Please..do explain love at your peril! ga peduli how hard you try, love ain’t that simple, it has never been and it won’t ever be. This paper however, very interesting as it is unussually try to explain love from the perspective of science, a truly educating read. baca..en dijamin kalian akan manggut manggut sambil garuk garuk kepala, and mungkin angkat topi buat penulisnya. anyone suka kimia?

The science of love

I get a kick out of you

Scientists are finding that, after all, love really is down to a chemical addiction between people

OVER the course of history it has been artists, poets and
playwrights who have made the greatest progress in humanity’s
understanding of love. Romance has seemed as inexplicable as the beauty
of a rainbow. But these days scientists are challenging that notion,
and they have rather a lot to say about how and why people love each
other.

Is this useful? The scientists think so. For a start, understanding
the neurochemical pathways that regulate social attachments may help to
deal with defects in people’s ability to form relationships. All
relationships, whether they are those of parents with their children,
spouses with their partners, or workers with their colleagues, rely on
an ability to create and maintain social ties. Defects can be
disabling, and become apparent as disorders such as autism and
schizophrenia—and, indeed, as the serious depression that can result
from rejection in love. Research is also shedding light on some of the
more extreme forms of sexual behaviour. And, controversially, some
utopian fringe groups see such work as the doorway to a future where
love is guaranteed because it will be provided chemically, or even
genetically engineered from conception.

ocument.write(’\'The scientific tale of love begins innocently enough, with voles.
The prairie vole is a sociable creature, one of the only 3% of mammal
species that appear to form monogamous relationships. Mating between
prairie voles is a tremendous 24-hour effort. After this, they bond for
life. They prefer to spend time with each other, groom each other for
hours on end and nest together. They avoid meeting other potential
mates. The male becomes an aggressive guard of the female. And when
their pups are born, they become affectionate and attentive parents.
However, another vole, a close relative called the montane vole, has no
interest in partnership beyond one-night-stand sex. What is intriguing
is that these vast differences in behaviour are the result of a mere
handful of genes. The two vole species are more than 99% alike,
genetically.

Why do voles fall in love?

The details of what is going on—the vole story, as it were—is a
fascinating one. When prairie voles have sex, two hormones called
oxytocin and vasopressin are released. If the release of these hormones
is blocked, prairie-voles’ sex becomes a fleeting affair, like that
normally enjoyed by their rakish montane cousins. Conversely, if
prairie voles are given an injection of the hormones, but prevented
from having sex, they will still form a preference for their chosen
partner. In other words, researchers can make prairie voles fall in
love—or whatever the vole equivalent of this is—with an injection.

A clue to what is happening—and how these results might bear on the
human condition—was found when this magic juice was given to the
montane vole: it made no difference. It turns out that the faithful
prairie vole has receptors for oxytocin and vasopressin in brain
regions associated with reward and reinforcement, whereas the montane
vole does not. The question is, do humans (another species in the 3% of
allegedly monogamous mammals) have brains similar to prairie voles?

To answer that question you need to dig a little deeper. As Larry
Young, a researcher into social attachment at Emory University, in
Atlanta, Georgia, explains, the brain has a reward system designed to
make voles (and people and other animals) do what they ought to.
Without it, they might forget to eat, drink and have sex—with
disastrous results. That animals continue to do these things is because
they make them feel good. And they feel good because of the release of
a chemical called dopamine into the brain. Sure enough, when a female
prairie vole mates, there is a 50% increase in the level of dopamine in
the reward centre of her brain.

Similarly, when a male rat has sex it feels good to him because of
the dopamine. He learns that sex is enjoyable, and seeks out more of it
based on how it happened the first time. But, in contrast to the
prairie vole, at no time do rats learn to associate sex with a
particular female. Rats are not monogamous.

