What happened on election day 2016?

What’s Going On?

I’ve never been more saddened and ashamed of an election result than I was two weeks ago.  It didn’t make any sense to me how someone, let alone millions of people, could support such a candidate.  We heard explanations from all sides about how nobody saw this coming and how this actually ended up happening.  We’ve seen analysis blaming Fox News, liberal millennials, the democratic party, the KKK, the Alt-Right and many more.  But I posit that we ALL need to take a look in the mirror and see what’s really happening in our communities, country and world.  We need to take a look back into history and see that the assumptions that we make about human nature itself are flawed and even toxic to a way forward from this calamitous election.  Finally, I think we missed an opportunity.  Yes, Fox News and other corporate media is to blame.  Yes the democrats are to blame.  Yes our arrogance and comfort are to be blamed, but ultimately I will argue that this is an inevitable result of history and culture coming together.

If it wasn’t the star of the Apprentice in this recent election it would’ve been another.  Populism is quickly gaining ground, capitalism’s failings are being felt through democracy all over the world, but what is the solution?

I would propose that the solution is instilling a true sense of compassion, empathy, justice and love in all of us.  We’ve missed that.  Our society is shamefully individualistic and there are those that propose more of that is the solution, but that would actually only separate us more.  We can’t be a “United” States when we are all our own mini-state.  We are no longer “united” in any true sense of the word and I propose that our separation of society into political parties, economics, sports, arts, sciences and other entities indeed is what is killing our society.  We need to foster an appreciation for being human and what that means.  Our culture today divides us into nationalities, races, religions and other labels that only make it too easy to vilify one of these groups that ironically do the same in return.  

We have a President-Elect who offers fear.  He offers who is to be blamed for the problems that many in this land face, when the fact of the matter is we need a collective and critical look in the mirror in order to solve the collective cultural problem that engulfs our world today.  I will give many explanations and culprits, and even a few proposals... but ultimately we need to figure out what we want this world to be.

So how did this happen?  How could he possibly have been elected in the United States?  Here we go…  

Part 1 > The System

Culprit #1 - Everyone’s favorite guilty party > The Media

Don’t blame the poor journalists.  I feel bad for them, I really do.  It’s not their fault, it really isn’t.  I’m giving the benefit of the doubt here to most journalists that they are stuck within a system of profit and not actual news delivery for public good.  The fact that the media has massive corporate ownership whose main interest is making a profit is the major problem.  In and of itself, making a profit isn’t bad, but it certainly is when there is a larger responsibility to deliver critical and relevant news to the public.  So long as the media has its corporate owners they will deliver only “news” and programs that will generate viewership, thus profit.  Therefore, if you follow the logic of the system, the journalists who are supposed to be the experts on challenging power and delivering fact based analysis to inform the public will only be allowed to air “news reports” that will obtain viewers.  This has been calamitous as people no longer choose which analysis of the facts to watch or inform them, but now the facts themselves are up for debate.  Facts are no longer facts and analysis is too predictable.  Breaking News flashes across the screen constantly and when a pop star puts on too much weight or gets a tattoo on their neck a panel of 4 “experts” is put together to discuss whether or not this was a good choice.  

The media will undoubtedly fail if they are corporate owned and if the newscasts are 24/7. There is not always breaking news.  But so long as they need viewers they will manufacture “news” to be watched.  It has gotten to the point where many have their own preferred cable news networks, not based upon the analysis, but the distortion of the facts.  There’s no doubt that Fox News has made this into an art and succeeded.  Study after study shows that Fox News watchers are actually less informed than people who don’t watch any news!

This study conducted by Fairleigh Dickinson University from 2012 actually reveals that you would know more about the domestic policy if did nothing rather than watched Fox News.  Unsurprisingly, NPR and the Sunday morning programs created the most informed, but Sunday morning show ratings are sadly much lower than nightly news programs on Fox.  

When it came to foreign policy Fox didn’t do any better.  The lefty version of Fox, MSNBC now actually joined Fox as having their viewers less educated than those who didn’t watch any news.  Here, the Daily Show was actually in 2nd place behind NPR.   

NPR was recently rated as the 2nd most trusted news source in the USA according to Pew, but only 53% of respondents had ever heard of it.  All 3 major corporate owned outlets (CNN, MSNBC and Fox) were heard of by well over 90% of respondents.  A television version of NPR could be greatly advantageous to the public good, but it’s much easier to get funding donations for a radio channel than a national news network.  And thus the rub, those that can make money and do, actually make our national discussion worse.  

