ideas [Breivik] expressed are good -- barring the violence. Some of them are great." Read Egan's whole post for a great commentary on the wider -- and deeply troubling -- narrative surrounding Breivik's actions.
• Back to the GOP for a quick sec: Mother Jones's Kevin Drum points out that the level of personal animosity and vindictiveness in Congress today is something new and different. No longer do crusty Congressmen holler at each other all morning and then sit down and make deals all afternoon. "When he was trying to whip his troops into line to vote for his debt ceiling bill on Wednesday, [Boehner's] pitch was simple: 'President Obama hates it. Harry Reid hates it. Nancy Pelosi hates it. Why would Republicans want to be on the side of President Obama, Harry Reid, and Nancy Pelosi is beyond me.' That was enough for conservative firebrand Rep. Allen West (R-Fla.). Boehner's plan wasn't perfect, he said in a Facebook post, but 'the fact Pelosi, Reid and Obama hate it doggone makes it perfect enough.' " With Krugman, remind me again why we're determined to reach for headlines that portray the Dems and Republicans as equally intransigent?

Great Utne reads to enjoy this weekend:

• "The Great Republican Sacred Cow:" if you guessed "no new taxes," you'd be right...
• "Liberating America from Wall Street Rule:" there's a novel idea. Guess how we do it: start by making things with real value (as opposed to credit-default swap "value," which is merely printing money to line traders' and bankers' pockets with). And ultimately, it's about (un)employment, stupid.
• "The Coming Economic Disaster:" not to put too fine a point on things, here's one version of the coming car crash of the American, European and Chinese economies. It ain't pretty...

Thrilled the Sox are playing well and/or glad to have the NFL back in your life? Time to "get uncomfortable" about those, too. Here's controversial military/defense writer Andrew Bacevich on the Sox' "hoo-yah" Fourth of July celebrations and, even better, Dave Zirin on the horribly anti-moral co-option and corruption of Pat Tillman's legacy. Both writers aptly cover the growing and troubling links between professional sports and the military that have sprung up since 9/11. Regardless of what you think about NFL players "going to war out there" every Sunday, consider that "When military planes fly over the Super Bowl or General David Petraeus tosses the coin to start the Super Bowl, we don’t blink. If going to war isn’t political, then nothing is. Yet this mix of sports and politics seems perfectly natural to us. It’s not seen as political at all" (Zirin). In the specific case of Tillman, Zirin not only charges that he has been more useful to the politico-military spin establishment dead than alive, but clarifies that the greater part of Tillman's valor was not in forsaking NFL millions for the Army Rangers, but for standing up to The Man: "Tillman had very un-embedded feelings about the Iraq war. His close friend Army Specialist Russell Baer recalled, “I can see it like a movie screen. We were outside of [an Iraqi city] watching as bombs were dropping on the town. . . . We were talking. And Pat said, ‘You know, this war is so fucking illegal.’ And we all said, ‘Yeah.’ That’s who he was. He totally was against Bush.” " From Bacevich's extended meditation on the Red Sox' Fourth of July theater:

To stand in solidarity with those on whom the burden of service and sacrifice falls is about as far as they will go. Expressions of solidarity affirm that the existing relationship between soldiers and society is consistent with democratic practice. By extension, so too is the distribution of prerogatives and responsibilities entailed by that relationship: a few fight, the rest applaud. Put simply, the message that citizens wish to convey to their soldiers is this: Although choosing not to be with you, we are still for you (so long as being for you entails nothing on our part). Cheering for the troops, in effect, provides a convenient mechanism for voiding obligation and easing guilty consciences. ...The late German theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer had a name for this unearned self-forgiveness and undeserved self-regard. He called it cheap grace. Were he alive today, Bonhoeffer might suggest that a taste for cheap grace, compounded by an appetite for false freedom, is leading Americans down the road to perdition.

From the "You Are What You Eat" Department: if you think you can trust the USDA and FDA to keep you safe, think again. Here's Tom Philpott on the latest agency self-censorship in the face of Big Ag voicing its displeasure. Basically, the USDA produced a document that pointed out that devoting 80% of antibiotics consumed in this country to factory farming might have consequences, for example that "A single antibiotic-resistant pathogen, MRSA—just one of many now circulating among Americans—now claims more lives each year than AIDS." I've had MRSA. It ain't fun. And it lives in your pork chops. Getting uncomfortable? (If you want to get really excited or really uncomfortable -- or both! -- about what you're putting in your body, click here for a range of TED talks on food. I highly recommend Michael Pollan, Mark Bittman [both on page 2] and Josette Sheeran.)

Finally, the requisite happy/intriguing ending: maybe we're on to something with all this, after all (and three cheers for travel and new experience!)

Challenging the Right, on both sides of the Atlantic

Before I get to the political Right -- Murdoch, Breivik and Boehner -- I am compelled to take on religious conservatism, specifically of the papal variety. An Taoiseach, Enda Kenney, a politically and religiously conservative man and practicing Catholic, pulled no punches in lighting up the Vatican last Wednesday. Speaking on the floor of the Dail Eireann, the Irish Parliament, in reaction to the publication of the Cloyne Report on sexual abuse in the Irish Church, the Taoiseach loosed all the righteous rage and indignation of a people that have been more completely under the spell -- and the thumb -- of the Church of Rome than any other in Western Christendom. I can't encourage you enough to read his whole speech (it's not very long, and linked above).

"It’s fair to say that after the Ryan and Murphy Reports Ireland is, perhaps, unshockable when it comes to the abuse of children," said an Taoiseach in his preamble.

But Cloyne has proved to be of a different order. Because for the first time in Ireland, a report into child sexual-abuse exposes an attempt by the Holy See, to frustrate an Inquiry in a sovereign, democratic republic…as little as three years ago, not three decades ago. And in doing so, the Cloyne Report excavates the dysfunction, disconnection, elitism....the narcissism .......that dominate the culture of the Vatican to this day. The rape and torture of children were downplayed or ‘managed’ to uphold instead, the primacy of the institution, its power, standing and ‘reputation’. Far from listening to evidence of humiliation and betrayal with St Benedict’s “ear of the heart”......the Vatican’s reaction was to parse and analyse it with the gimlet eye of a canon lawyer. This calculated, withering position being the polar opposite of the radicalism, humility and compassion upon which the Roman Church was founded.

All true, and all damning of the Church's way of operating. Till now, the Vatican has been in the business of obscuring, obfuscating, demurring, clamming up and outright lying in order to protect itself. If the Church is going to maintain any credibility at all, indeed, if it has any intention at all of preaching the Gospel and holding us all to a higher moral standard and encouraging us to be our best selves with a straight face, it had better get out ahead of the crisis and start begging forgiveness instead of buying and/or enforcing silence. When a person or organization speaks in absolutes, as Rome is wont to do, it is necessarily hard to retract from those positions. This is even more the case when one speaks in infallible absolutes. The Great Commandment, on which the Church was founded, is to "love thy neighbor as thyself." It is not to "cover thine ass for all thou art worth."

The only person in the Irish Church who has come through the scandal with any shred of dignity intact is Archbishop of Dublin Diarmuid Martin, who has been routinely passed over for election to the College of Cardinals and received an official cold shoulder for his efforts at reconciliation. Where the rest of the Church, from the Pope to the parish priests, has pointedly refused time and again to accept any blame whatsoever or to issue even a sincere apology for its sins, Archbishop Martin has demonstrated in the most elemental ways he can how sincere are his remorse and desire to reconcile with his flock. With Archbishop Sean O'Malley of Boston, he famously washed the feet of several victims of clerical abuse during a public Mass. Moreover, he has not only apologized sincerely, but recognized (during the foot-washing service) that apologies only go so far: "Someone once reminded me of the difference between on the one hand apologising or saying sorry and on the other hand asking forgiveness. I can bump into someone on the street and say “Sorry”. It can be meaningful or just an empty formula. When I say sorry I am in charge. When I ask forgiveness however I am no longer in charge, I am in the hands of the others. Only you can forgive me; only God can forgive me. I, as Archbishop of Dublin and as Diarmuid Martin, stand here in this silence and I ask forgiveness of God and I ask for the first steps of forgiveness from of all the survivors of abuse."

