17 November 2010

Thoughts On Building a More Perfect Union

After finishing Parting the Waters, I had a strong desire to read something a little more politically upbeat. Audacity of Hope is effective in its goal of giving me hope and left me a little more optimistic than before.

It is clear though that many of the changes he proposes wont be effected, which led to to wonder, what change in the American system would be most effective at shifting the social conscience of our nation? Are we largely shaped in the image of our parents or what are the external factors carry that carry the most influence over us? For instance, if all children receive more education in elementary school about the poverty of the bottom half of the world's population, would that lead them to become more socially liberal? What about mandating a community service component to students' learning from an early age? What if we took children from affluent schools to do activities with children from schools in poorer areas and vice versa? I believe that, if my personal aims in these proposals are ignored, most conservatives as well as liberals would agree they are generally wholesome additions to a child's education.

It is clear that most Americans want ours to be a meritocratic society, which we usually apply to financial standing, but what extending the idea of meritocracy to social beliefs also: we want a child from the morally worst household to have the support to become the most virtuous person. Would objective activities such as community service or pen pals in Africa change their world views?

Of course, their must be a strong critical analysis component to these activities because otherwise you might breed people who think debt-relief to African governments or direct budget supplements is a good idea (the problem is that these programs promote higher levels of corruption without a proportional increase in public outcry against the vice).

I was always raised to believe that education is central to shaping who you become and that it is one asset no one can take away from you. Maybe if we place weight on a well rounded and high quality education system in all corners of America, our future sons and daughters will make socially enlightened decisions on issues that are today vehemently debated.

12 November 2010

Date of My Return To the USA

I will be arriving in Portland, OR on March 9th, 2011.

Book Review and Subsequent Reflections: Parting the Waters

One of my goals before leaving Peace Corps was to finish reading Parting the Waters, an extensive biography of Martin Luther King Jr.'s involvement in the civil rights movement from 1954-1963.

Unfortunately, for our collective ego, a facile summarization of the book would be that it is a 922 page record of atrocities committed by Americans against our own people, in many instances receiving the tacit, and sometimes explicit, consent of individuals within the government. Here is one of the many graphic examples supporting this compendium:

At the beginning of the Freedom Rides to test the enforcement of desegregation of inter-state bus facilities, the local police formed a pact with local segregationists that they would not arrive at the scene for at least ten minutes. In this context, “a dozen men surrounded Jim Zwerg, the white Wisconsin exchange student [ who was on the Freedom ride . . . ] one man pinned Zwerg's head between his knees so that the others could take turns hitting him. As they steadily knocked out his teeth, and his face and chest were streaming with blood, a few adults on the perimeter put their children on their shoulders to view the carnage. A small girl asked what the men were doing, and her father replied 'Well, they're really carrying on.' ”

When the police did arrive they issued an injunction against the Freedom Riders, stating that they were under arrest for inciting violence, ignoring the fact that their movement was grounded in the principles of non-violence and blatantly disregarding all of the violent acts committed against them.

In light of these barbarous attacks and repression by city and state officials it would be reasonable to expect agencies such as the Federal Bureau of Investigation to aid in the prosecution of the true criminals. Conversely though, under Hoover's orders the FBI seemed primarily interested in falsely interpreting situations in a manner to suggest that King's associates were communist spies, directed by Moscow to subvert the United States government. Throughout this era, Hoover hid behind the supposed necessity of protecting implanted agents and informants as grounds for offering only unsupported accusations to the executive branch. To hide this affront to justice, after King was assassinated a federal judge ordered all FBI files related to King be sealed away, preventing public scrutiny of the FBI's groundless claims until 50 years later when a legal team fought, and won, the declassification of the files.

Reading these accounts within Parting the Waters, which are supported by an 82 page bibliography, makes me feel ashamed to be a human being and an American, and makes me distrust what we, the public, believe we know about the work of our government. If the same secrecy exists today that existed then, even Obama may not know exactly which lenses certain branches of our government are using to filter their presentations of information.

To put into a broader context why I am embarrassed, societies with a written history have existed since around 5,000 BC. A conservative estimate of the rise of the first democracy is 500BC, with the rise of Athens. In 1776 America began the journey towards democracy with the declaration of independence, at which point our founding fathers acknowledged as “self-evident, that all men are created equal” and that we have been endowed by our creator with “unalienable Rights, [ . . . ] Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.” It took roughly 200 years for these rights to be applied to Americans with more skin pigment than the founding fathers. In the broader context of colonialism and world slavery, it took approximately 6,960 years for these Rights to be nearly universally recognized across the globe (approximately 6,980 years for the dilatory South African government). Stated another way, minority groups have had their rights recognized for loosely 0.7% of recorded history and 2.4% of democratic history. These numbers of course are all debatable, and simply to to highlight the point that it has taken a very long time for civilizations to globally acknowledge equality based on skin color. Many people might even argue that we have not currently reached an acceptable recognition of Rights (consider, for example, people deemed “illegal aliens” by the government who have lived in America for almost their entire lives).

If something so basic has taken so long, what will happen now that our world is changing ever-more quickly, both ecologically and technologically? I am left feeling pessimistic that societies can pull together for the pressing, yet controversial, issue of transforming economies for the sake of environmental preservation.

Further, given the short time span over which “unalienable Rights” have been recognized as a preclusion to commit the atrocities of slavery and racially inspired violence, what should lead us to believe we have now reached a point where our social institution will forever dutifully protect basic human rights and freedoms?

Perhaps the problem is based on the observation of Reinhold Neibuhr (quoted in Parting the Waters), that “only in extremity do people 'discover what they really live by.' ” Only when a situation disrupts our complacency and rouses us from routine existence do we recognize an intrusion upon our core values. When we become complacent again, forgetting past struggles, so to may our application of rights wane.