From Haverhill to China
Mark Palermo
From Haverhill to China
Mark
Palermo
>>Valley Patriot>> |
Yes, the Zaikim Bridge looks nice when lit up at night, but the Big Dig was waste of time and money. Radio talkmaster Jerry Williams warned about it in the late 1980’s. Today it stands as a monument to kickbacks and corporate welfare, a grotesque 15 billion dollar reminder of Boston’s substandard public transportation system. Have you been on the T lately? A uniquely unpleasant experience indeed. They should rename it “the Four D’s” – depressing, dirty, disgusting and dangerous. Not to mention overcrowded and obsolete. In
China last month, I rode on a magnetic levitation train
which takes passengers from downtown Shanghai Everybody hates heavy traffic. Everybody hates pollution. But so far the government’s answer to gridlock is widening roads, which only encourages people to move further away from the cities and create even more gridlock. People say a train like that would be a great idea, maybe someday there’ll be one. In Shanghai, to their credit, they said, “Let’s build one.” Final cost was $1.2 billion. Much has been made about China’s “One Child Policy.” Urban planners and social engineers here like to point to China as an example of how developing countries can control their populations. But the policy should be renamed “Forced Abortion Po-licy.” Let’s say a married couple has a child and the wife gets pregnant again. How does the couple “bump up” against the system? A
Chinese tour guide explained it to me. Every neighborhood
has a “Neighborhood Committee” composed of
people, mostly pensioners, who have nothing better to do
than ingratiate themselves with authorities. And so if a
mother appears a few months pregnant, a neighborhood
committee member reports it. The police Now there are too many young men arriving in the cities. They want wives, but there are no women for them, and this means trouble. Drug addiction and crime are getting started in the big cities. This is the dark, shadowy side of China, of course. And while every country has a shadow side including ours, there is much of value too. Their everyday life is characterized by cheerfulness, safe streets, a strong work ethic, reverence for nature, and respect for elders. Napoleon once said, “Let China sleep, for when she awakens she will rule the world.” I
hope he was wrong. Mark Palermo is a professor at
Northern Essex Community College. He is vice president of
the faculty union and coordinator of the Northern Essex
Foreign Film Festival. You can email him Send your questions
comments to ValleyPatriot@aol.com |
My wife and I found ourselves stuck
in traffic in the southeast expressway tunnel- a familiar
scenario and I thought of a song by Peggy Lee called
“Is That All There Is?” 
to the airport, a distance of about
25 miles, in 7 minutes. It’s cheap and clean. It
goes 300 miles an hour and the ride is so smooth that
seat belts are not needed. And I thought what if, instead
of the preposterous Big Dig, we had invested in a system
of maglev trains? Imagine getting from the Merrimack
Valley to Boston in seven minutes. Or New York in 45
minutes. Or Mon-treal in an hour.
then pay her a visit, just to
verify that she has made arrangements for the abortion.
If the couple refuses, the child can neither go to school
nor get a social security card. Since there is no safety
net for elders, the Chinese want children so that
somebody will take care of them in their old age, which
means they want boys, not girls. Girls tend to be either
aborted, or put up for adoption to foreigners, which
pro-duces yet another problem.