When Sen. Olympia Snowe commented this week on translating “empathy of your experience into legislation,” she made a profound statement on what is currently missing in American politics. The pinnacle of such indifference to the average citizen’s plight is seen today in the partisan stalling of healthcare. You would think that our leaders would want the U.S. to improve its ranking of 37th in the world for healthcare, and to ensure that families are not destroyed by lack of affordable insurance.
By now few people can be unaware of the plight of 12-year-old paper airplane champ Mong Thongdee, who this month travelled around the only two countries he knows in the world but cannot call either his legal home because he does not have one. Although stateless, Mong, who won two medals in the contest in Japan, is still better off than an estimated half a million other children born on Thai soil to migrant parents, because he has been promised a scholarship by an influential and caring cabinet
From the Toronto Star With about a million British youth unemployed, ours is hardly an isolated crisis. A recent editorial in the conservative U.K. Economist says the “plight of the jobless young … invokes talk of a lost generation.” It notes the well-known phenomenon that “prolonged unemployment early in people’s working lives will leave them scarred in the long term. Youngsters who have been jobless for a year or more tend to do worse in the labour market for the rest of their lives.”
