Category Archives: May You Live In Interesting Times

Falling Out of a Canoe: Learning to Live in Disorderly Times

Attending a canoe school years ago, I fell out of the canoe the first day. The second day, I and my teammate managed to overcome a series of rapids, including unsticking ourselves from a rock without capsizing.

Unlike canoeing, which we don’t have to attempt, we have no choice in negotiating the currents of a disorderly world. And according to a U.S. diplomat retiring after a 38-year career, the world isn’t going to improve in the near future:

“If you look at the world, you have to conclude that in the coming generation, the forces of disorder are going to be as challenging as we’ve seen them over the last 10 or 15 years . . . . learning to navigate effectively in that kind of a world is extremely important.” (William J Burns, The Foreign Service Journal, November 2014,)

Burns, encouraged U.S. diplomats to “conduct diplomacy amidst disorder.” The advice could serve any of us attempting to live rightly amidst the disorder of the day. Religious, political, and cultural institutions all swim in a turbulent current.

We choose our direction and steer as best we can. If we fall out, we get back in and use what we’ve learned. What we don’t do is allow the rapids to freeze us. We keep propelling our chosen boat despite the disorder.

 

Tiptoing Through Public Speech

 

Changing MindsIt’s difficult these days to express opinions.

Brendan Eich, the head of the company behind the web browser Mozilla Firefox, resigned in April after boycotts of Mozilla due to Eich’s opposition to gay marriage. Eich’s view were praised/lambasted. Then Eich’s decision to step down was praised/lambasted by the opposite group.

When nonprofit World Vision changed its policies to recognize civil marriage between same sex employees, the organization was praised/lambasted. Sponsors of poverty-stricken children in developing countries quit in droves because of the decision. Apparently, they cared more for their views than for the children. Later, when World Vison chose to rescind this decision, the non-profit was praised/lambasted by the opposite group.

Pretty soon, none of us will risk saying what we really think. The ability to inflict monetary and other harm on those who disagree with us makes honest civil debate an endangered species.

 

Bonhoeffer For Today: Discipleship Still Costs

One of my book groups chose to read The Cost of Discipleship by Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the Christian pastor murdered by the Nazi’s toward the end of World War II. Bonhoeffer, a pacifist by inclination, chose to oppose Hitler’s reign of terror and was imprisoned, then executed.

His work with the “confessing church” in Germany before his imprisonment echos in today’s confused times. He ministered during the 1930’s, before World War II, when many Germans, including Christians, were mesmerized by Hitler’s oratory, a balm to humiliation suffered after World War I.

Bonhoeffer wrote when belief in Christendom still existed in Europe and America, a belief that the Christian religion was paramount in Western countries. However, the lack of genuine Christian living, he believed, encouraged the rise of Nazism. It allowed a charlatan, one who could blind multitudes with spell-binding, hate-filled speeches, to lead them toward the creation of the Holocaust.

Christians in Germany, he wrote, “drank of the poison which has killed the life of following Christ.” And in another place: “The prices we are having to pay today in the shape of the collapse of the organized Church is only the inevitable consequence of our policy of making grace available to all at too low a cost.”

If Bonhoeffer wrote today, would he claim that Christians’ lack of discipleship, not political changes or the new atheism or the Internet, has encouraged the moral atmosphere in which we live? Perhaps he would say it is the way we have NOT lived that has led to the abandonment of our faith by so many.

 

Seattle Seahawks and Togo, Africa

Pete Carroll, the Seattle Seahawks coach whose team won the super bowl in 2014, spoke to a reporter about, of all things, Iraq. Caroll, according to the reporter, is passionate about bringing out the best in people, including his players.

The reporter quotes Carroll as supposing that “we sent 10,000 people to Iraq as peacefully as we could go. And we walked wherever they would let us go, and we just talked to people and listened to what their issues were. And then we tried to figure out the best way we could to support them and change things . . .”

The idea is to listen to people and answer their call, not “tell them what to do,” Carroll said.

Recently I read an article in State Magazine about seven tiny programs in a small African country off the beaten path. Few Americans have heard of the country, Togo. It has few agencies of the U.S. government working there, just the State Department and the Peace Corps. Recently, however, the American embassy partnered with the U.S. Department of Defense and with local communities to use a small amount of money available for humanitarian assistance.

Projects were suggested by the community, a grassroots kind of process. Completed projects included school construction, clinics, and a waste transfer station. They were well-received by the Togolese. They were, after all, what the communities identified as needed.

Amazing what happens when you stop talking long enough to listen to people.

