A World Perspective

A World Perspective
Although I agree with Maya Angelou about the inappropriate paraphrasing of the "drum major" quotation, this quotation makes sense to me.

Thursday, December 5, 2013

A telling graphic...


With thanks to Khalil Sehnaoui and his post on Facebook, picked up by Anne O'Leary, a friend and colleague.

Friday, November 1, 2013

The publics are coming! The publics are here! The corporations are coming! The corporations are here!

A variation on the 1966 film "The Russians are Coming, The Russians are Coming" speaks to a steady pattern in international relations whose origins could be arguably be dated to the emergence of the nation-state but certainly is vivid today. Global publics are increasingly powerful, and we know that private firms are, too. This piece in The Atlantic - http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2013/10/the-real-reason-saudi-arabia-doesn-t-want-friendlier-us-iran-relations/281013/?utm_source=feedburner&&utm_content=Google+Feedfetcher#When:01:52:20Z (hat tip to the USC Public Diplomacy Center RSS) is only my most recent reminder of the commercial drive for profit in nascent or re-emerging markets, whether or not governments are ready for it. Where do the meanings of "public" and "governmental" and "private" begin and end? Ever boundary-spanning diplomats have to navigate and mediate between and across the overlapping interests and identities of civil society ethnic groups, co-religionists, unions and political activists (to mention just a few), their budget- and turf-conscious embassy and home ministry colleagues as well kick-start entrepreneurs and corporate giants. How? Public-private partnership -- a proliferating organizational patchwork with which scholars and government actors can barely keep up -- at our peril. In spite of the rise of independence-through-information and de- and self-regulation, these three dimensions of global society are interdependent and people still crave the rule of law and credible institutions. PPPs are coming! PPPs are here!  

Monday, October 21, 2013

Thirty years of loss to a family, a country, the world

I hold this Marine and his family in my heart, as I do others who suffered or perished in Beirut in 1983, and I continue to hope that we listen and learn together to emphasize inclusive listening, dialogue, and non-violent collaboration in our international relations.

  http://www.postandcourier.com/article/20131020/PC16/131029999/1009/beirut-30-years-later-james-island-family-remembers-lost-marine-father&source=RSS

Beirut 30 years later: James Island family remembers lost Marine father

  • Posted: Sunday, October 20, 2013 12:01 a.m., Updated: Sunday, October 20, 2013 2:20 p.m.
Jason Williams receives the flag that covered the casket of his father Scipio Williams during his father’s funeral in November 1983. Scipio Williams was killed in a truck bomb attack on an American barracks in Beirut on Oct. 23, 1983. Buy this photo


Janet Williams prayed that her husband had gone jogging that morning.

If you go

What: 30th anniversary memorial of the bombing of the Marine Corps Barracks in Beirut
Where: Jacksonville/Camp Lejeune, N.C. The Beirut Memorial is at the intersection of Lejeune Boulevard and Montford Point Road.
When: 10:30 a.m. Wednesday
Events: This is the cooperative, base-and-town event that is open to the general public. Other groups are holding smaller, mostly closed memorials during the week as well.
She knew his habits, so it was still a possibility. Besides being a tough Marine master sergeant, Scipio C. Williams Jr. was an early riser and a dedicated distance runner.

