Mrs. du Toit Weblog - WAP Version

Wednesday, August 27, 2008

Gathering Pieces

The difficulty in learning something new is that you don’t know what pieces are valuable and you don’t know what the picture is supposed to look like in the end.

Let’s say you were starting to work on a jigsaw puzzle.  You have in view a pile of pieces.  You know there is more than one piece, but you can only focus on one piece at time.

You take in the shape of your piece, but a puzzle piece all by itself doesn’t do you any good.  You have to make it fit with another piece, so you take in the characteristics of the first piece, perhaps laying out a view pieces on the table, and look for the relationships between the pieces… where one fits with another.

Now let’s say that we don’t have the box that the puzzle came in.  The finished picture on the box helps us limit the pieces to categories or sections, knowing that the reddish pieces go in the upper right, or the blueish pieces go across the top.  That helps us tremendously, because we can separate our pieces into piles and only look through a few in each pile when we’re looking for a match. Without knowing what the finished picture is, the colors of the pieces are meaningless to us in knowing where to begin placing them on the table.  We can use the colors to help us find ones that match the color we need, but we don’t know where any of it belongs.

In addition, our puzzle pieces are a mess.  We have the pieces for a 100 puzzles or more puzzles, and we don’t know which pieces will go with which puzzle.  We don’t have all the pieces for all the puzzles.  We have a few singles and a few doubles.

But we start to do it anyway, with all those deficits to make it more difficult.

In reality, we’re putting together a dozen or more puzzles at once, but we don’t know what the finished pictures are supposed to look like for any of them.

As we’re working through a few of them, we’re hoping that as we get more of the pieces in place that the final image will begin to appear to us, making it quicker and easier to complete the puzzle, by allowing us to focus on the pieces that make sense for that picture.  If we focus too closely, however, it doesn’t allow us to get a perspective of the image.

We often refer to that phenomenon as “we can’t see the forest for the trees.” The film, Blow Up, was based on the premise that you can look too closely at something, zooming in too much, and lose perspective.  The loss of focus was also an analogy.  We can get stuck in the technical aspects of what we’re doing to the extent that we forget that the technology is a means to an end, not the end itself.  We might be focusing on the roughness of the cuts or the style of the pieces, completely forgetting that it isn’t the reason we’re doing what we’re doing.

What we want is the finished picture, something we can look at and refer to, and anything else we do is a means to that end.

Analogy explained, I’ll continue…

When we study history, we’re caught in combinations of the above.  We don’t know what our finished picture is supposed to look like, or even that there will be a “finished” picture.  We’re working on multiple pictures all at once, not knowing if our various pictures will related to each other at all, or if we’re just picking up random pieces that don’t belong in any of our puzzles.  We have no idea what we’ll do with the finished picture once its complete, or that it will serve any purpose to us at all.

That’s the state that children are in when we start teaching them history.  They’re in a fact-gathering stage, not knowing why they’re learning what they’re learning and having no clue that there is a gold ring at the end.  They’re doing it without any relevance, except to the individual pieces to the one next to it. For many, there is no gold ring at the end, because they don’t do it well enough, long enough, or have the sense to change the perspective of what they’ve learned to see the “finished” product.  It is as if they only see this:

The finished product looks like this, if you stand far enough away so the details are obscured:

When you’re “done,” we have a picture, a pattern, and a reference that we can use.  If we zoom in on any part of it, however, time has blurred the details for us, and those details aren’t as important to us anymore.  We needed the details only for the purpose of placing it in our picture, but once that’s done, the details are superfluous…

They’re superfluous until we try to help someone else do it.  Someone else needs the details to do what we have done. We don’t hand people finished pictures, because what the picture represents requires the understanding of the context of the details. 

Details are important for context and trust.  We want to make sure that we’re not trying to cram a piece that doesn’t belong in our puzzle.  It might be the right shape, but the puzzle piece was a fake.  We have to validate that each piece belongs in our puzzle.  Once we’ve done that, however, the details provide no use to us at all. 

In addition, knowing the details about a specific piece without the context of the larger picture (why we want or need to know that) details are just stupid.  The only purpose they serve is to play Trivial Pursuit, or bore our friends at parties behaving as Cliff Clavens.  For details to be interesting (and useful) and to be remembered, they have to be put in context and with the awareness of why we want or care about it.

But we don’t know that while we’re learning something new.  We have, essentially, an empty basket and a process.  We don’t know which pieces are going to be valuable, which are false/fiction, which belong to each puzzle, etc.  We just have to work through it, hoping and trusting that at some future point an image will appear that we can use, and can refer to.  Details are unimportant on their own, most of the time.  They are only important in how they fit in the bigger picture.  Once we know how they fit, then we can forget them.

