IOUSA

U. showed me this frightening movie last night about the US National Debt. It takes about a half an hour to watch, but it's really pretty important to do so if you want to be informed in the least about how our finances are doing both personally and nationally.

It's really really really terrifying. We owe more money than we ever have in history, and we owe it to countries like China who we cannot trust.

Leading up this election, many of my second grade students were parroting their parents in talking about how bad it is that Obama wants to raise taxes. I realize they're only second graders, but I don't think their parents were making arguments much more solid. It strikes me as so nearsighted and selfish to be unwilling to pay taxes. Paying more now means protecting ourselves and our children from serious poverty in the future!

In general I'm upset at a consumer culture. Lately I am still avoiding buying new clothes at all costs because I've been learning that almost all of them are created through sweat labor! Yet so many wonderful people that I know drive to the mall and don't't think twice about all of those goods being offered for their benefit. And yet those things come at a price to someone else's well-being.

We are severely discouraged from believing that our actions are powerful enough to have an impact in the world. And yet everything we do... what we eat, where, how we travel, how we speak to others etc. DOES have an impact, either good or bad. We need to know where things come from, how they got here and what destruction or goodness they brought in the process.