By the numbers

On Oct. 23, 1983, a truck packed with explosives attacked U.S. barracks in Beirut, killing U.S. servicemen. The dead included:
220 Marines
18 sailors
3 soldiers
A list of the victims is available at defense.gov.
But the early images on her 1980s television set weren’t giving her much hope. The video was a before-and-after shot of the four-story Marine Corps barracks in far-off Lebanon. The first scenes were of a fully intact building with guards out front. The cut-away was to dust rising from unrecognizable rubble.
Stretchers were lifting away bloody, wounded Marines.
For the next several days Williams watched and waited for any snippet of news of her husband — “so handsome, so good-looking,” she said of the man everyone outside the military called “Scip.”
Just after the children left for school, a station wagon pulled up in front of her James Island home. Four somber
officers, one of them a chaplain, stepped out.
“I was standing in this room here,” she recalled from her dining room table. “And I heard the car doors slamming.”
In the next hours, “MIA” would become “KIA” after Williams’ body was recovered.
Thirty years ago this week, the United States became the victim of its first mass suicide bombing. Shortly after 6 a.m. on Oct. 23, 1983, a truck packed with thousands of pounds of explosives rammed into the U.S. barracks compound in Beirut, killing 241 U.S. servicemen, most of them Marines, and wounding many others.
At least four of the losses came from South Carolina, including Scipio Williams, 35, a lifelong resident of Charleston.
In the aftermath, Janet Williams tried to be tough. She had two children to raise: a son, Scipio Jason, 8, and a daughter, Keysha, 13, both of whom attended their father’s funeral at the small Payne Reformed Methodist Church on rural James Island.
A photograph of young Scipio receiving a folded American flag that day would splash across newspapers and television screens. For years afterward, including at memorials for the families of the bombing victims — and during his own future career as a Marine — those who had served under Master Sgt. Scipio J. Williams would stare at the boy’s face.
The likeness to his father was that strong.
Married on 9/11

In 1982, President Ronald Reagan ordered 1,800 Marines to Beirut. It was new territory for many in America as the nation’s finest fighting force was sent to join a multinational peace-keeping mission in the sectarian-torn nation.
The goal was to stabilize Lebanon, by sheer presence of might, after years of fighting that had brought in factions from all over the Middle East, including Christian and Muslim militias, and the spillover between Israelis and Palestinians.
Not long into the mission, community anger began turning on the Marines, largely because Muslims began identifying their involvement as pro-Christian.
A first taste of what was to come surfaced in April 1983 when a van loaded with explosives struck the U.S. Embassy in Beirut, killing 46 people. The Marines slogged on, even as the rules of engagement prevented them from heavily fortifying their barracks at the international airport. The image was not to appear “warlike,” according to media reports.
All that happened, though, long after Janet met Scip.
She was in high school at C.A. Brown on Charleston’s East Side. He was stationed at Charleston Naval Base. The attraction was strong. They were married on Sept. 11, 1971.
True to the military life, they traveled the world. He was a fully committed Marine who had served two tours in Vietnam. What he thought would be his last assignment was stateside with other Marines at Camp Lejeune in North Carolina. It was close enough that he could come home on weekends to the one-story brick ranch the couple bought off of Fort Johnson Road on James Island.
When word came that he was being shipped off to Lebanon, Scip saw it as just another duty station in a 16-year career. He told her and the kids not to get out of the car or give him a hug or make a scene when it was time to go. He was like that.
“I don’t want you to tell me ‘Bye,’” he said to her. “I don’t want you to ever tell me bye. Just pull off.”
She did just that. And she regrets it to this day.
Marines in Lebanon

The peacekeeping aspect of the mission in Lebanon didn’t sit well with a lot of people. Marines would be limited on when they could carry weapons. In his letters home, Williams told his wife how uncomfortable the restrictions had made the men as they moved around outside the wire, seeing so many armed bands of militia members driving around on trucks and in a chanting frenzy.
He had been encouraged to wear street clothes in public. Photographs he sent hone showed him seated on the barracks roof dressed in a casual blue sweatshirt and pants, not his camos.
Eventually, the Marines became targets of rifle-toting snipers and attackers with other weapons. “I knew before the bombing he was ready to come home,” Janet Williams said.
She has talked to Marines who survived the blast, but she never got a good fix on what Scip was doing in the last hours of his life. She does know he got up and sang “My Girl” at a USO show before his final days.
Historians would later declare the blast the deadliest attack on the Marines since the landing on Iwo Jima during World War II,
The attack was pegged to Iran and the terror group Hezbollah. But the Marine leadership also faced sharp criticism for allowing a state of poor security that led to their massive loss of life. Reagan pulled the U.S. forces out of Lebanon four months after the blast.
Still, nothing would stop young Scipio from following in his father’s footsteps.
At James Island High School, the teen had been a member of the Air Force ROTC. But he admits the Air Force route didn’t feel like the right fit.
At school he would carry his dad’s Marine rucksack and wear his oversize combat boots. “They looked like clown shoes” on his smaller feet, he said. And he would sneak into his dad’s closet and put on his dress blue uniform jacket. He enlisted in the Marines, serving 11 years on active duty and in the Reserve; he now lives and works in Charleston.
Marines he met who had been trained by his father were always eager to talk and unload. “They’d tell me stories like, ‘I got the best ass-chewing of my life from him.’”
Keysha also felt drawn to serve but not in the Armed Forces. Today she is an assistant principal at Garrett Academy of Technology in North Charleston. The loss of her father is a story she tells students at the start of every school year.
‘My heart bleeds’

