From this distance, life in America looks like a treadmill: working constantly to maintain a life with little reward or joy: striving and consuming.

Life is about accepting who you are from the inside first. Stop trying to always fix yourself. Also, don't fix yourself externally unless you are willing to fix yourself internally first.

In all this pain and suffering, stupidity and tragedy, war and natural disaster, hope and despair...in the final analysis, have we really learned anything?

Our dependency on plastic is not purely physical; it is the word used for surgery of many of those most of us envy. And sadly it is a word that describes many of us, certainly in how we deal on the outside.

Food has a special place in our hearts as Arabs, so Thanksgiving was the American holiday we most loved. Food symbolizes the essence of freedom, the ability to feed your family without fear.

We in the United States have a health care system that creates (rather than eases) burdens for those battling critical illness. We have it all backwards.

I stumbled across a list of the only countries in the world that don't offer guaranteed paid maternity leave. You might expect to see Liberia, Papua New Guinea, and Swaziland on the list. But the United States?

Nostalgia often affects our attitudes about change. The notion that "life was nicer when I was growing up" has been circulating in this country for generations.