A Cultural Revolution Revelation

I like to think that if George Bush at least wrote poetry about the things he's done, that I could forgive him just a little.

Did you know that Mao Zedong envisioned the Three Gorges Dam and wrote a poem about it?

I will remark to anyone who will listen to me that the greatest problem in our society right now is the business degree. We need leaders and business people with a liberal arts education - an understanding of history and literature and language - poetry.

I took the girls to see "Up the Yangtze" which was a documentary about a 15 year old girl whose family was one of the 1.5 million people displaced by the Three Gorges Dam project. Her family could not afford to send her to high school, so she went to work on a cruise ship on the very river flooding her family's farm and home. Sometimes I can nag and tell the girls they are fortunate. Sometimes they need to see it on a giant movie screen.

"Just think, you could go to high school and wash one family's sink of dishes, or you could not go to high school and spend your entire day literally washing an entire boat load of people's dirty dishes," I said.

Rather than roll her eyes, Anna looked aghast. "Wow," she said.

Great plans are afoot:
A bridge will fly to span the north and south,
Turning a deep chasm into a thoroughfare,
Walls of stone will stand upstream to the west
To hold back Wushan's clouds and rain
Till a smooth lake rises in the narrow gorges
The mountain goddess if she is still there
Will marvel at a world so changed.