Last month, InTheFray asked readers to respond to a few questions about America’s cult of excess. Sixty-four percent of you think we are just going to keep getting fatter and fatter, 55 percent of you think the media’s coverage of Tsunami relief donations is distracting attention from victims of the disaster, 100 percent of you are well supplied with electronic gadgets, but not plasma TVs, thank God, and 45 percent of you think the divide between a CEO and minimum wage worker is greater than that between an American and a citizen from a developing nation. What harmony if we could just get rid of the CEOs …

This month, paradoxically, we examine excess through the eyes of writers pushing limits. We start with three experiences abroad in which Americans are defy their own expectations. Chris Verrill, in an excerpt from his travel biography Is For Good Men To Do Nothing, breaks his rule of not giving to panhandlers while walking the streets of Nairobi. Geoff Craig unknowingly does battle with tradition while breaking for target practice in Yemen. And columnist Afi-Odelia E. Scruggs learns a lesson from Senegalese eye shadow practices.  

Back in the United States, our comfortable assumptions are challenged when Kai Ma investigates the national debate over legalizing sex work, columnist Russ Cobb questions the liberalization of the ivory tower, and Claire McKinney reviews Sonia Shah’s Crude: The Story of Oil, which will make you feel much worse than you already did about driving.

Finally, artist Aliene de Souza Howell paints and writes about the 1979 Ku Klux Klan massacre of five Communist Workers Party members while police stood by. If something like this could happen in 1979, we should be very worried about 2005.

Later this month, on February 21, Pearl Gabel shares her seesaw life as a constant dieter, proving that excess has two poles. Which one do you live at?

Nicole Leistikow
Managing Editor
Baltimore, Maryland

Coming Up

In March: ITF celebrates women’s history month by sharing stories of gender-bending.
In April: The meaning of Belonging.

Nicole Leistikow