The day that Benedict XVI -- or his successor -- stands in silence and in supplication of the forgiveness of God, survivors of abuse and Catholics everywhere, instead of in his usual infallible indignation and indifference, will be the day the Church may truly begin the healing process at last. The tables have turned, Your Holiness: for the first time in over 2,000 years, it is time for the Church to go to her flock in confession and accept the penance given. And it's going to take more than a few "Hail Marys" and "Our Fathers;" for starters, I don't think a Vatican III for the 21st Century would be asking too much...

***

To tell the truth, I have not followed either the Rupert Murdoch/News of the World phone-hacking scandal in Britain nor the Norwegian terror attacks allegedly perpetrated by Anders Behring Breivik in every intimate detail. With the rest of the world, I'm repulsed by both men and their actions (or the actions of their underlings, in Murdoch's case), sorry for the victims and concerned about the wider implications of each.

And we can't deny that there are wider implications for, or perhaps even indictments of, our culture inherent in both the Murdoch and Breivik cases. Neither are truly "lone wolves" in the sense that they cooked up in their twisted souls or unhinged minds actions that have no precedent and no demand. Murdoch's News of the World was not some unread right-wing rag, but a popular mainstream tabloid. Breivik, for all the apparent insanity of his actions, does not strike me as either truly insane nor as a lone Islamophobic crank. I am not about to claim that he is mainstream, but it is chilling that he has maintained that the world will understand his actions in a matter of decades.

Much as I sincerely hope that does not come to pass, we -- by which I mean mostly white, well-off Europeans and Americans -- do need to appreciate that Breivik is coming from somewhere, and that somewhere is not nearly as foreign as we would like to tell ourselves it is. Others have already drawn the parallels between Breivik's attacks and Jared Loughner's shooting of Rep. Gabrielle Giffords in Arizona (remember her?) and to Stieg Larsson's Millennium Trilogy, but I want to draw the connection between Murdoch, Breivik and the insidiously creeping monism and xenophobia that threaten our vaunted Western cosmopolitan values.

I've written before (and I'm certainly not the only one) that there is a fundamental disconnect in the European project as it currently stands regarding who exactly qualifies as "European." For the cosmopolitan Eurocrats who have been dreaming and imagining the European community for sixty years, that is a theoretical, intellectual and/or geo-political debate. But on the national and even more so on the individual level, it is a personal question. That is more a result of microeconomics than of pure nationalism, though nationalism plays an important role. But nationalism simply proves that "when it's not about the money, it's about the money," as one of my professors like to say. Or, to paraphrase a German friend, individual "European-ness" goes out the window the moment one's own taxes and, more importantly, state entitlements are brought into question. If states extend their social-democratic munificence to immigrants, that means there are more people clamoring for a piece of approximately the same pie as there were before. And when that pie is composed of individuals' tax money, the potential for resentment is understandably high.

I do not exempt the Americans from this criticism, either. We take an equally charitable view towards Mexicans and other Central and South American immigrants as Europeans do towards Muslims and North Africans; anyone who still remembers the "Ground Zero mosque" controversy will moreover have to admit that we can indulge in the occasional bout of Islamophobia ourselves. (That, and the fact that passing a Constitutional amendment to quash the creeping danger of Sharia law remains an arguably higher -- though somewhat stealthier -- priority of the current U.S. Congress and many state legislatures, but we'll get to that.)

Both Murdoch's and Breivik's transgressions were undeniably wrong and have caused a tremendous amount of grief and hurt to a lot of people. But before we get too carried away with cheering the downfall of the media's Mr. Potter or rooting on the Norwegians in hastily upping their maximum allowable prison term from 21 years (!!) so that Breivik could not be set free at the age of 50 (into a world that would understand the actions that got him locked away in the first place?), we need to take a harder look at the bigger picture. And I quite literally mean "we," gentle readers: all of us big-name-college-attending, Polo-wearing, Volvo-driving, Northeastern liberal faux-European stock are quite often part of the problem. Either we don't understand ("Hmph! I read the New York Times, never the Daily Mail!"), or we don't pay enough attention or give enough credence to the machinations of the "other guys" whom we probably don't understand anyway (care to guess how many U.S. states have considered legislation banning Sharia law or other "foreign" legal systems? Twenty-two!! Yep, nearly half of all these United States have seen fit to debate outlawing Islamic law in these days of 10 percent unemployment, self-imposed debt crisis, etc.)

So, if you're a Massachusetts or New York resident whose morning routine involves pulling on some Ralph Lauren or Land's End number, grabbing a Starbucks, commiserating with Paul Krugman about the latest affront to "the conscience of a liberal" and patting yourself on the back for living in a state that has legalized gay marriage, you're too comfortable. If you're proud to have a black(ish) President but don't personally know or interact with any black or Hispanic people (who are, it was announced yesterday in a statistic that sounded more like an Onion headline, suffering more from the current economic environment than are whites), you're too comfortable. And most of all, if you don't fundamentally understand what's going on with the U.S. economy (i.e. what 10 percent unemployment really means to your fellow Americans and what a crime this self-imposed debt-ceiling crisis is), what's going on with the Euro-crisis and its potential ramifications in Europe and the world, and/or what the real ramifications of default or downgrade of the U.S. would be (and how criminally insane it is that our government is trying its damnedest to turn us into Greece by choice), then you're too...feckin'...comfortable!

Much as Europeans need to do some serious soul-searching to determine what an appetite for the News of the World so ravenous that it reached (so far) from Scotland Yard to the prime minister's cabinet and a cultural xenophobia that produced Anders Behring Breivik (look up his manifesto and confession online for lists of the ultra-reactionary militant groups he drew inspiration from, from Britain to Scandinavia) say about their society, Americans need to do the same in response to the debt-ceiling crisis and its outcome. I'll leave the culture wars to fight another day. What is most important right now is to look -- really look at and understand -- where we are, how we got here, what's happening, what options are on the table and what they would each achieve if passed.

I'm not going to run through all the messy details. From a factual standpoint, most of what you need to know about where we're at today is contained in two of today's Times editorials, on the choices on the table (which are"between bad and worse"), and the "denial of reality" that is standard operating procedure in the Republican camp. Here are the basic facts to keep in mind:

1) The crisis is self-imposed. If the (Republican) Congress hadn't/didn't draw a line in the sand on the formality of raising the debt ceiling, there is no problem with our current credit as such. There are undeniably long-term policy problems with our borrowing, which is what the Tea Party-coddling Republican strategy is nominally reacting to, but in the short term all that stands between us and default is a congressional OK, which has previously been rubber-stamped ever since Congress got a say in the debt ceiling decades ago. The bottom line is that if we go Greece, we've no one but House Republicans to blame for it, and blame them we must.

2) In less than a week, on 2nd August (or thereabouts), there simply won't be any money left to pay the bills. Unimaginable? Yes. But it's the new reality of the Tea Party-influenced Great Recession country we live in. Either get used to it or get angry and tell Congress where to stick its misplaced, sudden and utterly hypocritical debt puritanism. If you read the second NYT editorial above, you'll get a glimpse of some of the utter BS the Republicans are spewing right now -- there's billions squirreled away somewhere; default ain't no big thing; we're not really going to run out of money because the Treasury is really just a tool of that communist Mau Mau Muslim of a President we've got, so it can't possibly be telling the truth; etc. You can't make this shit up, and no one is calling them on it. They say these things with absolute impunity because no one has found the cojones or moral courage or whatever to look Palin, Bachmann, T-Paw, Cantor, Boehner and the lot square in the eyes and say, "At long last, have ye no decency?"

