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Katha Pollitt and Sam Tanenhaus

the breakfast table
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from: Katha Pollitt

And Now for the Bad News

Posted Thursday, June 3, 1999, at 11:46 AM ET

Good afternoon, Sam, it's funny but my eye slid right over the exciting and cheerful stories you mention to fix on sad and gloomy ones. Perhaps everyone gets the newspaper they deserve. I'm still thinking about yesterday's front-page New York Times story about an illegal adoption ring that sold Mexican children to Long Islanders. Everything about this situation is so ghastly: the dreadfully impoverished mothers giving up their children in hopes of getting two-room hovels with running water instead of the tarpaper shacks in which they are currently subsisting; the Mexican broker, a big pro-lifer who insists he's only doing the humanitarian thing but makes $20,000 or more per sale; and his U.S. colleagues, two Long Island women known as "the Arlenes," who make large profits as well. The part of the story that really disturbed me, though, was that one little girl, sent off to Long island at the age of 9 with her 3-year-old sister, missed her mother so much the adoptive parents, the Libertis, sent her back to Mexico, where she now lives in squalor, doesn't go to school, and seems truly miserable. The Libertis told the Times that sending their adoptive daughter home was "like a death" -- it doesn't seem to have occurred to them that she's still alive, they could be helping her now! In Mexico! The money they would have spent on her had she stayed could support the whole family-- which is, after all, the mother and siblings of the adoptive daughter they kept.

Further inhumanities over at the Washington Post. Somalian women living in a horrible refugee camp--the result of a previous bout of humanitarian warfare on the part of our government--are now worse off than ever because funds are drying up. It seems that when the women and girls went off into the woods to collect fuel, they were raped in staggering numbers, so the United Nations spent a one and a half million dollars providing each household with bundled firewood. Reported rapes went way down, but now the respite is coming to an end. Why don't you go get the firewood? the reporter asked one woman's husband. Oh, I can't do that, he replied, getting firewood is women's work!

Do you feel that our government has a responsibility to these Somalians, Sam? I can't help thinking there's a lesson in this for the Kosovars.

More later,
Katha.

the breakfast table
entries
123456789101112
from: Katha Pollitt

And Now for the Bad News

Posted Thursday, June 3, 1999, at 11:46 AM ET
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Katha Pollitt is a columnist for The Nation and the author of Reasonable Creatures: Essays on Women and Feminism (click here to buy the book). Sam Tanenhaus is the author of Whittaker Chambers: A Biography (click here to buy the book) and a contributing editor to Vanity Fair.
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