When Story Explores How We Became What We Are

I recently discovered two fictional series, one in the detective genre, the other in the mystery category. Ruth Rendell’s Inspector Wexford series and James Runcie’s Grantchester series begin in the mid-twentieth century, a decade or two after World War II.

Critics describe both, as going beyond their genres. They are immersed in the social and cultural changes of their eras as they follow the main characters through time. They appeal to me for that reason.

My own novels have changed. In the beginning they tended toward romance, then women’s fiction, but the characters were wedded to the time period of the seventies and eighties. They explored a time period not considered either historical or contemporary. The era of near history is my niche, because it lends clues for how we became what we are in the present. In addition, nobody writes truly “contemporary” fiction. As one is writing the words, the present becomes past.

Time features even more in the series I’m writing now, which follow a man’s life from the late 1970’s into whatever near present I’m able to reach. Few would deny the tremendous changes during this time period.

Why did the changes happen? How did they develop? What do the changes mean to us today? What do they mean to relationships and families? What do they mean to our belief systems?

Another change occurs, too. The novelist is changed as a result of considering the changes to his/her protagonists. It makes for an interesting journey.

 

Farm Robots Who Toil Far From the Madding Crowd

The movie Far From the Madding Crowd is one created for my own heart. Character-driven, the movie portrays love, rejection, unwise choices, hardships, and redemption for some.

I could have sat all day devouring the movie’s soft visions of the English countryside: a farm community bringing in the harvest, gamboling lambs, galloping rides on horseback through woods and pastures.

Raised in the city, I must avoid too idyllic a view of rural life. I have never chopped cotton, worked until exhaustion as a farm peasant, or slopped the hogs. Watching those close-to-the-land scenes, however, I sensed loss in the evolution to our office-based, smartphone-in-hand culture.

On the same day I saw Far From the Madding Crowd, I read an article on the possible coming use of robots to perform the back-breaking work of farm tasks.

We could say good riddance to a peon type of farm laborer, vulnerable, with little power. Yet, what work will they do then? Will they join their working class brothers and sisters in unemployment?

I hope we reform our employment system to give all our citizens a chance at meaningful work, adequately rewarded. What about shorter work weeks, spreading the work around? Is a forty-hour work week necessary now that so much of our work is performed by digital and mechanical means? Some of us might use the extra time for family, friends, gardens, and rural hikes.

 

The True Story Behind Those Tales of Robin Hood and Tyrant King John

A popular movie in my childhood enthralled audiences with tales of Robin Hood and his battles against the tyrant King John of England and his minions. Robin’s particular target was the evil sheriff of Nottingham. Robin stole wealth from corrupted officials, including the sheriff, to give to the poor. The history may have been hazy, but King John was real, a true despot.

To facilitate better hunting, John destroyed ditches and hedges in the royal forests, even though destroying them meant animal predators could more easily harm the crops of the common people. He appointed officials who used their offices for increasing their wealth rather than governing justly (re the sheriff of Nottingham). Those nobles who disagreed with John’s system risked having their families taken as hostages and tortured or killed.

A group of English nobles united to seek reform and better safeguard the rights of all English people. Clergy and commoners sided with the nobles. (Including, no doubt, Robin Hood, whoever he really was.) John was outnumbered.

Eight hundred years ago this month (June 15, 1215), King John met with the nobles in a meadow called Runnymede, near Windsor Castle, and signed what is called the Magna Carta. By signing the charter, John agreed to remedy many of the abuses.

One of the provisions stated: “No freeman shall be arrested and imprisoned, or dispossessed, or outlawed, or banished, or in any way molested . . . unless by the lawful judgement of his peers and by the law of the land.”

Much remained to be done before true equality of all English citizens was a fact. Yet, it was a beginning. The thread sewn that day wound down to our own Constitution and the belief that all, including the wealthy and the privileged, are subject to the law.

 

On the Passing of a Son

“ . . . Beau Biden was, quite simply, the finest man any of us have ever known.” So said Vice-President Joe Biden after the recent death of his oldest son from brain cancer.