All three Williamses say they went through bouts of emotion in the months and years afterward as they tried to stay disciplined and busy moving forward with life. Still, they had questions that were never answered.
Why were the Marines left so exposed? Why wasn’t the terror threat immediately addressed with a heavy response force? Could the 9/11 terrorist attacks have been avoided if policies had gone in another direction because of the Marines’ final sacrifices?
“If more attention had been paid to these groups early on, maybe it wouldn’t be where it is now,” the married Keysha Williams Tolliver said of the confrontational state of the Middle East.
On Tuesday and Wednesday this week, the Williams family will attend 30th anniversary remembrances in and around Jacksonville, N.C., home to Camp Lejeune and the Beirut Memorial. Thousands are expected to attend.
Janet Williams still thinks about her former husband daily, even as she has moved on with her life, going to college and becoming a Charleston County teacher. And she sometimes sees glimpses of her younger self in the faces of today’s war widows whenever U.S. service dead come home.
“I sympathize with them a lot,” she said. “Anytime something like this happens and there’s a loss of life, and someone is left with a child, my heart bleeds. I walk with them.”
Reach Schuyler Kropf at 947-5551.

Saturday, October 12, 2013

Global Relations and Plastic Blocks

This story by Public Radio International -- http://pri.org/stories/2013-10-11/building-peace-and-security-one-lego-brick-time?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+WhatsNewInPd+%28What%27s+New+in+Public+Diplomacy%29&utm_content=Google+Feedfetcher#When:21:30:51Z  -- hits home for me. I need to go back through my files for a photo where, as a Fulbright program manager for the U.S. Information Agency, conducting outreach and recruitment, I used some of my son's Legos to demonstrate how individual fellowships, international visitor exchanges, speaker programs, American studies, and institutional partnerships can be coupled to build strong international relationships among global publics and private firms. As my study and teaching of public diplomacy become more oriented toward cross-sector, participatory peacebuilding, I have continued to use the Lego analogy, most recently this week, working with a community college expand their global humanities programs. The new UN Lego set is on my list for holiday gifts and a donation to my congregation's social justice and education programs!


Wednesday, October 2, 2013

New theory-building for better development practices!

Kudos to dear friend and colleague, Khaldoun AbouAssi:

http://bush.tamu.edu/news/index.php/story/new_research_on_ngo_donor_relations_wins_prestigious_award

New Research on NGO-Donor Relations Wins Prestigious Award

Dr. Khaldoun AbouAssi
October 1, 2013
Research by a professor at the Bush School of Government and Public Service at Texas A&M University on relations between non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and their donors will be recognized by the Association for Research on Nonprofit Organizations and Voluntary Action (ARNOVA) with the prestigious Gabriel G. Rudney Memorial Award for Outstanding Dissertation in Nonprofit and Voluntary Action for 2013. Dr. Khaldoun AbouAssi will receive the award at ARNOVA’s annual meeting in November.
“Hands in the Pockets of Mercurial Donors: How Three Theories Explain NGO Responses to Shifting Funding Priorities” demonstrates how volatile relationships between NGOs in developing countries and international donors can affect the missions and behaviors of NGOs. The research focuses on Dr. AbouAssi’s native country of Lebanon.
“I found that NGOs respond to changes in funding in a variety of ways.  I studied the response of four environmental NGOs to shifts in the funding decisions of two common donors,” said AbouAssi.  “The responses from the NGOs to the changing donor priorities ranged from suspending the relationship with the donor, to trying to reach common ground and maintain the relationship, to automatically executing the donor’s interests and adapting to the situation.  I then used quantitative data to show that these responses were influenced by NGO dependence on the donor and the ties NGOs have in local donor networks. Understanding how donors think and how their priorities can affect the important work of NGOs can be a key to increasing NGO effectiveness in critical areas of the developing world,” he added.
The Rudney Award selection committee cited AbouAssi’s dissertation for its attention to theory, contributions to the field of research, and relevance to both nonprofit organizations and the broader environment in which voluntary organizations participate. The committee also noted the research’s innovative approach and challenging field work and that it moved theory forward in a non-Western context.
“We’re delighted to see Dr. AbouAssi’s excellent work recognized with this prestigious award,” said Bush School Dean Ryan Crocker.  “It is yet another indication of the high quality of our faculty and the impact their research has on public policy around the world.”
AbouAssi holds a PhD in public administration from the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs at Syracuse University.  He received his bachelor’s and master’s degrees in public administration from the American University of Beirut, Lebanon.  He publishes extensively on NGOs and international development issues, and has trained civil servants and NGO executives on citizen participation, fund development, volunteerism, and collaboration.

