Happy Birthday, America, Land of the Free

July 4, 2012

To All my Friends, Ambassador John Malott, and Bloggers in America,

Best Wishes for the Fourth of July. Here are two youtube videos I have chosen to commemorate this special occasion for all Americans.

Happy Birthday, USA, the Land of the Free. Thank you for your generosity and for giving me a good education. You taught me what Freedom means and how it must be cherished and protected. It was the opening of my mind.

As a student in Washington DC, I also experienced to your generosity and kindness. With this, I will remember Professor, Academic Advisor, and Friend, the late Dr. Philip Donald Grub of The George Washington University School of Business. Phil, your Fourth of July Parties were great. Thanks for the memories.–Din Merican

Why Women Still Can’t Ask the Right Questions

by Naomi Wolf (06-30-12)

Naomi Wolf is a world-renowned public intellectual who played a leading role in so-called “third-wave” feminism and as an advocate of “power feminism,” which holds that women must assert themselves politically in order to achieve their goals. She has advised the presidential campaigns of Bill Clinton and Al Gore. Her books include The Beauty Myth and The End of America.

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If appropriate public policies were in place to help all women – whether CEOs or their children’s caregivers – and all families, Sandberg (of Facebook) would be no more newsworthy than any other highly capable person living in a more just society.–Naomi Wolf

We are just recovering, in the United States, from the entirely predictable kerfuffle over a plaint published by Anne-Marie Slaughter, former Director of Policy Planning at the State Department and a professor at Princeton University, called “Why Women Still Can’t Have it All.”The response was predictable because Slaughter’s article is one that is published in the US by a revolving cast of powerful (most often white) women every three years or so.

The article, whoever has written it, always bemoans the “myth” of a work-life balance for women who work outside the home, presents the glass ceiling and work-family exhaustion as a personal revelation, and blames “feminism” for holding out this elusive “having-it-all ideal.” And it always manages to evade the major policy elephants in the room – which is especially ironic in this case, as Slaughter was worn out by crafting policy.

The problems with such arguments are many. For starters, the work-family balance is no longer a women’s issue. All over the developed world, millions of working men with small children also regret the hours that they spend away from them, and go home to bear the brunt of shared domestic tasks. This was a “women’s issue” 15 years ago, perhaps, but now it is an ambient tension of modern life for a generation of women and men who are committed to gender equality.—Read On–Project Syndicate: Naomi Wolf