Solutions?

So what do we do? There seems to be no public outrage or political will to change anything in the media.  Any action has to be taken very carefully in the order to protect freedom of the press, but there are many ideas and solutions that could be useful.  

First, limiting corporate ownership of media is one option that the FCC (Federal Communications Commission) has done.  The problem is that their “regulations” have been more catering to the corporate ownership than actually limiting massive corporations from owning media outlets all over the country.  Fewer than 1% of the renewal petitions for licensing are not immediately granted.  The FCC, an independent government agency, has sadly become a bit of a rubber stamp of former board members of corporations involved in the media market.  In 1980, 90% of media were owned by 50 different companies, today that number has shrunk to 6.  There are only 6 companies that own 90% of the media outlets in this country.  Those 6 massive companies are Comcast, Disney, Fox, Time Warner, CBS and Viacom.  There is virtually nothing aired on television that is not owned by one of these 6 massive conglomerates.  This dramatically limits the “marketplace of ideas” and replaces that with the pure profit motivation.  Therefore, the History Channel in no way reflects actual history that a proper historian would teach, but reality television that has no relation to the teaching and learning of history now dominates the station with “Ice Road Truckers” and show of the like.  Breaking up these 6 and having the FCC make more stringent restrictions on media ownership would go a long way, but wouldn’t in itself be enough.  

An even better solution would be to ban advertising during news programming.  Therefore you could take away the profit motive behind airing the news.  This would be a difficult task, because you’d have to define “news programming” and you’d have a freedom of speech issue, but good quality news programming is so critical to a functioning Republic that it is worth “limiting” advertising speech during news programming for at least certain times during the evening when people watch news.

Two other worthwhile potential solutions could be mandatory media education classes in schools and exploring the possibility of an American version of the BBC, in other words a publicly funded news channel dedicated to serving the public interest.

Culprit #2 - The Democratic Party

“Why are the democrats so bumfuzzled?” - Danny Kincannon

“If liberals are so fuckin’ smart, why do they lose so goddamn always?” - Will McAvoy

In all honesty I am not a big fan of Hillary Rodham Clinton.  Don’t get me wrong, she would be an infinitely better choice for President than the President-Elect, but she should not have been nominated by the democrats in the first place.  There were so many better candidates, but it always seemed inevitable that she was going to win.  Why was this?  A candidate like Elizabeth Warren or the obvious alternative from the campaign, Bernie Sanders, would’ve appealed to many of the white, non-college educated voters that voted for the President-Elect.  The data is still inconclusive, but it doesn't appear most of them voted for Trump because they loved him or because he was racist, but because he seemed to speak to their experience of life in 21st century America.  Most assuredly, Secretary Clinton did not.  She was a flawed candidate, people simply do not like her.  Fair or unfair, and I think it’s mostly unfair, she should not have been nominated.  But the arrogance of the Democratic National Committee at thinking she’d roll to victory is now biting them, the entire country and world in the butt.  Many saw this coming, why didn’t the DNC?  Oh yea, don’t forget all those corporate donors that propped up her campaign when many of us were feeling the Bern.  Oh, what might have been?

Part 2: “You can’t eat freedom”

Culprit #3 > Rugged Individualism/Ayn Rand/Libertarianism

“The greatest trick the devil ever played was convincing the world that he didn’t exist.” - Kaiser Sose

Herbert Hoover consistently ranks in the bottom 10 of historians “Worst Presidents of all time.”  One of his major tenets was known as “rugged individualism” and it is a cancer that still plagues  our society.  

Life is a team sport.  We need support and help from those around us and to instead isolate ourselves within a society and make it every person for themselves will inevitably destroy a society.  People will start to live in a more and more competitive world and contrary to popular belief it hasn’t always been that way.  Competition is not the natural way of life.  Cooperation is.  Human beings have lived on this planet for 200,000 years mostly as hunters and gatherers and in that sort of culture cooperation is key to survival.  Competition in those days would have led to our early extinction.  Yet a belief persists that it is human nature that we are self interested and competitive.  I would argue that it only appears that way because we live in a culture that brings out the worst in all of us.  Our culture that is based upon consumption and materialism offers us many social ills that our hunter and gatherer ancestors would have never imagined.  Let’s be clear, this IS NOT HUMAN NATURE, it is a product of the society which we have created over the past 10,000 years since the Agricultural Revolution and has only intensified since the Industrial Revolution of the 19th century and the current Technological Revolution that we are living through.   