3) This is major-league politics with major-league consequences, and it's being conducted by a bunch of bush-league freshman representatives. In short, U.S. government default ends the world economic system as we've known it since WWII. The slightly less ominous prospect of a credit rating downgrade will permanently increase borrowing costs on the Federal government and by extension on state and local governments and on consumers. Planning to take out a mortgage on a house or a car? Those rates are tied to Treasury rates, and they'll be going up if we get downgraded, which may happen whether or not we raise the debt ceiling. (Side note: just who the hell are these all-powerful ratings agencies and who elected them lords of the world economy? Vague threats from S&P's, Moody's and others have kept the Euro-crisis unfolding, cast a pall over the U.S. debt ceiling crisis and kept the markets in uncertain flux since 2008. Like the Tea Party, no one seems willing or able to tell them to take a hike.) In any case, paying an extra $200-$400 a month on a $200,000 mortgage might not amount to diddly-squat if you've "gone rogue" to the tune of a few million dollars (Palin), spent $4,700 on your hair and makeup since you started campaigning (Bachmann) or spend whatever Boehner spends on his tan, but in real-people terms, another Benjamin lost to interest every week or two is real money.

Politics is one thing. Playing party politics (which both sides are doing) is another. But outright lying with a straight (bright orange) face is another. Remember when the punditry got all worked up about how Obama had "lost control of the narrative" to the Republicans? Think what an understatement that really is. If Obama is willing to sacrifice entitlements, health care, tax reform and who knows what else from the liberal agenda and that's still not enough for the Tea Party, what does that say about each side? Think for a minute about how completely the New Right has seized control of not only the congressional narrative, but the vocabulary of daily life: we can't say the words "liberal," "entitlement" or "tax (increase)" without flinching or embarrassment; things like cost-cutting, "best practices" and supply-side economics are firmly entrenched in our way of looking at the world; no one in politics is willing to admit that there is 10 percent unemployment, much less deal with it (despite my Paul Krugman jibe earlier, he's been on a roll lately as one of the only serious and respected voices dutifully reminding us a couple of times every week that unemployment is the clearest and present-est danger to the economy); we can't regulate anything or anyone worth a damn and refuse to prosecute anyone but private citizens who cheated on the order of thousands of dollars in the wake of the crash; we instinctively deride "Obamacare" as creeping un-American socialism; and we let politicians of all stripes but especially Republicans lie through their teeth about everything from the President's citizenship to the death of Osama bin Laden to the real reasons for the debt crisis. How anyone can say with a straight face that Obama is solely responsible for the Great Recession and the biggest spending binge in history is absolutely beyond me. The crash started during and was a direct result of the administration of George W. Bush, and the earliest and most expensive stimulus measures were passed by the Bush administration. Besides, basic economic principles demand more government spending (yes, deficit-funded spending) in recessions to stimulate demand, not government cut-backs. To suddenly "get serious" about debt after cheering the Bush tax cuts and two unfunded boondoggles in the Middle East is the height of hypocrisy.

To be fair, I have lost a lot of faith in President Obama as this crisis has worn on. His willingness to concede fundamental points and programs to the Republicans in the name of bipartisanship and compromise has been uninspiring and unimaginative. His speeches have been likewise. His patrician whining has been exasperating and unproductive (if you're the only adult in Washington, sir, act like it -- teach, cajole and/or spank the "kids" into line, don't cry about it to the voters). I had hoped that the election of the first independent President in modern times (let's face it, he's not really a Democrat, as evidenced by congressional Democrats' howls of protest at being shut out by the Oval Office) would bring with it a new, 21st-century chief executive who had a plan and the energy and bare-knuckled political will to educate the country about it and then set about enacting it in vintage Jackson/T. Roosevelt/F. D. Roosevelt style. Sadly, we got the compromiser-in-chief.

You can't expect to transform Washington by expecting it to compromise on its own. That's business-as-usual to a fault, and if the past three years haven't made that abundantly clear, I don't know what will. Though the Tea Party is completely out of touch with reality, it has hit upon something in seizing on constituent concerns and politicking for all it's worth to respond to them. That those expectations are ginned up, trumped up and hypocritically misrepresented is inexcusable, but at least the Tea Party has set an agenda and fought for it. I do not for a moment wish to see a President elected who would embody or follow the morally bankrupt Big Lie tactics of the Tea Party, but it cannot be denied that it is much easier to control the narrative when you actually have a narrative. Obama isn't trying to get even or get ahead; increasingly, he's not even getting mad, just whiny. Though we should have been doing so long ago, appealing to the nation to call their representatives and demand a deal when you, the President, can't get one done, is hardly the "adult" way of going about things.

Just like individual complacency regarding anti-Sharia initiatives, racial/socio-economic disparity, unemployment, and failure to be informed of and understand what's really going on in the world must be made uncomfortable, political complacency with lying, cheating, stealing, moral bankruptcy and focusing on the wrong issues for the wrong reasons must be made uncomfortable. If President Obama finds it less uncomfortable to let the Republican narrative go unchallenged and their intransigence stand than to confront them ("You want to bang on about birther/truther/deather/debt-puritan bullshit when we've got 10 percent unemployment, a broken economy, a hurting environment and an unsustainable population to worry about? Get out of my sight, and get the hell out of office!"), we as citizens need to start calling the White House as well as the Capitol and reversing his order of preferences. If Congress can't figure out how to "just say no" to pork, Laffer curves, non-regulation, pointless legislation and self-inflicted intransigence (even senior Republicans were admitting last week that their pledge-signing and apocalyptic/absolutist rhetoric had put them in a bit of an ideological Alamo), then we need to vote 'em out. Representatives are up for election every two years. If, as the current batch have, they have been an embarrassment to themselves and their country while in office, they need to go.

But most of all, if we can take anything from the events of the past several weeks, it is the lesson that it is long, long past time to open a serious, adult (though I hesitate to use that word), moral conversation in this country and the world. The Vatican must be put on notice that it's "Blessed are the peacemakers [Abp. Martin]," not "Blessed are the obfuscators [Benedict and pretty well everyone else involved]." Europeans and Americans need to start feeling uncomfortable about the privileged, wholly-unsustainable bubbles we live in. We'd better figure out how to deal with people who don't look, act, dress or believe the same as we do, and we've got to sort out how to stop conspicuously consuming resources at a rate that would require 2.5 Earths to sustain before we exhaust the one Earth we've got. And politicians everywhere have got to start either feeling uncomfortable about being crooks and/or cowards on their own, or we've got to make them uncomfortable.

Let's face it: we're not going to "win the future" with moon-shot platitudes when we don't even operate a space shuttle any longer. The longer we tuck ourselves in at night with the comforting thought that we once made it to the moon, the further out of reach we put the future. I'm not worried about maintaining "American exceptionalism" for its own sake, I'm worried about making sure that we demand the honesty, honor and moral courage of ourselves and our politicians to ensure that we create and hand off a better America -- and a better world -- to our children and their children. That's winning the future, and it's not mutually exclusive, either. In fact, it can't be: if being "exceptional" requires living beyond our means on the sweat of the rest of the world, we're not that exceptional nor admirable, and the world literally cannot cope with others aspiring to or achieving our level of "exception." If, however, being "exceptional" means that we're engaged in bettering our selves, our country and our world and making sure that we have the freest, most democratic, most welcoming society we can create, that's worthy of admiration and emulation, and it won't be zero-sum. Everyone can aspire to that and the world will be a better place for it.

I hope to hell you're uncomfortable by now. I hope you're squirming and the Starbucks next to you is growing cold. I hope you read the NYT's editorial page, call your congressman and bike to work. I hope you challenge yourself to be your best self and see what difference you can make. And, lest you think I'm just an angry, hopeless crank, I hope you'll read and take to heart the three most important reactions to the attacks in Norway. If we can all -- citizens, politicians, religious leaders, whomever alike -- take these to heart, we might actually benefit from the tragedy. From Norwegian Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg: "Our response is more democracy, more openness and more humanity." From the Mayor of Oslo, Fabian Stang: "I don't think security can solve problems. We need to teach greater respect." And finally, from a young girl who survived the shooting spree on the island of Utoya: "If one man can create that much hate, you can only imagine how much love we as a togetherness [sic] can create." Amen.

