We came across this at the Corner, from Kathryn Jean Lopez, an excerpt from a Huffington Post blog entry by one Sarah Stillman, who is a tad peeved at the world:

I’m already feeling pretty annoyed that the cheapest way I can get to Leon, Mexico for a conference on feminist resistance to U.S. imperialism and corporate globalization is by flying through RONALD REAGAN NATIONAL AIRPORT AND GEORGE BUSH INTERCONTINENTAL AIRPORT. But this is further compounded by the realization that my own speechlessness about Reagan’s unforgivable role in Central America reflects a much larger, collective inability of the left to combat national amnesia about the Great Communicator’s true legacy. Even more abstractly, it reminds me of our failure to hold U.S. imperial presidencies accountable for the terror they’ve incited and continue to incite — from the fincas of El Salvador to the trenches of Iraq to the militarized ghettoes here at home….

And so, I’m writing you not only for the sake of catharsis, but also to pledge that I won’t stop searching for the right words to address all future Reagan-lionizing golfer ladies until I can fly from Delores Huerta National Airport to Emma Goldman Internationalism Airport, where passports will be optional and “Ronald Reagan” will be nothing more than a brand of sanitary napkin disposal bins.

Miss Stillman is very angry, often about things very far away. By contrast, things up close have been going swimmingly for her:

Sarah Stillman is a senior at Yale University, where she is earning her simultaneous Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees in Anthropology. An active participant in the global justice movement, she has worked abroad with grassroots anti-sweatshop organizers in Shenzhen, China (www.cwwn.org), returned refugees in rural Guatemala (www.mesaglobal.org), and unionizing sex workers in Bangkok, Thailand.

Stillman’s first book, Soul Searching: A Girl’s Guide to Finding Herself, has sold over 30,000 copies worldwide and has been translated into five languages. She is currently at work on her next book–a collection of essays about corporate globalization’s consequences for young women worldwide.

At Yale, she is the editor of MANIFESTA, a bi-annual feminist journal, and the co-head of the Student Legal Action Movement, a group that works on local and national criminal justice issues. She is the recipient of the Elie Wiesel Prize in Ethics and a member of the USA Today All-USA Academic First Team.

Where to go with this? We have nothing personal against Sarah Stillman, and frankly admire her ambition. She may be against globalization, but she herself is fully globalized (and more than a little capitalistic). She certainly has a lot of get-up-and-go, as USA Today noted in her biography which it ran in the story about her selection to its Academic First Team:

Sarah Stillman, Yale University:Home: Washington, D.C.; Age: 20; Major: Anthropology; GPA: 3.95; Graduating: May 2006. Career goal: Human rights advocate. Accomplishments: Working with the Student Legal Action Movement, Stillman co-founded a prison tutoring program at three local prisons and started Reunite, a free prison transportation service for families; earning bachelor’s and master’s degrees concurrently; edits feminist journal; multimedia sculpture show recasting Barbies as prominent feminist figures; summer research on women’s issues in China and Guatemala; speaking tours to promote two Soul Searching books for girls she wrote in high school; writing book on corporate globalization’s impact on young women; articles published in national anthologies and campus publications; schoolwide journalism and composition prizes.

Stillman is a prolific writer, which again is something to be admired. While her first works may have been a little wooden, it is certainly remarkable that she wrote a book at 16. In any event, her style has opened up considerably. She turned her word processor up to 11 for her Elie Wiesel essay, in which she described the death of a 19 year old Chinese factory worker:

After nearly four years of making Disney toys for shipment to America, it’s as if Li’s slender body finally decided to say “No: I cannot carry another heavy box of plastic eyeballs or velvet paws; I refuse to breath another gulp of hot factory air swirling with multi-colored dust; I will not last another 16-hour shift for the sake of $1.92 in wages.”

And she did the same in her introduction to the debut issue of MANIFESTA:

It’s our rejoinder to the portrait of George Bush Sr. that currently hangs in Commons, Yale’s largest dining hall, daily tempting us to replace it with a watercolor homage to Emma Goldman or bell hooks. It’s our response to the recent wars in Iraq and Afghanistan that George W. Bush has waged in part in the name of women’s liberation, and also to the factions of the anti-war movement that have sidelined a gendered analysis of occupation. It’s our riposte to mainstream media that make it ten times easier to learn about Britney Spear’s latest battle with butt fungus than to ascertain any substantive information about the real issues facing young women around the world.

Butt fungus indeed. In the end, as it were, our problem with the world of Stillman is that it is one where the likes of Emma Goldman, anarchist and criminal, are lionized. Does Yale teach this threadbare and dated agitprop about the last hundred years? To quote ourselves:

Here is the signal fact of our progress in the last century. If you were born in 1900, your life expectancy was in the forties, and GNP per capita was about $4000. If you are born today, your life expectancy in about eighty, and statistically, as an average American, you are ten times richer. In reality you are a hundred or a thousand times richer, if you factor in your ability to be in Paris tomorrow for $500, your ability to watch events from fifty years ago as they actually happened, etc. – not to mention that your toddler’s severe pneumonia can be reliably cured in 48 hours or so. Only a little of this has to do with government.

Mostly it is because far more than 50% of everything ever invented in the history of humanity was invented in the last 130 years, and over 50% of that was invented by Americans. Milton Hershey invented the candy bar, Carrier invented the air conditioner for a tire plant, Sears invented catalogue distribution, Henry Ford invented cheap cars, some guys from Texas Instruments invented the transistor. It is almost impossible to overstate the importance of the invention and wide use of brand names, which communicate the quality and dependability of every product we buy. This alone deserves the Nobel Prize. And it was a large and growing market, the availability of risk capital, and protection of intellectual and personal property by the courts that made this possible.

It is capitalism that created the untold wealth that exists today and endows Yale University. It is capitalism that has increased wealth around the world, giving China a 9% GDP growth for the last twenty years and holding the promise of bringing its 1.4 billion souls out of poverty. Communism and its sister ideologies are dead-end streets, death traps of poverty for the average woman, man and child on the planet. No one is claiming that the capitalist world is perfect; Communism’s fantasy world is perfect — but, because it ignores human nature, it devolves inevitably into totalitarianism. The anti-globalization movement is precisely the path away from progress. It would be good if our best and brightest got on board with this.

This entry was posted on Saturday, July 30th, 2005 at 8:22 am and is filed under General, Religion, War, radical chic. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.