Once in a while, even in the power-mad world of politics, genuine goodness breaks through. It appears the Bidens managed to be a family in the best sense of the word—loving each other, putting family before politics, seeing their careers as a way of serving. According to news reports, both the Vice-President and his son graduated from the same Catholic high school. One of Beau Biden’s main concerns in his job as Delaware’s attorney general was going after child sex crime perpetrators.

Some might ask why a seemingly religious family who emphasized commitment and service has seen so much tragedy. Parents of children whose lives are blighted by drugs or other unwise choices might count the Bidens as fortunate.

We are reminded anew that our families and our friends weigh far more than power, money, or careers on the scale of life.

 

You Can’t Go Home Again; Home Goes With You

The writers’ conference was in North Carolina, in the foothills of the Appalachians. My husband and I rented a car at the airport in Knoxville, Tennessee, and drove across the mountains. From place names to bends in the highway, the times of my childhood floated back to me.

My parents, my brother, and I spent summer vacations hiking these hills, exploring small mountain towns in our car, stopping to spend nights in motels on different sides of the Great Smokies. As a teenager, I attended youth conferences at the center where I now gathered with other writers.

Strange how the going and coming, from childhood to adulthood, finds its way into the series of stories I’m writing now, stories I submitted for critiques and class discussion at the conference. The feedback suggested a green light to continue.

The series follows a young man raised in Appalachia who leaves home, first for university, then for an appointment as a Foreign Service officer with the U.S. State Department. Throughout his adulthood he will fit pieces together from old and new. He discards, keeps, and adds as he matures. He creates a mosaic, as we all do, hopefully with increasing wisdom and discernment.

 

Get Them Out! Removing U.S. Embassy Staff from Harm’s Way

The U.S. embassy in Yemen recently shut down, due to the ongoing conflict in that Arabian Peninsula country. Terrorists have targeted the embassy for years. When the current government fled, the State Department deemed the situation too dangerous for onsite diplomatic work. Personnel were evacuated to the tiny nation of Djibouti, in the Horn of Africa, bordering Somalia.

When I entered the Foreign Service in 1990, my orientation class was told: “You’ll probably be evacuated at least once in your career.” Only once in a career is increasingly optimistic.

In 1993, I was evacuated out of Algeria when terrorists targeted diplomatic personnel of several countries. In 2003, my posting in Saudi Arabia dramatically ended as U.S. missions there drew down due to terrorist threats. Fortunately, I was able to leave on an airplane in both cases. A recent evacuation from Libya included a nineteen hour trek across the desert to Tunisia.

U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry made a first ever visit by a Secretary of State to the U.S. embassy in Djibouti. His remarks to the evacuated staff from Yemen highlighted the complexity of an evacuation.

“I wanted to personally come here really just to tell the world about the story of what’s behind the news headlines when they read “Refugees trapped in Yemen,” or “trapped in Aden, people trying to get out.” And people have no sense of all the machinery that has to come together to work to find a way to get out, a safe way, get onto a boat, the harrowing nature of traveling across water under those kinds of circumstances; your family huddled on a deck or down below, or if you’re lucky, on a larger military ship . . .

“And the entire State Department family contributed to this effort from – literally, from Madrid to Jerusalem to Casablanca, people have come together . . . And the entire embassy here in Djibouti and the entire embassy community – American and local staff – have all joined together.”

Just another “evac” operation.

 

Writing for People Who Think God is Dead When You Don’t

The writer Bret Lott confesses the Christian faith but writes a different kind of literature from what is usually styled “Christian.” Lott quotes Flannery O’Conner, writing in 1955: “One of the awful things about writing when you are a Christian is that for you the ultimate reality is the Incarnation, and nobody believes in the Incarnation; that is nobody in your audience. My audience are the people who think God is dead.”

My own novels are more mainstream than “inspirational.” The characters live in a world where faith shares little space with the chaotic times they live in, one their parents could never imagine. This world is more likely to associate God and religion with hatred and brutal wars.