When details become important is to flag us… to jar our memories of the larger context.  We might say something like, “Ohhh, yeah, something like that was tried once and it failed miserably,” and we can look again at the details to refresh our memories to make sure the pattern we’re remembering from our picture matches the details we’re seeing in another context.  We don’t have to go through the entire process again and relearn all the details. 

History (and education, in general) is not a pursuit to remember with.  It is a pursuit to teach us how to think.  It might be fine and dandy to speculate on how something will turn out, but if there is plenty of evidence to suggest that when you do X, Y happens, then expecting Z this time would be stupid.  That’s the only reason we study history (except, perhaps, as a hobby).  Forgetting that, or not knowing that, is why so many people find the subject boring and useless… because they have nothing but details/pieces and no goal of having anything useful to look at or use when they’re done.

It becomes incredibly difficult to have conversations with people (especially arguments) when they don’t have a picture of their own, or have gone through the process of creating their pictures.  They want a shortcut and for us to explain to them why we think something is this way or that way, down to the nitty gritty details of why we have come to understand and know what we do.

NO!  Do your own homework and study.  There is a minimum cost of entry into adulthood and the discussion realm, and if you haven’t done any of the heavy lifting first, then that person needs to “go away” until they’ve done it, not ask others to provide them with some sort of Vulcan mild meld of what they spent years and years learning.  They shouldn’t trust what you say on faith alone, but until they have something with which to base an objection, or provide examples of pictures where the patterns were not the same, then they’re worthless, and provide nothing but noise. 

I like to refer to history as a great big Gantt chart.  You don’t have to fill in all the areas to see the finished product (to recognize it as a Gantt chart), and it is useful even with sections missing.  You can fill in other missing sections later, if you want, but if you have a starting point and an ending point, you can safely assume that the two are connected.  You just might not know all the details that went into their being connected.

The mistake we make, if we make one, is in thinking that our puzzle is ever finished.

Learning never stops, until we die, or we just act like we are.

Tuesday, August 26, 2008

Change Agents

Back when I worked at the Big U a group of people in high positions of management became partners.  They decided that it was better to work together than to maintain the typical aggressive relationship between their various fiefdoms.  In most companies, especially larger ones, the basic structure puts IT at odds with the functional departments.  Budget is always fighting with Finance.  Payroll is always fighting with Accounts Payable and Human Resources, and General Ledger fights with everyone.  They’re turf wars, but it is simply how the game is played, and has always been played.  But this group of people, at least at the highest levels of management, decided that it was time for a change… profound change in the way the university functioned.

Why did the university have to offer basic English classes when the local state colleges had the same courses?  Why couldn’t they combine forces, providing courses in close proximity for the various required courses they all had to offer.

California has a university system (for graduate degrees), a state college system (for 4 year, undergraduate degrees), and a local college system (providing trade courses and certifications, and AA degrees).  There wasn’t any reason why they replicated their efforts.  The only reason was that it had always been that way, but there was no reason why it had to stay that way.  Nothing was off-limits or out of bounds, except our fiduciary responsibilities, our integrity, and the constant awareness of the trust and duty that had been placed in us.

It was obvious to my bosses that things in California were going to change.  These were very smart, forward thinking people.  This happened at the local campus where I worked and with a handful of people at the level above (the University of California Regent’s office).

Most of them were about the same age I am today… in their 50s, having climbed the ladders in their respective fields to Vice Chancellor levels.

They knew from the research that college enrollment was declining and changing dramatically, as was the entire definition of education.  The baby boom was over.  The once overflowing ivory towers were now going to have to compete for students, and they were going to have to compete for a lower standard of whatever defined the cream of the crop.  The fact that it was difficult for students to get into college had been maintained by marketing.  The truth was, at the national level, that anyone who could pay full tuition would get in, even at the Ivory draped schools.  At the same time, California had a Master Plan that made as part of the UC’s charter, guaranteed placement for the top 10% of students in California, in one of the UC campuses.  These leaders knew that with the budget crises that were upon them, and would be upon them for decades, that they were not going to be able to meet that promise if they continued to operate with a business, as usual mindset.

So they set about to change it.

As one of their protégés it was interesting to watch.  It was fascinating to see them set aside their grievances in this way, even if they had to struggle to do it.  My own boss, for example, after another round of budget cuts, laid herself off, as well as most of my coworkers, and put me in charge of the department, with 50% of the budget remaining for contractors.  I was to continue to do the work they started, but with no staff, but the money to hire the expertise when I needed it. 