Friday, September 27, 2013

A Syrian American community that is divided, but hopefully not forever

If you have not already been introduced to the radio program "Marketplace," allow me.
Here's a sample story on which I couldn't resist commenting:

http://www.marketplace.org/topics/world/syrian-americans-find-ways-help-afar



Palestinian youths flash V-signs while they hold Syrian flags during a pro-Syrian demonstration November 18, 2005 in Gaza City, Gaza Strip.
How best to deal with the extremely messy situation in Syria?
That’s the question the U.S. government and the international community are wrestling with right now. But it’s one that Syrian expats have wrestled with in a different, more intimate way for more than two years.
Metro Detroit has one of the nation’s largest and oldest Syrian communities. How have they dealt with the crisis? How are they using the community’s social and economic resources to help? 
A long history, but strong ties
Syrians started migrating to Detroit more than 100 years ago.
But today, many are newer immigrants who still have close ties to Syria.
Recently, about one hundred Syrian-Americans gathered at a tidy park in suburban Detroit. They chanted and held banners depicting scenes of atrocities in Syria, including victims of a chemical weapons attack attributed to President Bashar Al-Assad.  
Ibrahim Alkeilani stood on the fringes of the protest, holding the flag of the Syrian revolution. He said it’s hard to even get ahold of relatives in Syria.  And when you do, conversations take place in a kind of code.
“I call it secret Syrian ways of communication,” said Alkeilani. “We use funny words, and different expressions, basically to evade Syrian monitoring of the telephone lines.”
Even before the uprising against Assad’s government more than two years ago, there were nearly as many Syrians living outside Syria as there were inside.
And right now, those inside Syria rely on family members abroad more than ever.
Wael Hakmeh, a Syrian-American born and raised in the U.S., said it’s not easy to send money to his in-laws there. At this point, ex-pats basically have to find someone to smuggle money directly into the country. And even then, there are dangers to spending U.S. dollars in Syria.
“The Assad regime now is jailing people who use currency other than the Syrian pound,” Hakmeh said, “and they don’t want the continued devaluation of the pound.”
Finding ways to help from afar
Hakmeh is an emergency room physician. There are lots of doctors in Michigan’s Syrian community. Some have even gone back to Syria to provide medical aid.
There are other ways for Syrian-Americans to help out from afar—like frequent fundraisers for humanitarian assistance.
“Consistently, these fundraisers have all raised over a million dollars,” said Lena Masri, a Syrian-American attorney with the Council on American-Islamic Relations of Michigan.
One thing southeast Michigan’s Syrian community doesn’t lack is money. And they’ve raised millions upon millions of dollars in relief funds over the last two years, with the vast majority going to help the refugees in the camps that have sprung up around Syria’s borders.
Masri said what they do lack is manpower -- especially to help refugees who have ended up in the U.S. She’s taken on dozens of refugee cases, for those claiming political asylum and also what’s known as “temporary protected status.”
Masri said the community isn’t seeing a truly overwhelming number of Syrian refugees -- yet. But there are some, and she has personally taken on dozens of cases.
Masri said an informal network of support has popped up to support refugees here. She’s seen applications showing that many receive money, housing and other support from Syrian-Americans.
“They’ve consistently been able to list others who have provided financial support from shelter to utilities to, you know every day expenses,” Masri said. “And these are people who don’t necessarily know each other.”
“A generation of refugees receiving another generation of refugees”
That kind of generosity -- even from strangers -- is something Dr. Adnan Hamad has seen again and again. He works for Arab-American Center for Economic and Social Services in Dearborn.
Over the course of decades, Hamad has seen waves of refugees from the Middle East -- Lebanese, Iraqis, and now increasingly Syrians -- arrive in metro Detroit. He said that absorbing these refugees is almost second nature to Detroit’s large Arab-American community.
“This community is about a generation of immigrants receiving a second generation of immigrants,” Hamad said. “A generation of refugees receiving another influx of refugees.”
These networks of support are impressive, but not all is rosy. The civil conflict in Syria has split Detroit’s Syrian community. There are rebel supporters like the protesters above, but there’s also a pro-Assad faction. The conflict has ended friendships and split families.
But Hamad is confident the larger Arab-American community will pull together to support displaced Syrians.
 “I think the community is going to be more helpful to the Syrian refugees than any other influx of refugees that we have received in the past,” he said.
And Hamad, once a Palestinian refugee himself, has seen a number of families arrive in Michigan traumatized, penniless and friendless. And he says within a few years, many have re-built their lives to the point where they’re the ones contributing the most to the next wave of refugees.