(Oh, and I hope you watch this video, filmed on Shop Street in Galway.)

Weekend Reading

Now that I've remained in one country for 25 straight days -- probably the longest such stretch in about six months -- it's time to change gears and change blogs, and get back to my ruffling/flourishing days of yore. Since it's a weekend and I want to follow through on the "get smart" theme of my last study-abroad post, I'll eschew grand narrative in favor of putting out a sampling of links to explore and brief explanations of what's interesting in the news right now.

[Before I start, the answer to the Yemen poser from last time is that the president's name is Ali Abdullah Saleh, who is currently convalescing in Saudi Arabia after being seriously wounded in an opposition bombing of a presidential compound.]

• On corn and ethanol: for a very quick overview of what's wrong here, read this op-ed from today's Times. For a slightly longer and more slanted argument, try Tom Philpott's post from Mother Jones a few days ago. For those unused to MoJo's coverage, yes it's lefty-loosey, but the writing's good and the facts are almost always very solid, if occasionally cherry-picked.
• More MoJo madness that will make you mad: this month's special report on what MoJo is calling the "Great Speedup" -- the "recovery" that has seen wages and wealth rise at the top by virtue of making those who didn't get laid off work even harder than before -- is vital reading for all you working stiffs out there who sense that things just ain't the way they once were and something's not quite right in the job world. Here's a link to the two-page main article; those who prefer visuals should at least check out the accompanying charticle. For those who want the real quick-and-dirty: corporate profits are up 22% and "productivity" is returning, but no-one's actually getting re-hired. What gives? Turns out industry has simply decided to get back to pre-crash output by demanding more of post-crash input, especially of the human variety. Yet another example of how fallacious traditional measures of economic recovery and well-being are these days: if corporate profits go up enough, GDP will recover, but those of us not in C-suites won't feel any better because we're either working too hard to enjoy it or still unemployed.
• I haven't gotten to this one myself yet, but here's a New Yorker article (courtesy of Longreads.com) on the s---storm that is Galleon. Definitely read this if the words "Galleon" and "Raj Rajaratnam" don't mean anything to you yet. This is an insider-trading scandal of fairly epic proportions that hasn't got nearly as much ink spilled over it as the Madoff mess.
• "Bombing the Moon": a quickie about the ridiculousness of GOP "bipartisanship" and no-new-taxes orthodoxy/lunacy. Should also be taken as a reminder that Obama hasn't exactly been leading from the front on a lot of important issues. I read an NYT opinion piece the other day about the post-FDR phenomenon of the "100 days" presidency, in which we watch with baited breath to see what a new President can do in his first 100 days, and then that's the ballgame for his four years in office as the whole machine gears up for the next round of elections. Think about it. We got ObamaCare and then...what, really? Lots of hot air about bipartisanship. The GOP is making a mockery of itself proving that bipartisanship isn't about to happen right now: if Republicans walking out of budget talks because raising revenue is still on the table -- and calling for Obama to show some leadership in the matter on their way out the door, no less -- hasn't made it clear that they're not about to compromise, what'll do it? Did anyone in the White House watch the GOP "debate" a couple weeks ago? A bunch of blowhards tripping over themselves to impugn Obama as the worst president ever. (Side note: Romney, your signature accomplishment as governor of Massachusetts was RomneyCare, on which ObamaCare is based. Now you're against health care and Obama has failed the nation? Maybe it's not the Mormonism that's keeping you out of office, pal. Maybe people want leaders who actually take a position on issues.)
• The grapes of wrath: in passing Arizona-style anti-immigration, Georgia lawmakers apparently forgot to ask the opinions of the constituency that makes the most use of immigrants: farmers. Now there are fears that Georgia's biggest economic asset, produce, will be left rotting in the fields this summer with no immigrants to harvest it. Whoops! If Georgia farmers -- not exactly bleeding-heart liberals -- are honest enough to admit that they're up a creek without illegals in the fields, somebody ought to listen.
• Southern-fried sanity: those paying careful attention to my last study-abroad lead might remember my Oxford American reference; that's the quarterly "Southern magazine of good literature" that I discovered a couple of years back and now devour every season. Here's an interesting, somewhat off-beat bashing of the Bible Belt and its burr-in-the-saddle relation to the modern, interconnected world of the "global village" from the OA's Hal Crowther. Great read, especially for you Yankees that think there's only one fire-and-brimstone line of thinking below the Mason-Dixon.
• Sibhialtacht Ceilteach (Celtic civilization): three much longer reads for the philosophically-minded among ye. First, the whole article by Michael D. Higgins that I quoted from in the last post, "The Challenge of Building the Mind of Peace." Reading it may remind you of doing homework for your college philosophy class, but I think it's worth it if you've 20 minutes to spare sometime. The other recommendations are proper summer reading: Jamie O'Neill's At Swim, Two Boys and Roddy Doyle's A Star Called Henry. These were the last books I bought for myself at Charlie Byrne's siopa leabhair (book shop) in Galway to help myself transition back across the Alantic; both are excellent treatments of the events of the Easter Rising of 1916 and the birth of modern Ireland as experienced by teen-aged boys in Dublin. At Swim, Two Boys is a 600-page tome that's a bit slow to wade into but thoroughly engrossing and a brilliant literary piece of work that's well worth the effort; A Star Called Henry is classic Doyle, shorter, quicker, peppered with the colourful speech of Dublin street urchins and totally anti-establishment. I've blasted through the first 200 pages in the last 24 hours and should have it finished and the next two books of the trilogy ordered by this evening.
• Grist: Gore on condoms, Obama's losing the greens and how to "put food on your family" courtesy of stupendous supermarket food waste. Three interesting -- and very short -- articles that should get your dander up. Highlights: a conservative (Wayne Christian [!], R-TX) actually admits that what arch-conservatives really want is to eliminate contraception, not just abortion; environmentalists are among the latest liberals to feel a distinct lack of hope or change coming from 1600 Pennsylvania Ave.; and one intrepid reporter literally dumpster-dives at Trader Joe's to feed his family some of the 96 billion pounds of food thrown away in the U.S. every year (correct: "That's 263 million pounds a day, 11 million pounds an hour, 3,000 pounds per second!").
• Traffic in paradise: ever wonder why suburbia seems a little weird when you think about it? Here's one theory: it is the most unnatural development in the world, the first human settlement built on the scale of something other than humans (namely automobiles). Worth a ponder...
• The economics of happiness: Correction -- last post, I mistakenly identified rogue British economist Tim Jackson as "Tim Robinson." Oopsie. In any case, here's his 2010 "Economic Reality Check" TED talk. It's still worth a listen if you're open to hearing that your entire lifestyle is based on buying things you don't need with money you don't have to make impressions that won't last on people you don't know (his words)!

So, happy weekend, and hit the links!

Once More, With Feeling

So it's been a couple of months since I last posted to this blog. A lot has happened in the world--the Macondo well has been capped and awaits completion of a relief well, the Tea Party has partied on at the expense of African Americans, the Shirley Sherrod saga played itself out, etc, etc, etc--but even though the news has not gone on summer vacation, I decided to go ahead and take a break of my own anyway.

But now I'm back for one last post before I take this show on the road a week from tomorrow night and begin my year abroad in Turkey and Ireland--and a few places in between--for which there will be a new blog (details to follow). "Ruffles and Flourishes," as its name implies, has always been and for now shall remain primarily domestically-focused. Barring some occurrence in U.S. national politics/life that absolutely demands a post, this blog will fall silent until sometime after I return to the States on June 1, 2011. For the moment, though, a few more ruffles and flourishes are in order, and I think I'll do them "10 Things"-style, since that's pretty much how I broke into this blogging business to begin with.

