Generational Transitions

I was at a funeral the other day and a wake the night before. They were for different people, but both of the deceased were from a generation that is passing. One was ninety-one and the other eighty-five years, both had lived full lives, both appear to have led relatively happy and prosperous lives. The same was true for two other funerals of the past several months. One person was seventy-five and the other was eighty-four – again, both having lived full and apparently contented lives with ample material and emotional support as they moved on. None died alone, none died with apparent regret, all passed into the ages. What did these people have in common besides the obvious end of life scenario? They were part of a generation that is now passing into eternity was one thing, but another was their common ethnicity and their common historical connection as the first generation born of immigrants.

As I scanned the room during the bereavement meal after the funeral yesterday it struck me how most everyone in that room, with the exception of a handful from my generation, but with that exception noted, barring catastrophic illness or accident, everyone else in the room was at least seventy-five to ninety years and most would probably be dead in the next five to ten years. With the exception of only a couple or so, everyone looked well, was well dressed and apparently living their last years rather comfortably. I felt both privileged and sad at the same time: privileged to be among family who had weathered the storms of the Great Depression, World War, and the myriad changes that took place during their lifetimes – during the twentieth and now early twenty-first centuries. Sad with the realization that the standard bearers of tradition and cultural familiarity, people who have either known each other, or were familiar with the names of families from a time when they lived in the same community, were living their final years. Many in the room had not seen one other since their childhood seventy or eighty years before and as they gazed upon one another, you could hear: “You look familiar, how do I know you? Oh my God, Bessie, we used to play together.” Or, “I knew your brother and remember you when …”

There is something about this generation that makes me feel the loss of a distant past, a time when there were still many little shops with Greek lettering on their storefronts, and Greek could be heard on the streets. Yes, it’s easy to say a generation is passing, but more difficult to understand, to feel the passage, to feel the end of an entire way of life. We didn’t realize when we were kids that we would grow up to experience the end of a culture, one borne of immigrants, but nurtured by the intersections of Greek and American life. The first generation of Greek immigrants has passed and now their children, the first American born generation, are becoming part of the ages. The world that made many of us feel comfortable, that nurtured us in ways not easily comprehended, that such a world would fade into the mists of time is not fully grasped until sitting in a room at a funeral watching a cultural reality about to die. What will happen to us when this generational shift completes, when we become the next generation to pass? What will the next generation go through when the time comes for them to have the experience of reflecting during bereavement meals? Will they feel what my generation feels? It is unlikely they will experience similar moments as many of them have grown up in suburbia or in communities too diverse to appreciate the holistic aspects of growing up as a hyphenated American with the Greek immigrants still around or in recent memory. Indeed, they would not think in terms of hyphenated America, simply in terms of America and Americans.

Afghanistan and the new Surge

It's amazing how policy is made and digested in today's world of twenty-four hour news and pundit analysis not only of the policy itself, but also of who is in and who may be out of influence with the current occupant of the oval office. The latest round of policy decisions on Afghanistan offers a good example of just how un-focused the fourth estate is on delivering information in favor of an entertainment styled digest of who's who: is Biden in? what did Rumsfeld or Cheney say? who can refute the fastest? did President Obama chose the right venue for his policy speech on Afghanistan? And on the questions go, but in the next several months nearly a hundred thousand troops (US and NATO) will be on the ground in Afghanistan for a military operation designed to squelch militant Taliban and Al-Qaeda operations and not to engage nation-building -- at least that appears to be what we are hearing regarding US policy in Central Asia.

However, it has been the failure of nation-building, the failure of re-building war torn Afghanistan over nearly nine years that has created conditions ripe for a resurgence of the Taliban. What is meant by the oft heard phrase "nation-building"? Usually it means working to create the setting for a stable government with as little fraud and corruption as possible, the construction of roads, water/electric infrastructure, medical services, schools, public safety, welfare for the poor (which is nearly everyone in the country), food, and jobs that come along with the re-building process. Afghanistan has been war torn and rift with civil conflict ever since the end of the Soviet Occupation in 1988-89 and there are many ethnic and regional factions that make up the Afghanistan and undermine the very notion of an Afghan nation.  Do we really need a straight-forward military strategy and will it satisfy US interests and resolve the breakdown in Afghanistan? There was a disconnect between what is needed in Afghanistan and US policy by the Bush Administration, who squandered nearly eight years by not paying attention to nation-building in the area where Al-Qaeda and the Taliban were based in favor of Iraq, which had nothing to do with 9/11.

In fact, since 2001, US policy has actually contributed to the conditions leading up to the Taliban resurgence and there were plenty of warning signs over the past eight years and now that the Taliban control lots of Afghan territory a military option seems the only thing to do. And the Obama Administration is moving forward with a military solution, which unfortunately still ignores the issue of creating a peace time infrastructure that would help eliminate the reasons for the Taliban resurgence. On top of this is the porous Afghan/Pakistani border and the majority Pashtun population that occupies that area -- a population that has not been adverse to a Pashtunistan in the past, an entity that would effectively dissolve both Afghanistan and Pakistan as we know it today. The Afghan question cannot be separated from connections with Pakistan -- it is a related set of problems and needs to be approached in tandem with much more than a troop surge.

