Yearly Archives: 2009

When someone removes a part of our burden, we reward him, because we don’t have to do the burden moving ourselves. I suspect that Mr. Kristof understands this human inclination to pay forward the responsibility, and I am convinced, with some eight years of fruitless Darfur activism under his belt, that he fully comprehends the difficulty of kindling communal action to solve a problem. Having attended his book talk at Duke University, I also know that he is regarded as somewhat of a savior by socially inclined college students. So, I have a feeling, that even though he implores us to get rid of all the 3,5, and 7 plastics in our house, that he is really writing in a noble doublespeak dialect. He is aware that if too many people pay the responsibility forward, no one will actually do anything. The fact that he devotes most of the article to nebulous references about chemical dangers, and indulges in bits of wild speculation (like the part on rates of breast cancer in Asian women going up in the US due to plastics), tells me that he is trying to fire up more than just the casual New York Times Reader, and appeal to the motivated young activist.