Ten Things I Think I Think

1. I think I'm thrilled that the well in the Gulf has finally, finally, been capped and looks on track to be permanently "bottom-killed" by an intercept well towards the end of this month. That said, I think the catastrophe has been a real black eye for the nation and the administration (and of course BP and the oil industry) from day one, and that Washington really fumbled the on-the-ground disaster response and especially the political one. If ever there was a time when the earth itself was crying out for us to take a serious look at the feasibility and sustainability of our energy policy and the political will to at least start addressing the issue existed, June 2010 was that time. Yet, as seems to have been the case all too often with this administration and this Congress, a little resistance went a long way in keeping anything from happening, and it's going to haunt us. As Tom Friedman likes to say, "Have they no grandchildren?"

2. I think, on the subject of the Gulf, that it's critically important that we as a country stay focused on the area and its rebuilding. August 29 marks five years since the storm--the rebuilding from which, let me assure you, is a work in progress--and now the economic rug has been pulled out from under the people of the region. With spill coverage already off the front page--when it appears at all--and BP/government claims that the oil from the largest maritime spill ever was somehow magically gone just weeks after the well was capped (which is bull; dissolved oil/dispersant is still there) being promulgated instead, the greatest threat to the recovery is that it simply disappears from the national consciousness as Katrina has. It's not that we have to raise awareness, per se, since the words "Deepwater Horizon" will quickly conjure images of catastrophe in the mind of any American, but the same is true of the word "Katrina" and yet hardly anyone thinks about the storm on a daily basis any more. As after the storm, the spill generated a lot of attention, exposure, and idea-generation regarding an economically, environmentally, and culturally important region of this country that is often relegated to "forgotten coast" status. Let's take a lesson from the last disaster and keep the Gulf in our minds this time, and keep the heat turned up on BP.

3. I think this is where the rubber meets the road, Mr. President. As you're probably aware, the country--myself very much included--is less than impressed with your job performance these days. Eighteen months in, with the first batch of aides/advisers leaving and midterms coming around the corner, yours is no longer a young presidency, sir. Whatever slack you might have been cut or excuses you could have made are pretty much non-existent by now. If your presence is as toxic to Democratic candidates this midterm season as it was in the last round of gubernatorial races, that's a sign that you're in deep doo-doo.

4. I think I have two hints for the White House on that front: 1) JOBS, JOBS, JOBS! Nobody cares about your legislative or stimulatory accomplishments if they're unemployed/underemployed. While you're on the Vineyard next week, listen for the Ghost of Bill whispering "It's the economy, stupid!" and take that message to heart. 2) Stop blaming Bush already, for crying out loud! Just yesterday, the New York Times ran a story about Obama practicing his latest campaign pitch, using an extended metaphor of the country as a car that the Republicans (read: Bushies) drove into a ditch, the Obama-ites extricated, and, now that it's back on the road, the Republicans want the keys back. Yeah, whatever. Bush happened, it basically sucked, now move on. As one of my lacrosse coaches once preached, "Are you a finger or a thumb?", i.e., are you going to spend all your time pointing the your finger at the Bush years or start pointing your thumb at yourself and say, "Maybe my perception problem is my fault, not Bush's...." Let's face it, Mr. President: the county picked you over Hillary because cojones trumped skin color. So far, your metaphorical cojones seem to have been lacking from your governing style. Screw the "No-drama Obama" image; you're not playing around with the Harvard debate team anymore, you're the President of the United States. Let me be perfectly clear: neither the "Party of No" nor the Taliban seems inclined to listen to the Unruffled Professor, so kick ass. Now that might be change we could believe in.

5. I think the single scariest trend in America today, and the greatest threat to our position in the world, is the downward revision of expectations by those in charge, coupled with the currency of "Man-on-the-moon syndrome." That is, when the economy nosedives and seems reluctant to recover, Geithner and Obama start talking about the "New Normal" of reduced expectations, while the punditry spouts off about our one-time greatness, as traditionally exemplified by the Apollo program ("We put a man on the moon, so why can't we kill an oil well?"). Here's why: in life, past successes do not guarantee future ones, and the basketball team at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. should be able to grasp that better than anyone. Does Bill Belichick tell the Patriots faithful, "Hey, we used to be pretty hot shit but the going's gotten kinda hard so now we're going to call making the playoffs a victory by the metrics of the 'New Normal' for the New England Patriots"? Hell, no--he takes all the pictures of the glory days off the walls of the team's facility and tells the team that if they want to see Super Bowl pictures on the walls again, they'd better man up and win one for themselves. JFK, like a good coach, coaxed the country into accomplishing more than it thought it could. Now, Obama is telling us that we're still pretty good but that we had our time. Again, let me be perfectly clear: that is un-American, and if we can't recognize that, it means that flag pins, Orange Alerts, "God bless America"s, and all the other trappings of post-9/11 shows of patriotism--as well as the triumph of Palinesque prideful ignorance--have done a deep harm to the fabric of this nation. If the "Post-American world" is to come about, it's because we will allow ourselves to accept that as the global "new normal" and take comfort, European-style, in our past glories instead.

6. I think that if a President rides into office on the highest, whitest, glowingest moral horse in history and pitches himself as the moral compass of America, he'd better be prepared to take some stands and stick to his guns. Maureen Dowd (whom I normally can't stand) wrote a great column on this topic in yesterday's Times in regards to Obama's equivocations on the proposed mosque near Ground Zero. Is it the right thing or isn't it? Constitutionally, it is, so if there's some higher moral reason why it might not be, there'd better be a damn good explanation why. Gov. Bloomberg has been crystal clear from the beginning that he wants that mosque built and that, essentially, the terrorists win if we don't build it. He's absolutely right, and Obama should be backing him to the hilt. (Hint: this might be a great time to teach a lesson to the 20% of the populace that thinks our commander in chief is a Muslim a little lesson in fact-checking and religious tolerance.)

7. I think problem number 1A (right behind the new normal) facing this country is the ascension of single-viewpoint, opinion-based "news" coverage being pitched to self-selected audiences, particularly on the far right. As one of my professors liked to say, "Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not his own facts." The Glenn Becks, Rush Limbaughs, Newt Gingriches, and especially Sarah Palins of the modern punditry fly in the face of this notion, presenting opinions wrapped in lies (explicit or implied) wrapped in shilling for corporate sponsors as fact. I'm not saying I think CNBC is any better or more responsible with the truth, but I do think that Fox News et al. take a particularly insidious, cynical, fear-mongering angle that is uniquely divisive and destructive (though the portion of the country that accepts Newsweek's "conventional wisdom" as gospel should bear in mind that its editor literally wrote the book on The Post-American World). Bipartisanship already looks enough like a pipe dream; the emergence of semi-factual, heavily slanted, ideologically-masturbatory single-viewpoint "news" outlets that both self-select and cater to their partisan audiences is really harming the tone and tenor of the national debate.

8. I think that's a problem that's crying out for some presidential involvement, and that the current President should have been the perfect person to deal with it honestly. Instead, when the going gets tough, he goes on The View. Yes, Obama, Glenn Beck is an ass, but crying on those ladies' shoulders about it really isn't bringing us any closer to the post-racial, post-partisan never-neverland you promised on the campaign trail. As Maureen Dowd wrote in her above-mentioned column, "What's so scary about Fox News?" You would think that a great moralist and vessel of truth should have no problem taking on some nay-sayers; you would at the very least hope that a former head of the Harvard Law Review would be able to pick up a piece of chalk of his own and show how everything on Glenn Beck's chalkboard logically reduces to lies, fallacies, and crap.

