What society doesn't realize is that in the past, ordinary people respected learning. They respected books, and they don't now, or not very much. That whole respect for serious literature and learning has disappeared.
— Doris Lessing, born on this date in 1919
About a month ago, while taking the bus from Boston to Lowell, I sat next to a pharmacist from Sudan, who was in America to make a better life for himself and his young family. As we talked about education and how he got a scholarship in Russia, but now needed to learn English better to apply it in America, he made the remark that he could not understand why people here don't care about their development, which got me thinking about what it means to people to be in a less "developed" country, "developing" or "under-developed". When I asked if he planned on going back to Sudan, he said, "No." Welcome to America, where we can feel better about ourselves simply by putting down others.
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