Two things crossed my mind yesterday while listening to my weekly dose of public radio. First, there's a direct correlation between how rural an area is and the quality of it's public radio station. Either that, or the lack of competition for a person's entertainment in rural areas creates quite an illusion. Wyoming, which is about as rural as it gets, has great public radio. KSKA, based in Anchorage, is pretty good, but leaves a little to be desired. KLCC, based in Eugene, is a fine station, but lacks the charm of it's more rural brethren.
However unrelated, this gets us to my second realization--that too many American's really are arrogant cusses. I found myself enthralled with a program on KSKA yesterday. This American Life was chronicling the experiences of a Man and his adoption of a Samoan girl. You can listen to the program here.
The gist of the story is that an American family had adopted a Samoan girl in the hopes of providing a better life for the girl, only to find out well after the fact that the adoption agency was fraudulent and had, more or less, stolen the girl from her natural-born family. What's more, the U.S.-based adoption agency had enabled nearly 1,000 similar adoptions between Samoan children and American families.
The story is quite compelling, pitting the childhood provided by a wealthy adoptive family in America against the upbringing provided by natural parents in a poor Samoan community. It seems to me, you need to be awfully arrogant to believe that you can provide a better life for a child than that child's natural parents just because you have more money. But, what do I know, I've never been adopted and, even at my poorest, my wealth wasn't the limiting factor.
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