About the author

Sarah Cwiek is a reporter who joined Michigan Radio in October 2009.

Sunday, September 22, 2013

The soft power of transnational scientific collaboration

Good news today from the American University of Beirut in the march to reduce suffering from cancer <http://www.dailystar.com.lb/News/Lebanon-News/2013/Sep-21/232017-lebanese-scientists-hope-for-breakthrough-against-leukemia.ashx#axzz2fdAF4UN1>. Here, a copy of the article, with the added hope that people around the world can better appreciate the resilience and dedication of scientists amid political strife.

 Lebanese scientists hope for breakthrough against leukemiaSeptember 21, 2013 12:38 AMBy Kareem Shaheen
People stand in front of the American University of Beirut Medical Center, Friday, Sept. 20, 2013. (The Daily Star/Hasan Shaaban)
People stand in front of the American University of Beirut Medical Center, Friday, Sept. 20, 2013. (The Daily Star/Hasan Shaaban)
A+A-
BEIRUT: Scientists in Lebanon have developed a drug cocktail that they hope could cure a rare form of leukemia, in a milestone for cancer research in the region.
The drug combination targets Chronic Myeloid Leukemia (CML), a blood cancer that affects 1 in 100,000 people in Lebanon but whose prevalence is rising as patients use expensive drugs to live longer with the symptoms.
The researchers at the American University of Beirut Medical Center tested a combination of arsenic and interferon in mice injected with leukemic cells. A paper on the research was published this month in the International Journal of Cancer, a peer-reviewed publication.
Current treatments for CML are expensive, reaching up to $4,000 a month, and patients have to remain indefinitely on treatment because the primary drug in use, known as imatinib, does not cure the disease.
While imatinib targets the bulk of the tumor in CML, it does not affect the cancer stem cells, which can self-renew and generate new cancer cells if the treatment stops. The existing medication therefore controls the growth of the cancer, but does not cure it.
“I’m not from a rich family, I have sick people in my family and understand how it is important to have the money,” said Rihab Nasr, assistant professor of medicine in the Department of Anatomy, Cell Biology and Physiological Sciences at AUB and the project’s leader. “I wanted to find a treatment that cures.”
Both interferon and arsenic are used separately for cancer treatment. Arsenic is a toxin, but can be used in cancer treatment and may be instrumental in degrading the proteins that are central to cancer stem cell growth.
Nasr first tried the combination on cancer cell cultures that were collected from patients and kept alive in incubators in the lab, some of which were resistant to the current treatments.
The drug cocktail worked, and so Nasr moved on to try it on mice.
First, the scientists injected the mice with cells infected with a DNA fragment that carries a specific “oncogene,” which is a gene that can transform into a cancer cell that causes CML.
The mice developed leukemia within a few weeks. Then they were treated with the drug.
“And it worked,” Nasr said.
But to make sure the treatment was targeting the cancer stem cells that can multiply and renew the cancer, Nasr took the experiment one step further. She took samples from the bone marrow of the treated mice, where the cancer stem cells would have remained if they were not eradicated, and injected them into a second set of mice.
Most of the mice that received the treated bone marrow did not develop the cancer, and lived on to die essentially of old age.
“This tells me that the combination of arsenic and interferon is eradicating this small population of cancer stem cells,” she said.
Nasr and her fellow researchers will now look into why the interferon and arsenic combination works on the leukemia cells, a process that is not fully understood.
Nasr thinks the combination might be targeting a chain reaction that allows cancer stem cells to replicate, breaking down the cycle and causing them to die off.
Nasr said that advances in cancer research and technology are allowing the development of more advanced treatments. She would like to eventually carry out clinical trials to test the efficacy of the drug on humans, but she would need to do that in combination with other clinics and research centers abroad as the population with the disease in Lebanon is too small to prove whether the cure could work.
The disease is more common among older adults, between 40 and 50 years of age.
Still, she is hopeful because the combination could also mean an easier life for patients. Many cancer patients do not take well to interferon, for instance, but a drug combination would have a lower concentration of it, thus reducing side effects.
Nasr presented her findings in Europe and Qatar, where the foundation created by the country’s former emir funded part of her research.
She said that a major challenge for cancer researchers in Lebanon and the Middle East was often a lack of resources, and that scientists in Lebanon had the knowledge to make significant contributions to cancer research.