This is where the vasopressin and oxytocin come in. They are
involved in parts of the brain that help to pick out the salient
features used to identify individuals. If the gene for oxytocin is
knocked out of a mouse before birth, that mouse will become a social
amnesiac and have no memory of the other mice it meets. The same is
true if the vasopressin gene is knocked out.

The salient feature in this case is odour. Rats, mice and voles
recognise each other by smell. Christie Fowler and her colleagues at
Florida State University have found that exposure to the opposite sex
generates new nerve cells in the brains of prairie voles—in particular
in areas important to olfactory memory. Could it be that prairie voles
form an olfactory “image” of their partners—the rodent equivalent of
remembering a personality—and this becomes linked with pleasure?

Dr Young and his colleagues suggest this idea in an article published last month in the Journal of Comparative Neurology.
They argue that prairie voles become addicted to each other through a
process of sexual imprinting mediated by odour. Furthermore, they
suggest that the reward mechanism involved in this addiction has
probably evolved in a similar way in other monogamous animals, humans
included, to regulate pair-bonding in them as well.

You might as well face it…

Sex stimulates the release of vasopressin and oxytocin in people, as
well as voles, though the role of these hormones in the human brain is
not yet well understood. But while it is unlikely that people have a
mental, smell-based map of their partners in the way that voles do,
there are strong hints that the hormone pair have something to reveal
about the nature of human love: among those of Man’s fellow primates
that have been studied, monogamous marmosets have higher levels of
vasopressin bound in the reward centres of their brains than do
non-monogamous rhesus macaques.

Other approaches are also shedding light on the question. In 2000,
Andreas Bartels and Semir Zeki of University College, London, located
the areas of the brain activated by romantic love. They took students
who said they were madly in love, put them into a brain scanner, and
looked at their patterns of brain activity.

The results were surprising. For a start, a relatively small area of
the human brain is active in love, compared with that involved in, say,
ordinary friendship. “It is fascinating to reflect”, the pair conclude,
“that the face that launched a thousand ships should have done so
through such a limited expanse of cortex.” The second surprise was that
the brain areas active in love are different from the areas activated
in other emotional states, such as fear and anger. Parts of the brain
that are love-bitten include the one responsible for gut feelings, and
the ones which generate the euphoria induced by drugs such as cocaine.
So the brains of people deeply in love do not look like those of people
experiencing strong emotions, but instead like those of people snorting
coke. Love, in other words, uses the neural mechanisms that are
activated during the process of addiction. “We are literally addicted
to love,” Dr Young observes. Like the prairie voles.

It seems possible, then, that animals which form strong social bonds
do so because of the location of their receptors for vasopressin and
oxytocin. Evolution acts on the distribution of these receptors to
generate social or non-social versions of a vole. The more receptors
located in regions associated with reward, the more rewarding social
interactions become. Social groups, and society itself, rely ultimately
on these receptors. But for evolution to be able to act, there must be
individual variation between mice, and between men. And this has
interesting implications.

Last year, Steven Phelps, who works at Emory with Dr Young, found
great diversity in the distribution of vasopressin receptors between
individual prairie voles. He suggests that this variation contributes
to individual differences in social behaviour—in other words, some
voles will be more faithful than others. Meanwhile, Dr Young says that
he and his colleagues have found a lot of variation in the
vasopressin-receptor gene in humans. “We may be able to do things like
look at their gene sequence, look at their promoter sequence, to
genotype people and correlate that with their fidelity,” he muses.

It has already proved possible to tinker with this genetic
inheritance, with startling results. Scientists can increase the
expression of the relevant receptors in prairie voles, and thus
strengthen the animals’ ability to attach to partners. And in 1999, Dr
Young led a team that took the prairie-vole receptor gene and inserted
it into an ordinary (and therefore promiscuous) mouse. The transgenic
mouse thus created was much more sociable to its mate.

