Tag Archives: Ann Gaylia O’Barr

Dying to Live

At least 27 migrants, including children, trying to reach Great Britain by boat from France were drowned recently in the English Channel when their boat capsized. Four smugglers who are suspected in the attempted crossing have been arrested.

The migrant families came only a few days after British and French authorities reached an agreement to try to stem the number of people taking to the sea. Both countries struggle to handle large numbers of migrants into their countries.

Thousands of people this year have attempted to cross from France to Britain after French authorities closed unauthorized refugee camps in France. Authorities also have cracked down on smugglers attempting to bring in asylum seekers inside trucks crossing through the Channel Tunnel.

Many migrants from countries in Africa and the Middle East prefer Britain as an ideal destination because of its English language, fellow citizens already there, or because the job market is more favorable to them.

On the other side of Europe, multitudes of refugees flowing through the country of Belarus have been blocked by barricades placed by Poland between Poland and Belarus. The European Union has accused Alexander Lukashenko (leader of Belarus since1994) of an organized campaign to use migrants as a weapon. He appears to have encouraged migrants from crisis regions including Afghanistan, Syria, and Iraq to fly to Belarus on tourist visas, then cross over into European countries. The migrants thus act as a threat against the countries who have criticized his rule.

Meanwhile, Mexico and the United States are the destination of refugees from Haiti and Central America, fleeing corruption and poverty, sometimes massing at border crossings. For years, American immigration policies have lacked responsible, humane goals and implementation.

Immigration done properly is a boon to developed nations. Immigrants are generally younger than the populations of receiving countries. They often revive economies with younger people and new workers. Massive flows, however, can be dangerous for the refugees and can strain the resources of countries they overflow.

Receiving democracies need co-ordinated immigration policies. Just as important are joint efforts to encourage more humane governments in sending countries to avoid massive outflows of their citizens.

Sweet Revenge for Stalin’s Gulag Archipelago

Joseph Stalin ruled the Soviet Union for a quarter of a century until his death in 1953. During that time, millions of people, dissidents and sometimes ordinary citizens with modest wealth, were sent to Soviet prisons as punishment. Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago chronicled their imprisonment.

What happened to these prisoners after their release?

The Economist (December 4th, 2021; “‘Levelling up’ at gunpoint”) pinpointed a study shedding light on this question.

Released prisoners, the study indicated, tended to settle close to where they were released, generally isolated regions of the Soviet Union. The dissidents often were well-educated. The study suggested that their choice, upon gaining freedom, was a boon for the regions where they settled. After the Soviet Union broke up, economic activity tended to grow rapidly where the released prisoners settled.

This result, the article suggested, is a revenge on Stalin’s inhuman practices: “Joseph Stalin did his best to wipe out perceived enemies.” Instead, their activities have “outlived the gulag by six decades.”

Green Technology Race

“When it comes to climate change, the United States should compete, not cooperate, with its rival.” (Andrew S. Erickson, Gabriel Collins; “Competition With China Can Save the Planet,” Foreign Affairs, May/June 2021)

The United States’ relations with China are among the most important in the world today. While the relationship is complicated, the authors suggest one area in which the U.S. should definitely compete, not cooperate.

The authors cite China’s commitment to coal technology, as seen by their continued building of coal-fired power plants. The authors believe that “cooperation” with China in the field of climate change would mean the U.S. would have to give up its own progress toward climate friendly energy generation.

Instead, they suggest, the U.S. should strengthen competition in green energy technology. “Carbon taxation now attracts serious attention on both sides of the Atlantic, and the world’s democracies are generally significantly ahead of China when it comes to both meaningfully pricing carbon and having the industrial energy-sourcing preconditions in place to make the transition to a future of net-zero carbon emissions viable.”

A race to find better energy technology? Much better than an arms race.