The embrace of rugged individualism as a “good” thing is what has really corrupted our society.   Once we begin to think that evil things actually don’t exist, or worse, that they are not in fact evil, our society has reached the edge of the cliff.  This is the point we’ve reached with so many in the millennial generation embracing Libertarianism.  I understand the pull of it, I really do.  However, it will only pull us further apart as a society and will not create any sense of unity as we each work only for our own interests.

Culprit #4 > Corporatism & Free Trade

The President Elect greatly appealed to folks in former industrial cities and regions.  These were mostly non-college educated whites whose families had typically worked in the regional or local industry.  However, as the neo-liberal idea of free trade and deregulation grew momentum since the late 1970’s this particular group of former industrial workers have been particularly vulnerable to the “new world economy.”   These ideas gathered even more momentum with the elections of Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan and the eventual collapse of the USSR.  Even communist China jumped on board with this new version of capitalism that in essence greatly benefitted the massive international corporations and those already with capital and eviscerated the workers in the industrial world.  

Free Trade, like most things, isn’t bad in and of itself.  As with most things it is how the agreement is structured.  The ideas behind free trade are simple: 1.) A country can’t produce everything it wants or needs, so it needs to trade.  2.) If a country has an advantage in producing a certain product, they should focus there and sell it to the world.  Granted, that is oversimplified, but that is the basis of the argument from economists like David Ricardo.  However, Ricardo was also clear that you can’t restrict the mobility of workers if you’re not going to restrict the mobility of jobs and capital.  

Free trade deals such as NAFTA, CAFTA and the proposed TPP allow jobs and capital to move freely, but the modern day borders we have restrict the mobility of the worker.  Problem #1 is that the worker benefits much less than the capital (corporation).  Yes, some poor countries do get better more higher paying jobs, but this is not nearly a unanimous positive effect.  Culture is eroded and replaced by the aforementioned competitive individualism and typically the workers taking the newly created jobs have no protections that workers in industrialized countries enjoy.  This is the main reason that moving jobs to China, Mexico or Bangladesh is so cheap, because their workers typically have no protections or benefits that a worker in the USA or the UK may enjoy.  Therefore, unions are weakened in the industrialized nations and there are typically no workers unions (at least not nearly as strong) in the developing countries that absorb these jobs.  

Ok, deep breath.  Here’s how this has led to the President-Elect.  Former industrial towns and regions in this country are struggling to a significantly large degree.  No jobs replaced the jobs that were lost.  People were forced to leave their roots and move or turn to worse paying jobs and rely on government benefits.  In many communities drug abuse and addiction has skyrocketed and crime has risen.  In short, the people in these communities have been the victims of free trade over the past 30-40 years.  Their quality of life has clearly declined there seems to be no hope in places like Erie, Flint, Youngstown, Detroit, or Grand Rapids.   

In what seemingly was a last-ditch effort these forgotten people of the modern Corporatist economy have turned (understandably) towards populism, and as Donald Trump was the only one speaking to their issues (see Dems, you should have nominated Sanders) they turned not to racism and xenophobia, but any last hope of “making America great again.”  

Sure, the privileged college educated individual might rightly respond, “When was this time that American was so great?”  I’m sure different people supporting the President-Elect would answer different ways, but essentially they’re looking for that time when they could live a comfortable middle class life where their children would get similar opportunities that they had.  However, as those jobs were outsourced in the name of economic freedom and growth they have realized that you indeed can’t eat freedom.  Secretary Clinton didn’t offer much hope to those who were hopeless.  In fact, none of the other Republican nominees did either.  A group that the privileged have over-looked (for the record Bernie Sanders never did) swayed the election hoping beyond hope for some hope.   

Conclusion

There are many more culprits including our education system, the rise of social media and the new en vogue denial of science on both ends of the spectrum; however, these four culprits are some of the main reasons that I see that explain the rise and election of the President-Elect.  In my view, we need wholesale change in our culture.  People need to work less and love more.  We need to actively work to create equality, not more competition between our world’s citizens.  We need to rethink the idea of the state and how it divides our world.  Most importantly, we need to correctly identify the biggest problems in our world and actively act to solve them.  Most of us are too busy to do such a thing, but we can’t let the immediate drown out the important.  