 

Those Who Don’t Know History . . .

Leonard Pitts, a syndicated columnist who writes in the Miami Herald, asks: What if different directions were taken in our policies toward the Middle East in the past? Would we now be planning campaigns against the ISIS forces in Iraq and Syria?

One “what if” question concerned, not officials, but the American people. What if, Pitts asked, the American people in 2003 had asked for better proof that weapons of mass destruction actually existed in Iraq? That was the reason given us for that war. As it turned out, the “intelligence” for those weapons turned out to be flimsy at best, if not actually a calculated falsehood.

The mistake not only cost us lives and wealth. Our entry into Iraq caused the sudden fall of Saddam Hussein without any clear understanding of the ethnic cleavages that would result. His removal without adequate planning for the aftermath allowed ISIS to develop.

So we are back again. Perhaps if we had not gone that first time, had asked more questions . . .

 

What Do We Do With Our Soul Issues?

When I worked as an American consular officer in other countries, our most difficult cases dealt with child custody issues, that is, with the children of divorced American/non-American marriages. In one case, the father, divorced from the American mother, refused to let her visit their child. He told me that the mother’s influence could result in his child’s spending eternity in hell.

Faith issues can cause conflict because they often deal with what are regarded as life or death issues—including eternal life and death. Extremist organizations like ISIS believe it is their duty to force their perception of religion on all in order to, in their minds, save society.

Reactions to such attitudes can lead some to an opposite extreme: disavowal of all religion. Religion is bad, they say, and results in fighting and warped views. Yet, faith also leads some individuals to dedicate their lives to helping others—to fight inhumane prison systems, for example, or to work with Ebola victims, or to advocate decent working conditions for laborers.

If we truly believe in God, it is rather foolish to take on the role of God ourselves. If we believe in a God of power, we witness to our beliefs, but trust God to handle the results.

 

 

Age of the Het Up

To be het up over something is an old-fashioned phrase, similar to getting bent out of shape. Something angers us. A lot of us are het up these days. Politics, perhaps, or the NFL, or religious issues.

Being het up may lead us to organize for righting wrongs. Some activities, like human trafficking, should make us het up.

Serious forms of het up include the recent Scottish movement for separation from Great Britain. Extremely lethal forms include al-Qaeda and ISIS.

Reaction is a natural response to times and processes that affect us. Liberalism sparks a conservative reaction and conservatism a liberal reaction. Religious emphasis on grace may change to an emphasis on works and vice versa. Trends toward strict parenting and permissive parenting swap places through the decades.

In areas of the world thrust suddenly into modern times in the past century or so, reaction to change is understandable. Encouraging the survival of a culture that offers identity is acceptable. Murdering innocents is not.

A wise society allows challenges to the status quo. Those challenging it have the obligation to challenge it within civilized bounds. Allowing differences that don’t destroy community means finding a balance. The rules include respect for the one who may not agree with you.

 

No Shock and Awe This Time

 I finished a late night visit to a morgue in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia, in March, 2003, where I was working at the U.S. consulate. For months, the U.S. and its allies had prepared for a war with Iraq, two countries to the north of us. Meanwhile, a lone terrorist had killed an American working in Dhahran, and his identity must be verified to notify next of kin. After my return to the consulate, I phoned the victim’s boss to brief him. He informed me that the air war with Iraq had begun with the bombing of Baghdad. Utterly exhausted, I stood in the desert breeze and hoped the campaign was going to be over with as quickly as the first Gulf war over a decade before.

This one was to be, so we were told, a brief campaign of shock and awe, after which we would conquer Iraq and be greeted as liberators. The war lasted over eight years, and by then, Americans had become increasingly unpopular in Iraq and most of the Middle East.

The current proposal to destroy ISIS appears more realistic. No optimistic blitz. It is anticipated to last beyond the tenure of our current president. Ground fighting will be left to local armies, not U.S. combat forces. Syria, where the conflict began, will be included in the campaign.

Kenneth M. Pollack, at the Brookings Institution, also presented a more sober assessment of any conflict which intends to ultimately defeat Bashar al-Assad. The Syrian dictator’s brutal tactics led to the current situation. Pollack’s observations are found in the September/October 2014 issue of Foreign Affairs. He proposes American support of a new Syrian army and political structure. It not only would defeat Assad but support the aftermath with the establishment of “a functional, egalitarian system of government.”

If carried out, a big “if” as Pollack realizes, it would overcome the peace that so defeats us in these wars: “a victory by one side, followed by a horrific slaughter of its adversaries . . .”