In the Old Testament book of Esther, one character asks Esther as she struggles with a difficult decision: “Who knows but you have come to the kingdom for such a time as this?” Esther is the only book in the Protestant Bible that doesn’t mention the name of God. Different times call for different narratives.

 

Does Permissiveness Disadvantage Poor Kids More Than Rich Kids?

Ross Douthat, columnist for The New York Times, explores the consequences of a “no rules” culture on working class Americans.

“ . . . our upper class should be judged first . . for failing to take any moral responsibility (in the schools it runs, the mass entertainments it produces, the social agenda it favors) for the effects of permissiveness on the less-savvy, the less protected, the kids who don’t have helicopter parents turning off the television or firewalling the porn.”

The abandonment of marriage has harmed working class Americans more than the privileged. The rate at which children are born to unmarried parents has risen drastically, but especially among working class Americans. The higher income parents in our society are more likely to be married. If they divorce, courts oversee custody and child support.

Among unmarried parents, the father is more likely to skip his responsibilities any time he decides to, with no divorce court to oversee child support.

The permissive, less attached partner arrangement has proved devastating for those on the lower rungs of the economic ladder. And, as Douthat suggests, the culture shapers, who tend to be the more well-off, bear a great deal of responsibility for the consequences.

 

When the In Group Becomes the Out Group

Political parties do it. Religious institutions do it. Corporations do it. When a formerly influential group loses power, it often responds by fighting to retain that power.

Wiser ones use the opportunity afforded by lessening influence to regroup and search out core principles instead.

Almost everyone in America used to believe in religion as a force for good. Most were members, at least in name, of a religious group. Now something like thirty percent and growing no longer count themselves as religious. A few are atheists, but atheists impart to religion a certain honor by reacting to it. Most of the nonreligious no longer react against religion. They simply ignore it.

Our situation has parallels with the world of the early Christians. Their rulers, the Romans, provided security and a certain measure of economic prosperity. Various philosophies encouraged cynicism and skepticism for old ways. Those with means to do so often lost themselves in an unending search for pleasure. Spiritually, it was a wandering age, like our own.

The religious movement known as Christianity offered a revolution based on a loving community that shared rather than sought power, wealth, or pleasure. Indeed, its founder had refused a political kingdom. It was the ultimate out group. Yet it appealed to more and more, outlasting the Roman empire.

A renewal of that same spiritual revolution goes beyond bemoaning how immoral our society has become. It does not seek political power. Rather it lives in the now, not some supposedly golden age of the past. It seeks to understand and meet needs and hurts of the now.

 

Boat People

A member of my small, mostly expatriate Christian church in the north African nation of Tunisia became a boat person. He was a destitute Nigerian, a Christian, and found his way to Tunis to wait until he could pay a smuggler to take him to Italy. One Sunday he did not appear in church. Word came that he had reached Italy safely. He had broken the law, yet how could we not rejoice for our friend’s safety and hope for a new life?

Boat people appear in our news every few years. After the Vietnamese war, multitudes of boat people rushed to escape. Cubans took to boats to reach Florida. Haitians came, too. Recently, many Central American children flooded across the southern border of the United States on foot.

Now Europe is in the news as growing numbers of boat people from North Africa and the Middle East attempt to reach Europe. Thousands drown when crowded, unsafe boats capsize.

The best way to deal with the problems of mass migration is obviously to reduce the circumstances that lead people to risk their lives in hope of a better life.

Wars almost always produce refugees. The first lesson might be: Do not go to war unless the war is unequivocally caused by a threat to the nation. The war that the United States fought in Iraq is not the only reason for the following turmoil in the Middle East, but it certainly contributed.

Corrupt governments ruled by elites, where ordinary citizens barely survive, feed mass migration as well. Rich nations have an obligation to consider carefully their development and military aid to such regimes. Supporting them comes at a steep price.

 

Al Qaeda and ISIS Aren’t the Same

The terrorist group Al Qaeda so far is a movement, not a nation. In contrast, ISIS (the organization calling itself the Islamic State) holds territories in Syria and Iraq and has a land-based army. These and other distinctions were made by Audrey Kurth Cronin in his article “ISIS Is Not a Terrorist Group” (March/April 2015 Foreign Affairs).