Love, love me do

Scanning the brains of people in love is also helping to refine
science’s grasp of love’s various forms. Helen Fisher, a researcher at
Rutgers University, and the author of a new book on love*,
suggests it comes in three flavours: lust, romantic love and long-term
attachment. There is some overlap but, in essence, these are separate
phenomena, with their own emotional and motivational systems, and
accompanying chemicals. These systems have evolved to enable,
respectively, mating, pair-bonding and parenting.

Lust, of course, involves a craving for sex. Jim Pfaus, a
psychologist at Concordia University, in Montreal, says the aftermath
of lustful sex is similar to the state induced by taking opiates. A
heady mix of chemical changes occurs, including increases in the levels
of serotonin, oxytocin, vasopressin and endogenous opioids (the body’s
natural equivalent of heroin). “This may serve many functions, to relax
the body, induce pleasure and satiety, and perhaps induce bonding to
the very features that one has just experienced all this with”, says Dr
Pfaus.

Then there is attraction, or the state of being in love (what is
sometimes known as romantic or obsessive love). This is a refinement of
mere lust that allows people to home in on a particular mate. This
state is characterised by feelings of exhilaration, and intrusive,
obsessive thoughts about the object of one’s affection. Some
researchers suggest this mental state might share neurochemical
characteristics with the manic phase of manic depression. Dr Fisher’s
work, however, suggests that the actual behavioural patterns of those
in love—such as attempting to evoke reciprocal responses in one’s loved
one—resemble obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD).

That raises the question of whether it is possible to “treat” this romantic state clinically, as can be done with OCD.
The parents of any love-besotted teenager might want to know the answer
to that. Dr Fisher suggests it might, indeed, be possible to inhibit
feelings of romantic love, but only at its early stages. OCD is
characterised by low levels of a chemical called serotonin. Drugs such
as Prozac work by keeping serotonin hanging around in the brain for
longer than normal, so they might stave off romantic feelings. (This
also means that people taking anti-depressants may be jeopardising
their ability to fall in love.) But once romantic love begins in
earnest, it is one of the strongest drives on Earth. Dr Fisher says it
seems to be more powerful than hunger. A little serotonin would be
unlikely to stifle it.

Wonderful though it is, romantic love is unstable—not a good basis
for child-rearing. But the final stage of love, long-term attachment,
allows parents to co-operate in raising children. This state, says Dr
Fisher, is characterised by feelings of calm, security, social comfort
and emotional union.

Because they are independent, these three systems can work
simultaneously—with dangerous results. As Dr Fisher explains, “you can
feel deep attachment for a long-term spouse, while you feel romantic
love for someone else, while you feel the sex drive in situations
unrelated to either partner.” This independence means it is possible to
love more than one person at a time, a situation that leads to
jealousy, adultery and divorce—though also to the possibilities of
promiscuity and polygamy, with the likelihood of extra children, and
thus a bigger stake in the genetic future, that those behaviours bring.
As Dr Fisher observes, “We were not built to be happy but to reproduce.”

The stages of love vary somewhat between the sexes. Lust, for
example, is aroused more easily in men by visual stimuli than is the
case for women. This is probably why visual pornography is more popular
with men. And although both men and women express romantic love with
the same intensity, and are attracted to partners who are dependable,
kind, healthy, smart and educated, there are some notable differences
in their choices. Men are more attracted to youth and beauty, while
women are more attracted to money, education and position. When an
older, ugly man is seen walking down the road arm-in-arm with a young
and beautiful woman, most people assume the man is rich or powerful.

These foolish things

Of course, love is about more than just genes. Cultural and social
factors, and learning, play big roles. Who and how a person has loved
in the past are important determinants of his (or her) capacity to fall
in love at any given moment in the future. This is because
animals—people included—learn from their sexual and social experiences.
Arousal comes naturally. But long-term success in mating requires a
change from being naive about this state to knowing the precise factors
that lead from arousal to the rewards of sex, love and attachment. For
some humans, this may involve flowers, chocolate and sweet words. But
these things are learnt.