Try this, for starters: it's time somebody, anybody, stood up to all of the aforementioned talking heads and said, "Who are you?!" Seriously: who are these people? What have they done to deserve their exalted posts as shapers of a wide swath of American opinion? Gingrich hasn't been in office for half of forever, and he wasn't exactly a world-beater when he was in charge. Palin, upon discovering that her inimitable blend of willful ignorance, put-on populist mask, and Tina Fey looks resonated for some reason with the American people promptly quit her job to become a full-time "Mama Grizzly." Excuse me?! What the f--- kind of job description is that, "Mama Grizzly?" Who elected you that? Who pays your salary? Used to be, if you thought you had a message, you put it to the people by running for office. If your ideas resonated, you won your race. If they actually worked, you got re-elected. These days, if you have a message--particularly if it is aimed at the Tea Party crowd--you run away from office and into a ghost-written book deal and a slot on Fox News. That's messed up, and what's particularly messed up is how well-fortified The Punditry has convinced the country that its position is. It's long past time for The Punditry--left, right, and Tea-crazy--got taken to the woodshed and exposed for the pretentious, hot-air-blowing farce that it is, and I'm frankly shocked that Professor Post-partisan hasn't done so. Intellectually, it should be child's play to logically parse such misinformation to expose it for the garbage it is; instead, everyone's afraid of the talking heads. Even if Obama doesn't want to pay Beck an on-air visit, why not just put forward an FDR-scale jobs bill, wave it under the "Party of No"'s noses, and put the country on notice: if they say "no" to this thing, they're being worse than counter-productive. How can you vote for that? (Incidentally, how can you vote for the current GOP platform? Read it some time; you'll be shocked.) Being no-drama only plays into the hands of The Punditry: they're going to "no" and slander Obama to no end until he steps back. Like a child without parental control, they're just trying to find the limits of what he'll let them say and get away with. Draw some red lines, already, and fight back. Isn't that what great lawyers and logicians do?

9. I think the Sorry Saga of Shirley Sherrod showed made everybody involved look bad, including the country as a whole. It showed how the far right, operating without limits, is wont to willfully twist the truth; it showed how the left, from the NAACP to the administration, is running scared from the fear-and-misinformation-mongering and won't bother to fact-check, either; and it showed us, as an op-ed that I believe was written by Gail Collins said at the time, that Obama still hasn't gotten his finger on the "black thing." (Paradoxical as this might sound, he doesn't; as one of the most perceptive and prophetic Post op-eds I read last year around election time noted, we have a black President, not an African-American one. Without the history of slavery and the unfulfilled promise of 40 acres and a mule in his background, Obama might be the product of the union of an African and an American, but he does not share the cultural heritage of the African-American community.)

But I've already hammered on all those points, so the one I want to make here is this: what the Sherrod Saga really illustrated is a worrisome look at the emerging division of American society along precisely the lines Mrs. Sherrod was speaking about in the speech from which the vignette that got her fired was lifted. As her experience with the farmers taught her, Mrs. Sherrod noted that the real divisions in this country aren't of race, but of class. Often, it is easy to mistake one for the other, but at the end of the day it is class, the Haves vs. the Have-Nots, that marks the boundary in the increasingly stratified society in which we live today. Middle America and the coasts are barely on speaking terms; Red States fundamentally don't understand Blue ones, and on and on and on. Moreover, the divisions are widening: as the Times noted recently, it's harder to find a Future Farmer of America or a 4-H member on the campus of an elite American university these days than it is to find an ethnic minority student. With the confirmation of Elena Kagan, there are now zero Supreme Court Justices who are not Ivy League-educated. Whatever the racial/gender/religious breakdown, the true diversity of the court is of school colors, rather than class or life experience. Hence, in many ways, the rise of the hated "Beltway Insiders," the propensity of yacht-toting billionaires to run as outsiders to get inside said Beltway, and the Gilded Age 2.0 blind trust in industry robber barons to do the right thing in the total absence of government regulation. We got out of the first Gilded Age when T.R. realized that there is a place for government in society and a place for regulation in industry, and the same will have to happen now. In order to do so, Wall St. and Main St. will have to come back into conversation with one another, and the country will have to recognize and accept that its Future Famers, its future captains of industry, and its future political leaders all have different and valuable viewpoints, and that all deserve a seat at the table.

10. I think that's enough of ruffles; it's time to close on a more positive flourish. (If the previous Things I Think I Think froze your liberal blood, I hope you're still with me--this is the light at the end of the tunnel.) In criticizing the Obama administration, in no way am I rooting for it to fail. Quite to the contrary, I would very much like to see it succeed and fulfill the promise that so many Americans, myself included, saw in it during the campaign. I'm still not sure why the smart, incisive, motivational Candidate Obama disappeared and the no-drama-to-a-fault President Obama emerged after Inauguration Day, but I'd really like to see the candidate's personality make a comeback and inspire the country to pick itself up and get moving. Of course some campaign promises have been unfulfilled; that's the nature of the beast, especially when pre-election expectations are so high. That said, I think the major problem with the administration so far is that it has allowed itself to lose authorship of its own narrative and message. Yes, he was dealt a shitty hand and yes, many people were excited to be done with Bush, but what hasn't been fulfilled is our excitement for Obama. I'll remember making the spontaneous run from the Hilltop to the White House to celebrate on election night 2008 for the rest of my life, and I would very much like to remember the election I was celebrating along with hundreds of other young people in D.C. to have marked the beginning of a great and transformational presidency.

While Candidate Obama emerged to a desperate-enough electorate with a relatively ambiguous pie-in-the-sky message and not surprisingly became an vehicle for millions of hopes and dreams, I think what's been missing so far has been the sense that all of the fervor that led up to the election was felt or is felt by the White House. More than half the nation--and huge numbers of its young and independent voters--were head over heels for the junior senator from Illinois, and now that he's in the highest office in the land, we'd like to see him show us some love (or any emotion, really) in return. We got excited about you, Mr. President--don't be so cool in the name of bipartisanship or some such thing that you don't harness what's left of that excitement.

Finally, while I pointed to a lot that I see as flawed or worrisome in society today, that doesn't mean I think the system is irrevocably broken or that America's time has passed or any such thing. I do think that we're in a pretty good-size pickle, but it's not like that's never been the case before, and the country has so far managed to pull through its moments of crisis and self-doubt, usually emerging stronger for the experience on the other side. I also think that we're on the cusp of a time of great change and reckoning, as economics, politics, demographics, the environment, and technology as we've known them for most of modern history are all at momentous tipping points, and navigating how, when, and where each of these factors tips is going to take a concerted effort on the part of public- and private-sector leaders the world over.

In the course of this change, it is vital that we recall President Kennedy's admonition to ask what we can do for our country (and the world), but it is also important that we do ask what our government can do for us. This should not be wheedling for entitlements or other handouts, but rather a legitimate effort to offer constructive criticism to a government that has come to seem in many ways too ossified for its own good--or that of the people it nominally exists to serve. That is one of the great strengths and values of American democracy that must not be allowed to die out; the First Amendment, in the hands of informed, concerned, and activist citizens, is a mighty thing indeed. It's time we as citizens--future farmers and future Ivy Leaguers alike--took some time to get to know one another, get to know the issues, and then take some responsibility for our government. America has always had a vast, youthful energy, but we do have some intellectual growing-up to do. Enough with the championing of false populism and willful ignorance. Stupid isn't sexy; it's just plain stupid. We have every right to want our politicians to be coherent and able to converse with the common man, but why not want them to be smart, too? Moreover, why should we so undervalue and understate our own intelligence as to choose the candidate with the lowest perceived intellectual wattage on the ballot?

At my brother Taylor's graduation from high school this June, the faculty address was given by an English teacher, Mr. Adam Cluff, that both of us had as sophomores. In his talk, Mr. Cluff quoted the character Prior from Angels in America, who says that "The world only spins forward." Mr. Cluff said that he agreed with Prior: even when negative forces try to spin the world backwards, they may slow it down, but in the end, the world always spins forward. Obviously, the point has stuck with me (now I'll have to read the play myself), and I agree with Mr. Cluff's analysis that while the negative forces seem to have been in ascendancy lately, they will not win out over what Lincoln termed "the better angels of our nature." With that, I'll let Prior deliver the final "flourish" before I go abroad: "The world only spins forward. We will be citizens. The time has come."

