Good Lord. Thomas Friedman actually said something that I agree with. He says, or rather, quotes, that in America, "The only real entitlement we need to get rid of is our sense of entitlement." I think that most American youth grow up with some sort of vague notion that there is some degree of poverty, somewhere, and it appears in the form of starving children that show up on TV every once in awhile. Anxiety this might incite can be quelled by donating ten-year-old canned yams from the back of your cabinet every Thanksgiving and donating the penny you get back from your 99-cent burger to the Ronald McDonald House for Children. This is, of course, an overstatement--it really discredits the countless ranks of benevolent Americans that Do Things--but bear with me, because I am allowed to be as sensationalist as I want in my dinky little online journal. What I found, coming back from India, is that we in the developed world have a very subtle subconscious notion that for some reason we deserve what we have. If tomorrow I were to wake up in the shoes of a shoe-less woman selling wormy apples on the streets of Jaipur, and this shoe-less woman were to wake up in my Sketchers, the situation would somehow be percieved as unfair. If all human beings are equal, there is absolutely nothing unfair about it: it's her turn. Gloom-and-doom economic forecasts for the United States are regarded with the seriousness of the apocalypse, whereas newspaper headlines of famine in Africa quickly find themselves in the recycling bin to be made into new newspapers declaring the next famine in Asia. Why am I even writing this? I'm just saying what every hippy has heard and repeated before from their own respective seats from the fourth floors of a libraries in the Netherlands. Someone give me a bullhorn, if the Western window is open maybe they can hear me in Brussels. I need to stop muttering arrogant cynical incantations and start articulating constructive thoughts in complete sentences to people who care. Maybe that advice should be manufactured into a bumper sticker to be sold at Record and Tape Traders. Or better yet, a tattoo. I'm already off to a good, constructive start. Good idea #2 is in the works; I think it will have something to do with how to surgically implant my foot into my mouth.