If humans become conditioned by their experiences, this may be the
reason why some people tend to date the same “type” of partner over and
over again. Researchers think humans develop a “love map” as they grow
up—a blueprint that contains the many things that they have learnt are
attractive. This inner scorecard is something that people use to rate
the suitability of mates. Yet the idea that humans are actually born
with a particular type of “soul mate” wired into their desires is
wrong. Research on the choices of partner made by identical twins
suggests that the development of love maps takes time, and has a strong
random component.

Work on rats is leading researchers such as Dr Pfaus to wonder
whether the template of features found attractive by an individual is
formed during a critical period of sexual-behaviour development. He
says that even in animals that are not supposed to pair-bond, such as
rats, these features may get fixed with the experience of sexual
reward. Rats can be conditioned to prefer particular types of
partner—for example by pairing sexual reward with some kind of cue,
such as lemon-scented members of the opposite sex. This work may help
the understanding of unusual sexual preferences. Human fetishes, for
example, develop early, and are almost impossible to change. The
fetishist connects objects such as feet, shoes, stuffed toys and even
balloons, that have a visual association with childhood sexual
experiences, to sexual gratification.

So love, in all its glory, is just, it seems, a chemical state with
genetic roots and environmental influences. But all this work leads to
other questions. If scientists can make a more sociable mouse, might it
be possible to create a more sociable human? And what about a more
loving one? A few people even think that “paradise-engineering”,
dedicated to abolishing the “biological substrates of human suffering”,
is rather a good idea.

As time goes by

Progress in predicting the outcome of relationships, and information
about the genetic roots of fidelity, might also make proposing marriage
more like a job application—with associated medical, genetic and
psychological checks. If it were reliable enough, would insurers cover
you for divorce? And as brain scanners become cheaper and more widely
available, they might go from being research tools to something that
anyone could use to find out how well they were loved. Will the future
bring answers to questions such as: Does your partner really love you? Is your husband lusting after the au pair?

And then there are drugs. Despite Dr Fisher’s reservations, might
they also help people to fall in love, or perhaps fix broken
relationships? Probably not. Dr Pfaus says that drugs may enhance
portions of the “love experience” but fall short of doing the whole job
because of their specificity. And if a couple fall out of love, drugs
are unlikely to help either. Dr Fisher does not believe that the brain
could overlook distaste for someone—even if a couple in trouble could
inject themselves with huge amounts of dopamine.

However, she does think that administering serotonin can help
someone get over a bad love affair faster. She also suggests it is
possible to trick the brain into feeling romantic love in a long-term
relationship by doing novel things with your partner. Any arousing
activity drives up the level of dopamine and can therefore trigger
feelings of romance as a side effect. This is why holidays can rekindle
passion. Romantics, of course, have always known that love is a special
sort of chemistry. Scientists are now beginning to show how true this
is.

Ini sebuah artikel menarik tentang cerita 2 orang laki laki; seorang penganguran di amerika dan seorang dokter di afrika, artikel ini mempelajari standard hidup kedua orang ini, membandingkanya, dan mempelajari attitude mereka tentang apa yang mereka punya.

Moral point yang bisa diambil dari artikel ini adalah supaya kita lebih menghargai apa yang kita punya tanpa selalu mengeluh, dan kalau kamu muslim, bersyukurlah, karena walaupun kita tidak selalu bisa dapet apa yang kita yang kita inginkan, banayak orang yang lebih tidak beruntung dari kita, jauh lebih tidak beruntung.

Anyway, it’s the end of the year, time to reflect!! come on people! don’t be boring…read this artikle and you might learn something. enjoy!

Favourite  quote: Mr Banks, for his part, expresses an intense dislike of President
George Bush. “If someone shoots that sonofabitch, I’ll celebrate,” he
says.

