Several months ago, I went to a fundraiser for
Habitat for
Humanity. One of the items auctioned off
there was a Dinner with
Noam
Chomsky. I won the bid, together with another
guest at that event. And past Wednesday, we
finally went out for dinner.
Note: Check out the
picture of us with Noam Chomsky.
So there were four of us, besides Maha, there were
Jessica and Alma, both were working for
Lawrence Community Work, a local non-profit
dedicated to the development of the city of
Lawrence.
It turns out to be a fun, casual evening. Chomsky
was not lecturing, but very approachable. Yes, we
talked about politics, about client states,
community work, drug policies and incarceration
rates, but also about his kids, rents,
neighborhoods, and our lifes. We learned that he
and his wife email each other from one floor in
the house to the other. He spends a lot of time
answering email, and like everybody else, he has
to fight spam pretty hard.
We touched on Germany, a topic I was very
interested in, obviously. While Germany seems in
much worse shape than the USA, at least from my
perspective, Chomsky put them more or less in the
same league (for example unemployment: He pointed
out that the official number hardly reflect
reality, e.g. the 0.7% of the population that is
in prison in the USA is not counted as
unemployed). Similar arguments go for the state
of health insurance, pension plans, etc. To put
things into perspective: To judge the severity of
a situation, it's important to look at who is
affected. In Germany, the population as a whole
is affected to a larger degree (due to the social
nature of the Germany system). In the USA, it's
limited to the poorer groups within the
population. Personally, I still think that there
is a significant difference. In Germany, these
issues are more likely to affect the economy, as
politicians are unwilling to allow social hardship
(at least to the degree it happens in the USA).
German politicians are willing to make different
trade-offs than their American counterparts. Add
the EU to the picture, and right now specifically
the stability pact, and Germany is endangered to
end up with deflation, and a recession similar to
the one happing in Japan for the last ten years.
At the same time, the USA approach certainly
generates much more poverty and resentment than
the German system.
At some point Chomsky said: "That's what people
always did, it's human nature." We can't change
nature completely but we can try to make this
world a better place. That's what Chomsky is
about. He was completely unjudgmental, but tries
to make us aware of our surroundings.