Open Letter to Republican Presidential Candidates

Dear Republican Presidential Candidates (except Gov. Kasich),

I am a middle school social studies teacher, and you are making my job harder than ever.  In schools across the world teachers are trying to teach their students to be decent human beings to each other and value education.  You are making that job harder.  You are daily on the news acting like children, showing no value for facts, bullying each other, and plainly acting worse than little children I see on the playground.  How has this happened?  I know that recent political elections and debates haven’t lived up to the Lincoln-Douglas debate by any means, but there was always some sense of decency amongst the candidates.  Now, however, you have stooped to the lowest level I have seen in my lifetime, and it is hard to educate children while you are dominating the national consciousness.  

I know the biggest problem, we all do if we’re honest with ourselves.  None of you are blameless, but you, Mr. Trump, are the most to blame.  You have treated facts as jokes.  You have riled up your supporters behind blatantly racist ideas calling Mexican immigrants criminals and rapists, when in fact the FACT is that a lower percentage of  Mexican immigrants commit crimes than do white American born people.  You have called for the banning of Muslim immigrants to our shores and mentioned that you thought it was a good idea to force Muslim-Americans to have identification cards.  I thought for sure when you said this, that your numbers would tumble and you would shamefully remove yourself from the race with an apology.

Astonishingly, the opposite happened, you refused to apologize and this shockingly emboldened your supporters and amazingly your poll numbers went up.  How? Why?  These are a few of the many questions that I struggle with on a daily basis.  How has such a large number of citizens from my beautiful home country supported such an openly xenophobic and racist candidate?  How can I possibly educate the youth of America and the world while we watch you being so outwardly rude, disrespectful, racist and hateful?  How can we encourage and inspire the youth of America to be the best that they can be when you represent the worst that America has to offer?  Mr. Trump you are a disgrace to America and what she stands for, but you clearly have not done this alone.  

Senator Rubio and Senator Cruz, you had and still have an opportunity.  You have mostly squandered it by playing the silly game that Mr. Trump started.  You didn’t have to play his game, but you looked at polls and clearly decided that the only way to win was to jump in the same mud pile he was living in and wrestle with the beast.  You could have and still can take the high road.  You have to immediately and unequivocally denounce his racist and xenophobic threats.  You have a chance to redefine the Republican Party and redefine the shape of presidential debates in America, but you have to care about more than just winning.  If all you want to do is get elected (and I understand that motivation) then you, and America will lose.  You can’t out con a conman.  You can’t win if you play by his rules, but America still can.  You have a lot of options available to you, but being President is not one of them.  Your diving into the fight with Mr. Trump makes my job as a teacher infinitely harder.  When the leaders of a country act as you and Mr. Trump are, kids see it and take it to heart.  Where are the role models that I can point my students to within government?  Where are the Lincolns, Roosevelts and Oliver Wendell Holmes in today’s Republican Party?  They’re clearly not running for President.  

Governor Kasich, thank you.  I can often point my students towards you as a reasonable man who genuinely has the best interests of his country in mind.  But often my students say, “but he’s losing?”  I know you are losing the battle, but you’re winning the war.  It may not look like it now, but you are.  

 

Mr. Trump, Sen. Cruz and Sen. Rubio, I end my letter by pleading with you.  Make our job easier.  It is never easy to teach the youth of the world and encourage them to be the best that they can be, but it makes our job all that harder when they see “adults” trying to be the leader of their country being the worst of themselves, and sirs, I’m sorry to say, but that is exactly what you’re doing right now.  

With Hope,

Bryan Rusin

  

Beauty in Simplicity

This past weekend Janae, Neyla, and I went to the beach with some friends.  It was a great couple of days filled with great conversation and beautiful views.  There is something about the beach that just completely levels me, and I know I’m not alone in this.  Everytime I watch the sunset over the Pacific the endless number of colors that come out are majestic.  The bright orange ball with pinks, yellows, oranges, reds and purples surrounding it always seem to bring my faith in a higher, more beautiful power back again.  That last moment when the bright orange ball finally dips beneath the surface of the ocean is truly mesmerizing.  We are watching something that has happened everyday for billions of years, and yet every time it does, it is enthralling.  



