May 29, 2007

Imagine being a single parent who works as a nursing assistant at a hospital. You love your job, though your wages are only $9.50 per hour. The hospital gives you health insurance for yourself, but not your two children. Health insurance for your children would cost $200 more per month—which you can’t afford. The worst thing about your job is your schedule. You never know ahead of time what shift you will be working, which makes it impossible to coordinate after-school care for your children.

The massacre that took place at Virginia Tech last month can be only partially explained. We can criticize privacy regulations that allowed Cho Seung-Hui to move freely about in spite of his desperate mental condition. We can point to federal and state gun control laws that allowed him to secure his weaponry.

If you found the first two installments of the Spider-Man series poetic, imaginative and impassioned, you’re likely to experience an unpleasant jolt at Spider-Man 3. The first two pictures were built on beautifully worked-out fantasy scenarios that operated as metaphors for the emotional development of the main character, Peter Parker (Tobey Maguire), aka Spider-Man.