THE HOUSE ON FREEDOM ROAD

You betta Belize it: Global ESCAPE Team IV and I had a wonderful time in Belize, C.A. From the time we all met up last Sunday afternoon in Miami International Airport to yesterday afternoon’s parting over a last cup of (remarkably good) café con leche from the airport edition of the Miami institution Café Versailles, the 11 of us navigated customs, learned to live on Belizean time, saw Mayan ruins, ate mountains of fryjacks, demolished pounds of rice-n-beans, tortured our taste buds with Marie Sharp’s famous Belizean habañero sauce, roasted in the sun, sweated through outfit after outfit, got drenched by the beginnings of the rainy season, shook it with Garifuna dancers, “went slow” on Caye Caulker, sampled a few bottles of Belikin (the Beer of Belize), saw crushing poverty butted right up against relative opulence, and in so many other ways crammed a remarkably large slice of Belizean life into a weeklong trip—oh, and let’s not forget: we left a bright yellow, 16-by-16 foot home behind as a lasting legacy of our time there.
After snatching about four hours of fitful sleep, my trip started with the beep-beeping of my alarm clock at 3:55 AM on the 23rd. I shoveled a bowl of cereal, threw a last few items in my bag, and jumped in the car with Dad for the ride to Logan to catch the 7:05 American flight to Miami. There, I met up with the rest of the group, which was making its way in from New York, New Jersey, and Washington, for the flight to Belize City and the more official start of the trip.

***

Aggravating/Enjoyable Travel Note of the Week I: Sitting at the gate in Boston, sipping a Starbucks and perusing the Sunday Globe, I’ve been watching Nervous Nellie a few seats away fidgeting and glancing worriedly out the window for some time. Turns out she’s concerned about the fog that’s blanketing the airport; unable to contain herself any longer, Nellie turns to the gate attendant and asks, “What do you think are the chances of these clouds lifting in the next hour and a half [before takeoff]? I mean, how do we know if there are other planes flying around out there so we won’t hit them?” Mystified gate worker: “Ummm, it’s all electronic, ma’am.” Welcome to the 21st century, Nellie: the fog didn’t lift, but we took off on time and without incident.

Aggravating/Enjoyable Travel Note of the Week II: Thanks to a booking snafu, I was not ticketed with the rest of the group, and ended up being booked in business class, front row, port side, aisle seat. I’d never flown anything but steerage before in my life, and, especially given that American’s nickel-and-diming is especially noxious (you have to pay for snacks, blankets, pillows, and earphones, for crying out loud), found that the front row suited me just fine. I spent the first half-hour of the flight luxuriating in my leather seat, stretching out for every inch of that legroom, figuring out where all of the tray tables and stuff are stowed (in the armrest, apparently), turning down glass after tiny plastic glass of champagne, and scoffing at Celebrated Living, American’s special in-flight magazine for the upper classes. The extra-attentive service, warm dish of mixed nuts at takeoff, and curried rice and shrimp entrée with salad, bread, and dessert served on real china and silver were also much appreciated.

***

Unsurprisingly enough, my 96 minutes of celebrated living ended rather abruptly upon deplaning. That will conclude the climate-controlled portion of today’s service, ladies and gentlemen: a giant staircase improbably perched in the bed of a 90’s-vintage Ford pickup made a few awkward passes at the side of the aircraft before coming to rest squarely against the door, which was duly opened into the 80-plus-degree heat with 80-plus-percent humidity that is Belize on the cusp of the rainy season. After letting the less-celebrated folk catch up inside the terminal, we all cleared customs and immigration together and got the Belizean portion of the trip officially underway.

Aside from the heat, the lifestyle contrast was the most striking thing: I’d gone from business class to the land of the bicycle right-of-way (“They have to ride, you don’t have to drive,” explained one of our hosts) in a matter of minutes. Hand In Hand Ministries, the Kentucky-based organization that was our in-country host group, sent us Roxanne and her giant maroon van to meet us outside the terminal. That van, and the Starfish House to which it would take us, would be our twin homes for the next week.

After getting settled in at the Starfish, we met in the kitchen over chips and salsa (to sate those who’d missed out on the curried rice shrimp-and-scallop bowl) to go over the schedule for the week and other orientation matters with Roxanne and Bridget, the ESCAPE director our group’s leader. Once we’d gotten the logistics ironed out, Roxanne introduced to the story of the starfish, for which the house we were staying in was named. As the story goes, a little boy is walking along the beach, throwing stranded starfish back into the water. Along comes a cynical old man, who watches for a while, then chides the boy for the futility of his action: he can’t possibly save every starfish washed up on the beach, so why bother? The boy simply tosses another one back, then turns to the old man and replies: “I made a difference for that one.” The metaphor was well-chosen. Starting Tuesday, we’d be headed into one of the poorest parts of a very poor town in an impoverished country—the entire population of which is about half that of Washington, D.C.—to build a house for one woman and her daughters. We’d see a lot of other struggling families in the area, some only feet away, that we couldn’t help, but we knew that we could make a real difference in the life of one of them.

That night, we attended Mass at the local Jesuit parish, St. Martin de Porres. The celebrant, Fr. Brian, began his homily with an anecdote from his days as a student at none other than Boston College. After a very upbeat worship service that induced a serious case of “ministry envy” in Keith, our Jesuit novice, we went back to the Starfish to rest after a very long day of travel, feeling immersed in the Belizean culture and reminded of the high calling of our mission that week. Exhausted, we fell asleep to the unique drumming sound of heavy tropical rain on a zink roof.
Having celebrated the birthday of the Church the previous night (Pentacost), Monday marked another birthday celebration: the Queen’s. A former British possession—hence its English-speaking presence in a decidedly Spanish-speaking neighborhood between Guatemala and Mexico and its membership in CARICOM despite its Central American location—Belize celebrates Commonwealth Day, the Queen’s birthday, as a bank holiday. That being the case, not much work, including of the Global ESCAPE variety, gets done on Commonwealth Day. Instead, we reverted to some good old-fashioned volantourism, taking a field trip to the Maya ruins at Altun Ha with Roxanne, her husband David, and their adorable youngest son, Asher. After climbing the pyramids, we piled back into the van for a trip to Old Belize, a very cheesy tourist location that attempts to market “old-time” Belizean heritage along with a Zipline Adventure and artificial lagoon (yours with Slippery Conch waterslide access for $10BZ). Resisting the temptations of the Slippery Conch, we took a van tour of the north (nicer) side of the city, giving us an image of Belize that would be challenged by the beginning of the build the next day.

Tuesday morning, we arrived onsite to find Miss Amybell, the woman whose home we would be building, standing in the door of her colorful but obviously precarious shack with a gaggle of children and grandchildren. In front of the house (such as it was) was the 25-by-25-foot square of more or less packed and leveled soil, required by Hand In Hand of all potential home recipients, on which the house would be built. Besides the dirt patch, all we had to work with was a load of lumber, some coarse aggregate and cement mix, cinder blocks, tools, and our site bosses, Beto and Alfonso. After a quick opening prayer, we unloaded the truck and set up the tent that would offer some shade to those working beside the foundation site throughout the week.

The work went blindingly fast. In the space of three and a half days, we went from dirt patch to fully-constructed (if sparsely-appointed) house. By 4 PM on Tuesday, we’d constructed the five cinder block columns that would form the house’s foundation, built and laid the two halves of the floor, and framed two of the exterior walls. As the day progressed, many of the neighbors (some of them daughters of Miss Amybell, some recipients of Hand In Hand houses themselves) pitched in to help with the construction. This had not been planned, but more hands made for lighter work and they were welcomed onto the jobsite.