Sunset in Monterrico, Guatemala
 

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The most fascinating moment of the weekend for me was much different.  It reminded me the amazing perspective and creativity that kids have and how sad it is that so many of us lose that as we get older.  Neyla loves playing in the sand, that girl will play and build and move sand around until she is covered in sand.  Just the thought of that alone irks me.  I don’t like feeling sand everywhere once I leave the beach.  But Neyla doesn’t seem to care.  She was playing in the sand, mixing water and sand and patting away with her hands.  I asked her if she was building a sand castle, and she said no.  That was the only thing that I could imagine building, I mean you have a few buckets, shovels and strainer, what else are you going to make out of black beach sand?  She responded with a little 3 year old attitude, “I’m making goose apple pie daddy.”  I chuckled and said, “What’s that?”  She just shook her head and kept on making it.  A few minutes later it was finished and she gave me a taste.  

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For lunch we decided to take the beautiful 20 minute walk into the town of Monterrico for some fresh seafood.  On the walk, I was carrying Neyla and we were running in and out of the waves.  There were some teeny tiny crabs walking on the beach and Ney pointed them out to me.  She said, “Daddy, do you know what a crab says?”  I replied quizzically, “No?!?”  She said, “Hi, I’m a crabbie.”  How simple, too simple, I would have never thought of that.  

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It makes me wonder why I’m not like that anymore.  It makes me want to not raise this curiosity out of her.  Picasso once said, “Everyone is born an artist, the problem is to remain one as we grow up.”  Too many of us lose that sense of simplicity and creativity that make up the wonderment of childhood.  I’m trying hard not to educate that out of my daughter, but I fear it’s already been ripped away from me.  It’s never too late to regain what you’ve lost.  This is one of the biggest lessons that I have learned by being a father, to find the beauty in simplicity.  We miss it too much and I don’t want to be that way anymore.  I’m using my 3 year old daughter as a role model in this way.  I want more of that child like way of viewing the world with joy.  I just want to be able to have a blast making goose apple pie in the sand.  I want to appreciate those beautiful daily moments that have been happening for billions of years.  

Living my dream... or just perpetuating a nightmare..?

At some point during my college years, I don’t remember exactly when, I remember thinking how amazing it would be to teach and live abroad.  When I first found out that there was a demand for teachers internationally and that those teachers get a pretty sweet gig, it became my dream to do that.  

I love travelling and I love teaching.  To combine these two things became my dream, which I am now living.  Yes, I am living my dream and it is simultaneously an amazing experience and an extremely guilt-ridden one.  

I am so happy that my daughter is being raised abroad and will be bilingual from an early age.  I love the fact that she is growing up and has grown up in a place where everything isn’t cushy and easy, but is raw and real.  She is surrounded by so much natural beauty and amazing people that all help us to provide a unique and meaningful early life for her.  She is so lucky, and I want to impress that upon her and hope someday she uses her fortunate position in life to aid those who are less fortunate.

Here’s where the guilt-ridden side comes in.  I love my life.  I love my job, my friends, my boss, the beautiful country we live in and mostly my wife and daughter.  However, there is a lot of hurt in this country.  Over half the population lives in poverty.  It has been ranked on the top 10 worst places in the world for women and children to live.  And finally, corruption and impunity rule.  However, that does in no way tell the whole story of Guatemala.  Most Guatemalans have never played a role in the story of their beautiful country.

Over the past 75 years the United States has been a major player (in a negative fashion) in Guatemalan affairs:

• 

  Jacobo Arbenz, 1st democratically
  elected President of Guatemala

  In 1944 they led and supported a coup through the CIA to remove Guatemala’s first democratically elected leader,  Jacobo Arbenz, from office.  Why?  Not a simple answer, but a corporation named United Fruit Company was worried about losing land, so they used their connections to convince Eisenhower that the President was a communist.  He wasn’t of course, but nonetheless was seen as one in Washington and forced to leave the country under threat of violence.
• This led to a series of Right-Wing military dictatorships directly supported, both financially and militarily, by the United States.  This is when violence and impunity became the norm in Guatemala.
• In the early 1980’s Reagan ratcheted up support for the dictator Efrain Rios-Montt who, according to the UN, committed a genocide against Ixil Mayans in the northern highlands of the country.  These actions were supported directly by the weapons and money given to Rios-Montt from the Reagan administration.

These are just a brief overview of the horrid negative effects that my country has had on the beautiful country that I currently live in. What if another country even tried these actions in our homeland?  How would Americans react?  

While I am living my dream, I am often torn with the guilt of the actions my country took here.  Everyday I see the challenges that Guatemala faces and so much of the negative facets of life   here can be directly linked to the coup of 1944 and the aftermath of brutal dictatorships that divided this country and created violence as the norm.  Look what my country has done.  Worse yet, so few American even know or care.  