The mountain man and the surgeon

Reflections on relative poverty in North America and Africa

Corbis

ENOS BANKS tells a cracking yarn about ketchup. One day, he spilled
a splurge of it on his shirt. For fun, he persuaded his brother in law
to shout angrily and shoot through the window. When their two wives
came rushing in, they saw Mr Banks lying there covered in what looked
like blood. “My wife passed out,” chuckles Mr Banks, “and my
brother-in-law’s wife shook him till his [false] teeth rattled.”

Mr Banks lives in a trailer in eastern Kentucky, amid the
majestically forested Appalachian mountains. He is in his early 60s and
has no job—he used to work as a driver for a coal-mining firm, but left
after a heart attack 25 years ago. He wears a cowboy hat and talks with
an accent that outsiders find nearly impenetrable. He is clever with
his hands. When the price of petrol soared this year, he grafted a
chainsaw engine onto a bicycle to make a moped.

When Americans hear the words “poor” and “white”, they think of
someone like Mr Banks. He has half a dozen cars in varying states of
disrepair parked outside his trailer, car-parts everywhere and a pile
of crushed Pepsi cans below his porch.

He “draws” $521 a month in supplemental security income (a form of
cash assistance for the elderly, poor and disabled). He laments that
the authorities deduct $67 a month because he won $3,600 on the slot
machines. Why, he asks, won’t they take account of all the money he has
lost gambling? It is a fair question. If middle-class America had this
problem, accountants would surely find a way round it. Mr Banks also
complains that he cannot draw food stamps. In order to qualify, he
would have to sell his truck, which he cannot bear to part with. Mr
Banks would probably be surprised to hear that, thousands of miles away
in central Africa, there lives a prominent surgeon whose monthly income
is roughly the same as his. Mbwebwe Kabamba is the head of the
emergency department at the main public hospital in Kinshasa, the
capital of the Democratic Republic of Congo. After 28 years as a
doctor, his salary is only $250 a month, but by operating on private
patients after hours, he ekes it out to $600 or $700.

Given the lower cost of living in Congo, one might guess that Dr
Kabamba is better off than Mr Banks. But the doctor has to support an
extended family of 12, whereas Mr Banks’s ex-wife and three sons claim
public assistance. Indeed, the reason Mr Banks split up from his wife,
he says, is because they can draw more benefits separately. She still
lives in the trailer next door.

Why juxtapose the lives of a poor man in a rich country and a
relatively well-off man in a poor one? The exercise is useful for two
reasons. First, it puts the rich world’s wealth into context. A
Congolese doctor, a man most other Congolese would consider wealthy, is
worse off materially than most poor people in America. That, in itself,
is striking.

The second purpose of the exercise is to shed light on some ticklish
questions. What is the relationship between wealth and happiness? And
what is the significance of relative poverty? Mr Banks makes $521 a
month in a country where median male earnings are $3,400 a month. Dr
Kabamba earns $600 a month in a country where most people grow their
own food and hardly ever see a bank note. The two men’s experiences
could hardly be less similar. But which of the two would one expect to
be happier?

Before trying to grapple with these questions, take a look at the
places where the two men live. Eastern Kentucky was where President
Lyndon Johnson stood by a shack in 1964 to launch a “national war on
poverty”. Since then, Appalachia has had tons of government cash and
seen real improvements in living standards, but it retains large and
stubborn pockets of distress. Mr Banks lives in one. His trailer stands
in a hollow near a disused coal mine in Perry county, where the
official poverty rate is 24.5%.

The region is poor partly because it is remote. Steep slopes and
heavy rain can make it hard to get around. Julie Zimmerman, a professor
of sociology at the University of Kentucky, notes that Appalachian folk
sometimes make appointments with the proviso that “I’ll be there, God
willing and the creek don’t rise.”

