Note: Original link (see below) has been fixed (if you tried earlier) but some people are having trouble getting onto the New York Times article without registering. If that is the case, please go to the very bottom of the entry and you'll see a "continue reading" type of link that gives you the article. Sorry for the confusion.
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You'll all recall the personification of the concept of "hunger" found in the first book of A Tale of Two Cities when we came across Chapter 5.
It goes a little something like this:
The mill which had worked them down, was the mill that grinds young people old; the children had ancient faces and grave voices; and upon them, and upon the grown faces, and ploughed into every furrow of age and coming up afresh, was the sigh, Hunger. It was prevalent everywhere. Hunger was pushed out of the tall houses, in the wretched clothing that hung upon poles and lines; Hunger was patched into them with straw and rag and wood and paper; Hunger was repeated in every fragment of the small modicum of firewood that the man sawed off; Hunger stared down from the smokeless chimneys, and started up from the filthy street that had no offal, among its refuse, of anything to eat. Hunger was the inscription on the baker's shelves, written in every small loaf of his scanty stock of bad bread; at the sausage-shop, in every dead-dog preparation that was offered for sale. Hunger rattled its dry bones among the roasting chestnuts in the turned cylinder; Hunger was shred into atomics in every farthing porringer of husky chips of potato, fried with some reluctant drops of oil.
Familiar, right? OK, hang on. Here comes the leap-o-faith:
Well, a funny thing happened to your Hon Eng II teacher while he was standing in line at a local Starbucks waiting for his oft-ordered "Venti, whatever-is-darkest, no room". Because they had to brew a new pot -- and offered to give it to him for free (cha-ching) if he wouldn't mind waiting -- he began looking around for something to do.
Because he didn't want to buy a bowl of granola or stare at holiday coffee mugs on the sale rack, he picked up the morning's New York Times.
To his amazement, he saw the following article on the front page of that paper. In addition to it being a fascinating topic globally -- and a bit heartbreaking/frightening in its implications, too -- it also made his English Teacher Dork radar go off as if a Cold War missile was coming in from the early 1980's. That was before you were born. I was in high school. Wore parachute pants and a beret. In school. By choice. I'm not proud.
"OK, Mr. English Teacher, where exactly are you headed with this ('cause I'm running out of patience...and I'm wondering how I can get credit for this)!"
Your challenge:
- Read the article. Click this link to find it. If you can't get to the article, skim to the very bottom of this entry and you'll see that I copied the entire article in a link for you to read on this blog.
- Write an "oh, my, I see what you mean" reaction. Trust me. It won't be hard. Unless you don't read it. Of course.
- Length? Be thoughtful and detailed. Pick the length. If you're invested, you'll get real credit. If not, you won't. Pretty reasonable transaction.
