Upping the Permission to Harm

I just finished Dead Wake by Erik Larson, the story of the ocean liner Lusitania’s final voyage. The Lusitania was sunk by a German submarine in 1916, during World War I. Out of 1,959 passengers and crew, 764 survived.

Larson gives poignant details for many of the passengers. We follow survivors as well as ones who perished. He analyzes reasons why the tragedy happened, asking why no ships of the British navy accompanied the liner as it neared England in submarine infested waters.

Mentioned over and over was the belief that no modern nation would sink a non military ship with so many innocent civilians aboard. It reminded me of how often we are deceived into thinking that “civilized” people have passed beyond the barbarity of their ancestors.

When the temptation is great enough, we are apt to condone, if not to conduct, acts of barbarity.

Previously, ships that sank other ships were supposed to warn the targets first so the passengers could escape in lifeboats. The attacker, it was thought, should also pick up survivors.

Submarines, however, were a new form of war, unsuited to the old civilities. If a submarine warned a ship, the ship would escape because ships were faster than subs. And a sub had no room in its crowded compartments for survivors.

Faced with the choice to use their power or see it made useless by the old rules, the subs chose to attack the Lusitania and other civilian ships.

With each conflict, we invent new weapons to harm and less means to protect innocents.

Chronological Snobbery

The professor and writer C.S. Lewis had a name for the tendency to suppose one’s present age is superior to all others. He called it “chronological snobbery.” In his talk, “Learning in Wartime,” Lewis said:

“… we need intimate knowledge of the past. Not that the past has any magic about it, but because we cannot study the future, and yet need something to set against the present, to remind us that the basic assumptions have been quite different in different periods and that much which seems certain to the uneducated is merely temporary fashion.”

Doctors used to think bleeding a sick person rid them of harmful humors. Some used to believe that moonlight contributed to insanity. Decades ago, smoking cigarettes was considered sophisticated. Then we learned that tobacco was a factor in lung cancer, as well as other diseases.

In the future, Lewis said, that which we now consider the height of learning may turn out to be ridiculous.

We should carry our present assumptions lightly and treat with respect those who cherish past ones. Who knows, present dictates may turn out to be merely temporary fashion.

Comfort for a Pessimist

When I was thirteen, my father died. He had suffered a coronary attack days earlier and was rushed to the hospital. He recovered, so it seemed. I last saw him in the hospital on a Wednesday, two days before he was due to return home.

On Friday, the day we looked forward to his return, a woman showed up in the back of my school classroom. I saw her talking to my teacher. Probably they looked my way. I knew why she was there. I knew my father had died. She came and gave me the news and took me home to my grieving mother and the many friends of my family.

That’s the day I realized how suddenly good can turn to bad. It’s the time I began accepting good times as always temporary. It’s why I wait for that knock on the door or that phone call or that visit by a policeman.

Nobody enjoys a pessimist, so I try to blunt my tendency to melancholy. After all, I have close friends. I have enjoyed more blessings than I have a right to expect. I take pleasure in friends and books and hiking and travel and a thousand other pursuits.

Still, I accept my tendency to pessimism. No reason to stress over it. We pessimists have our place.

The character of Puddleglum, from C.S. Lewis’ The Silver Chair offers solace. Puddleglum, as his name indicated, was a born pessimist. It certainly made him a less than ideal companion during good times. On the other hand, Puddleglum was an ideal companion when bad times came. Unsurprised, he offered stoical help.

Perhaps there’s a place for us pessimists.

 

Era of the Best Bad Solutions

“And so, we’ve got groups here in town, members of the House and Senate . . . who whipped people into a frenzy believing they can accomplish things that they know—they know—are never going to happen.”
—John Boehner, CBS Face the Nation, September 27, 2015

Politicians have always made promises they knew they couldn’t keep, declared in order to win elections. What is different about today’s elections is not only that the promises are especially outrageous. Even more amazing is that more citizens appear to actually believe them.

One candidate for president has promised to end the Syrian refugee crisis by sending all the Syrians back to Syria if elected president. And how will he do this? Take control of all the nations who have Syrian refugees? Force them to do his bidding? Set up some miraculous delivery system through battlefields for millions of refugees?

We have grown up listening to stories of World War II victories as though they were inevitable. In addition, post World War II was a favorable economic time for the United States. The nation had survived war with its factories and infrastructure intact, unlike Europe and much of the world.