Daniel Boone and Native Americans

I grew up in Tennessee with a father who gave me a love of history, beginning with local and regional history. He told me about the pioneer Daniel Boone and his early settlement in Boonesborough in nearby Kentucky and how Boone lived for a time with native Americans.

In Matthew Pearl’s book The Taking of Jemima Boone, the stories I had learned as a child were fleshed out with Pearl’s research. Pearl begins with the capture of Daniel Boone’s daughter and two other young women by a Cherokee-Shawnee raiding party in July 1776.

The American Revolution began that month. The land’s original inhabitants would be called on to take sides in the struggle. The wiser ones knew that a win by either side would not be of benefit to them in their struggle to survive the coming of European settlers.

Pearl lays out the conflicts, the reasons, and the struggles of the time. We have celebrated America as a haven for the oppressed fleeing Europe’s wars and persecutions. Jemima Boone’s story and its long aftermath does not take from this story. Daniel Boone was portrayed as a decent individual, with feeling for his family as well as native Americans with whom he came in contact.

The coming of Boone’s people began in hope for inhabitants in the old world, those on the margins who now had the opportunity to better their lives in this new country.

But how does a country act as a sanctuary without the sanctuary being overwhelmed? The question exists for African villages, overwhelmed by fleeing refugees, as it did for America’s original inhabitants and does for the United States today and for Europe, pressed by desperate people on Europe’s borders.

The ultimate answers surely include actions which improve the lot of the sending countries. The ability of people who want to better their lives by moving is generally a spur to a more advanced society only if the numbers are not overwhelming.

In the meantime, the American story needs to be seen warts and all. Our great American experiment has been more costly than it should have been to some.

Owning Up to Our History

Tish Harrison Warren, a white Anglican priest, addressed the question lately roiling the political landscape: “Is America Willing to Tell the Truth About Its History?” (The New York Times, November 14, 2021)

“Yes, the white American church has sometimes conflated a sanitized story of America with Christianity to embrace loyalty to ‘God and country,’” Warren wrote.

As a child of the American south myself, I appreciated her commentary. I accepted, as children do, without reflection, the racism of my early years: the separate drinking fountains for “Colored” and the segregated schools.

I began to change as court decisions mandated an end to separate school systems. My undergraduate study was in an all white Southern Baptist college (at the time) in Alabama. Yet we students, especially in our church groups, discussed how wrong this segregation was. By the time I studied for a graduate degree in a state school in Georgia, it had changed. The school was integrated without, it appeared, whites thinking much about it.

Only much later, I confess, did it occur to me that I indeed had been favored by my white skin. I never had to think about my color when I applied for a job or went shopping or approached a teacher in school. I realized that any American of color, stepping into the larger society, knew that the people around them, even if not consciously racist, noticed first that the person before them was not white.

Within my lifetime, black Americans have been killed and mutilated by whites without the whites, at the time, in any way being called to account for their sins.

Do we need to understand this? Do we need to repent? Yes, we do. It can’t be said often enough.

The old South, where white school children, including myself, stood up for “Dixie” as they did for the national anthem, has to repent.

Russia’s Pet Poodle?

“The polarization of American society has become a national security threat.”

So writes Fiona Hill in “The Kremlin’s Strange Victory,” (Foreign Affairs, November/December 2021.) Hill served as an intelligence officer dealing with Russia and Eurasia under Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama.

In time, Hill writes, the United States has moved surprisingly close to Russia “as populism, cronyism, and corruption have sapped the strength of American democracy.”

Especially under President Donald Trump, the country moved in the direction of Vladimir Putin’s Russia. Trump, according to Hill, admired Putin, who “adjusted Russia’s political system to entrench himself in the Kremlin.”

Trump desired to do the same thing, she writes. “He saw the United States as an extension of his other private enterprises: the Trump Organization, but with the world’s largest military at his disposal.”

Americans must defeat the corruption of the American political system as well as deny Putin the ability to exploit America’s current dangerous divisions. Politicians should cooperate with the private sector, Hill says, “to cast light on and deter Russian intelligence operations and other efforts to exploit social media platforms.”