Because ISIS is essentially a nation, some suggest a conventional war against it. Cronin calls this a “folly.” He reminds his readers: “Wars pursued at odds with political reality cannot be won.” Such a war would be exhausting and certainly not supported by the American public over a necessarily long duration.

Cronin advises a policy of containment, the policy generally followed in the Cold War with the Soviet Union. We never fought a hot war with the Soviet Union. We waited out our adversary until it collapsed. While waiting, we shored up allies and built our economy. We knew some colossal failures (Vietnam), but overall, our policy was correct.

Similarly, Cronin suggests that we become a “diplomatic superpower,” rather than one dependent solely on military solutions. Effective leadership requires patience.

 

My Visit to Dachau

Dachau, the German concentration camp for Jews and others considered inferior or dangerous to the Nazi cause, was liberated in the spring of 1945.

Allied soldiers stood horror stricken at the emaciated survivors staring at them through the fences. They were the pitiful remnants of the thousands who died there, some gassed or otherwise executed; others succumbing to disease, overwork, or mistreatment.

My husband and I visited Dachau over fifty years later. We stepped off the train and found our way to the Dachau Concentration Camp Memorial. The neighborhood was quiet, with few of the usual shops and restaurants associated with places where visitors come in large numbers.

Inside the camp, we studied exhibits tracing the history of this monument to inhumanity. The exhibits were stark: black and white pictures of Jews being corralled; methodical recording of statistics; and scientifically dispassionate accounts of brutal experiments done on prisoners.

As in many historic sites, a movie was shown in an auditorium to add to the exhibits. I think it’s the only time I didn’t watch such an audio-visual aid. I couldn’t. I wept and could not stop. My husband led me from the building.

I never want to go back to Dachau, but I think everyone should see it at least once. Then they will understand the phrase “never again.”

 

Why Do We Make It So Hard on the Mothers?

I watched a television correspondent interview a mother and son after she had pulled her son, not gently, away from the street violence in Baltimore.

It was obvious during the interview that the mother loved her son and wanted the best for him. It was obvious that the son loved and respected his mother. Why do we make it so difficult for responsible mothers to raise their children?

Why do we not insure that a mother can find work at decent wages to put food on the table and pay the rent? Why do we not insure that good schools and job training are available for the son and all American children?

What are our plans for these millions of poorer American young people of any race? Where do we expect them to learn job skills? We have some of the finest schools in the country—but some of the poorest as well.

When I was raising my sons as a single mom, I was able to hold a decent job because I had a college education. In the days when I was a young person, college tuition was low enough that my own widowed mother could pay it.

My sons graduated from college as well, because they went to good public schools. They were able to use various government programs to help them with tuition or were able to find part time jobs that paid enough. College costs were lower.

I think the most heart rending part of the television interview was the question to the mother: “What do you fear most when your son walks out the door to go somewhere?”

“That he won’t come back,” she said.

 

Time and Setting as Characters

My stories usually unfold in a definite time and setting. Like other characters, time and setting influence the other actors. Their experiences pinpoint changes that began then and influence us today.

Quiet Deception takes place in Pennsylvania and Tennessee following World War II. Changes like the growth of suburbia and later the entry of the United States into the Vietnamese conflict drastically altered the lives of many Americans. Urban neighborhoods declined, encouraging a growing underclass. Antiwar sentiment divided the nation.

Tender Shadows CoverTender Shadows happens within the first decade of the twenty-first century. Places of action include London; Washington, D.C.; Memphis, Tennessee; and a Persian Gulf emirate. Global terrorism changed habits, from the way we pass through airports to how we think about religion. The digital revolution sped new ideas around the globe, sometimes to those not ready for them.

None of my stories take place in the immediate “now.” Indeed, even a story classed as contemporary leaves the contemporary realm as soon as it is written, since the future constantly replaces the “now.”

Are my stories historical? “Near history” is a term I prefer. I believe the time and setting of a story are as important as the characters. Peering back into the near past, we can see how it has influenced the present. Why? Why do some values endure and others pass away? Why do others seem to die, then return in another era?