American leaders from Eisenhower to Kennedy had known war, as had many members of Congress. The political parties had their partisan moments, but more often than not, they cooperated for what was best for the nation, knowing how close we came to losing it.

One cannot picture them risking America’s standing in the world by a willingness to bring the government to its knees over a single issue.

We live in a time of no perfect solutions, worsened by selfish political posturing. Yet we yearn for that magic bullet to solve our problems. It doesn’t exist.

To reach solutions, we have to listen and, when our turn comes to suggest, do so with genuine ideas, not quick fix solutions suitable only for sound bytes on the evening news.

Did Pope Francis Zap Xi?

China’s president, Xi Jinping (pronounced Shee Jin Ping), paid a state visit to the United States. Ordinarily, Xi’s visit would have grabbed the most headlines. It might even have overcome the celebrity status now given to presidential nominees.

However, a visit by Francis, the Roman Catholic pope, upstaged them all, at least for a while. He spoke to Congress about saving both the poor and the planet from greed. He appeared to single out one man, U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry, who has played a central role in the Iran nuclear agreement, for a handshake.

He blessed children, including the grandchild of U.S. House Speaker John Boehner. His request for Boehner to pray for him deeply impressed the Speaker. Perhaps the Pope’s request played into Boehner’s decision to announce the next day his coming resignation from his posts as speaker and as a Congressional representative.

The Pope has left the United States. Politicians have returned to calling each other names. Political commentators speculate that Boehner’s resignation will bring on more political infighting.

Concerning any lasting benefit of the Pope’s visit, we might consider a parable told by Jesus in the New Testament. The parable told of a woman putting yeast in bread, allowing yeast’s silent growth until it spread through the entire mixture.

No political agreements were produced by the Pope’s visit. Xi and President Obama did reach a few agreements. Yet who’s to say how much effect Francis’ bit of yeast might have over time?

 

“But Christianity Cannot Be Reckoned as a Real Force . . .”

Sayyid Qutb, an Islamic activist in Egypt, was executed by the Egyptian government in 1966 for opposing that country’s secular government. He has influenced many of today’s radical Islamists. He is quoted as saying:

“But Christianity cannot be reckoned as a real force in opposition to the philosophies of the new materialism; it is an individualist, isolationist, negative faith. It has no power to make life grow under its influence in any permanent or positive way.”

Qutb lived in the United States in the late 1940’s and attended school at Colorado State College (now the University of Northern Colorado). Reportedly of a puritanical nature, those years turned him against both the West and Christianity, which he equated as the same. He saw Christianity as an individualistic religion, powerless against the materialism of the West.

Qutb was in error, seeing Christianity only through the eyes of a post World War II university society. Though Christians have certainly influenced Western nations, the religion of Jesus is not the same as our Western culture.

In contrast to today’s individualism, which so entraps many American Christians, the early Christians created community. They needed community in order to survive. Their love for each other drew pagans to them. Their lives indeed grew in permanent, positive ways, as did the societies they occasionally influenced.

 

Who Helps the Poor When Religious Institutions Vanish?

A church in the Seattle area has opened its parking lot for homeless car owners to park at night. The church rents portable toilets for them. A church member opens the doors of the church for two hours on weekday mornings and evenings so occupants can use the bathrooms and kitchen, useful for those who have school or jobs.

Some in Seattle have called for more parking places for the homeless. One of the reasons cited for the lack of spaces, at least in church parking lots, is that many congregations are shrinking in size, along with their budgets for staff, extra utilities, and services.

Religious institutions have provided help for the poor since the first churches in the Near East took up collections for needy brothers and sisters. Monasteries and nunneries provided refuge for the destitute and dying during the Middle Ages.

We are familiar with the caricature of the Victorian do-gooder, more interested in saving souls than in physical sustenance to the poor. Religious leaders, however, prodded secular society toward fairer treatment of the poor, not to mention the end of the slave trade.

Working through government for humane change is as important now as then. However, one result of that shrinking church membership mentioned above is that fewer Christians are around to take up the slack when secular institutions fail.

 

Jade Helm Is Over and We’re Still the Land of the Free

Jade Helm, the U.S. military training exercise in Texas and surrounding areas, is over. No government roundup of private firearms ensued. No rogue U.S. government was set up. No martial law was declared.

The operation’s commanders said their aims were satisfied. The drill, so the military said in the beginning, was to train troops to operate in “hostile” territory. Since U.S. forces often operate in hostile territory, designating a section of the training terrain as “hostile” is not unusual. It’s a training term.