Her selfless act set the bar for how I approached work from that day forward. 

It was also a way of thinking totally contrary to the way the public sector functions.  Reward structures and promotions were based on how big you could make your empire, regardless of how big or small it needed to be to get the job done.  It was backwards to the way that public monies should be handled.  Instead, they put in efficiency and streamlining as the benchmarks for promotions, reversing decades of rewarding the least efficient and most bloated.  You were not promoted if your empire got bigger.  You were promoted if you did more with less.

They met weekly and I’d be asked to come to the meetings when something in my area would be discussed.  I would often have to present them with something, or they would want a progress report on some initiative I was managing.  At one of these meetings, before the meeting had officially started, we were chit-chatting a bit and somehow we got into a discussion of what the university would look like when they had done all they hoped to do was complete.

“Oh, we won’t be here” they told us, and they all nodded in agreement with the statement, as I stared at them in shock and awe. “Change agents are always destroyed and we will be, and most of what we have done will be reversed, but we will have set in motion a series of changes that will ultimately get us to where we need to be, but we’ll be long gone before that happens.” They went on to explain to me that those most responsible for change are always targeted, and their reputations were destroyed, and they would be forced to leave.  It wasn’t a matter of “if” they told me, it was simply “when.” They were focused on doing as much as they could before the wolves who fought against changing the status quo found a way to destroy them.

And all of their predictions were correct.  They were correct about California’s budget being a multi-decade nightmare.  They were correct that the Master Plan would be revoked.  They were correct that they would eventually be destroyed, and forced to leave, and those who remained (who were against their changes) set about to reverse as many of the changes as they could.  In as short as seven more years they were all gone, and what they’d done was (as much as possible) purged from the record, so that very little sign of what they had set about to do would remain… and their ideas could be forgotten.

While few would remember their names and what they tried to do, their radical ideas corrupted those who came in contact with them. 

If, for example, you are a writer or a speaker or a preacher, you put forth an idea which lodges in the Unbewußtsein of a casual member of the Remnant and sticks fast there. For some time it is inert; then it begins to fret and fester until presently it invades the man’s conscious mind and, as one might say, corrupts it. Meanwhile, he has quite forgotten how he came by the idea in the first instance, and even perhaps thinks he has invented it; and in those circumstances, the most interesting thing of all is that you never know what the pressure of that idea will make him do.
Isaiah’s Job, Albert Jay Nock, 1936

Planting seeds of change is probably the most a change agent can hope to achieve.  They might never see the seeds they planted bear fruit, in fact that is most often the case, but they have to content themselves with knowing that some of the seeds will grow and fester in the minds of those with whom they came in contact.

* * *

It was not at all surprising for me that what Kim set about to do with seeding the Nation of Riflemen would be eventually forgotten.  His way of breaking through boundaries and crossing lines was not an idea that some could find palatable.  They have to think like us, too many would think or say, and try to maintain little fiefdoms and cliques in the old ways of thinking.  Putting requirements on people to be polite and responsible, in all facets of their daily life, was something many more could not swallow either. 

Day after day Kim lived, as best he could, the idea that a gun owning society was a polite, responsible society and demanded that of himself and others that he knew and associated.  There was no except clause in that statement.  Law-abiding didn’t have an asterisk, nor did integrity, duty, or honor or being a man.  It had to be a pervasive way of thinking of ourselves and our duties as citizens.  Now Kim was far from perfect himself, as we all are imperfect.  But mistakes and falling off the wagon are not reasons to change the standard, only to work harder at trying to achieve it.  Kim was the first to admit when he’d screw up.

Trying to live the ideals gets annoying for the people around you.  The idea that there was no fine print in a handshake and that there is a code of behavior required to define oneself as polite or honorable was something that would be rejected by many, and disparaged by many more.  They worked at the edges, generally, attacking the left- or the right- flank, depending on which you left open and vulnerable.

Folks would get upset when Kim would write things about how silly it is for adult men to wear baseball caps, respectable people not having tattoos, or lambasting young men for showing up for a date in shorts and sandals.  They’d argue when he’d write about demonstrating proper table manners, or conducting oneself politely.  That didn’t have anything to do with the Nation of Riflemen they’d say… it was just about gun ownership people would say.

But it wasn’t about just that.  A law abiding, participating citizen is a complete package.  It can’t be parceled out into pieces with compliance with only part of it, as one might order from a Chinese menu. 

