I Decided In My Life That I

Child Psychologists Have Demonstrated That Our Minds Are Actually Constructed By These Thousands Of Tiny Interactions During The First Few Years Of Life. We Aren't Just What We're Taught. It's What We Experience During Those Early Years - A Smile Here, A Jarring Sound There - That Creates The Pathways And Connections Of The Brain. We Put Our Kids To Fifteen Years Of Quick-cut Advertising, Passive Television Watching, And Sadistic Video Games, And We Expect To See Emerge A New Generation Of Calm, Compassionate, And Engaged Human Beings?

If I'm Remembered For Having Done A Few Good Things And If My Presence Here Has Sparked Some Good Energies, That's Plenty.

I Always Wanted To Be Someone Better The Next Day Than I Was The Day Before.

But Perhaps More Important, As Someone Wishing To Make A Comment Or Two About Contemporary Life And Values, I Don't Have To Dig Through Libraries Or Travel To Exotic Lands To Arrive At A View Of Our Modern Situation Refracted Through The Lens Of The Preindustrial World, Or The Uncommercialized, Unfranchised, Perhaps Unsanitized-and Therefore Supposedly More "authentic"-perspective Ofthe Third World. Very Simply, This Is Because That "other" World, As Alien As If Separated By Centuries In Time, Is The One From Which I Came

We Suffer Pain, We Hang Tight To Hope, We Nurture Expectations, We Are Plagued Occasionally By Fears, We Are Haunted By Defeats And Unrealized Hopes . . . The Hoplessness Of Which I Speak Is Not Limited.