Opinion: In today’s pages: Warning bells in Somalia; the cult(ure) of exceptionalism
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Why does this look so familiar? Somalia is showing all the signs of being a budding Afghanistan, the editorial board warns, with Al Qaeda strengthening its position there and young American men disappearing from their Midwestern towns to train in terrorist camps. The United States has learned what doesn’t work to fix or prevent failed states like Somalia; now it needs to learn what does.
Years after the shocking brutality of its civil war, El Salvador now moves toward an election that could transfer power peacefully from the more right-wing party to a candidate who identifies himself as left of center. But an ugly campaign is leading to concerns about election fraud, and the editorial board encourages the country to hold a free and fair election, and an honest tally afterward.
On the other side of the fold, Erin Aubry Kaplan recalls her sometimes uncomfortable -- and often worthwhile -- experiences with school integration and notes the white flight from public schools that makes her childhood school segregated once again -- this time made up of mostly black and Latino students:
Later groups of kids bused from my neighborhood had no opportunity for true integration because white students didn’t stick around for it. Today, Loyola Village Elementary still sits in a largely white neighborhood, but less than 20% of the student body is white. More than 75% is black and Latino. Westchester High down the street is the most heavily black high school in the Los Angeles Unified School District . That strange equation -- white neighborhood, black and brown school -- has become common in L.A. Call it educational flight. Students of color flee from inferior schools, only to see white students at their new schools flee from them.
Also on the Op-Ed page, Joel Stein searches everywhere for someone to blame for the economy. But author Frederic Morton argues that the responsibility falls not so much on a person, but on American culture’s adoration of the exceptional -- the most, the first, the biggest -- and calls for an era of admiring moderation.
In other words, a dweller in the land content with the possible falls short of America’s spirit; he fails his country’s stern, norm-shattering exceptionalism. The map of your truly American life charts a freeway leading from a log cabin, literal or figurative, to the White House, literal or figurative (that is, to the movie icon’s aerie or the billionaire’s topiary garden). No intermediate destination is recorded on this map; no speed limit, no rest stop, no side roads, not even a space for getting out to enjoy the scenery.