When Kim wrote a post about the kid in Alaska who was stealing bandwidth from the local library, that created one of the greatest rifts among those who read his blog.  Who did it harm? folks would say, still not clear on the idea that it harmed the person doing it, and not clear on the difference between property owned by We, The People and personal property.  We know the definition of is and the only person they were fooling was themselves.  Integrity runs deep and there are no exceptions to it.  The litmus test is not who it harms but what gives you the right, and without it being your personal property (bought and paid for personally), you have no right to anything else.  We are entitled to nothing.  We have to earn and pay for everything ourselves, or we can’t have it, use it, or call it our own.  This American thing of being a nation of laws requires that we be a nation of law-abiding in the extreme, to the point of irritation, and without that, then it’s simply fancy words, a pipe dream, and an excuse to behave badly, because you have the freedom to do so.

That means that there is no falling into the ranks and allowing others to do for you, regardless of the situation.  It means you always volunteer.  It means that no one takes a lead role, because everyone has the duty to take a lead role themselves.  It means that you never look to others to what needs to be done, as that is an anathema to the entire concept of what a nation of free citizens, of free agents, and a nation of and by the people is all about… and if you are able to do all of that, then you may exercise rights guaranteed and enabled by the rest of us who try to do that, too.  Without the constant demonstration of responsibility and duty you have no rights, and exercising that which you have not yet earned is the definition of a scoundrel, and nothing that could be labeled American.

So, it did not surprise us that after we shutdown the GunThing that some folks would use that opportunity to criticize Kim (or me), for whatever they could come up with do it.  It was sort of funny, really, because it was so predictable.  These were folks who never got the idea that the Nation of Riflemen wasn’t about coming to the table for what you could get, but for what you could bring to it.  The site closure didn’t enable people to behave badly.  It just allowed us to identify the good and bad more easily.  It was not at all surprising to us, although I’d be dishonest if I said that it wasn’t disappointing.  It will get a whole lot worse when Kim stops blogging, too.  A WHOLE lot worse.

Kim knows that he will be forgotten (eventually), and by extension (in my much more insignificant role), so will I.  In 10 years, if the Nation of Riflemen continues to exist, it would surprise us, or it will have become something entirely different from what it was all about. 

But the seeds are there, that tree will grow and bear fruit, and we won’t live long enough to see it, nor would we be invited to the party to celebrate if we were still alive.  Our reputations will have been trashed and thrashed by then, some folks will chide themselves for ever reading what Kim had to say, and they’ll mock him whenever they get the chance… and you can bank on that. That’s all part of the job description and we knew that going into it.

But Kim (and I) can go back to the quiet solitude of our ordinary, anonymous lives knowing that we have corrupted the minds of a few.

And that’s the coolest thing of all.  No one can undo that, ever, regardless of what they say about us… as he has quite forgotten how he came by the idea in the first instance, and even perhaps thinks he has invented it; and in those circumstances, the most interesting thing of all is that you never know what the pressure of that idea will make him do.

Monday, August 25, 2008

Not So Sure

To admit that I’m not so sure about something is to show a bit of weakness… at least from an Internet perspective.  Some folks will take any opportunity to blast you if you show weakness, but I don’t care anymore about that, and I won’t be blogging in less than 100 days anyway.  There are a number of things I’m not so sure about anymore, and the idea that our way is the only way is one of them.

I’m not so sure that our style of Republic is the only successful model.  In fact, I’m sure there are other successful models, depending on how you define success, and given the time and circumstance.

* * *

One of the things that struck me about India is how much infrastructure is missing.  They don’t have so many things that we take for granted… national highway systems, potable water, constant and reliable power (of any stripe), paved roads, a population that doesn’t piss openly on the sidewalk, soap/toilet paper in public restrooms, etc. 

In science fiction stories there’s always one about finding a place that is missing its people.  I know there were Twilight Zone episodes that had that as a focal point.  The protagonist finds themselves alone, or they land in a place where there are signs that people were once there, but they’ve vanished.  There might be a hairbrush on a dressing table or a half-full glass of water… something that says “we were here, but we’re gone.”

That was the feeling I had when I visited some of India’s famous places.  It is not a feeling I’ve had any place else in the world.  It was an odd feeling, especially given the fact that I was completely surrounded by people… lots of them, as people is something that India is not lacking.

In many respects, India is being lost to the jungle, and I don’t mean that in a metaphorical sense.  I mean it literally.