She suggests the importance of investing in people to tackle “inequality, corruption, and polarization.”

Keeping a democracy in this age of social media takes discipline: to read newspapers instead of tweets, to read a book instead of depending on visual media.

Democracy without discipline dies. It’s much easier to follow a Hitler or a Putin or a Trump, loud voices untethered to any life lived in the service of others.

Cold War Nostalgia

Reading Ben Macintyre’s The Spy and the Traitor, I was tempted to yearn for those Cold War days when friends and enemies and goals seemed more easily defined.

Macintyre’s recounting of a Soviet Union diplomat who spied for Britain during the Cold War is both fascinating and a bit nostalgic. We knew who our enemy was. In the United States, Democrats and Republicans actually cooperated for the good of the country.

Most important, World War III did not happen. Unlike the first half of the twentieth century, neither superpower desired a major war, though misunderstandings and challenges brought that war perilously close at times. The spy’s courage in passing information about our enemies may have contributed to this avoidance of a nuclear war.

Yet even while the glory days of the late 1980’s and early 1990’s played out, forces emerged to challenge our smugness. Racial sins haunted and divided us. Respect for our history too often turned into a worship of country. New role models challenged old ideas.

No need to yearn for the past. Struggles, temporarily hidden by those Cold War days, have emerged, requiring our attention, finally.

The problems we face today call for the same courage shown then by leaders of both parties: respect for those with whom we disagree; avoidance of self-serving propaganda; disregard for unfounded allegations spread today by social media.

We are all fallible human beings. No one of us has perfect truth. A respectful coming together with a bit of humility may overcome dangerous trends toward demagoguery.

Where the Light Fell

When the author Philip Yancey was a baby, his father contracted polio and died. Today, few Americans give thought to that horrible disease, arriving without any seeming purpose, crippling some, killing others.

Yancey doesn’t remember his father’s death. He only learned as a young man of his parents’ decision to remove his father from the hospital and its life saving equipment “against medical advice.” The couple had planned to be missionaries. They believed God would heal Yancey’s father so the couple could carry out what they believed to be their mission.

When the father died instead, Yancey’s mother dealt with this crisis of faith by offering up her two sons to be missionaries in the couple’s place. Yancey comes to realize: “My brother and I are the atonement to compensate for a fatal error in belief.”

Yancey’s book is the story of the sons’ journeys through this awful blood sacrifice. His brother, a talented young man, chose a devastating route out of the destiny his mother planned for him.

Yancey also fought against the legalistic straight jacket placed on him by his mother and some of the churches and colleges he attended. He began his own study of books and writings that opened both his mind and his spirit. He fell in love and knew a joy he had never known before.

Unexpectedly, in a college prayer meeting, he opens up and actually prays—at first defiantly against a God he doesn’t care for—but something happens. His honest prayer begins what is perhaps his first true experience of God’s grace.

Yancey’s story (Where the Light Fell) and his other writings bridge the gap felt by many who struggle within legalistic churches that too often have failed to understand what Jesus lived and taught.

 

Culture and the Christian Faith

The Christian faith, over time, has refused to be bound by one culture. Beginning in the Middle East through a few Jewish followers, it broke the bounds of those who wanted it tied only to that nationality.

It refused to be bound by Greek speakers, spreading to the western Roman empire. When the new religion of Islam devastated Christian empires in the east, it grew in Europe.

Eventually, it burst the bounds of church/state unions in Europe. Kings tried to own it, but segments broke away from a church/state identity and spread, especially in the New World. Amazingly, Christianity began to grow in a new arena that refused any ties to state domination.

Over the centuries, Christianity keeps discovering new areas of growth: against slavery and racism and worship of money. Against nationalism.

Christians still struggle not to be dominated by outside interests: class, wealth, politics, power. In the United States, a too-close identification with American culture has led to declines in some groups.