Last spring, U.S. Army soldiers with the 2nd Cavalry Regiment carried out a 1,100-mile convoy through six countries en route to their home station in Vilseck, Germany, after finishing training with allies in Poland and the Baltics.

To reassure countries on Russia’s western periphery, the U.S. and other NATO allies have been training continuously in the Baltics and Poland since Moscow annexed Crimea from Ukraine last year.

The forces were cheered by local residents, reminiscent of liberation scenes at the end of World War II.

Interesting that units of the American army can ride through Eastern Europe and be welcomed as heroes, but here in the U.S., we don’t trust our own army.

 

Refugee Story from the Mother of A Friend

I’m reading the story of a refugee, the mother of a friend of mine. The mother was a child during World War II. Her family was fairly well off on their Latvian farm in the Baltic region of Europe before the war. Then they fled, as armies churned toward them.

She was wounded from nearby fighting. They fled further with millions of other civilians. Some estimate the number of displaced persons during the war as high as sixty million.

Finally the war ended, but they could not return to Latvia, now under Russian control. Europe was devastated from the war. They were placed in a “displaced persons” camp with thousands of others from different countries. They remained in the camp about four years.

Eventually, the family emigrated to the United States. She became a nurse, and her family entered the American mainstream.

Now we are again facing the greatest civilian displacement since that other war. They come from the fighting in Syria, Iraq, Lybia, Afghanistan and some sub Saharan countries. Economic refugees join the surge, making it more difficult to identify true refugees.

Families grab what they can carry and flee to any country that promises safety. They pay life savings to human smugglers, who, once paid, don’t care whether they reach safety or not. Thousands die en route.

Perhaps we can learn lessons from that other time. Obviously, the chaos that ensues when thousands of people surge into small countries calls for a more orderly process. The fact that the European Union, or the rest of the world, was not prepared for this exodus is water under the bridge. Better to work on the immediate situation.

Perhaps displaced person camps can be set up, especially for families. They could be cared for in a more humane setting while proper vetting of the applicants is carried out. We would expect all democratic nations, including the United States, to take in refugees, as the U.S. did following World II.

 

Stories as Community

For as long as we have had language, we have told stories. Stories inspired men and women and children at solemn events—coming of age ceremonies and funeral reminiscences. Sometimes stories were told merely to entertain around a fire on a cold winter’s night.

Stories gained new potential once we learned to write down our thoughts. We were not limited to present memory. We could write for future generations or for those outside our immediate group.

Much of our entertainment was still communal, however. Writers like the Greek playwrights and Shakespeare created plays for audiences to approve or disapprove.

Then the novel appeared. Reading a novel, unlike watching a play in a theater, often is a private affair. However, book clubs and book reviews abound. We like to discuss what we read. We gain pleasure from sharing our thoughts.

A form of the play, the movie, was created in the twentieth century. We can rent movies or watch them on Netflix, but we still enjoy our community movie houses. Sometimes we invite our friends and families to be with us when we watch movies at home.

Now we have smart phones. At the moment, checking and using our phones seems to favor private viewing. Yet, who knows? The urge for community may conquer even this solitary activity.

Notice the number of people checking their phones even when in a group. Perhaps we will begin using our smart phones as stepping stones for discussion, all reading a book or an article at the same time.

 

We Buy Politicians; Why Not Buy an Army?

It seems money rules not only politics but increasingly warfare.

In dysfunctional societies like Somalia, mercenaries act in place of a national army. Even in some countries with recognized governments, both the civilian police force and the military are corrupt or ineffective. Wealthy citizens hire their own security.

Faced with an increasing number of terrorist threats to U.S. diplomatic posts in countries with minimal security, the State Department began contracting with private security firms. The firms handle security for the more dangerous missions. Members of one firm, Blackwater, hired to protect U.S. diplomats in Iraq, were convicted of murdering unarmed civilians after a firefight in Baghdad in 2007.

The contracts with security firms often are lucrative, giving the companies great incentive to manipulate conditions, if necessary to keep a contract. In the case of the Blackwater incident, investigators earlier found serious misconduct by the company, but the findings were ignored because of the security firm’s power over security arrangements.

On a broader issue, going to war becomes easier for a country like the United States if it can contract forces to fight. The government need not mobilize support from its citizens.

It’s doubtful if hired guns will make the world a safer place. Read “Hired Guns” by Allison Stanger, Foreign Affairs, July/August 2015.