Our answers may guide us to better understand the “now” and suggest wiser present choices.

 

Vietnam: To Avoid Repeating History

The Foreign Service Journal devoted its April, 2015, issue to the fortieth anniversary of the fall of Saigon to the North Vietnamese.

Several future American leaders served apprenticeships as young diplomats in that country. Many, including Richard Holbrooke, point man in later diplomatic efforts in Serbia and Afghanistan, learned lessons they never forgot. Holbrooke wrote in an article for The New Republic (May 3, 1975): “But then finally it all seemed to come down to one simple, horrible truth: we didn’t belong there, we had no business doing what we were doing, even the good parts of it.”

More than three million Americans served in Vietnam, a country of 26 million, in one capacity or another. Yet we failed.

Many in the U.S. government in the last years and months of our efforts in Vietnam were in denial. They did not plan for the defeat that younger colleagues knew was coming.

It was left to lower level Foreign Service officers to plan evacuations. Two young officers risked disciplinary punishment to fly unauthorized into Saigon in the last days to aid evacuation efforts. Others worked their contacts in Washington. Not only were Americans in danger, but also their Vietnamese coworkers, who risked harsh measures if left behind. Finally, thousands of Vietnamese were evacuated with Americans and third country nationals.

A review of those last days before the fall of South Vietnam reminds us that we are not all powerful. We failed to defeat the Communists in Vietnam. Our later victory in the Cold War came from economic staying power and a strong military that we chose not to use in major conflicts. Better if we had not chosen to enter Vietnam.

Lessons for today?

 

A Model Senate: How a Legislature Might Actually Work

The Economist (April 11, 2015) reported on an undertaking at the Edward M. Kennedy Institute in Boston. The Institute has constructed a model Senate for teenage “senators” from various high schools to stage a mock Senate. The teenagers study how a proper legislative body might actually get things done.

It was, the article reported, “both uplifting and heartbreaking.” Uplifting because, while watching the young people produce legislation, “It is cheering to see the legislative branch stripped to its core principles, and to realize that the system can work.”

The heartbreak occurs when one realizes, the article said, that these senators “face no pressure to raise millions in campaign funds. No outside groups rank them on ideological score cards. . . . They need not fear primary challengers from hardliners who scorn the very idea that decisions with broad, nationwide support enjoy special legitimacy.”

As candidates declare for the 2016 presidential election, we brace for the absurdity of a campaign season that lasts over a year and a half. The absurdity goes beyond those political ads assaulting our psyches for that long. It means ever more money will be spent on political campaigning that ought to be used for better causes.

We have only ourselves to blame for our refusal to pass campaign finance legislation. And we are the ones who insist on screaming so loudly for our pet causes that we refuse to hear anyone else.

As the cartoon character Pogo said decades ago: “We have met the enemy, and he is us.”

 

Three Cheers for Inefficiency

A businessman in Seattle has made news by raising all salaries in his company to $70,000 a year. He’s temporarily lowering his own to the same amount until the company brings in enough profit to pay for the rise in salaries. Dan Price, founder of Gravity Payments, said he wanted to do something to address the issue of inequality.

“The market rate for me as a CEO compared to a regular person is ridiculous. It’s absurd,” Price was quoted in The Seattle Times.

Is Price against capitalism? Isn’t the goal of capitalism to be as efficient as possible? To produce the most goods or services with the least amount of cost to the producer? Isn’t that the Wall Street credo?

Perhaps the principle of the goose who lays the golden egg also applies. Kill the goose, and you have no more golden eggs. Treat your hired hands badly, and they will be uninterested in serving you. They will leave for another employer as soon as they can, forcing you to spend valuable time training someone else to take their place. And unhappy employees will be less productive.

A few employers may have read the Biblical warning to landowners not to reap crops to the very borders of their fields. Leave some, the passage says, for the poor, the widows, and the orphans. Capitalist ownership of land is not condemned. Too much capitalist efficiency is.