But one of the faith’s strengths is that defeat leads it to find new arenas for growth.

Touching the Sore Spot

“No one wants to have a sore spot touched, and therefore a society with so many sores reacts strongly when someone has the courage to touch the sore and say, ‘You have to treat that. You have to eliminate that. Believe in Christ and be converted.’” (Oscar Romero, Quoted in Plough, Autumn 2021, “Daring to Follow the Call”)

Oscar Romero, a Roman Catholic archbishop, was a critic of armed groups in El Salvador and a spokesperson for the poor. He was assassinated in 1980 by an unknown assailant.

At the same time as I read of Romero, I was reading about bloody religious battles in 1500’s Europe over efforts to reform what had become an unbelievably corrupt religious system. Criticizing established institutions is not a job for the cowardly.

We Americans are like anyone else in our desire to be proud of our culture and our institutions. They are ours. They are us. We don’t enjoy seeing them criticized.

Yet no human institution is without error. To worship an institution or a country or a leader is not only idolatry. It also cuts off efforts to heal and overcome imperfections, to become, never perfect, but better and more useful.

Many sore spots are being touched today. If we are wise, we will not react with hatred or fear but with the ability to listen and change and heal. Perhaps even to love our neighbors as ourselves—including our critics.

I am God Politics

Recently, during a local election in our normally quiet small town, political fighting has turned ugly. Election signs have been vandalized and hateful words exchanged.

Why?

Most of us say we believe in a peaceful exchange of power according to what the voters decide. Traditionally, the candidates campaign, the voters cast ballots, the votes are counted, and the one with the most votes wins. While the electoral college may cause problems in the presidential election, simple rule by majority is normally the case in local elections.

This November we are electing members of the local school board and our city officials. The vindictiveness of national politics has affected even these elections.

The idea of the gracious loser is an American tradition. John McCain, in his concession speech on losing the election to Barack Obama in 2008, gallantly wished Obama his support and praised the system that elected him and dealt McCain his loss.

Recently, too many of us have spurned his example, nationally and locally. Instead, we’ve chosen to act like those who support charlatans like Putin in Russia or dictators like Lukashenko in Belarus. Some of it is a clinging to power, but some of it, I think, is an arrogance that presumes we have complete truth.

We choose democracy precisely because no one has complete truth. The best we can do is let the majority rule. We have freedom of expression to state ideas peacefully challenging the majority. In the extreme, if one disagrees with the majority, one may offer civil disobedience, but even this should be peaceful, not a presumption that we have eternal truth. We are all imperfect human beings.

It is supreme arrogance to disrespectfully treat those with whom we disagree. We are all imperfect human beings.

Pledge of Allegiance in Saudi Arabia 1991

The first Gulf War, forgotten by most Americans by now, ended when Iraqi forces under Saddam Hussein were pushed out of the small country of Kuwait in February,1991. U.S. President George H. W. Bush chose not to send U.S. forces further north into Iraq but to end the war with Kuwait’s liberation.

Saddam’s forces had taken over Kuwait in August, 1990. The reason for U.S. entry into this regional conflict was fear that Saddam would continue his southern march and send his troops into Saudi Arabia’s oil fields. The Iraqi dictator would end up controlling much of the world’s oil, as well as a country we considered an ally.

I had arrived at my first diplomatic posting in December, 1990, at the U.S. consulate in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. The U.S. push into Kuwait began a few weeks later. To say this time was an exciting introduction to working abroad in my chosen profession is an understatement.

No one knew the outcome, of course, when I arrived in Jeddah. Understandibly, Americans, Saudis, and other nationalities greeted our victory—after a short, anxious-ridden few weeks—with jubilation.

That spring, Americans working at the consulate gathered for a Memorial Day ceremony before the consulate flag. I don’t think I’ve ever joined with fellow Americans in a more heartfelt Pledge of Allegiance.