Getty Images

Another problem is that the region’s mineral wealth has corrupted
local politics. For decades, argues Mil Duncan, another of the many
sociologists to have pondered Appalachian poverty, coal bosses exerted
an unhealthy influence, and politicians won support through patronage.
The 13 coal-producing counties of eastern Kentucky have consistently
worse poverty than the others, notes Justin Maxson, director of the
Mountain Association for Community Economic Development, a local
microfinance group. “Corruption by public officials has been a
significant contributor to poverty in the region,” he adds.

Congo is also remote, and its politics have also been corrupted by
mineral wealth. But corruption in Kentucky consists of mining firms
leaning on local officials to go easy on environmental regulations, or
school boards appointing their members’ relatives to sinecures. In
Congo, it means half a dozen armies and dozens of militia groups
fighting over the country’s gold and diamond mines between 1998 and
2003, leaving perhaps 3m dead.

Sporadic fighting continues in the east of the country, but this
does not directly affect Dr Kabamba, who lives in the west. Still, the
soldiers in Kinshasa, where he works, are a menace, because they rob
civilians to supplement their wages. Dr Kabamba is shaken down about
twice a month by men in uniform.

Dr Kabamba’s hospital is healthier than it was during the war, or
under Mobutu Sese Seko, the leopardskin-hatted crook who ruled Congo
until his overthrow in 1997. There are no medicines unless patients can
pay for them, and many of the sick lie huddled on the ground. But it
used to be worse. In the early 1990s, patients who could not pay were
sometimes held hostage for weeks until their families found cash to
free them.

Dr Kabamba’s income fluctuates with his country’s fortunes. His
$250-a-month salary is a fivefold increase from last year, and the fact
that it is paid only two months in arrears is an improvement too. The
cause of his good fortune is that Congo was given a huge debt write-off
when the civil war ended in 2003, so there is more money around. What
do Dr Kabamba’s wages buy? He has a four-bedroom house with a kitchen
and living room, which would be ample if there weren’t 12 people under
his roof. His home would be deemed unacceptably overcrowded in America.
Even among the 37m Americans officially classed as poor, only 6% live
in homes with more occupants than rooms.

Having seen how doctors live elsewhere, Dr Kabamba would quite like
running water and a regular power supply. His family fetches water in
jars and the electricity comes on maybe twice a week. Air-conditioning
would be nice, but “that’s only for VIPs,” says Dr Kabamba. In America, three-quarters of poor households have air-conditioning.

Dr Kabamba earns enough to feed his children, but not as well as he
would like. The family eats meat about twice a month; Dr Kabamba calls
it “a great luxury”. In America, poor children eat more meat than the
well-to-do. In fact, they get twice as much protein as their government
says is good for them, which is why the Wal-Mart near Mr Banks sells
such enormous jeans.

“Poverty” describes two quite different phenomena: utter penury, of
the sort experienced by the billion or so souls who subsist on $1 a day
or less; and the situation of people in rich countries who are less
well off than their compatriots.

For the first group, finding enough to eat is a daily struggle, and
a $2-a-day job hand-washing mineral ore in a river is a lucky break.
Shortly before meeting Dr Kabamba, your correspondent interviewed a
group of Congolese ore-washers who were delighted to have found such
lucrative work.

European countries tend to use relative measures of poverty. A
household with an income less than 50% or 60% of the national median
counts as poor. This has the perverse result that if the country gets
richer, the poverty rate can still rise, as long as incomes at the top
and in the middle rise faster than those at the bottom.

America, more sensibly, uses an absolute standard. The “poverty
threshold”, created in the mid-1960s, was based on an estimate of how
much an adequate diet might cost, multiplied by three. This figure is
adjusted for inflation each year, but is otherwise unchanged. So the
fact that, according to the Census Bureau, the share of Americans in
poverty rose between 1974 and 2004, from 11.2% to 12.7%, ought to be a
cause for shame.

But it is not, because American poverty statistics are misleading.
For one thing, the poor rarely stay that way. In 1996-99, only 2% of
Americans were poor every month over the full four-year period. And
life appears, by most measures, to have improved. Poor people today
live longer, spend longer in education and are more likely to have
jobs. Fewer live in substandard houses, more have cars, fridges,
boomboxes and other necessities that were luxuries a couple of
generations ago.

