Happy 4th

Today I was helping one of my Italian colleagues decipher and translate a documentary about New Orleans and there was one part of the film that shocked him even more than the post-Katrina footage: scenes of man from the lower ninth ward proudly talking about how his mother, a single parent who worked as a maid, managed to send both him & his sister to the best private (parochial) school in the city and put them through college AND bought two homes all by herself.
My Italian colleague found it incredibly difficult to believe that something of this sort could be possible, his reaction was a mixture of disbelief and amazement and he said "It blows my mind how much people can accomplish in the US with hard work".

Happy 4th of July.