The usual images of Africa are of a continent mired in conflict and squalor. But this picture, based on Africa’s most corrupt regimes, is unfair and misleading – like claiming that all Europeans are guilty of “ethnic cleansing” because of what happened in the former Yugoslavia. Yes, African has some failed states, but most of its 53 countries are mostly peaceful, agreeable places.

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All over the world, people have responded generously to the devastating earthquake that struck Haiti. In just three days, more than a million Americans had donated $10 with the aid of text messages from their cellphones. People with very little themselves, like Maria Pacheco, an unemployed single mother from Chicago, donated food and clothes.

Others did whatever they could – from pedicures to washing cars – to raise money. On current indications, the amount Americans will give to relief efforts in Haiti could surpass the $1.9 billion they gave to assist victims of the 2004 Asian tsunami, which until now has stood as a record for donations to a disaster outside the United States. Given that the US is undergoing economic hard times, the size of the response has surprised many.

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Of all the arguments against voluntary euthanasia, the most influential is the “slippery slope”: once we allow doctors to kill patients, we will not be able to limit the killing to those who want to die.

There is no evidence for this claim, even after many years of legal physician-assisted suicide or voluntary euthanasia in the Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg, Switzerland, and the American state of Oregon. But recent revelations about what took place in a New Orleans hospital after Hurricane Katrina point to a genuine danger from a different source.

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Do nations have psychological processes – even Freudian processes, such as collective egos that can be injured, and repressed guilt feelings that can well up from the collective unconscious – just as individuals do? I believe that they do.

I also believe that just as an individual’s dreams and slips of the tongue reveal his or her repressed knowledge, so a culture’s “dreamwork” – its films, pop music, visual arts, and even in the resonant jokes, cartoons and advertising images – reveal the signs of this collective unconscious. Moreover, a nation’s “irrational dreamwork” often reflects its actual condition more truthfully than its “ego” – its official pronouncements, diplomatic statements, and propaganda.

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