How, then, to account for the apparent rise in poverty? It is partly
a matter of definition. Some non-cash benefits, such as food stamps,
housing assistance and Medicaid, are excluded from the calculation. And
the raw data must be wrong. Nicholas Eberstadt of the American
Enterprise Institute, a conservative think-tank, notes that while
reported annual income for the poorest fifth of households in 2003 was
$8,201, their reported expenditure was $18,492. Nobody can explain this
vast discrepancy.

All one can say is that whereas the poor in Kinshasa complain about
the price of bread, the poor in Kentucky complain about the price of
motor insurance. Fair enough—they need to drive to work.

Granted, the poor in America do not starve. But their relative
poverty can hurt in other ways. To be poor in a meritocracy implies
failure. Eastern Kentucky is one of America’s least meritocratic
enclaves, but failure still carries a stigma. Though few Americans say
that the poor have only themselves to blame, many believe it. Many of
the poor believe it, too.

For a Congolese peasant, there is no shame in living in a hut made
of sticks. Everyone you know does too. In America, by contrast, the
term “trailer” denotes more than a mobile home, and the people who live
in one know it. They are also acutely aware of how richer folk live,
because they watch so much television. A typical poor household in
America has two televisions, cable or satellite reception and a VCR or a DVD player.

Dr Kabamba, though hard up, enjoys the respect that doctors receive
in all societies. Perhaps more, for people can see that he does an
essential job under the toughest of conditions. That his hospital still
functions despite years of war, corruption, economic decline and the
occasional “grand pillage” by unpaid soldiers is, he sighs,
“almost a miracle”. His compatriots might add that it is almost a
miracle that Dr Kabamba, whose skills would allow him to emigrate, has
chosen not to.

Those who know Dr Kabamba treat him with deference. When your
correspondent was detained by the police outside his hospital, for the
crime of appearing to possess a wallet, one telephone call to the
doctor was enough to fix the problem. The officers even apologised.

Mr Banks, by contrast, though outwardly cheery, has no illusions
about how other Americans see people like himself. Of the officials who
hand him his monthly cheque, he says: “Some are okay, but some act like
the money’s coming out of their own pockets.” His great-niece, Rosie
Woolum, tells a story about growing up in the hollows. She was the girl
on the school cheerleading team who could not afford shoes. A teacher
who lived nearby could have offered her a lift home after practice, she
says, but never did. So she had to wait a couple of hours for her
mother. At the time, she did not understand why her better-off
neighbours shunned her. Now that she has a good job (running a project
that provides health care for the homeless), she finds they no longer
do.

It is hard to guage the pain of relative poverty because no one
knows how to measure happiness. Simply asking people “Are you happy?”
only gets you so far. The answers people give depend in part on
cultural factors. Few English or Japanese will offer anything more
ecstatic than a “mustn’t grumble”, but that does not necessarily mean
they are glummer than say, Americans, 86% of whom told Gallup this year
that they were “completely” or “somewhat satisfied” with their jobs.

Indirect evidence of unhappiness is equally hard to gather, since so
many potential proxies, such as drug abuse and wife-beating, are hushed
up. Nonetheless, for what it is worth, when your correspondent asked Ms
Woolum and three of her local social-worker colleagues to share their
life stories, those stories shared a common thread.

AP

All four women had been beaten by husbands or boyfriends, most of
whom had problems with drink or drugs. One recalls being knelt on so
that her arms were pinned to the floor and punched repeatedly in the
face. Another says she was stabbed. Without excusing the abuse, the
women assume that it had something to do with their menfolk’s sense of
frustration at the poor hand life had dealt them. As the last of the
quartet puts it: “He wasn’t happy. We got hit.”