 

Your Obituary, The Only Certain Story

In between summers when I was in college, I worked as an intern on my hometown newspaper. My first job was calling funeral homes to find out who had died. Obituaries were an important section of the paper.

I would be sent down to the basement where the newspaper’s “morgue” was located to bring up past stories about a recently deceased citizen. This was before the days of digital storage. The morgue was a kind of library of past news articles.

At my young age, death seemed remote, but it dawned on me that the only certain story about anybody was their obituary. For the famous, it already was stored in the morgue because death, even more than taxes, was certain. Someday it would be used. As a person accrued honors or elective office, the facts became current news, but they also entered that person’s obituary file.

When a famous (or infamous) person dies, the story is already written, now waiting in an online file, except for the immediate circumstances of death.

My current hometown newspaper carries the obituaries of most who die in our area. If we haven’t known the deceased since childhood, the obituary surprises us with information we didn’t know about former marriages, former jobs, former honors, association with historic events.

Some may not wish to think of death’s inevitability. For others, it acts as a reminder to joy in the gift left to us.

“Each man’s death diminishes me,
For I am involved in mankind.
Therefore, send not to know
For whom the bell tolls,
It tolls for thee.”
(John Donne)

 

Dealing with the Whole Enchilada Syndrome

Our politics have descended into the Whole Enchilada or Nothing Syndrome. We either get all we want or we threaten to destroy the system.

When is it ever possible for mortals to have perfect knowledge? Negotiation, diplomacy, and compromise are necessary because none of us is God.

Genuine listening, give and take, and civil dialog work best in an imperfect world.

We can’t always work out a win/win solution but more often a some/some resolution. Nobody hogs all the cake and ice cream. We enjoy a better party if everybody shares some.

 

You Must Be Willing To Be Rejected

“I was willing to be rejected. That’s what allows you to be a good salesperson. You have to be willing to be rejected.”

–Atul Gawande, Being Mortal

Gawande, in the above passage, is talking about a doctor who was able to sell his new ideas on caregiving to a nursing home, resulting in better quality of life for the patients.

But a willingness to be rejected is true of many successful pursuits in life. Most writers who eventually publish first undergo rejection from publishers.

One fights the temptation to quit too early. Success may require persistence. Top athletes do not begin at the top of their form. Politicians may lose races before they finally succeed.

We are unrealistic if we expect to succeed all the time. Accepting that one path is not the right one and choosing another is not necessarily failure. Sometimes it’s part of a journey.

But one has to start out. And starting out requires the understanding that failure will happen along the way. We must be willing to endure in order to enjoy a useful life.

 

Five Suggestions for Surviving This Election Cycle

By the time this election is over (if it ever is) we will be sick of every candidate. Each will probably have at least one scandal dragged up against them by opponents.

We may struggle to find any candidate we like enough to vote for. Perhaps the one who offers the most comic relief will win.

No quick fix exists, but here are five partial solutions:

1) Limit your time watching election coverage except in cases of obviously news worthy events. (Example: Hilary Clinton and Donald Trump join forces to establish an independent ticket.)

2) Read a book about the current condition of the country’s political system.

3) Read a book about America’s place in a changing world.

4) Research the Internet for articles exploring growing inequality in our nation’s economic system.

5) Write emails every few weeks to your elected representatives asking them to vote for a constitutional amendment against excessive campaign funding. If the candidates have less money, they can’t afford such long campaigns.

 

Teaching Americans to Work the Chinese Way

Recently, Chinese businesses have invested in the United States. Reasons include the strength of the U.S. economy, recent actions of the Chinese government concerning their currency, and a possible U.S. trade agreement with Asian nations that excludes China.

One area of Chinese investment is the American textile industry. Textile jobs migrated decades ago from New England to the South to find cheaper labor and then to Asia for the same reason. Many U.S. workers lost their jobs when mills closed.

Now workers are finding jobs as the Chinese invest in the textile industry in places like North Carolina. Chinese supervisors mention, politely, that American workers sometimes work differently from Chinese workers. For example, Americans don’t always arrive at work on time.

An economic mixing of cultures occurred earlier when Japanese and Germans invested in factories for their cars to be made in the United States.

Such diversity happens because most communities accept foreign investment when it encourages jobs and economic growth, regardless of differences between nationalities. Even former enemies (i.e., the United States and Vietnam) have found common ground in an economic version of the global village.

