Bob:

Heinke put our rather heavy box of books on her bike and walked along with us to the Post Office about a half a mile away from their house. It cost us 22 Euros to mail the books back, which was high in one sense but not nearly as much money as it would have cost me to buy those maps back in the U.S., so I figure we came out ahead on the deal. Speaking of weight, I finally weighed myself and found I was 83 kilograms (German scale). At 2.22 pounds per kilo that converts to about 184 pounds, so I gradually lost weight during our three weeks of wandering around Germany, probably due to the constant activity. We also kept active while at Heinke and Gustl's home, typically by walking a loop around the Bramfeldersee (approximately 5 kilometers), and this day was no exception. After our walk I relaxed by responding to all the people who had emailed us in the last few days, which required a bit of thought and a lot of typing and thus took a couple of hours. I also worked on the journal and Monika worked at transferring our camera pictures to backup chips and to the computer, so we kept busy.

In the afternoon Gustl came back from a funeral for one of his erstwhile coworkers, after which we sat down to Mittagessen. At the end of the afternoon we all went for a walk at the Alster, and we said good bye to that as well. Although the weather was cool and overcast, the Alster was alive with boats. We saw a few people rowing, quite a few sailboats, and an "Alster Dampfer" tour boat that just circles the Inner and Outer Alster lakes in central Hamburg.

Monika:

Bob:

We also walked through some of the nearby neighborhoods that were quite high-class and correspondingly high-priced. This is the area near the American Consulate in Hamburg. Some of the houses, especially the ones that I expect had survived the WWII bombing, were quite pretty. Many, of course, were of the basic Bauhaus post-war modern architecture which I find clean, efficient, and unfortunately also boring.

Monika:

Bob:

Watching the Tagesschau that evening I saw a piece about the German Supreme court that really made me think. The court decided that handicapped children deserved to be mainstreamed even if it required having a full-time tutor go to school with them to act as a mediator. There logic was that having separate education in special schools was inherently unfair to the child and therefore not permitted under the constitution. In contrast, our Supreme Court has recently decided that "separate but maybe equal" school systems for minorities is just A-OK under the U.S. constitution. It took the European Union's high court to finally break Microsoft's monopolistic stranglehold on the secret codes used by the operating systems on about 90 percent of PCs. Conversely, our Supreme Court is so beholden to business interests that they recently decided that price-fixing by manufacturers was just honkey-dory because maybe it would lead to better service, a piece of asinine logic if I ever heard one, Clearly the rights of the common people are highly valued by the German and European courts while being given short shrift in the U.S. Supreme Court.

The evening news also talked about the German government's determination to triple the number of licensed pre-kindergarten schools in the next few years, which indicated a far stronger support for early childhood education than in the U.S. where programs like Head Start are static or shrinking due to constricted government funding. Then Gustl mentioned a proposed government regulation that every child in Germany would have to be examined by a doctor at least once a year to check for any signs of child abuse, neglect, malnourishment or poor parenting in general. Some form of that regulation seems likely to pass in Germany, but I can just imagine what an uproar would ensue in the U.S. if our Congress tried to pass legislation like that. Similarly, medical care for pregnant women and children is provided by the government at greatly subsidized rates in Germany while back in the U.S. President Bush just vetoed medical care for the children of poor working parents and Congress supported that veto so some poor kids in the U.S. will die like dogs for the lack of medical treatment. Bush said that he was vetoing the bill because of the threat of "socialized medicine", but I say that if "socialized medicine" as in Germany means cheap, convenient, and effective medical treatment for children and adults, for heaven's sake let's get on with it! I was startled (and amused) by the Germans complaining that they had to pay about $10 for 3 months worth of Zocor or Lipitor because the Danes only had to pay about $6! Well I know that I am charged about $300 for the same kind of lipid-control medication for 3 months, so the drug companies are making a killing in the U.S. with our crazy-quilt system of privatized (or maybe "piratized" would be more accurate) medicine.

All of this information taken together kind of hammered on me and led me to reconsider which culture was really more "Pro Life", the German or the American. The facts are these: The German Government gives direct payments to each parent for raising their children, they guarantee high-quality pre-school care, effective education and good medical care for each child, they have strict gun control so that fewer children are killed by guns, and they have abolished the death penalty for either children or adults. The United States government offers parents no direct support for raising children, plays no role in directly funding and licensing pre-schools for those children, provides no medical care for any children above absolute poverty, allows primary and secondary school systems to become disastrously disfunctional, lets guns flood the culture so that even pre-teens can easily obtain them, and enthusiastically not only endorses the broad application of the death penalty for adults but seems to be trying to ratchet downward the age at which the death penalty can be applied down to 16 or so. I was forced to come to the uncomfortable conclusion that the German culture is really Pro Life, but the American culture really is not. At best, the folks who call themselves "Pro Life" in the U.S. are really just Pro Birth, because although they want women to give birth, they do not systematically support the entire range of child-supportive, life-enhancing measures that typify the German culture.