"Keeping up with the Joneses: the Re Development of the US"

First things first: FINALLY it is cooling down here!!! Apparently this heat is abnormal...but of course it would be the hottest fall people can remember when I come to town!! Last night we went to bed pleasantly with out neither a fan nor the AC!! YAAY! Now I am sitting outside on our balcony beginning my first response paper on what development is and about to create my very own definition....ahh the power....and I am not dying of heat! It is great!! Its sunny with a nice breeze! PERFECT!! Anywho, enough about the weather, I hate small talk!!

Remember a long long time ago when I blogged about the students attitudes about the West and how I said I just want to tell them to stop blaming the US and start improving their country from within? No? Its ok I remember. Anyway! I finally said something in class discussion yesterday!! It was SO fun for me! My professor got a kick out of it I think. There is a kid in my class who I think is a great person outside of class but is one of those guys who thinks he knows everything in class and has really radical views (anarchist, athiest, the works) and has to contradict everything anyone says....yea hes that guy. Anyway he was blaming really stupid things on the US and so I started off with asking, "and which country set up your government the way it is now? (he was complaining that its all a product of US imperialism)" and he of course said "the French" (cus they were the colonizing country here) and I said "right. So, why is it the US's fault your country is underdeveloped? wait, dont answer that yet, is it not at all possible for you and others in this country to use political participation to change things here? Is it not possible for you and other citizens to not demand the government build new roads and figure out the electricty problem here? Is that not at all possible? Is the US controlling your ability to speak? Get up and DO SOMETHING if you think your government isn't developing/improving Lebanon the way you think it should be!! It is NOT the US's fault you are underdeveloped! Even with all the sneaky politiking we do around the world, even if we did have a hand in the corruption of who is in power, THE PEOPLE HERE VOTED AND THE PEOPLE IN POWER WON!! Do like Palestine and hold elections w/o interference and elect the people you want! See, the elected "terrorists" by US definition! DO SOMETHING" Anywho, I got really worked up if you can tell by the caps lock! :) It was fun!! And he, sort of shut up after that...but of course not really! :)

I get really sick of the West being blamed for everything, but I know we have done alot in the world to get us that reputation. It just seems sometimes EVERYTHING is blamed on us. I guess that is why something my friend Emily in India said is so true. In regards to the question "what it means to be American" she answered that it means to have great responsibility. And I think that is so true. As a nation we have a great responsibility to lead by example and to do good in the world where we can and face critics humbly when we dont. As people we have a great responsibility of representing the good of our country and passing that along to people who don't see it, but also recognize where our country has failed both us as citizens and the world a the only remaining super power. And the latter is sometimes very hard to do...but I try.

Something actually that has really interested me since I have been here is the idea of the declining state of power the US is in now. And a topic that keeps coming into my head for a paper or an article or something (which of course i cant write for classes here cus we focus on the Middle East, but maybe one day) is "Keeping up with the Joneses: the Re Development of the United States." It seems that in the US we are recognizing that we have hit our peak and are declining in power in relation to the other rising actors such as China, Japan and the EU. But as I was thinking about my time on the HECB and all the reports we saw comparing us to the rest of the world in education, and as I was talking/arguing with Kael the other night about Socialized medicine and the current healthcare debate taking place in our country, I have decided that we try so hard to find the aspects in other countries that are working well for them and try to replicate it in the US but we don't want to restructure our system to be able to do it properly, which leaves us mimicking policies of the EU and others without the systematic backbone. Does that make sense? Let me flesh out my ideas. In education policy we are told that we are lacking, this I believe is very true, especially after seeing what my 15 year old cousin is expected to know at his grade level that we were no where close to learning until high school. BUT the way in which people prove this is actually somewhat deceiving. My auntie Lynn if she is reading this will remember a conversation she and a friend of hers and I had in MN about this. When we are compared to other countries standardized test scores it is somewhat misleading. For instance, the French system of education (which is the same/similar in all of its former colonies including Lebanon) is that students are tested in 9th grade and if they dont pass this test they dont go onto high school, and the ones who do are placed in the level of high school that they test into. SO when we see our test scores which is a number that includes ALL of our students compared to the test scores of the French lets say it is decieving because the French students test results are the results of the best of the best of their students who went to high school. Does that make sense? So unless we want to really re structure how we offer education (which I believe we should) its misleading to compare our standards with others in Europe. But something should be done in Education and we should have the guts to re wire the way we do things to make that happen. Actually I read an article where I think it was Zimbabwe I cant remember tho, during a major economic crisis (hmmm arent we in one of those now?) made a huge shift in investment into education and preventative healthcare because those are areas that will help re build economies within a generation (better education=more skilled workers, better health of its people = better life expectancy). NOW if Zimbabwe of all places can do that, why aren't we? I was on the HECB during the economic "crash" last year and we were cutting education spending like crazy, even WITH the stimulus bill. It doesn't make sense.

Lets try not to get me started on healthcare but another problem is that we are trying to create a socialized system for healthcare without the proper tax set up to fund it, just because other people/states are doing it.

We SHOULD be making these social changes, we SHOULD provide better healthcare for our citizens, we SHOULD have a better education system, we SHOULD prioritize these things before spending billions and billions on war and violence BUT we need to figure out a way to do these things in an American context that works within our system...we shouldn't just do it because the Joneses are doing it. Does that make sense? I really think there is a huge need in the US to "re-develop" if you will. We led the world in industry, agriculture, military for a very long time, and still do for the most part. But we began failing our citizens a long time ago. The amount of poverty in the US is scary. The amount of violence against women, children and the violence amongst gangs is rising. Sometimes in our development class, the terms that we all use to describe a "developed" country would not describe the US. We are vastly in debt. We have two major "conflicts" (apparently they are not "wars" they are conflicts, I learned from a military friend of mine...whatever) on our hands in the Middle East, and judging by what I read in the news, I wouldn't be surprised it if flows into Pakistan soon. There are a lot of things we need to change in the US. I think thats why a lot of people voted for Obama because the saw the word "change" in his campaign...but we really need to talk about what that change should look like. Because remember "change" is not synonymous with "development"...it does not indicate a forward movement. You can change in any direction. the US needs to move forward. We need to take a deep hard look at ourselves and make systematic changes that are going to be really hard to do but will be vital if we don't want to "change" in a backward motion and find ourselves "underdeveloped" very soon.

Ok, this is a really long post, sorry for rambling. I had to get my thoughts down and I am terrible at keeping a journal. I really think the US is in a fundamental state of emergency I guess you could say. We need to do something. We need to follow the example of countries that have risen up from nothing and are now huge power players, but not copy them, unless we want to re structure our system. We cannot institute copy cat policies anymore without the systematic backbone like a new income source to pay for this huge healthcare bill that is going through Congress for example. We need to invest in Education so our citizenry is educated and inventing and leading again. I am going to go work on my development papers now...and examine how the Middle East needs to develop. Hope I didn't bore you...

Much love,

Sash