I think about that time in our quibbling over whether some meeting or other opens with the Pledge, or whether this person or that one is patriotic enough. I see such arguments as childish quibbling. Whether one does or does not say the Pledge should be a heartfelt personal choice. We are not, I hope, some dictatorship that requires mouthing loyalty oaths.

Breaking the Cycle: Hope

My mother’s father came down from the mountains of east Tennessee to the big city of Nashville and began working in an iron foundry. My father’s father also moved from rural Tennessee to the big city and found employment as a policeman.

Something happened in the next generation. By the time my brother and I came along, our parents were solidly middle class. They sidestepped aimless lives that trapped some of their brothers and sisters.

Both my parents underwent a spiritual transformation when they were in their teens. Something happened to them that shot them away from ruinous personal choices. A sense of hope gave them meaning and purpose and a sense of responsibility.

My parents were disciplined with their money, saving from modest salaries so their children received the college education they themselves were unable to enjoy.

Except for buying a house, my parents never went into debt. We had health insurance, which kept medical emergencies from overwhelming us. When my father died at the age of fifty-three from a heart attack, his provision of life insurance kept us going, along with our paid-off house, the social security my mother received as a widow with two children, and her modest job as a school secretary.

All these programs benefitted my parents, enabling them to give their children a good start in life. Today’s generational poor need access to jobs that pay a living wage. They need health insurance that stresses good health habits and prevents medical emergencies from ruining family finances. But it may be up to families, ministers, and teachers to instill hope and purpose.

Pax Victoriana and Pax Americana

Julia Baird’s Victoria the Queen, a detailed biography of Britain’s Queen Victoria, highlights that long nineteenth century when Britain became a world power. The nineteenth century, most of which was during her reign, belonged to Britain, it is said, as the twentieth century belonged to the United States.

The accomplishments of Britain in the nineteenth century were many; nevertheless, the author also delves into the shortcomings of her times. They include the terrible legacy left by the superiority many Europeans felt over the rest of the world. A little over a decade later, some of the failings of Victoria’s time became evident in two world wars.

What about the United States and the twentieth? We saved the world for democracy, yet have difficulty keeping democratic rule for ourselves.

We have never been able to rid ourselves of what Jim Wallis, of Sojouners, calls our “original” sin—that of enslaving Africans and refusing to recognize and repent of that sin. Even today, white supremacists march in calls for rule by whites only.

Who will the twenty-first century be named after?

Wretched Refuse

“Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!” (Emma Lazarus, 1883)

Once again, the tempest-tossed find their way to the United States. They join a long line of previous refugees—escapees from Europe’s religious wars in the 1600’s; then joined through the centuries by the poverty-stricken, seeking economic opportunity; followed by survivors from Nazi concentration camps; then the “displaced persons” of World War II; then Koreans, Vietnamese, Iraqis, and now Afghans.

In between, the descendants of black slaves and native Americans have fought prejudice. From south of our border, economic migrants added to the mix.

Our population history is a mixture of marvelous acceptance and depraved hatred. Yet, from these struggles, the country has continually been blessed by new life.

Nobel prizewinners and philanthropists, inventors and scholars—as well as ordinary business owners and stalwart middle class citizens have descended from this jumble.

May God give us the grace and wisdom to once again be blessed by this newest “wretched refuse.”

Decline of Religion

According to one academic study, religious practice in the world appears to be declining:

“From about 2007 to 2019, the overwhelming majority of the countries we studied—43 out of 49—became less religious. The decline in belief was not confined to high-income countries and appeared across most of the world.” (Ronald F. Inglehart, University of Michigan, “Giving up on God; the Global Decline of Religion,” Foreign Affairs, September/October 2020)

A previous study analyzing 49 countries from 1981-2007 had found that 33 of the 49 countries had become more religious. The 33 countries included most former communist countries, most developing countries, and even a few high income countries.

The more recent study, however, showed that religion was practiced less even in many lower income countries.

