Read my latest flash, Venison, at 52|250.

Naomi Klein’s article about the currents (literal and metaphorical) that led to the death of a Polish immigrant in Vancouver International Airport reminded me of the ELL students I used to teach in New York.  Many of them had come from Poland.  A large percentage of these Polish students were around my age and had advanced degrees: some in law, others in engineering– fields in which you wouldn’t expect job-hunting to be especially difficult.  But all of them had come to the US because of the difficulties they faced in finding a job that payed a living wage.  Some were planning on staying and were working on getting their green cards so they could get an American university degree without having to pay the outlandish tuition that international students are charged (since many employers would not accept their degrees from Poland); others just wanted to improve their English abilities because they believed it would be a major advantage in the job market back home.

All of them found themselves facing immense difficulties in the US, though none of them faced anything so dire as what happened to Robert Dziekanski.  They found themselves working long hours at low-wage jobs (sometimes illegally).  One student, a woman who gave an impression of eloquence despite occasional misunderstandings of English structures and vocabulary, told a story of sleeping for weeks on a jacket on the floor in the apartment she shared with several other recent immigrants.  The situation only improved when she found a mattress on the curb and carried it up six flights of stairs.

As Naomi Klein’s article suggests, my students were relatively successful in a system created by the kind of globalization that is guided by the needs of corporations.  Isn’t it about time that we started to demand and create a globalization driven by human needs?

Today should’ve been a beautiful day.  Warm enough to wear a thin shirt or even short sleeves but with just that hint of autumn crispness that makes you appreciate the warmth while you still have it.  Or perhaps that hint of cool is a hallucination brought on by the sights and sounds of dried-out leaves.  It should have been a beautiful day.

But it wasn’t.  The air was full of smoke and smog thick as any but the thickest fogs I’ve passed through (and I’ve known some serious fog).  It’s not entirely unusual here in Zhengzhou.  Throat lozenges occupy prominent locations near grocery store cash registers year round because of it.

This is what happens when pollution goes largely unchecked in the name of economic growth, and it’s an important reminder that protecting the environment isn’t so much about ‘saving the Earth’ (barring its physical destruction, it will go on in some form or another regardless of human interventions) but about improving our lives on Earth.  It’s something economic indicators don’t account for, but really what’s the point of these ‘indicators’ if they can’t point to the fluctuations of our happiness?