Do we have enough patience to act as midwife to such a slow birthing?

 

America and ISIS: Guns Blazing or Sergeant Alvin York

 Alvin York was an east Tennessee hillbilly who received the Congressional Medal of Honor in World War I. He led nine American soldiers in capturing 132 German combatants after half his original group of Americans had been killed.

York was an uneducated religious man who hated war and fought in World War I only because his request for conscientious objector status was denied. He reluctantly came to believe that the war to defeat Germany was justified. He followed a similar path before World War II, convinced by the actions of Hitler’s Nazis that his country should enter battle to defeat them.

York, however, spent most of his adult life working to bring education to the disadvantaged poor of Tennessee. The fact that he is remembered mostly as a war hero and not for his other pursuits indicates our tendency toward misplaced values.

The U.S. savors the myth of the individual: the war hero who blasts his way to victory. York is sometimes pictured through that myth—the lone hero. York, however, had the help of the others in his unit. And he fought reluctantly. York’s other activities remind us of ideals that shape a country worth defending.

The confrontation with ISIS must be taken with the understanding that military involvement should be reluctant and in consultation with allies. We should acknowledge that other values, like inclusive government, are of more consequence.

 

Your Friendly Neighborhood ISIS or the Law of Unintended Consequences

 Why has this new group, the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS or just IS), which outstrips even al-Qaida in brutality, suddenly thrust its acts of horror into our living rooms?

In 1991, the United States led an international force that routed Iraqi forces who had invaded Kuwait. We fought that war to maintain world oil supplies. Saddam was threatening two major oil suppliers, Kuwait and Saudi Arabia.

Some cautioned that oil should not pull us into a shooting war in the Middle East and that a war fought for oil companies was immoral. At least the U.S. was wise enough not to advance into Iraq but stopped with the liberation of Kuwait, a country that asked for our help.

We should at least have understood the consequences. Middle Eastern violence would not stop with our defeat of Saddam, either in that war or the later one. Extremist factions in the Middle East resented interference by Western powers. They wanted Saddam defeated by Islamists and the restoration of Islamist empires of the past.

All are related to the humiliation of Islamist nations since the nineteenth century and the carving of spheres of influence in the Middle East by Western powers. Forces of secularization are clashing with centuries-old cultures. The accumulation of wealth by corrupt leaders also plays a part.

These issues were behind later terrorist incidents, including the attacks on our own country in 2001. They are a chief reason for the IS faction now.

 

Words Don’t Pay for Lives; Count the Cost Before Acting

 We could pay off the national debt if we had a dollar for every word uttered on how to handle the Middle Eastern crises (multiple). Words that detail the possible consequences of suggested actions probably couldn’t pay off one small underwater mortgage.

Today, I’m simply going to link to an article by Thomas Friedman in The New York Times, which does explore consequences.

 

 

Different Rules for Conflicts in the Twenty-first Century

 Our country’s enemies now are rarely nations but rather terrorists and guerilla foes. They carry out unspeakable atrocities against innocents. We are tempted to believe that a crushing military victory will rid us of their evil. Our victory in World War II tends to be the standard by which we measure all wars since.

Yet even that war was not a pure success. It left the Cold War in its wake, which we fought differently than World War II. Though we fought small wars, we avoided the big one between the Soviets and the West. Our military was essential for our protection, but we did not depend on military efforts alone or primarily. Diplomacy and development were tools that we used, not always wisely, but well enough that World War III was avoided.

More important were our victories over racism and poverty and prejudice that gave us the moral high ground in the waning days of the Cold War. Of course, such victories are never complete. We fight them again and again, even as we consider recent events in Ferguson, Missouri.

Defeating our enemies in the twenty-first century requires patience, not revenge. We must reassess our moral strengths: the worth of each individual, regardless of differences; opportunities for work that allow a decent standard of living; concern that the vulnerable among us are given chances to overcome the barriers that hold them back. We cannot win in Syria or Iraq or Afghanistan if we don’t nurture the moral high ground that divides us from our enemies.

 

Why We Need More News Junkies

 Why go beyond the usual celebrity news or sob stories marketed as entertainment?

In the words of Charles M. Blow, a columnist for The New York Times: “But if America, as the world’s last remaining superpower, is to faithfully play a role — if we must play that role — as a check against tyranny and terror in the world, its citizenry must be up to the task of discernment.”

I started this blog a few years ago after a return from several years overseas. My lifelong interest in global affairs led me to that job, then to write a blog with an emphasis on world events. My audience is the spiritually attuned news junkie. Or the morally attuned news junkie. Those whose commitments speak to a desire to discern wise choices, not see the news as one more sitcom.