 

Where I Belong

After working with a story over a long period, I develop an attachment to my characters. That’s probably why they reappear in later novels, often in cameo roles. Joe Harlan, an older Foreign Service officer, appears off and on as a kind of mentor to the younger characters. I finally made him a main character in Tender Shadows.

The author Wendell Berry, in his series of writings about the fictional town of Port William, Kentucky, does much the same thing. Main actors in one novel become supporting actors in another.

His novels, like mine, are not a connected series featuring one main character.

After completing Tender Shadows, I began a story about Mark Pacer, a transplant from Mocking Bird, Georgia, to the Foreign Service in 1976. I decided to let Mark have his own series (Where I Belong). A series lets me enjoy Mark from youth to—who knows—old age?

Following Mark’s life through the years also allows me to indulge my love of near history. The seventy years from 1945 (the end of World War II) carried us from early television to smart phones, from daily print newspapers with occasional extra editions to news from the far corners of the globe at the flick of an iPad.

What did this warp speed journey do to us? How does a fairly conservative young man, raised in an Appalachian village in the fifties and sixties, react to the changes of the seventies and beyond? Where does he belong? Will he become a refugee from the past?

Mark is twenty-one when the series begins, just finishing college and accepting an appointment with the U.S. Foreign Service. His father objects. “Too dandified for people like us,” he says, and we’re off into the story, which I’ve almost finished.

 

Going Beyond Democrats and Republicans: Why Not a Third Political Party?

Dick Meyers asked that question in an article for The Seattle Times (August 9, 2015). After all, political parties aren’t even mentioned in the U.S. Constitution. Nothing says we must have political parties, much less limit them to two.

Third parties appear from time to time, but generally are too quixotic or too one-issue oriented for the average American. What about a party focused more widely and deeply on many issues?

As more and more citizens become disgusted with either party and become independents, the followers who remain tend to be more extreme. Thus, voters often must decide between two candidates from the more extreme ends of the political spectrum. Each party must play to its base, then try to shift gears and appeal to independents in the general election, the swing voters.

To avoid saying anything that would scare off voters from either group, politicians tend to mouth meaningless platitudes: “I’m for peace. I’m for jobs. I’m for a great America.” They coat their opponents with scorn and harsh criticism verging on accusations of criminal behavior.

What about a middle-of-the-road party that speaks to today’s independents, the fastest growing segment of the electorate?

 

The Nuclear Accords with Iran and Injustices, Ours and Theirs

In the 1990’s I served in the State Department with one of the released hostages of the Iranian takeover of the U.S. embassy in Tehran in 1979. The Iranian government, in a breach of all international norms, allowed radicals to take over the U.S. embassy and imprison sixty-six Americans. Some were released at various times, but fifty-two Americans, including my acquaintance, were held for 444 days. Captives were mistreated and harshly interrogated. They were released in January, 1981.

Today, three Americans; Amir Hekmati, Jason Rezaian, and Saeed Abedini; are jailed in Iran on spurious charges. Saeed Abedini, is a Christian pastor whose imprisonment in Iran is a form of religious persecution.

Iran has supported Syria’s brutal tyrant, Bashar al-Assad.

Iran also has issues with the United States. Before the takeover of the U.S. embassy, we strongly backed an Iranian ruler, the Shah, whose regime used secret police and torture. Before that, in 1953, the United States supported a coup against a popularly elected Iranian official because we disagreed with his policies.

All wrongs cannot be righted, either ours or theirs. That is not the purpose of the nuclear accords. Their purpose is to control nuclear weapons. Judge them on their ability to inhibit nuclear weapons in the Middle East.

 

Prisoners With a Purpose: Training Dogs to Find Bombs

Labrador retrievers are dogs known for sociability and physical resilience. Those qualities, according to an article in The New York Times by Ethan Hauser, make them ideal for training as dogs to detect bombs and drugs.

One program supervised by a canine performance group at Auburn University uses prisoners as handlers to begin the task of training the dogs as sniffers. The prisoners, living in a more structured environment, train the dogs better than families do, who tend to see them as pets rather than candidates for a challenging job.

Inmates chosen for the trainer jobs must have a high-school diploma or equivalent and be free of disciplinary problems for a year. They live in a dedicated living area, with the dogs in crates beside their bunks.

A former warden credits the program with improving the inmates’ morale and behavior. “A lot of these guys have never been given a lot of responsibility, and this is their chance not only to be a responsible adult but a responsible citizen.”

Maybe we need to consider how many of our incarcerated citizens crave meaningful activity—and whose experiences might prove advantageous for certain jobs.