One weekend we traveled to the Palace at Mysore.  Our driver took us to the palace as well as some of the other “tourist” sites in the area.  Mysore was the Raj’s last stand, you could say, and is where the opulence of royalty and British rule came to an end. 

But the British didn’t leave with a bang.  They just left.  And they left those half-full glasses behind, letters half-finished, pens with their tips still dipped in ink, and it is odd to see it, stuck in a time capsule of sorts.

It was so odd, in fact, that I don’t think I’ve written about it much, although I’m sure I touched on it in my India travels posts.  I may not have written about it, but it has plagued my thoughts as I tried to come to terms with it, and find a way to reconcile it and have it make any sense.

As you wind through the corded paths through the Mysore palace there are artifacts under glass.  Some of them are sketches of the royal family, and other dignitaries that worked in the seat of Mysore.  After you’ve taken in the idea of it, and look past the images and personal belongings, details become apparent.  All of the sketches were done at about the same time, by a British artist.  All of the sketches are fading, but that’s not the worst of it.  They’re molding at the edges.  The glass display cases, as one might find in a department store, are not the stuff of museums that protect the contents from the elements.

And if India is anything, it is a nation of elements… a country that fights a continual battle to maintain man’s dominance over the weather, the slip into the past, and the jungle.

In another 25 years, the sketches will be dust… reabsorbed by the jungle and with that bit of artwork gone, so will be the proof that history existed this way or that way, and you could write anything about what happened without proof or contrary evidence.

It wasn’t just the main palace.  We saw this all over the tourist sites.  The summer palace was half gone, its inlaid ceilings were literally falling down, so much so, that it was too dangerous for tourists to go into the upper rooms.  When something is “too dangerous” in India, you have to know how bad it really is.

Around the summer palace there had been set great arches, with Indian style sculpted rock tigers at their anchors.  They were crumbling and some of them had fallen over completely, and you can see them being swallowed up by the soil. 

This doesn’t seem to bother the Indians and I came to a harsh conclusion:  India doesn’t care about its history.  It only cares about today.  That’s not something I can get my head around easily, as it is so contrary to our culture.

But beyond not caring about their history, they lack the skill and the infrastructure to do anything about it if they did.  There are no sketch artists to take the place of the British art school graduate who had been busying himself for a few months or years recording what he saw.  Then one day he got his orders to leave and he left everything where it was, and got on a ship, and sailed home.

At the library in Bangalore, a sight our driver thought we’d like to see, too, we walked through the various rooms and floors looking at the books.  The smell of must and mold was strong and the books placed there by the British were still there, and no new books had been added since they left.  Astronomy, geography, the world’s greatest fiction, world history, frozen in time on the day the British librarian got on the ship home.

I was struck with an incongruity… is there a difference between burning books or just allowing them to rot?

Surely the burning of books would have gotten notice, but if malaise and indifference replace the fury and haste of the fire, is the end result really any different?

In 20 to 30 years the few remaining books that are salvageable today will be gone.  I felt this urge to pack them up and send them somewhere so they could be protected and loved, the way that books should be loved.  But more than anything, I was angry.  I was angry that they’d let these books disintegrate this way.  In those books would be the reason not to allow them to disintegrate, but no one bothered to read them. 

Indians don’t read literature.

* * *

In Amsterdam, the centuries of infrastructure is palpable.  It isn’t just the fact that the land was not originally fit for man nor beast and they somehow managed to make it so.  That’s plain.  That’s obvious.  But just like looking through the cracked glass display cases in India, if you look a bit deeper, beyond the veneer, there are hundreds of years of maintenance beneath. 

There was a small section of one of the main canals sectioned off.  It didn’t take much to divert the traffic under the other bridge.  There was a man with two boats, one to carry himself, and another full of supplies… bricks, mortar, and hand tools.  He was taking apart a section of bricks and replacing them with new bricks and new mortar.  This allowed you to see the work beneath the surface. 

It’s times like that in which you can allow your mind to ponder… who last repaired the section beneath?  Did he, like the man we saw, have two boats, too?  How did he learn to do these repairs?  Did they always travel alone in this way, so skilled and confident in their craft that a single man could be entrusted with a repair of so old and so lovely a small bridge?

There had, obviously, been men like him for centuries, since the bridge was first built over 500 years ago, and before that, thousands of men dug the trenches that make the canal system today… men who were paid by the wealthy merchants to do more than their share of the work, work that all were expected to do.  Paid conscripts, thousands and thousands of them, built the city and beat back the sea with hand tools… 700 years ago.  And the city stands, as glorious as the day they built it.  They built it to last that long.