I wonder if I’m doing any good here or just making a difficult situation worse?  While I’m living my dream, my country helped to create a nightmare of a situation in much of Central America.  The little I’ve mentioned here is just the tip of the iceberg of the USA’s negative influence in this country and region.  My hope is that in some tiny way I can inspire hope and progress in this often times forgotten, but incredibly beautiful corner of the world.

I still remember...

I remember it like it was yesterday.  My students weren’t even born.  

I was getting ready to take my first test of my junior year in college and turned on CNN.  What?!?!? A helicopter had flown into the World Trade Center?  Or at least that was the first guess.  Then, it happened.  Live on television the second plane flew into the second tower of the World Trade Center, and fear filled the nation, the world and my heart.  

Nothing like this had ever been imagined.  If you would’ve have wanted to make a Hollywood film about something like this, you’d have been laughed out of the room because it was such a preposterous suggestion.  Yet now, we were all watching it live on television.  It was not a movie, it was real.  

What gives me more sadness then remembering that horrible day is what has happened since.  Fourteen years ago I had never seen more unity in America and the world.  Over 1 million Iranians took the streets in Tehran to voice their support for our country in our time of need.  Everyone rallied behind the United States and there was a sense of brotherhood as I haven’t seen since.  

But fourteen short years later the reality saddens me.  The United States is now more ideologically divided than anytime since the Civil War.  We are still fighting wars that few American citizens seem eager to end.  The American government is still keeping 28 pages of the 9-11 report secret, so survivors, family members and American citizens still don’t have the truth. Furthermore, it has been almost impossible to get the American Congress to pass the now famous “First Responders Bill” made notorious now by Jon Stewart’s activism.  Add to this Congress’s lack of ability to provide body armor and proper healthcare for the veterans returning from the two wars began by the US. And fourteen short years after this horrible tragedy world polling shows that over 70% people in the world think that the USA is the “biggest threat to world peace.”  

How has this happened?  How did we squander this opportunity?  How have we become so divided?

It’s easier than ever to not pay attention to the problems in the world.  Distraction and escapism in the form of reality TV, manufactured news and busyness do a great job of keeping people ignorant about truly significant events.  I hope we can all agree that war and supporting the first responders and veterans is more significant than reality TV and fantasy football… but that’s a hard message to sell to modern America.  

I understand how much easier it is in this world to be ignorant to the reality.  But, it in no way is helpful to only remember tragedy once a year and to forget the daily tragedy so many live in.  To forget the Syrian refugees or half of the world that daily lives in poverty is not helpful, but only continues the trend of apathy and ignorance all too apparent in our world today.

Modern culture has the capability to enable activism or to infantilize us…  We all make our choice.  

Part 2: What was it like when I was my students' age...

Finding Answers… War is Over?

            A few weeks ago my 10^th year as a teacher ended.  I began thinking about my life when I was in 8^th grade, the current age of my students.  I was amazed at how much had changed in twenty years.  AOL was new cutting edge technology.  Now every one of my students has a smart phone, laptop and Ipad.  It boggles my mind; even my 11 year old nephew has an Iphone!  I was still trying to figure out Nintendo at that age.  I can’t imagine what middle school would have been like with that technological access.  In part 1 of this blog I talked about how the movies of Top Gun and Rocky IV were formative to my naïve view of the world as a middle schooler.  I grew up believing many simplistic notions, such as:

·      War did not happen again after WW2

·      America was not only good, but helped the little guy.

·      America = good, Russia = bad

·      Life was good, for everyone.  Everyone had it as easy as me.

·      Racism was something of the past that was now gone.

As a 14 year old, I had so many questions that were awakened in my mind by the beginning of the Gulf War and seeing the film, Forrest Gump.  The first of these was the erroneous symbiotic beliefs that war wouldn’t ever happen again after WW2 and that America always made good moral decisions, or more simply, America = good. 

When the Gulf War began in 1990, it was explained to me that a small defenseless country that I’d never heard of, Kuwait, had been invaded by a greedy, power hungry, dictator next door named Saddam Hussein.  This made sense to my mind.  America was good and helping the little guy from a bully.  The war seemed to be a quick success.  Iraq, led by their “evil dictator” was defeated swiftly and the threat to our friends in the Middle East was ended.  I found that this made me proud as a young American. Here we are being a peace maker and putting the bully in his place.  The one thing that confused me, was the fact that this “evil bully,” Saddam Hussein, was still allowed to be the leader/dictator of Iraq.  I wondered, if he was so bad, why would he be allowed to stay in power?  My mind was taught to be simplistic, but I was starting to ask questions.

