A trip to Chile.

• Author: Rothschild, Matthew
• Position: Editor's Note - Editorial

I'm just back from a vacation in Chile. My wife and I went down there to pick up our daughter, who was on junior year abroad in Valparaiso. I was struck, right away, by how vibrant the political scene was. Leftwing graffiti adorned the walls of the city. A likeness of Salvador Allende peered down from a mural on an apartment building. And the students there had been on strike for two months, demanding free, high-quality college education.

One day, we went to a demonstration where tens of thousands of students, professors, port workers, former political prisoners, and truck drivers jubilantly joined in.

On our last day in Chile, we went to Santiago and visited the powerful Museum of Memory and Human Rights, which is dedicated to chronicling the coup that brought General Augusto Pinochet to power in 1973 and to documenting the viciousness of his sixteen-year rule.

I watched video of the Chilean air force bombing the Moneda, the presidential palace. It was the first time in 100 years that the military had overturned civilian rule in Chile.

I heard Allende's astonishingly eloquent last speech on radio while he was inside the Moneda, just minutes before taking his own life.

And I saw the unbearable testimony of some of the victims of Pinochet's brutality.

Leaving the museum, I was reminded how fragile democracy can be.

When I got back to the office d started going through my e-mails, I came upon one from a reader who responded to Sandy Williams's first-person piece in our June issue, "What's After the Piggy Bank?" In that story, Williams showed how the economic downturn was having a dire effect on poor people in her Alabama community.

"I was so touched by the piggy bank story I looked up the store where the article suggested Sandy worked and sent her $100 to put back in the piggy bank," he wrote. "The letter was returned as...