As Charles Blow said: “We have a responsibility to stay abreast of the conflicts in the world so that we can support or reject our leaders’ efforts to navigate them.”

 

We Are All N

Recently, ISIS, the extremist state in Iraq, has forced Christians to choose between conversion to Islam, paying a fine, or “facing the sword.” Christians began leaving homes and culture that have been in the area since early Christianity. Their dwellings have been marked with an “N” for Nazarene.

A hash tag has appeared: #WeAreN. It identifies with the Christian “other” in Iraq. However, as Jim Wallis wrote in a column in Sojourners, those who take on the N designation are doing it in the name of all those excluded in one place or another: Jews, Christians, Sunni Muslims, Shia Muslims, Turkmens, Yazidis, and others.

This new form of acceptance has nothing to do with conversion. It simply signifies that we are all other when we identify with the persecuted of the world.

 

How A French Guy Shakes Up the Dismal Science

I was into journalism and history when I attended college. I took one course in economics. I don’t remember whether the two major ways of making money were discussed: 1) income from investments and 2) wages from jobs. Economics, sometimes referred to as the Dismal Science, has seen new life this year after a book was published by Thomas Piketty, a French economist. The book, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, examines what happens when wealth from investments grows faster than wages from jobs. Specifically, does the society become more unequal?

Piketty concludes that when investment growth exceeds wage growth, inequality increases in a society. His proposed solutions are controversial, but many economists believe that Piketty’s findings of inequality are correct.

One reviewer, who agrees with the inequality finding but not the offered solutions, suggests that cultural factors are more significant in increasing the wealth of individuals (Tyler Cowen, Foreign Affairs, May/June 2014). He points to the tendency of immigrants’ offspring to advance far beyond their usually poorer forebears. Cowan is not suggesting that upbringing is the only answer to inequality. He offers other aids for reducing inequality such as limiting tax deductions and improving education. Nevertheless, his emphasis on child rearing brings a neglected issue to the discussion on income inequality.

If proper raising of children is so important to our society, why do we make it difficult for parents to spend necessary time with their offspring? Other countries allow working mothers long maternity leaves, some stretching to years, to be with their children during their beginning years. But wouldn’t fathers also profit from career breaks to be full time parents for a season?

Childhood only lasts a few years, a much shorter time than most careers.

 

 

Malaysia Flight 17: Just Collateral Damage in the New World Order?

The tragic end of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17, which crashed Thursday, killing 298 passengers and crew, is a reminder of what some call “the new world order.” Evidence so far points to Flight 17’s downing by a rebel group in Ukraine, who may have thought they were shooting down a Ukraine military plane.

The new order challenges the bounds of the world order that came into favor at the end of World War II. The old order encourages representative government, fair trails, independent judicial systems, the will of the people over elites, and so on.

The new order operates with clandestine rules something like gang warfare. It is an in-between place of half truths or of outright lies told as truths, of might makes right. Ukraine is the latest battleground between the two orders.

Ukraine is a country left over from the Cold War. The progress of democracy in Ukraine since it left the failing Soviet Union in the heyday of the 1990’s was halting at best. Two steps backward followed one step forward. Corrupt leaders and their equally corrupt tycoon followers abetted the backward direction.

A movement apparently favored by a majority of Ukrainians (mostly Ukrainian speaking) recently tossed out the latest corrupt leader, who wanted to ally with Russia. They elected a new government. It signed an agreement with Europe, turning away from Russia. Russian speakers in the eastern part of Ukraine, unwilling to abide by the majority decision, rebelled and called on Russia for help.

Russia, still smarting from humiliation at losing the prestige it had during the Cold War, saw a chance to rebuild influence and territory. Russia has supported the rebels in various ways, short of outright invasion. The facts are murky as to how much help has been given. This type of situation illustrates “the new world order.” The strewn bodies of innocent victims is just collateral damage from what is really no order at all.

 

An Eye for an Eye, a Tooth for a Tooth, a Child for a Child?

The saying is attributed to Mahatma Gandhi: “If we practice an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth, soon the whole world will be blind and toothless.”

I thought of these words when reading about the killings of teenagers in Israel/Palestine, both Israeli and Palestinian.

As I understand it, the original commandment in the Old Testament about requiring recompense for injury (“eye for eye” and so on) was originally intended to require ONLY strict accounting for a wrongdoing. The purpose was the avoidance of revenge reprisals that often spiral out of control.

