The Volkswagen and I

We have had Volkswagens off and on since the 60's. They have been more or less OK as automobiles, although it's hard to forget the company's origins in the Nazi period. The very name "Volkswagen," after all, is a piece of Nazi-German.

Well, this is the end of my relationship with this company. We have just traded in our '99 New Beetle. During the nine years of misplaced pride of ownership, it was hard to see its inexcusable downsides. I did, and still do, love the looks of the car, but not enough to overlook its grave defaults:

1) It sits too low off the ground. This caused us at least two expensive repairs because the car could not avoid objects and curves on the ground.

2) The visibility from inside the car is worse than in any other car that I have ever driven. It's very difficult to see what's coming from behind, and even difficult to see what's on its sides.

3) The service, as exemplified by the local VW dealer, is poor. Service hours are scheduled to accommodate the dealer, not the customer.

4) The inside space is cramped, the space in the trunk is laughable.

5) Repair history, as reported by Consumer Union, is below average.

I am now driving a Honda Civic, and driving has become a pleasure once again.

Auf Wiedersehen.

Hunger

This picture by Käthe Kollwitz hung in my childhood home in Berlin when I grew up, and later in my mother's apartment in Washington Heights. My nephews and I donated it to the Israel Museum when my mother died some ten years ago.

The picture was part of a leftist Weimar-era teaching, which my parents conveyed to me, that we have an obligation to feed the poor of the world. Everyone I have ever known, or ever hope to know, agrees with this sentiment. But who has made it a priority ? A priority on the level, say, of war-time priorities to protect our freedoms ?

I think that this election year gives an opportunity to rethink priorities. I think that poverty in the Third World, particularly Africa, hangs over all of us as a terrible threat. How can we enjoy what we have when we know that, in Africa alone, there are some 300 million people without enough to eat ?

The problem of poverty is enormously complex, containing at the very least six interrelated components: under-development, governmental greed and corruption, chronic inter-ethnic violence, disease, western indifference and greed, and hunger itself. One expert, Alex de Waal, has done us the tremendous service of reviewing some recent scholarly work, and any thinking on the subject may well start with the study of such materials.

One of the things that I learned from de Waal is that the British government, beginning with Tony Blair, established a new, Cabinet-level Department for International Development
to administer and coordinate British concerns for feeding the hungry. This is more than we have done, it seems to me.

I think that, with due regard for the great complexity of the issue, and the great unlikelihood that fully satisfactory solutions can be found soon, we need more of a sense of urgency on the part of our top political leadership.

Whether you favorite presidential candidate's name starts with an O or an M, will you write to him and ask him to place world hunger somewhere on the top of his concerns ?

Father Pfleger speaks about Farrakhan and Wright