Inglehart concluded: “Modern societies have become less religious in part because they no longer need to uphold the kinds of gender and sexual norms that the major world religions have instilled for centuries.”

What is interesting for me, however, in a personal look into Christianity’s place in the world today, is how it is, this moment, continuing its tradition of breaking new barriers.

In times past, religion in western societies usually revolved around families and communities. Schools, politics, and other forms of civic life tended to uphold norms held by the majority. Religion included a kind of civil religion, generally Christian or Jewish.

Mass migration of young people away from birth communities as well as modern inventions like social media have played havoc with community norms. The multi-generational family long ago gave way to the nuclear family which gave way to young people setting up single person households or with a significant other. Religion as encouraged by family suffered greatly.

Now, however, a next generation Christianity is proving that Christianity is not dead but evolving, perhaps closer to the model lived by Jesus.

A minority, but a significant minority, are espousing issues like racial reconciliation and care for the struggling—the homeless, the mentally ill, and the migrant, to name a few.

From the time the disciple Peter struggled to accept Gentiles into the Jewish Christian community, Christians have broken bounds, sometimes willingly, sometimes after fallow periods—but the conquest first named in a letter from the missionary preacher Paul continues today: “There is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female, for you all one in Christ Jesus.”

Vaccines Then and Now

I grew up in the dark ages. Children died from diseases like polio and measles. I remember attending a funeral for a young girl in my neighborhood who died of complications from measles. Another child died of complications from polio. A classmate was crippled by this disease. We saw images of children in “iron lungs”—large metal tubes they lived in to help them breathe after suffering polio. Measles could be a short childhood illness or it could kill or blind a child.

My parents were constantly worried about my brother or me catching one of these horrible sicknesses. We came back early from a vacation because a polio epidemic had suddenly broken out where we were planning to visit. During the summer, swimming pools required swimmers to get out of the water every hour and rest for ten minutes because overexertion might encourage the disease. Nobody complained about this restriction harming their civil rights.

Of course, we had immunizations against some diseases. Death and serious illness from small pox and typhoid no longer visited whole populations as they once had. My great aunt told of almost dying from typhoid, with a fever so high, she said, that her hair had fallen out.

Immunizations against these diseases were given each year in our public schools. The county nurse would make the rounds inoculating all students against the diseases for which we had vaccines.

When vaccines against polio came out, parents rushed their children to schools to be vaccinated—it was midsummer, as I remember—but schools opened for mass inoculation. Almost immediately, the fear of polio vanished in this country because almost every child had been vaccinated against it. It was a miracle.

If only, I remember thinking, the vaccine had come out a few months or a year earlier, my classmate’s life could have been saved.

With this history and these memories, I have a hard time understanding the massive resistence to vaccines. To me, science and vaccines and modern medicines are a gift God has given us with the power to create good for the world’s people.

Evacuations from Harm’s Way

Following recent events in Afghanistan, I’m reminded of my own two departures from danger zones, as a U.S. Foreign Service officer. Mine were much less harrowing than the departures in Afghanistan.

Mentors for my orientation class in the Foreign Service told us we could expect at least one evacuation experience during our career.

Mine came in Algiers in 1993. Groups wishing to bring back a more fundamentalist government in Algeria began attacks against foreign interests. It seemed prudent to draw down embassy personnel. My job there as an economic reporting officer was deemed nonessential, and I was ordered to leave Algeria.

I flew out on a crowded commercial plane to Paris, where I spent an interesting afternoon and evening exploring the City of Light, attempting to make myself understood in very broken French. Eventually, I was reassigned to the U.S. consulate in Montreal, Canada.

My second exit, from Dhahran, Saudi Arabia, was a more serious affair. Americans in that country had been killed in attacks specifically targeting them, including one on a compound housing Americans. This followed the beginning of the second Gulf War in 2003. In this one, I managed to remain until my tour was up, then left by a commercial flight after being driven to nearby Bahrain.