Read more: http://www.dailystar.com.lb/News/Lebanon-News/2013/Sep-21/232017-lebanese-scientists-hope-for-breakthrough-against-leukemia.ashx#ixzz2fdBTebFu
(The Daily Star :: Lebanon News :: http://www.dailystar.com.lb) 

Monday, September 9, 2013

Blogging on the intersection of peacebuilding and public diplomacy

Dear Members of the U.S. Congress:

Don't forget to fund a robust international peacebuilding effort! International diplomacy depends on the partnerships we build through non-violent communication from the local to the global levels. This recently published peace
http://www.allianceforpeacebuilding.org/2013/09/peacebuildings-vital-role-in-national-security-best-value-for-impact-at-all-levels/ is a collaboration with a dear friend and former U.S. Information Agency colleague, Michael Graham.


Monday, September 2, 2013

Celebrating the past and enjoying the present

My dear aunt, Lorna Michaelson, passed away July 20th. She was a concert pianist and music educator http://www.startribune.com/local/minneapolis/219131771.html?



page=all&prepage=2&c=y#continue . I won't be at this celebration of diasporan culture in Detroit https://now.mmedia.me/lb/en/usa/traditional-arab-music-and-flamenco-unite-on-stage-in-detroit

Image courtesy of www.theaustralian.com.au

but I will continue to honor all Arab American artists, including Aunt Lorna, for their contributions to world-class song and dance. 

Saturday, August 3, 2013

An emerging trend in public diplomacy and development?

A nation's soft power has in a recent blog posting in The Guardian (hat tip to USC's CPD) been suggested as a governmental tool and process to alleviate poverty while increasing governmental credibility http://www.theguardian.com/global-development/poverty-matters/2013/aug/02/britain-aid-soft-power?CMP=twt_fd&utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+WhatsNewInPd+%28What%27s+New+in+Public+Diplomacy%29&utm_content=Google+Feedfetcher#When:19:33:09Z

Is this a "blip on the screen" of trends in PD and international development, or an emerging trend? It's noteworthy that the blog is supported by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, too, another major "influencer" and partner in governmental efforts to reduce poverty and disease.

