2/2/2010 11:01:00 AM OPINION: The Cow Catcher Collection
By Steven Johnsrud
Peace and Justice
By Steven Johnsrud
The Cow Catcher Collection
Americans voted for change in electing President Barack Obama and almost immediately begin to bicker when the process of change begins to happen. My highest expectation of our new president would be that America's perception in the world at large would greatly improve.
I would rather see the Peace Corps quadrupled and the military kept at a trim fighting weight for necessary conflict resolution.
Heroes leave an aftermath of responsibility if they are to carry any on-going substantive weight. In my case, Victor Frankl, the psychiatrist who survived the horrors of Auschwitz concentration camp and went on to write his classic, "Man's Search for Meaning," is one example.
Nelson Mandela, former prison inmate and former president of South Africa is another.
Sensitized to the reality of the Jewish Holocaust and aware of the ramifications of South Africa's previous policy of racial apartheid are the residues of their reality.
This is the path, which leads to awareness and involvement in our own modern world.
Change is good.
Americans agonize over the complex relationship of the West with Islam and feel bewildered in separating the good guys versus the terrorists. But terrorists come in all flavors, as we were so chagrined to discover in the tragic Oklahoma City bombing of the Federal Building.
Homegrown domestic terrorists were one of our earliest and worse foes, despite early fears and reactionary reporting in the press of "foreigners."
Our collective misunderstanding of the Muslim world after 9/11 is not surprising; but too little has been done to rectify the ignorance and prejudiced perceptions. The pain is still too fresh and too close to home to begin to find the path to healing and building bridges of understanding to peace and justice.
In 1984, I published "Nicaragua at 6:00 a.m.: Wedding in a War Zone" in the Radical Option, Weston, Vt. This was a poem based upon an attack of a wedding party near Esteli reported on NPR.
"Good angels of Nicaragua, awake!" it began in a good jeremiad tradition of calling for peace and justice. Over 25 years later I read a more realistic account of the atrocity in a book by Maryknoll priest who interviewed the survivors.
Getting into world affairs is a hankering, which comes from a sensitization to issues of human rights and global implications of human actions.
Naiveté will end when indifference grows intolerable and the world community becomes the location of our concern and prayer and action.
Cuba would be another good bad example, and illustrate of how one voice can come to dominate American domestic policy by an inordinately vocal, well-situated minority, the Cuban-American population of Florida.
Citizens of Cuba still drive '59 Chevys as some of us can barely remember the origin of Communism in out neighbor to the south.
Gorbachev's wall came down and the Cold War was said to have ended, but not for all. Cuba remains ghettoized in old superstitions and we claim to fear its Castro family leadership as much as ever.
Get a life! There should be lucrative casinos and tourism facilities under construction right now and not the dog and pony show our Congress timidly negotiates with the Miami lobby.
When we get to the possibility of a rapprochement between the Americans and the Turks, we have another clash of old histories, old hostilities still not addressed and certainly far from healed.
We remember how painful the truth commissions were in South Africa and how everyone held their breath to see if they would work, bring results and help end apartheid.
Likewise, unimaginable is ending many regional and tribal conflicts in the rest of African continent, where as Christian Hennemeyer with "Bridging the Gap" NGO has said, "Fifty years after the first wave of independence, most of Africa is still waiting to benefit from democracy. Rulers extending their terms in office certainly aren't helping matters any." www.globalpost.com/dispatch/worldview/091119/africa-democratic-backsliding.
America must fight its war on terrorism both globally and domestically but while it does, the voices of peace must not be silenced nor lured into a dichotomizing such as occurred during the Viet Nam conflict.
The homework for peace and justice is formidable. The implications for the sanity of our planet are immeasurable and crucial, so we do not wake up again to another tragedy we never saw coming.
And for those who suffer in these distant conflicts and continents and mysteriously named countries, it should still mean something to dream about the golden land across the sea where there are dreams and hopes for a better world to some. We are the world and they are our brothers and sisters.
