Experimental Blog #51

Comments on "The Next Big Story" - My Journey Through the Land of Possibilities by Soledad O'Brien with Rose Marie Arce

Most people probably know the author of this book, Soledad O'Brien, as the well-known, always charming, news anchor and special correspondent. Not surprisingly, she has always been an exceptionally high achiever. Soledad is a graduate of Harvard University, as well as are all 5 of her high achieving sisters and brothers. Page after page of this book relate her seemingly inexhaustible energy, optimism, and successes.
Soledad O'Brien's stories about her family and hometown, and her reporting about the different news networks where she has worked, and about all kinds of people, such as Lou Dobbs, another news anchor and Harvard graduate at her workplace, are extremely interesting.
Most of all, however, she seems to concentrate on the events of Hurricaine Katrina and the massive earthquake in Haiti in January 2010.
She generally seems disappointed with and is disparaging about the efforts of the American government. However, it also seems that the nature of the American government and political solutions must derive from American sources; they can not be imported, at least for very long.
America has its own "political philosophers", such as, Alexander Hamilton, Thomas Jefferson, and Theodore Roosevelt, to mention only 3. The best description, or most dependable in the longest run, of American government seems to be Abraham Lincoln's; that is, the conveniently somewhat ambiguous, "government of the people, by the people, and for the people." This description can impose limits on those people who want more American government as well as on those people who want less government.