Before we’d even reached the site that morning, however, we’d had an incredibly touching visit to a Hand In Hand homeowner named Lauren, whose house had been built by the first Global ESCAPE team three years ago. Roxanne had driven us on a somewhat meandering route through the south side of the city to get a glimpse of what the impoverished half lived like, Lauren’s house was our last stop before heading to work. After seeing what she’d done with the home in three years—a remarkable transformation from basic structure to small but very personalized and well-kept home—Lauren launched into a parting soliloquy on what a blessing the house had been in her life the past several years. She concluded that all good things came from God and that she was convinced that we doing His work—a powerful sentiment with which to begin the workweek—then told us to wait one moment before we left.
Ducking behind a doorframe into the master bedroom, she retrieved a card and held it out to us. There, in a poor but proud home in the poorest section of Belize City, we beheld a picture of Healy Hall, the main building on Georgetown’s campus. This card was one of the GU bookstore staples, one we’d passed by half a zillion times on our way through to pick up textbooks or trinkets. It was a note from the members of GET I, which she read and then passed around the group. On the back of the card were the signatures of all the team members, many of whom we knew personally. It’s hard to describe what it feels like to see something like that, lovingly preserved for three years, in such a foreign corner of the world. “Hoya Saxa” doesn’t quite cut it; I think our other, unofficial, slogan may do better: Georgetown Forever!

The next days passed in a sweaty haze of sun, occasional rain, and furious work. We made so much progress on Wednesday—walls framed, planked and painted; bathroom nook floored and framed; first cuts made on the next day’s lumber—that there was hope of finishing the entire build on Thursday. As it happened, that was getting a little ahead of ourselves, but by the end of Thursday the end was clearly in sight. Another few hours, we knew, should do the trick. Caught up to the schedule of the week, we knew we’d have time to make our planned visit to Hand In Hand’s older ministry, an outreach center for children infected and affected by HIV/AIDS on Friday morning before finishing construction and blessing the home that afternoon.

The trip to the outreach center was both touching and devastating. First, we talked with the Belizean director of the center and its two nurses, one a Belizean woman and the other a nun from Wisconsin who’d spent years as a nurse practitioner in Belize working with HIV/AIDS patients. After a question-and-answer session with them and a quick tour of the facility, we got to meet and play with about two dozen children of preschool age who were attending the center that day. Closer inspection of these apparently happy, normal, young children quickly revealed the lesions on their legs characteristic of their disease. Though they are all nominally on antiretroviral drugs, ensuring compliance of these children (whose parents often don’t tell them that they are sick or what ails them) with their drug regimens is always a challenge. It was absolutely heartbreaking to see these kids running, playing, eating watermelon, and doing all the other “kid things” that their peers in would be while knowing that they were all living under what could be viewed as either a life sentence (of ARV’s, doctors, and sickness) or a death sentence (of noncompliance, ignorance of their illness, infection, and eventual death, reviled by a society that deeply stigmatizes HIV and AIDS).

Still running on the deliciously fresh local pineapple and bananas Bridget and Keith had surprised us with at breakfast that morning, we headed for the worksite and the completion of the project. A few hours of especially energetic work saw the roof completed, the final paint jobs completed, the windows and doors installed, the interior partition nailed up, and me earning the title “Wet Boy” by remaining outside to finish nailing false rafters up under the eaves despite a sudden tropical downpour while everyone else worked inside the house. Toeing in the last nail atop a ladder, water pouring down off the roof into my face, and swinging the hammer with one hand while trying to hold electrical wires out of my face (smart move, Colin) with the other, Beto finally called me inside. Another nail here, a little redecoration with a Skil Saw there, and it was time to hand over the keys.

By that point, the directors of Hand In Hand had arrived to participate in the blessing ceremony, and they brought Miss Amybell and her daughters from their old house out to their new home. After singing a few songs, dripping onto her new floor, Keith led us in a blessing focused on sharing what we were each grateful for in life, in hopes that the new home and its owners would be filled with the spirit of gratitude long after we had left. After the sharing concluded, we extended our hands over the family in blessing and then “grabbed a wall” and blessed the home. That done, Bridget handed the keys, a card, and a housewarming gift to Miss Amybell, who held them up, smiling and wiping away a tear. After hugs all around, we sang Bob Marley’s “Redemption Song,” posed for a group photo in front of the house, and then waved goodbye to Miss Amybell, clambered into the van one more time, and left the bright yellow house—the newest address on Freedom Street—to its proud new owners. We couldn’t help every family there, but seeing Miss Amybell hold up her new keys made clear beyond any shadow of a doubt that we’d made a difference for that one.

***

The rest of the trip put the tourism in “volantourism.” Friday night, a troupe of Garifuna dancers came to the Starfish to share their culture with us through dance. Though their people make up only seven percent of the population of Belize, as the dancers said, the Garifuna make a disproportionate amount of noise. Their singing and drumming is loud, to be sure, but his point was more broadly taken: they might be a minority but the Garifuna, children of the Arawak, Carib, and African peoples, exert a loud and proud influence on the culture of Belize as a whole.

Early Saturday morning, we were off to Caye Caulker (pronounced “key”) for a day of fun in the sun before leaving the country. Fun it was, but sun there wasn’t: yet another rainstorm rolled in and blanketed our one day on the island with clouds and showers. The official motto of the island, Go Slow, set a vastly different tone from the jam-packed days of construction that had preceded this one. We started out with a wonderful snorkeling trip out to the reef, then spent the rest of the day wandering the streets haggling at tourist traps, drinking coffee and playing UNO at a café, and generally going slow. Being ESCAPE leaders, we couldn’t really go a night without reflecting, so we all went up to the roof of our hotel after supper to stare out over the ocean, shoot the shit one more time, and simply enjoy each others’ company for one last night.

Sunday was a blur, from 5:30 AM (central time) wake-up to 7 AM water taxi back to Belize to 9:30 flight to Miami to 6:10 flight to Boston. After an excruciating odyssey through the T (thanks for the heads-up on the maintenance work, D line), I arrived at Woodland station pretty spent and hungry (nothing to eat that Cuban coffee and pastry in Miami just after 5). Sans car, though, I decided to walk home. Turns out the Newton to Wellesley schlep takes a bit longer by foot (with duffel bag) than by car; about 45 minutes after leaving Woodland, I finally unlocked the door to my empty house just after midnight. Fighting back the initial panic at seeing the note from my family (away camping on the Cape) that apologized for the lack of food in the house, I managed to put together enough leftovers, cereal, and granola bars to make a very late supper. Tired beyond sleep, I read a few pages, fell asleep on the couch (a time-honored tradition of mine), woke at 4 AM with all the lights on, and stumbled to bed. And slept till 9.

And so ended, for good this time, sophomore year and my time as an ESCAPE leader. I covered what those milestones meant to me last time; suffice it to say for now that those feelings have only been deepened by this past week’s experiences. It was a wonderful and challenging experience that was also deeply rewarding and memorable. I’m sure I’ll treasure it for a long time, especially as I head into the summer and then into my year abroad. I’m certainly glad to have had this taste of life in a foreign country before heading out into the world (God willing, I’ll be touching down at Ataturk International in Istanbul in less than three months).

More than anything, the feeling that abides with me from this trip is the one that I felt at the beginning when Lauren showed us her Healy Hall card and that I felt again when Miss Amybell held up her new keys. Quite simply, that feeling is this: Georgetown, no matter its faults, has a longer reach and a wider net than I ever could have appreciated before this, and it produces a lot of good people who do a lot of good in the world. We might not be able to save the entire world or even an entire neighborhood, but we can be angels to a woman and her family, and at the end of the day it’s a real blessing to be part of something like that and to have the wherewithal to have done what this group did. Few twenty-somethings in this world have the resources and opportunity to do something like that, and few of those that do choose to make use of them. Back in my multi-roomed, multi-storied, fully-wired and –plumbed yellow house on Clifton Road, I’m immensely grateful to have been one of nine students at a school that provides and encourages such opportunities to have said Yes to the chance we were offered.

Who can know what becomes of the starfish the boy in the story rescues, how many little starfish they have, what sorts of lives they live? The important thing is that live they do, and that’s difference enough for each that gets rescued to justify the apparently quixotic effort in the first place. Who can know what will become of Miss Amybell’s new home, how it may impact the lives of her and her family and any future inhabitants? Perhaps a solid structure will be satisfactory enough, perhaps she’ll take what she has been given and run with it as Lauren has. At least we helped give her a chance. And that’s something, isn’t it?