Christ set the bar higher for his followers: “But I say to you, Love your enemies . . .”

I thought of his command when I read another quote:

“Whether Jew or Arab, who can accept the kidnapping and killing of his son or daughter? I call on both sides to stop the bloodshed.”

–HUSSEIN ABU KHDEIR, a Palestinian whose 16-year-old son was found dead a day after the burial of three Israeli teenagers who were kidnapped and killed. Quoted in The New York Times.

Shall we continue taking child for child until no children are left?

 

 

Two Quotes on Iraq, Twenty Years Apart

1994:

“Once you got to Iraq and took it over, and took down Saddam Hussein’s government, then what are you going to put in its place? That’s a very volatile part of the world, and if you take down the central government of Iraq you can easily end up seeing pieces of Iraq fly off. Part of it the Syrians would like to have to the west. Part of eastern Iraq, the Iranians would like to claim, fought over for eight years. In the north you’ve got the Kurds, and if the Kurds spin loose and join with the Kurds in Turkey, then you threaten the territorial integrity of Turkey. It’s a quagmire.”

–Dick Cheney, former member, U.S. House of Representatives from Wyoming

2014:

“We have been engaged in the Islamic world at least since 1980, in a military project based on the assumption that the adroit use of American hard power can somehow pacify or fix this part of the world. We can now examine more than three decades of this effort.

Let’s look at what U.S. military intervention in Iraq has achieved, in Afghanistan has achieved, in Somalia has achieved, in Lebanon has achieved, in Libya has achieved. I mean, ask ourselves the very simple question. Is the region becoming more stable? Is it becoming more democratic? Are we alleviating, reducing the prevalence of anti-Americanism?”

–Andrew Bacevich; Professor of International Relations and History at Boston University

 

Iraq: How Do We Sort Out the Mistakes?

According to polls I have seen, most Americans now wish we had not invaded Iraq in 2003.

We lost lives and treasure, yet the reason given for the war—weapons of mass destruction—turned out to be a fabrication. No such weapons existed.

The reason proposed for our military campaign then became the chance to rid the country of a brutal dictator and establish democracy. Saddam Hussein was indeed destroyed. Democracy, however, appears a long shot.

Our foray into Afghanistan is far from a success story, but at least, as the country from which the terrorist attacks of 9/ll were launched, a basis existed for our military involvement. Some of our policies were unwise, and our belief in our power to change the country were unrealistic. However, an election with some rudiments of democracy, has occurred, albeit with the usual complaints of fraud.

Now Iraq is again on our radar screen, in a spillover from the Syrian tragedy.

We have invested heavily in that part of the world. Our past mistakes almost guarantee that whatever we do there in the near future has minimal chance for success. Whoever touches the region most likely will suffer political fallout because we tend to demand perfect solutions, and none exists in this case.

WeaponsGive weapons to the moderate forces in Syria? How do we keep the weapons from falling into the hands of the region’s extremists, as may be happening now in Iraq. Once provided, weapons cannot be recalled like peanut butter jars from a factory that we discover has sprouted salmonella.

Neither can our past foreign policy mistakes.

 

What Happens After the Next Sale at the Mall?

 

Walter Russell Mead, a professor at Bard College, writing in Foreign Affairs (May/June 2014) suggests that Americans and Europeans risk losing all that they have gained after the end of the Cold War. They are, he says, becoming “a narcissistic consumer with no greater aspirations beyond the next trip to the mall.” They are “unwilling to make sacrifices, focused on the short term, easily distracted, and lacking in courage.”

What happened to our victorious march to democracy in every corner of the globe?

Boris Yeltsin on tankFlying in a small plane over one of Saudi Arabia’s deserts in 1991, I read of the first attempt of the old Russian guard to bring back Soviet Russia after Gorbachev’s pivot toward the West. Boris Yeltsin, showing courage he lacked later in bringing true democracy to his country, stared them down and won the day. Russia appeared once more set on the road to what we call Western liberalism.

But something has happened on the way to the glorious finale of Soviet communism’s demise, of the Arab spring, and of nations on every populated continent accepting democratic ideals.

Every blessing, every progression seems to host a two-edged sword. The digital revolution has made neighbors of us all. It has revolutionized everything from medicine to street protests to Wall Street, yet we seem to have lost our ability to live for more than ourselves.

Is there hope? Probably not in the places of usual power—governments and corporations. If rescue comes, it will probably come in the guise of small communities of people deliberately deciding to live intentionally instead of grabbing for the most toys before dying.