Even this one, of course, never approached the danger level of the evacuations in Afghanistan.

I pray for those in danger, foreigners and Afghans. I pray that one day, the country may become a safer place, as well as free for women. I pray for God’s help in figuring out the complex world we live in. I pray for an appreciation of differences and respect for those with whom we disagree.

Syria and Dante’s Inferno

“. . . the Syrian conflict, with its bloodshed, destruction and human suffering, seemed immune to all our efforts to find a diplomatic solution.” (William Roebuck, “Raqqa’s Inferno: A Diplomat Reads Dante in Syria,” The Foreign Service Journal, May 2021.)

Such are the words of a weary U.S. diplomat, retiring after a 28-year career, on his last assignment to war-torn Syria, another country ripped apart by a dictator’s desire to hang on.

My own diplomatic career didn’t take me to places as devastated as he experienced. I was assigned to Saudi Arabia for two wars with Iraq and was in Algeria at the start of civil conflict, but I was never close to the terrible suffering recounted in Roebuck’s article. Nevertheless, I identify with the hopelessness of conflict which never seems to cease.

Lacking easy hookups to the internet, Roebuck caught up on his reading in off hours, including Dante’s classic Inferno. This is Dante’s literary picture of his imaginary journey through concentric rings of Hell.

Roebuck fits his daytime journeys into Syria’s destruction with his evening reading of Dante: “I had never seen anything like it—blocks and blocks where every single building had been hit. Slabs of concrete jutted out at wrong angles, like fractured limbs broken beyond any cast would ever repair. More concrete hung from blasted ceilings, dangling in a mesh of wrinkled steal rebar like insects caught in some horrific, oversized spider web.”

At night Roebuck returned to the Inferno. “Dante’s intense, bizarre, even grotesque imagery seemed to my mind to capture the depth of suffering and destruction in Syria.”

The situation in Syria is still bleak, but Roebuck took some comfort in the defeat in Syria of the Islamic radical group, ISIS, leading to a chance for recovery.

In the Inferno, Dante eventually makes his way out of the underworld, where he then notes a refreshing view of the stars. Roebuck compared that to evidences of life again in the broken towns of Syria: some refurbished schools, a bit of night life, families chatting on carpets outside their homes.

Fulbright Scholarships and Segregation

It’s one of those paradoxes—America’s sometimes heroic leadership in the post World War II era and its torturous dealings with its racist sins at the same time.

A recent article in Foreign Affairs about J. William Fulbright, a senator from Arkansas from 1945 to 1974, mirrors this struggle. (Charles King, “The Fulbright Paradox,” July/August 2021).

Fulbright’s name is attached to the famous scholarship awards program begun in 1946. The program has allowed thousands of American and foreign students to study each other’s learning and culture.

Senator Fulbright also led the successful fight to end Senator Joseph McCarthy’s reign of terror. McCarthy’s false conspiracy theories had destroyed careers and people’s lives.

In addition, Fullbright began hearings on the Vietnam war in 1966. Testimony was taken from numerous people, including John Kerry, then a young anti-war veteran of the war. Kerry’s testimony is remembered to this day for his question: “How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake?”

Here is Fulbright, then, espousing such liberal causes as opposition to the war.

But Fulbright shows another side to his character: “In 1956, Fulbright signed the Declaration of Constitutional Principles, also known as the Southern Manifesto . . . .The document codified southern resistance to racial integration . . .”

The idea of black Americans in Arkansas having as much power through voting as white Arkansans was simply, for him, a bridge too far.

Though he could advance learning and understanding between nations and could see the folly of Vietnam, he, like many Americans today, could not see our own racial sins.

As King writes: “He was a figure who committed his life to global understanding yet found it impossible to apply the same ideals to his homeland. What seems like a contradiction in Fulbright’s outlook, however, is really a blind spot in Americans’ own. Ths combination of open-mindedness abroad and bigotry at home was not unique to him.”