Two recent articles on NPR news piqued my interest:

http://www.npr.org/blogs/thesalt/2012/10/04/161875989/the-cost-of-saving-lives-with-local-peanuts-in-haiti

and:

http://www.npr.org/2012/10/03/161408561/did-man-who-armed-black-panthers-lead-two-lives

The first is about peanut paste fortified with extra nutrients to help children.  Technology is often blamed for all ills of the world, but it has the potential to do a lot of good. I guess in practice it goes both ways, as evidenced by the first comment in the article, and the reply to it.  I very much like that the jobs to make the peanut paste are going to the Haitians.  There are many factors that might contribute to a country's poverty: a legacy of colonialization and, in the case of Haiti, slavery; poor soil and natural resources; weather - floods, tropical diseases, etc.  I wish I knew of a list of what makes a country wealthier, without necessarily hurting another country's wealth.  I am sure that there would be quite a few items on the list - I'd like to discover them.

The second article led to reading this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/African_american_history

Woah.  I wish I had read it sooner.  So much about history that I was completely ignorant of.

What made me shudder was not the horrific cruelty, but the complacency towards it.  How an institution like slavery can be so deeply embedded into a society's fabric, and that reason can be so far from the minds of people, that a war or bloody revolution is needed to uproot it.  It makes me shudder to think that I may be so wrapped into what I consider normal that I cannot even see my own barbaric acts.