Where are our priorities?

While glancing through "The Penguin Atlas of Women in the World," I found my jaw continually dropping as I read various surprising statistics and shocking facts. The section titled Body Politics particularly affected me, and left me wondering where our priorities are as a society. It was interesting to contrast the breast cancer graphs with the page on beauty. First I learned that the United States has the highest rate of breast cancer in the world, and then I turned to the beauty page to discover that Americans spent $13 billion on cosmetic procedures alone in 2006. I wondered, how can we justify spending this exorbitant amount of money on mostly superficial procedures, while people that we know and love are fighting breast cancer ever day? This is only one example of the skewed priorities in our culture though. We spend millions of dollars on cars or fancy clothes everyday while there are people living on the streets and lacking health care. For me, reading this book went behind simply highlighting women 's place in the world; it helped to remind me of problems that I see, and empowered me to want to make changes in the way I personally feed into the issues within our society.