4th of July

Hey yall...sorry about the wait. I wrote this blog about a week and a half ago, and wasn't going to post it, but I think its okay so here you go:


I must keep you waiting on my official ipod charging blog as there s something else I have to get down...

Last weekend, we heard that on Sunday night, Milford (my hometown) was having a fireworks show for the first time. Would they shoot them off from Silver Sands or Walnut Beach? Would they shoot them off at Gulf Beach near the harbor so they could be seen easily from a beatiful, thriving downtown? Nope. The fireworks were at...The Connecticut Post Mall. A pretty odd choice if you ask me, but I could live with it. As some of you may know, we live 5 minutes from the mall, and I figured we should be able to watch them from our back yard. So, we sat in the yard on lawnchairs around 9 PM waiting for the fireworkds to start. Finally, around 9:30, we see some flashes through the trees. Unfortunatly, they were not high enough above the treeline to make them enjoyable, so me, my mom, and my Dad hopped in the car to try and find a better view without actually driving to the mall. We tried the sidestreets around our house, but nothing. We continued driving until we reached Post Rd., Rt. 1. We tried to see from Krispy Kreme, but the view was not consistent enough, so we went nextdoor to, of all places, McDonalds. And we parked, of all places, right behind the flagpole. I didn't think twice of any of this at first, but suddenly I realized how American I was right at that moment. Me, sitting on the hood of the car, staring at the booming fireworks high in the sky being launched from the mall (which has pretty much doubled in size in the last year)on the most American of holidays, the 4th of July. In the foreground of my view, a flagpole. Atop that flagpole, a large American flag. Just below that, another flag of equal size sporting the red background and the all-American Golden Arches.

I struggle almost daily with my feelings on issues like globalization and America's role in the world. As an undergrad, outside of my engineering curriculum, I gravitated towards the departments of Development Sociology (country not child) and City and Regional Planning. Here, Marx was God and the World Bank was nothing but a bunch of neo-colonialists. I learned to HATE McDonalds, Walmart, sweatshops, Adam Smith, and Larry Summers (check out "Let Them Eat Pollution", a leaked internal memo written by Dr. Summers when he was with the World Bank). I even wrote a paper on the dangers of the commodification of land, labor, and money and my professor ate it up.

In the last few years, I have studied more seriously some economics and public policy, and have become more of a centrist on these issues. I don't mind that my shirt says "made in India" because the sweatshop where it was made may be pulling its workers' families out of extreme poverty or giving women their first access to an income. I have met and learned from several World Bank advisors (one senior level) that I have all the respect for in the world. As tactless as Larry Summers is(you may recall his most recent blunders as President of Harvard), there are points in "Let Them Eat Pollution" (a justification for exporting pollution from rich to poor countries) that I actually agree with to some extent. Finally, I have learned to at least respect the power of markets, and along with "The Wealth of Nations", I even own a book entitled "The Wisdom of Adam Smith." It sits awkwardly on my shelf next to "The Communist Manifesto" and "The Great Transformation".