Eventually I got to college and revisited this question and what I found out shocked me!  First, Kuwait was actually slant drilling Iraq’s oil.  In other words, they were illegally stealing oil from Iraq.  While it is true that the border is pretty porous between the two countries, this practice understandably infuriated Iraq, as their main income was from oil profits.  Secondly, Kuwait was deliberately flooding the market with oil in order to drive the price down.  This too infuriated Saddam.  While his invasion was fool-hearty at best, his invasion was not totally unjustified, and it was clear that it wasn’t just a bully picking on a little guy.  Kuwait was not being a good neighbor.  Ultimately, the US didn’t get involved to defend the little guy, as I was led to believe, they were primarily concerned with the stability of their oil imports from Kuwait and especially worried about any incursion into Saudi Arabia, one of the largest oil suppliers in the world.

Now, however, more bothersome questions arose.  Why are we supporting and defending a country that was breaking international laws on slant drilling?  Why are we supporting the House of Saud and their dictatorship in Arabia?  Saudi Arabia doesn’t allow women to drive or have any equal rights to men, they allow no freedom of the press and are one of the few countries to not sign the UN Declaration of Human Rights.  Why would we be so cozy with them?  This confused me.  How could we so strongly support a country that was so clearly against the principles we claimed to represent?  The answer really disturbed me, it was one word that I was slowly beginning to realize ran the world.  Money.

Over time I came to the realization through my teenage years that my assumption that war was over was naive and completely wrong.  The Gulf War was just the tip of the iceberg for me.  I began to realize that our military wasn’t on vacation since 1945, but had been deeply involved throughout the world and was stationed in countries all over the globe.  In my formative years (the 1990’s) the United States was involved in conflicts in Somalia, Haiti and The Balkans; yet shockingly absent from even trying to stop the most rapid genocide in history in Rwanda. 

When I was my students’ age, I believed that war ended with WW2 and that America’s actions were always good.  At first, the answers to the questions I asked didn’t make sense to me and I didn’t like them.  But then I realized that no nation or country is more morally superior to any other.  They are all stuck in the Machiavellian world of making decisions based upon survival of the state.  The ultimate goal is to keep power and to expand it, because the belief is; if we don’t, they will.  The “they” is always changing however.  It used to be the Soviets.  Now it is the Chinese or the Islamic fundamentalists, or any of the dozens of other groups mainstream America demonizes.  But there is always a “they.”  And sadly we try to keep this view that “we are better” alive.  I started realizing when I was about my students’ age that this is a myth.  War is a constant in the world and we choose sides not based on morality or Human Rights, but on what will keep us powerful.  It has been a sad realization…

Next time: Racism and race relations….

Remembering when I was my student's age...

      I’m not that old, but I’m starting to realize just how old I am.  When I first started teaching I realized that all of my students were born after the Cold War had ended.  Therefore, they couldn't understand living through that time, even though I lived through very little of it, I remember it well.  But today, my students have all been born after 9-11 and do not have any memory of that defining event…  Things are getting stranger for me as I get older, it’s harder to relate to my students.  They are 13 year old kids with smartphones and Facebook and I still don’t get Twitter.  When I was 13 I’d yet to have even heard of email…  When I think of what I was like when I was their age and what my world was like, really 3 movies come to mind.

Growing up in the 1980’s and 90’s was interesting.  I am now amazed by what I assumed growing up.  Especially when it comes to what I thought was so great about my country and the world.  I remember the pride surrounding the Olympics.  I used to love watching the Olympics, especially when it was us vs. the Russians!  I’m thinking Rocky IV here.  Those were the days.  No matter what sport it was, no matter if it were the summer or the winter games, it was amazing seeing the freedom loving Americans compete against the brain-washed machine like athletes of the communist world.  Rocky represented everything great about America and Ivan Drago represented everything that was wrong with the USSR.  And at the end of that magnificent movie Rocky won, no not just Rocky, but America.  Our culture, our way of life, was shown to be more magnanimous and clearly more human than the defeated robots unthinkingly cheering for the mechanized Drago.  What a great film!  Little did how know how much was over-looked by this convenient way of seeing the world and particularly the US’s role in it.

