David McElroy

I would have sworn that Jack and Martha were newlyweds if they hadn’t been quite a bit on the older side. When they first came into the fast food restaurant where I was having dinner Monday night, they seemed like a young couple in love. I couldn’t help but smile when I saw them sit at a booth together — side by side instead of across from one another. What I didn’t know then is that they were newlyweds. They just got married Monday.

Jack fell in love with Martha more than 50 years ago, but he was too timid to approach the girl he said was the prettiest in the school. Besides, Martha always had plenty of dates, so he didn’t think she could possibly be interested in a skinny boy with little confidence and no apparent future. That was in the early ’60s at a high school near Birmingham. Neither knew that they would end up together in 2012.

Jack graduated from high school two years ahead of Martha and headed off to college. He kept a picture of Martha that he had gotten from one of her friends. Unknown to him at the time, Martha had wanted Jack to ask her out, but he had never shown any interest.

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Some of the most meaningful presents don’t come from a store. For one young woman who graduated from high school last week, her graduation gift from her father cost only a few dollars at a store 13 years ago — but what he’s done with it over the years will make it priceless to her.

I don’t know the woman’s name, but she told her story by posting pictures of herself and the gift from her father on Thursday. Since then, it’s been seen by more than 4 million people.

The story starts when she started kindergarten. Her father bought a copy of the Dr. Seuss book, “Oh, the Places You’ll Go,” and he’s kept it a secret all these years. Without her knowing about it, the father has been getting every teacher, principal and coach who knew her along the way to write about her at the time they were dealing with her. I’ll let her tell her own story:

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In the early 19th century, the United States was an economic backwater with relatively little influence on the rest of the world. There were certainly plenty of natural resources and there were agricultural crops such as cotton and tobacco that were valuable, but the economic centers of the world were in Europe. What happened over the next 150 years that transformed this country and created the highest standard of living in the world?

Things didn’t change because kindly Europeans sent poverty aid to help poor Americans. It changed because Americans took advantage of the opportunity to build businesses and produce valuable goods in ways that were unheard of until the Industrial Revolution. Americans harnessed the market — which was free to a great extent — in order to start up an economic engine that would become the envy of the world.

When we look at places in the world where poverty is crushing and the economy is crippled, why aren’t those people taking the same path that Americans took starting in the 19th century? And for those of us who have serious concerns about global poverty — both the human cost and the violence it brings — what can we do to change things?

Zachary Caceres is a researcher at the Free Cities Institute who’s traveled to poverty-stricken countries to study what factors are holding poor people back. I asked him what he sees and why the help that many westerners are trying to provide isn’t making a long term difference.

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