Archive for May 7th, 2008
“Give it a go” and “can do”
May 7, 2008Americans want to do nation-building, says Thomas L. Friedman in the New York Times after five months of traveling the country while writing his next book, but “they want to do nation-building in America.”
Why? In a May 4 op-ed piece entitled “Who Will Tell the People?” Friedman says ordinary citizens in the US are becoming aware that the country desperately needs to be rebuilt.
He believes people are realizing that the US is not as strong as it used to be, that city-states like Dubai and Singapore are providing money to shore up American banks, that the war in Iraq has the military pinned down, and that President Bush has been reduced to begging Saudi Arabia for petroleum cost relief.
The post-WW II belief in America as the place where everyone wanted to be is, now, harder to maintain.
Friedman cites two transportation hubs as examples of the impoverishment of American infrastructure relative to that of other nations. One is Berlin’s “luxurious central train station” in comparison to the “grimy, decrepit Penn Station in New York City.”
Well, of course, Europe beats us on trains, many Americans would say. We know that.
But the second comparison pits a John F. Kennedy Airport terminal against one in Singapore’s Changi Airport. At JFK, Friedman says, he and his wife recently had difficulty finding a place to sit. In Singapore’s airport they found spaciousness, free internet portals, and children’s play zones.
And he doesn’t even mention some of the things that make Singapore’s airport a preferred stop-over point for me and my partner. In one terminal there are luxurious foot-massage machines. These are stress-reducing and they’re free. Not far away there Read the rest of this entry »