In all honesty, I never saw Rocky IV until the 90’s, after the Cold War had ended, but it still made me feel glad that I was on the side that won.  One movie I did see as a young boy was only the greatest movie ever, Top Gun.  “I feel the need, the need for speed!”  I can actually quote every line of the film and have unquestionably seen that particular film more than any other.  As a young 7 year old boy, this film made me want to be a pilot.  No that’s not true, I wanted to be a Naval Aviator.  I don’t remember saying this, but my mom says I did… after I first saw the film and told my mom of my desire to join the Navy and become a fighter pilot, she said, “But son, you could die like Goose did.”  Upon that, I gazed at my mom and as serious as a 7 year old boy can be said, “Mom, if I have to die for my country that is ok.”  I was captured by the sensationalism of the film and the amazing Kenny Loggins music.  It was a highway to a danger zone that I wanted to take.  Again, however, so much of the story was missing.

As I moved into middle school I remember studying history and always studying wars, especially World War 2, which my grandfather fought in.  I remember being so relieved, that “we” won the war and good prevailed.  I remember thinking, what would happen if the bad guys actually won?  That thought terrified me, and I assumed everyone shared the same sentiment.  I remember thinking how great of a world we lived in and that war was over, forever!  Those things that I learned about in history class were so far removed the world that I now lived in.  America had won and the world was better for it.  The world I lived in consisted of boring days at a Catholic school, baseball, Disney World and ice cream.  What could be better than that?  War would never happen, could never happen in this world that I lived in.  America had won and would continue to win and all was good. 

CNN footage of the Gulf War. 

I don’t remember how old I was when I first heard of Saddam Hussein, but I must have been about 10.  America was at War again.  Operation Desert Storm.  However, it was explained to me that this was nothing like WW2.  This was a big powerful country sticking up for a little country (Kuwait) who was being bullied by a big one (Iraq).  This made me feel good.  WE were standing up for the little guy against the big bully.  To my 10 year old brain, this made sense.  I didn't need nuance or explanation, it furthered my idea that America was good.  I remember watching this on TV.  A dark screen with the lights of Baghdad in the background and explosions throughout the city.  The “war” seemed to be over very quickly, and now we were only defending a seemingly defenseless people.  Again, I liked that.  It made sense to me.  We always do that.  That was the narrative that I was told about WW1 and WW2 also.  We saved Europe and the “civilized world” not once, but twice from losing to the Germans.  But, I was still confused.  We were now friendly with Germany, how’d that happen?  The big bad bully got to keep his power after the Gulf War, why?  If he really is a big bad bully, shouldn't he be in jail and not the leader of a country?  As I got older, I got more and more confused about these things.

Fast Forward to when I was 14 years old, about the age of my current students.  I had a life changing moment.  I saw Forrest Gump.  I recall that I had nothing to do on a Friday evening and my parents were going to see it, so I tagged along to a movie of which I had no idea what it was.  I learned so much from that movie.  I learned about the 60’s, was introduced to some of the greatest music ever and discovered the importance of being who you are.  Forrest is always just Forrest, he’s never ever trying to be anyone else.  He loves himself and stands up for what his mother taught him.  Jenny on the other hand was searching.  She had lost who Jenny was, it was taken from her at a young age.  The abuse she suffered made her search in every dark corner of the world for Jenny, without ever realizing that happiness stood right in front of her the whole time in a simple loving man. It brought out in me emotions that I never knew I had, it turned a switch on inside of me.  It made me ask more questions. 

Gov. Wallace blocking entrance to the University of Alabama. 

The two issues from Forrest Gump that I really remember thinking about were racially inequality and the Vietnam War.  I knew Forrest Gump was a fictional story and so I partly dismissed the part about the University of Alabama and Governor George Wallace not allowing African American students just 30 short years ago.  I kept asking questions and realized that in fact, this was true.  I was shocked!  In America this happened?  In my parent’s lifetime?  That was the first crack in the mirror for me.  I remember thinking that a black man my dad’s age wouldn’t have been allowed to go to many schools in the South.  This astonished me.  But I also remember thinking, well look how far we have come, nothing like that happens today.  So while that was sad and tragic, America has made up for its sins and is now the “home of the free” and a country based upon equality. 

However, my questions were not answered fully yet.  What about this Vietnam War?  What’s up with that?  You mean, we have fought a war since WW2?  Why Vietnam?  Where is that?  That’s not a real country, is it?  The answer I first got was convenient as it fit right into my paradigm.  Vietnam was a country being taken over by Communists, and we went there to help them.  Oh, that makes sense.  Again, we’re helping, aren't we nice.  But quickly, the answers flooded in.