I have no idea how long it had been since that small section of the bridge had been rebuilt.  The older section below was darker, made with bricks from a different mold, perhaps by hand.  There was a patchwork of different types of bricks, all put in at different times, during other repairs.  Perhaps those bricks had been re-dried and repaired, taken from different, older sections of the canals before they were reused there.  Perhaps the original builders of the canals had placed one of those bricks as keystones, some multi-hundred years ago.

The workman would not have known what he’d find as he took away the modern layers, but he touched a continuum, and the pride of workmanship of countless generations of men, just like him.  He didn’t need to be told to be careful or to have pride in his work.  He had the pressure of the ages on his shoulders.

Community works was taken to high art by the Dutch.  Perhaps that’s a natural result of inhospitable places… perhaps those most social, most dutiful, are molded by adversity and the awareness that the survival of the one is dependent on the contributions of the many.

Our modern, failed socialist ideas took root in the working model of the Dutch, but the duty and the social obligation which gave birth to that idea depends on the work ethic that came about by the fight to survive against the harsh and cruel elements, and the never ending battle to control the sea.

A diamond without pressure is a lump of coal.

Perhaps the ease of every day life created by the machinery of man’s cleverness has had the unintended consequence of removing the social pressures that created dutiful, contributing citizens.  The work ethic is being destroyed.  It was in the 1960s that the Dutch decided that they no longer wished to do this hard work themselves and offered Middle Eastern men the brutal work, in exchange for Dutch citizenship.  They came for a better life for their children, knowing full well that their lives would not be made measurably better.  It was an act of future faith… that their children and grandchildren, people they might never know, would reap the rewards of their sweat.

* * *

When I lived in New York in the early 80’s, I lived and worked in the Chinatown area.  At that time, there were more people from Mainland China in New York than anywhere outside of China.  The Chinese were poring out of China, coming into the country illegally, and then going through the process to become legal, once they were here.

They weren’t entitled to refugee status and had to demonstrate the ability to work and support themselves.  Low pay, unskilled jobs wouldn’t be enough to pass the scrutiny of the Immigration Department.  Knowing this, many employers overstated their salaries and their job duties, and the people paid the extra taxes out of their own pockets to compensate.

It’s hard for younger people to understand that it wasn’t illegal to hire an illegal alien back then.  Those laws changed gradually. 

One of the women I worked with, “Mrs. P,” had been an English translator in China.  She’d come over first, working for a year and setting up an apartment in Queens.  Once that was done, and she had enough money, she sent the money for her husband and only daughter to come to America.

Mrs. P’s husband had been in public relations in China.  He’d been a very social man, having a wide circle of business associates.  I could imagine, from Mrs. P’s stories, that he’d sit in tea shops, whispering about the news and politics with his mates, but that was not the man today.

Mrs. P had made the decision to move to Queens, rather than staying in the Chinese ghetto that Manhattan’s downtown Bowery had become.  It would have been easier for her to be among other Chinese people, but it would create a conflict for her daughter.  Her daughter would always have one foot in the old world and one foot in the new, and Mrs. P and her husband wanted her to have both feet firmly on American soil. 

Mrs. P’s husband took a job, any job, to help support himself and his family.  He couldn’t speak English and his degree was not transferable to Capitalist America.  He was, essentially, unskilled.  That wasn’t the case for everyone.  I knew physicists, engineers, and other skilled men who sold shirts on street corners, or worked as waiters in the co-op restaurants… their deficient English-language skills preventing them from working in their respective fields.

They didn’t care.  They didn’t come to America for themselves.  They came for their children. 

The isolation and loss of social network was hard on Mrs. P’s husband.  He no longer had the social standing or respect he left on the tarmac in China.  He became a lowly factory worker, unskilled, working a brutal day of physical labor… but his daughter would be an American citizen.  He traded everything for his faith in the future.

No one needed to tell Mrs. P’s daughter that she had quite a load to carry… that she had to do well in school and be successful.  She had only to look in her parent’s eyes, see their forlorn faces caught between two cultures, to know that she had to repay their sacrifice, and she’d repay it by being happy, successful… and free.

* * *

When we were in Amsterdam, we were driven to the airport by a Muslim taxi driver.  His father had been one of the workers who came to Holland for the public works projects of the 1960s.  He was frustrated.  We talked of the War on Terror and assured him that America’s desire was to reform the Middle East, not destroy Islam, nor we were desirous of creating little Americas all over the world.  We would bring the tools and help build the infrastructure and they would design nations that took the best of what worked for their cultures. 