 

Past Wrongs; Present Choices

Few Americans under forty remember the seizure of the American embassy in Iran in 1979 by Iranian radicals, followed by the imprisonment of fifty-two American diplomats for 444 days. Many hostages, after their release, went on to productive lives. Others suffered severe emotional damage that they and their families carry to this day because of torture and inhumane conditions.

The Cuban revolution happened in the late fifties, many years before the Iranian crisis. It affected more people, however, and Cuban-Americans live among us who fled Castro’s dictatorship since then and who can tell us of wrongs committed by that government.

Both Iran and Cuba practice human rights violations. But some of our allies do also. Saudi Arabia and Egypt come to mind. That does not excuse their human rights abuses. It means that we find it in our interests to have diplomatic ties. Choosing not to have relations appears to do nothing to stop human rights violations.

We broke ties with Cuba half a century ago because it was a nation on our doorstep allied with the Soviet Union. The Cuban missile crisis was real, but the Soviet Union no longer exists. Neither Russia nor Venezuela (a supporter of Cuba) are able to offer the aid they once did.

Iran is more difficult. Iran wants to become a major power in the Middle East. If Iranians are not subject to nuclear inspections, they will most likely develop a nuclear weapon. If they are subject to inspections, they have less chance of doing so.

We tried military intervention in Iraq. It cost us dearly and multiplied our problems in the Middle East. Why do we suppose any military “solution” we might inflict on Iran would end differently? Get real.

While accepting that we have serious concerns with both countries, can we not forge a more intelligent relationship with Cuba and Iran? One that has more chance of success than failed policies of the past?

 

Wanted: Alternative Career Cycles

Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse, head of the Ruth Institute, made an interesting observation at a conference on demography and public policy. As women have entered the labor force, they have tended to fit themselves into a man’s career cycle.

When mostly men made up the labor force, the energy of young adulthood was the driving force in careers.

Young adulthood, however, is for women the ideal time to birth and rear children. Women are fitted with a biological clock that men don’t have.

We’re all different, of course, with different reactions to the seasons of life. Some women successfully birth and rear children in their thirties or even early forties. Others manage both career and family in their younger years. Some careers lend themselves to work at home or part time hours. Nor are all women called to become mothers.

Nevertheless, women remain the life producers. Get rid of motherhood and we become extinct. For the first few years of a child’s life, the mother appears the more essential parent for the child. It’s suggested that children who are breast fed for up to a year have an advantage over those who are not.

Perhaps we should make it easier for those women who choose motherhood to do so in early adulthood. After early nurturing, fathers might take on more child care while mothers add other interests, including careers. That would vanquish the “empty nest” syndrome as well as encourage men into a more balanced life. The old pattern of the career cycle may be outdated, even for men. Or for singles who want permission to drop out once in a while.

 

The Iranian Negotiations and World War I

Tower Red PoppiesWe are in the midst of the centenary for World War I. The recent placement of red ceramic poppies in the moat surrounding the Tower of London brought home its horror: a sea of red, 888,246 poppies, representing British commonwealth soldiers killed, only part of the estimated millions of deaths, civilian and military, for all the nations involved. Most of the soldiers were young men in the prime of life, forever unable to live the productive lives that would benefit their nations.

Today we acknowledge how horribly stupid this war was. A royal was shot in Serbia. Different nations lined up, driven by pride and perceived loyalty. Leaders thought the war would be a simple skirmish, over with in a short time. It wasn’t. Modern weapons changed the way wars are fought.

The reminder of that war, and the absurdity that so-called civilized nations allowed it to happen, caused me to examine more closely the Iranian nuclear deal that is going through the paces. I think I must support it.

Do we want to be part of another war in the Middle East? Look at the horrors unleashed by the last one we initiated.

World War I (and probably World War II, its continuation) wouldn’t have happened if nations had backed down, swallowed a little of their pride, been reasonable. But they didn’t. It wouldn’t have been a perfect deal for anyone but better than the alternative of WW I.

Negotiations are so much harder than starting a war, in the give and take, in the lack of complete victory for one side or the other. They are, however, superior to the alternative.