"The Borgen Project has some good info on the cost of addressing global poverty.
$30 billion: Annual shortfall to end world hunger.
$540 billion: Annual U.S. Defense Budget."
A New Message From Watts: Hope But Verify
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What can Barack Obama do? He'll need help. The world, alas, is not a Barack Obama TV commercial. F––– NIGERS, read graffiti—a sign of simmering black-Latino tensions—on the sidewalk in front of one Spanish-language bodega. Watts seems pleased at least to have a president who will more assiduously notice that such crises exist. "We don't need any more of those Bushes," I overheard a woman say riding up Central Avenue on the No. 53. "Now with that Katrina and FEMA, when they said he went on vacation—that killed me! You got dead bodies floating in the water!" But hope's evil twin can be disillusionment. Sociologists' most common explanation for the baffling 1965 riots in Watts was the "crisis of rising expectations"—like what happens when a president proclaims these the most hopeful times since Christ was born in Bethlehem, while some Americans felt they were watching progress only on TV. The 1965 Voting Rights Act, after all, affected only the South; it did nothing to improve police brutality in Watts.
Transformative change in our republic is difficult, for good or for ill—which was how the Founders devised it. Some things a president, no matter how great, has no control over at all. Among the many challenges President Obama will face, the biggest may be to live up to the transformative hopes he stoked during this campaign.
© 2008
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