He made a point of telling us that he was Dutch, having been born in Holland.  He was not a citizen of any other country.  His wife was a laywer and when people suggested that Middle Eastern men, like himself, engaged in barbaric practices of forcing their wives to be submissive, he laughed at the idea of trying to tell his head-strong, educated wife to do anything.  They were both Dutch citizens. They were born in Holland. They were both Muslims, but Islam wasn’t so much a religion to them as it was a cultural identity.  It is what defined their social circle, but it didn’t define their citizenship nor negate their pride of their nation of birth.

We could have spent hours discussing politics with this man, and I wished we’d had more time and the freedom to tell him to take us to his neighborhood and postpone our flight.  We wanted the conversation to continue, to get to know him better, to meet his head-strong, lawyer wife, and share a cup of tea.  But we were not free to do those things and so we shook hands with this stranger friend, and waved goodbye from the airport.

* * *

When we were in Zürich a short time after America invaded Iraq and began the shock and awe bombing of the cities.  It was in a small café that we met Jimmy.

Jimmy is an Iraqi Kurd. In 1980 he and his brother were arrested in Baghdad, along with nearly two hundred others. Jimmy was “interrogated”, then pressured to work for Saddam Hussein’s regime. If he accepted this work, as a terrorist and saboteur in foreign countries, he would be freed. (As a Kurd, he was “expendable” to Saddam.) If he didn’t agree to do this, he and his brother would be tortured until they died, or until he changed his mind.

After four days of torture, Jimmy broke, and told his captors that he’d work with them. He was released from prison, as was his brother (who had been held there just as a threat), and given twenty-four hours to recover from his ordeal. He was also given four visas to various European countries, and told to report back to Saddam’s secret police for instructions.

Instead, Jimmy recovered his passport and went straight to Baghdad Airport, and took the next flight to Italy. For the next twenty-odd years, he’d move from country to country, not daring to contact his family, not knowing what had happened to them, and not being able to tell them whether he was alive or dead.

Eventually, he was able to call his elderly father and mother, who’d thought that he was dead. His father died soon afterwards. Jimmy went to Syria, then crossed the Iraqi border at night, and spent a couple of days visiting his mother in secret. He couldn’t stay too long—the longer he stayed, the more likely he was to be betrayed to the secret police—and so he left the country by the same method he’d come. While still there, by the way, he’d found out that none of the two hundred others arrested with him had ever been heard from again.

Jimmy was never to see his mother again. During the invasion of Iraq last year, a missile exploded about a hundred yards from his mother’s house, and she died of shock. He doesn’t know whether it was an American or Iraqi missile, and doesn’t care.

I think of Jimmy often.  I thought of him and our cab driver in Holland when the Muhammad cartoon fiasco occurred in Denmark.  I doubted they’d believe that we were interested in bringing liberty to the Middle East or acceptance of Muslims in Europe with all the hate that event created.  I couldn’t even explain the shame I felt regarding it to my own countrymen, with whom I shared a culture, let alone justify it to those whose culture I did not share.

* * *

I’ve been studying a bit, as a described in one of my recent posts.  Some of that has been studying culture… well, more than “some.”

Culture is an interesting construct.  It is different from society, which is the amalgam of the residents of a place.  Culture is something else entirely.  It’s such a complicated mess of genetics, tradition, and habit.  It has seen its big and small revolutions and what we know about most are the ones that involve blood and battlefields.

But there have been other revolutions and remaking of cultures.  Cultures are not static things, as we’re often taught.  Culture is the constant battle between the have and the have-nots to distinguish themselves from each other, and from within, and the traditions passed on that define it, and allow its people to survive and prosper. 

I thought of all of that while I was watching the Olympics of the last two weeks.  I thought of the Muslim woman who ran a race with a uniform that had her head covered.  I thought of Mrs. P and what she’d think of seeing Beijing today.  I thought of the little Chinese girl, far too young for the competition, whose family refused to allow her to leave the gymnastics training she was receiving, because it was through gymnastics that her family would have a future.  I thought of her in comparison to Mrs. P’s daughter, and how people have a different cultural view of the responsibility of family. 

I thought of the Dutch and their enormous infrastructure projects and how they didn’t come about at a time when there was so much freedom in Holland. 

I thought about Kim’s post on Let Africa Sink and how folks unfamiliar with Africa view the post so differently.  They don’t hear the angst and sorrow, combined with the shrug of Africa Wins Again.  It is a different cultural construct, one that Americans and Europeans have difficulty relating to or even noticing.  Indians would have no trouble understanding it. 