Friday, August 2, 2013

Arab Diaspora Event

I have been following the progress of a fairly recent organization,  https://www.facebook.com/arabempowerment . They are DC-based but have strong links through the U.S. and the MENA region. On August 18th they are convening a conference to get even more mobilized on socioeconomic development projects for the region. See
http://www.plussocialgood.org/Post/Harnessing-Global-Arab-Talents-Enabling-Arab-Diaspora-Knowledge-Transfer-Online-SocialGood/d2ba02bc-9570-4beb-b53f-29fb151b061f

Article on peacebuilding in Syria

The article at http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/news/regions/middle-east/lebanon/130801/syria-peace-lebanon-taif-accords?page=0,1 is by Reese Ehrlich, entitled "Do Lebanon's Taif Accords offer lessons for Syrian peace?" It may be a bit biased toward the Taif Accords, but the comments by the Lebanese interviewed are worth a read, for overall context now, for the hopefully-not-too-distant future when all sides put down their weapons.

Monday, July 15, 2013

The past few days

The news from Egypt is unbearably inhumane for folks who are rooting for security and justice over there as much as for in the U.S. How many more peaceful protesters will die because of social injustice and cultural misunderstanding? How many more innocent bystanders to peaceful demonstrations will be killed, like Andrew Pochter? He is not much younger than my son and grew up near us. He mentored kids in the U.S. His reprinted letter to one of them (http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/worldviews/wp/2013/07/12/how-to-live-your-life-advice-from-an-american-student-who-was-killed-in-egypt/) brought me to tears as I processed the jury's verdict in the Zimmerman-Martin trial. 

Arabs and Jews want peace. They want inclusiveness, in the governing of Egypt, their most populous state, and through a Palestinian state. I was reminded of this by young people yesterday at an event held by Middle East peace advocacy organization New Story Leadership (http://www.newstoryleadership.org/), again, in our neighborhood. 

David Ignatius wrote for the July 12th Washington Post: "the Arab Muslim world must recapture the inclusive spirit [of its first centuries]....Otherwise, the broken political culture will not mend" (http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/david-ignatius-recapturing-the-arab-muslim-worlds-golden-age/2013/07/12/e21d4bc8-ea68-11e2-aa9f-c03a72e2d342_story.html). 


Secularists, co-religionists, all citizens, need to share our stories and yearnings for peace, and figure out how to bring enough Egyptians, Gazans, West Bankers, other Arabs around the region, Israelis, and Americans together to tip the balance of the U.S. House and Senate and demand a Palestinian-Israeli peace treaty for two secure states. We -- in the U.S. and across the globe -- cannot bear the loss of life.

Friday, July 12, 2013

With apologies to Clint Eastwood, I have gone ahead and made my day


It's the little things that make life interesting, especially when you spend many of your days job-hunting. Today I was doing background research for a job application and I came upon a lovely passage in an article about experiential pedagogy, taken from a book of conversations between two radical educators, Myles Horton and Paolo Freire. One of Horton's reflections is retold, 
"Recalling an incident when someone criticized [Horton's] workshops at the Highlander Folk School [in Tennessee, which he co-founded], he recalls: 'All you do is sit there and tell stories.' Well, if he'd seen me in the spring planting my garden, he would've said: That guy doesn't know how to garden. I didn't see any vegetables. All I saw was him putting a little seed in the ground. He's a faker as a gardener because he doesn't grow anything...' Well he was doing the same thing about observing the workshop. It was the seeds getting ready to start, and he thought that was the whole process."

The conversations are in the book edited by Brenda Bell, John Gaventa, and John Peters, We Make the Road by WalkingConversations on Education and Social Change, Temple University Press, Philadelphia, 1990. 
Here's a blurry copy of the book cover, courtesy of amazon.com:
Front Cover

The quote is on p. 99. I found the quote in: "Critical Experiential Pedagogy: Sociology and the Crisis in Higher Education," on pp. 146-147, by Brian P. Kapitulik, Hilton Kelly and Dan Clawson, The American Sociologist , Vol. 38, No. 2 (Jun., 2007), pp. 135-158, accessed July 12, 2013, at <http://www.jstor.org.proxygwa.wrlc.org/stable/27700496>.

Reading this story makes me feel inspired and grateful for people who are patient and willing to spend time planting seeds, faithful that they will grow, or having conversation, believing that dialogue makes a difference.