Happily, all four have escaped their abusers. Ms Woolum reckons that
the welfare reforms of the 1990s have, indirectly, made local women
more assertive. “Welfare is more demanding. [To receive it], women have
to get out and work, so we’re getting out into a different
environment.” This, she argues, fosters self-reliance and self-respect,
so “Women don’t take it as much now.”

The personal is political

Both Dr Kabamba and Mr Banks feel bitter about the state of politics
in their respective countries. Dr Kabamba resents the fact that Congo
is run by a mob of unelected thieves and warlords, who for the most
part only pretend to care about good governance so they can continue
milking western donors. The country was promised an election by June
this year, but the ruling class somehow never got around to organising
it. They now promise to have one next year—they held a constitutional
referendum this month—but Dr Kabamba is not holding his breath. He
takes such a dim view of the probity of Congolese politicians that he
once turned down a job in the cabinet. In his spare time, he is the
leader of one of Congo’s many opposition parties, but no one is tipping
him to be the next president. He is neither rich nor ruthless enough.

Mr Banks, for his part, expresses an intense dislike of President
George Bush. “If someone shoots that sonofabitch, I’ll celebrate,” he
says. Some of his complaints echo those of the coastal
intelligentsia—he thinks the president should create more manufacturing
jobs, for example. But some of his gripes are of the sort rarely aired
in the New York Times.

For example, he berates Mr Bush for allowing too many foreign
doctors into the country. In eastern Kentucky, as in Congo, those with
marketable skills often leave as soon as they graduate. Unlike Congo,
however, Kentucky can attract doctors from poorer parts of the world,
such as South Asia. Mr Banks does not think much of these immigrant
medics. He fears they may give him the wrong medicine, perhaps
deliberately, and threatens to “shoot them plumb between the eyes” if
they try. He is not serious about this threat, one assumes, but his
sense of grievance is no less real for being incoherent.

The point of this article is neither to mock Mr Banks nor to praise
Dr Kabamba. Both have their virtues and flaws, and your correspondent
cannot reliably judge which is the happier. But here are two concluding
observations. First, if poor Americans were to compare their standard
of living with what is normal elsewhere in the world, let alone in
Congo, they would see they have little cause for discontent. Then
again, were Americans not so incurably discontented with their lot,
their great country would not be half as dynamic as it is.

I know it’s going to happen, I know it has to happen, but when it happens, I feel this great sadness, unimaginable sorry, and guilt that will haunt me for sometime, I hope this is the last, Im sorry…

In the meantime, I am drown with sorrow and sing along to this James Blunt’s song…

Did I disappoint you or let you down?Should I be feeling guilty or let the judges frown?'Cause I saw the end before we'd begun,Yes I saw you were blinded and I knew I had won.So I took what's mine by eternal right.Took your soul out into the night.It may be over but it won't stop there,I am here for you if you'd only care.You touched my heart you touched my soul.You changed my life and all my goals.And love is blind and that I knew when,My heart was blinded by you.I've kissed your lips and held your head.Shared your dreams and shared your bed.I know you well, I know your smell.I've been addicted to you.

Goodbye my lover.Goodbye my friend.You have been the one.You have been the one for me.

I am a dreamer but when I wake,You can't break my spirit - it's my dreams you take.And as you move on, remember me,Remember us and all we used to beI've seen you cry, I've seen you smile.I've watched you sleeping for a while.I'd be the father of your child.I'd spend a lifetime with you.I know your fears and you know mine.We've had our doubts but now we're fine,And I love you, I swear that's true.I cannot live without you.

Goodbye my lover.Goodbye my friend.You have been the one.You have been the one for me.

And I still hold your hand in mine.In mine when I'm asleep.And I will bear my soul in time,When I'm kneeling at your feet.Goodbye my lover.Goodbye my friend.You have been the one.You have been the one for me.I'm so hollow, baby, I'm so hollow.I'm so, I'm so, I'm so hollow