I thought about Kim’s posts written as a result of our visit to Chile (The Pinochet Conundrum (1) and The Pinochet Conundrum (2)), and how the people there had an entirely view of Pinochet than we had come to believe through Western media:

I was puzzled, when we visited Chile a couple of years ago, why it was that Pinochet was not a reviled figure in Chile itself. In fact, if anything, the reverse was true. His house, a modest pension in Montevideo, was almost a shrine rather than a museum. Passersby would drop bouquets on the sidewalk outside, and people would cross themselves when they walked past his house. And these were ordinary (ie. poor) people who behaved this way—people whom one would think would be more likely supporters of “popular” (ie. Marxist) politicians like Allende.

But that wasn’t the case.

What has emerged is, for anyone who isn’t a socialist, a profoundly complex reaction to Pinochet. While he was in power, he did, or allowed to have done, actions which were reprehensible to any decent government: summary imprisonment, torture and execution of his more outspoken Marxist opposition; assassination of same (eg. the car bombing of former Chilean ambassador Orlando Letelier, in Washington D.C.), and so on. In fairness, it should be noted that his Marxist opponents were not all folk singers and poets: most were advocating, and planning, violent revolution.

* * *

It is probably impossible for us to grasp the depth and breadth of the infrastructure that makes The West possible and keeps the wheels of our Capitalist economy’s churning.  We don’t complain about having industry enough for all to find work.  That we take for granted.  We complain when it billows out black smoke and want it to be easier, less dangerous, and cleaner.  We want to continually fine tune perfection.

India has not made a new truck design since WWII.  In fact, they didn’t design the factory and assembly line they have.  The British did.  In the 70 years since, the Indians have not had the ability to change a single thing about the trucks coming off the line, nor much of a highway system to drive them on.  Their drivers die in traffic accidents that we don’t have, simply because the trucks lack the safety features that have been in our designs for decades. 

Then I looked at China from the helicopter shots of the Oympics, sans the billowing industrial smoke they knew would be unsatisfactory to their Western visitors.  It wasn’t the picture they wanted to present, even if the one they presented was false.  I noticed, too, that the road surfaces had been redone recently, probably also a result of wanting to show off for guests.  In every face in the crowds I saw a little of Mrs. P and how proud they were in their country and opening their doors.  It didn’t matter if it was contrived or false.  I’ve been known to throw messes in closets when company comes, too.

China has a long way to go before they can even begin to compare with the infrastructure of the West.  India has even further to go.

It occurred to me that the progress that China has made and the ability to organize a people around those Herculean public works projects is because they have the Draconian authority to do so, which is why India (which although leaning toward socialism, has a economics professor as their Prime Minister) cannot make the same progress.  India hasn’t and won’t make the same progress in infrastructure that China can, simply because they don’t have the same kind of Draconian rule to force people to build the way the Chinese do, and the same way the Dutch did when they dug their first canal.

It occurred to me that everything I thought I understood just didn’t fit so nicely in its puzzle frame any longer, and that perhaps the freedom we enjoy today, made possible by our infrastructure and culture, was built by people who didn’t care about history, who didn’t care about books, and who cared more about the future than they did about lofty ideals such as liberty and freedom, or themselves.

Maybe caring about your grandchildren’s future is a loftier ideal.

I’m not suggesting that it would work for us, or anywhere in the West, nor am I suggesting that it is better.  I’m just proposing that it is easy to put those ideals in the forefront when the water that comes out of our taps is safe to drink, and millions of our countrymen aren’t dying of easy to cure illnesses and diseases, because we lack the infrastructure to deliver the medicines or the food necessary to prevent them.

It’s easy to look askance at our less free brothers in other places in the world and suggest that what they need is a little more freedom, but the details tell a different story.

Perhaps what they need is less freedom, until they have the infrastructure to support it. Perhaps freedom is earned on the backs of tyranny and struggle. But I doubt I can make the case convincingly enough to soften the criticisms of places far away… it’s too complicated and I am not skilled in writing sufficient to make the case strongly- or well-enough.

But, I’m not so sure anymore.  I’m not so sure that our way is the only way.  Perhaps other cultures need to find their own way, with a different model, and get there via a route similar to the one our ancestor’s took, but forget about ourselves:  and one that values today as much as we value yesterday… and puts faith in the future in a way that we can only barely comprehend.  We can’t comprehend a life without freedom. We think of it as essential.  They think of it as frivolous…

...and I’m not so sure that’s wrong.