Nick Kristoff had a largely overlooked column at the NY Times back on the 14th, datelined Phnom Penh. He called it “Where Sweatshops Are a Dream,” and it echoes one of the great moments in the fall of the Soviet Empire. In the post-Gorbachev days, or maybe just before, Boris Yeltsin visited Manhattan, and greatly annoyed most of the journalists assigned to cover him, because Yeltsin kept on praising American accomplishments. Finally, he went to visit one of the worst neighborhoods in the Bronx, and a journalist asked him “Well, Mr. Yeltsin, what do you think of our slums?”
Yeltsin replied, “Your slums are our dreams.”
Kristoff understands the message.
Before Barack Obama and his team act on their talk about “labor standards,” I’d like to offer them a tour of the vast garbage dump here in Phnom Penh.This is a Dante-like vision of hell. It’s a mountain of festering refuse, a half-hour hike across, emitting clouds of smoke from subterranean fires.
The miasma of toxic stink leaves you gasping, breezes batter you with filth, and even the rats look forlorn. Then the smoke parts and you come across a child ambling barefoot, searching for old plastic cups that recyclers will buy for five cents a pound. Many families actually live in shacks on this smoking garbage.
Mr. Obama and the Democrats who favor labor standards in trade agreements mean well, for they intend to fight back at oppressive sweatshops abroad. But while it shocks Americans to hear it, the central challenge in the poorest countries is not that sweatshops exploit too many people, but that they don’t exploit enough.
Talk to these families in the dump, and a job in a sweatshop is a cherished dream, an escalator out of poverty, the kind of gauzy if probably unrealistic ambition that parents everywhere often have for their children.
Our slums are their dreams. And as we enter a phase in which we’re going to hear a lot of people decrying America as the cause of the world’s ills, do remember that very few people choose to leave America, while millions and millions will risk everything to get here.
Several years ago, the German weekly Focus had a report about a Ukranian orphanage. I’m no blue-eyed romantic, but it shook me. Little food, kids having to share spoons to eat what they did get, thin blankets, no heat, filthy outdoor toilets. There were some good people there trying to provide for these kids, but for many people the terrible struggle to survive kills empathy and kills their souls. I know it is hard now for many Americans, but we have a reservior of strengths to draw on: charity, ingenuity, determination, and yes, wealth. When we really try to understand the lives of the destitute, we can count our blessings and role up our sleeves. The cultivation of victimhood has to go.
Michael, I have two stories regarding skid row here in Edmonton. The first one dates from 1972, when my mom and I were visiting relatives, and we were in Chicago for a while. A picture was taken of me in front of Chicago Stadium (the old home of the Black Hawks), and when my mom and I got back, she said, “We have high class
slums”.
The other is more recent. A retired policeman from London became friends with a sister and her husband, and he
wanted to see the rougher parts of Edmonton. When he was taken there, he couldn’t believe they were slums, because the slums are worse in London, England.
Selective Vision sentences the most vulnerable to what ought not be the case, indeed what doesn’t have to be the case.
Whatever the cause, if there slums in America but the US remains a moral country for humanity.
Americans who freed Europe from the Nazis, and freed them from communism as well, Americans who freed Iraqis from despot Saddam in Iraq. American mind made some countries in the world possess the largest economy in the world as “Japan, Germany, and Italy”.
Unfortunately, there in the US who claim themselves as “Americans”, but in fact, they are enemies America. They are good advocates for despotic regimes “the Terror Masters”. They struggle strongly to humiliate the US greatness such as “Mr. Zbigniew Brzezin’ski, Mr. Michael Moore, Mr. Noam Chomsky, Mr. David Duke and other of the humiliating scandals sellers”.
I call every one who decrying America to see the dirty slums in the ugly Middle East that possesses more than 74% of Global Oil. You can see a very dirty slums in the countries that possess the largest Oil reserves in the world as “Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Iran, and Kuwait.” Yet, those people still extremely late nations and violent and form real threat on global security.
Please do NOT decry America, just see the suspicious situation in the ugly Middle East.
AMERICA, LOVE IT OR LEAVE IT!!!
How does that old joke go?: “I hate the vile and disgusting United States. It is the worst country in the entire world. Can you help me get a visa so that I can move there?”
Reminds me of a trip I took to Nairobi, Kenya some years ago. I saw high-rise apartments that were filthy and decaying. The streets in front of them, once paved in asphalt, had reverted to dirt roads, with just a little bit of pavement left here and there. People in ragged clothes sold used shoes from old carts outside the buildings.
In all, it looked vastly worse than the appalling Chicago housing projects where some members of my family lived back in the 1960s.
I visited a professor at a local college, located right near these dreadful-looking slums, and told him how dismayed I was about the poverty of the people living in them. The professor, a native of Italy, looked a little dismayed at my words. He said that the area I was talking about was a middle-class neighborhood where relatively affluent Kenyans lived.
Years before, I’d visited India and had had a similar epiphany. I occurred to me that although I’d grown up in a Chicago slum, on welfare, I’d never been poor in my life. I’m not denying or belittling the serious nature of poverty in America. It’s no joke and we must do what we can to eliminate as much as we can. But believe me, American poverty is as nothing compared to the horrible circumstances faced by a large percentage of the world’s people.
Malevolent nr 4
I am not an American, I am living in Europe, but I LOVE the US, I BELIEVE STRONGLY IN AMERICAN IDEOLOGY, the US is my HEART. Therefore, I am risking my life to advocate the US. So, if you will love America only when you will get visa! In this case the US do NOT needs fool people like you!!!
Prof. Ledeen, you can see slums and terrible filthy streets and dirty slums in the west, ONLY where a live immigrants from the third world. Of course the vast majority of them scorn the west values, especially “Moslems”.
No doubt more than 90 % of the Middle East countries “dirty slums, filthy disgusting streets and cities, and appalling poverty” despite most of those countries are very Oil-rich as “Iraq, Iran, Saudi Arabia and Kuwait.”
To Mr. Thomson.
Dear Thomson, I really very sorry about my comment toward you. Obviously my English is very very poor, but I think that my thoughts are clear. And also I was so much tired. I did not know that you are an American; I thought that you are one of those who scorn America!!! But you told us just a joke about subject. I read most your comments, I saw that “You have hard-line like me”. Please, forgive me.