In terms of understanding the region and examining US policy, there needs to be a broader examination of the recent history and how that history is playing out on the ground today in order to understand the folly of US policy in Afghanistan and Pakistan over the past ten plus years. I hope to offer such an analysis in the weeks ahead and look forward to reading comments from folks with an interest on this topic.

Posting, Editing, Blogging ...

The experience of blogging is new to me, including posts that I thought were clear, but after reading them again, realizing that more editing was needed. I just re-worked the last few sentences of my post on War and Society and hope it now makes better sense. Just like writing academic papers, I'd best do a better job editing before submitting comments for public discussion. On the other hand, perhaps blogging is also about getting stuff out there and not fretting too much. Time will tell ...

War and Society

Is it in our nature to wage war or is it something created by specific societies in specific times?  It is true that wars and conflicts of varying degrees seem to have accompanied human societies since the earliest known settlements emerged in the Neolithic Age. On the other hand, during the Paleolithic Age, which is by far the longest age in human history dating approximately 200,000 years in length, it seems conflict was avoided as the hunting/gathering communities did their best to avoid conflict with other groups. Perhaps their small size gave more reality to conflict -- it wasn't someone else's sons and daughters being killed, but it could be their own or even their entire community at risk in any conflict with another group.  For the longest period in our history as a species (Paleolithic Era) conflict was avoided, so I'm less inclined to agree with the view that "war is inherent in our nature" and more inclined to agree with the view that war and conflict is a by-product of leaders too far removed from the needs of society and too focused on the needs of specific economic interests.  Since the days of the ancient world when Pharaohs and Kings sought to expand their boundaries and increase the size of their treasuries to more recent times when the British (19th, early 20th centuries) and the United States (now) used its military power to control segments of the Middle East and Central Asia (Iraq and Afghanistan) -- in all these instances royal or national interests have been defined by small groups of people at the expense of the many who fight, die, and are maimed by war.  Nationalism and patriotism are used as tools to whip populations up into a frenzy and all of a sudden thousands of troops are sent to war in the name of supporting freedom when the real reasons are far more complicated and have more to do with political dominance and oil/gas extraction-pipelines than anything else. As far as I can tell, war is a creation of conditions shaped by governments and their perceived interests, not by the nature of human beings, who would rather be left alone to live their lives in peace.

Of course, things are made more complicated when racism is mixed in with Imperialist policies to create dis-compassionate, amoral polices that wipe out or enslave entire peoples as was the case with the European dominance of the New World, Africa, and parts of Asia during the 19th and 20th centuries.  Generally speaking, that era provided foundations for the 1920s, which further set the seeds for Nazism and the genocidal aspects of the catastrophic Second World War. Was all this mayhem due to our nature as human beings?  Or, was it a result of years of warped cultural and ideological thinking that heralded a cultural mentality best described as survival of the fittest at the expense of anyone who was not us?  I tend to favor the latter as I believe it is borne out by the historical record. The nineteenth and twentieth centuries have time and again shown us the power of nationalism and patriotism to manipulate and motivate populations toward war.  We have seen this in the era of colonial wars, the two World Wars, all the way through to the current wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.  For instance, national security and patriotism have been tapped into for the past eight years as the US continues to wage war even though continuing the wars now seems disconnected from the tragic spark of 9/11.  

War usually doesn’t happen overnight, which is only realized once an examination of the conditions leading up to war, minus the nationalist feelings, can take place and provide a clear picture of whether a war was justified or not. It often takes years and specific historical conditions to create the conditions for war and peoples beliefs and attitudes are usually shaped by those conditions, which also means that perhaps what we call our "human nature" toward conflict is actually crafted to suit specific situations and whipped up when those situations require troops and public support.  Lots has to be done to get societal war juices flowing.  If so much has to be done to bring societies to war, then perhaps we are by nature more focused on survival in peacetime than we think?  Or, perhaps we are by nature more a blank slate waiting to be filled up by culture and/or ideology depending on the time and place, depending on how peace or war is crafted?

In the beginning ...

We always hear and experience life's frenetic pace and we hear lots about fulfilling goals and assessing end results, but perhaps we also need to focus on the journey itself, which is not always about goals and assessments, so I'd like to share a favorite poem that seems to resonate with meaning about life's journey. Let's begin with Constantine Cavafy's Ithaka:

As you set out for Ithaka
hope the voyage is a long one,
full of adventure, full of discovery.
Laistrygonians and Cyclops,
angry Poseidon—don’t be afraid of them:
you’ll never find things like that on your way
as long as you keep your thoughts raised high,
as long as a rare excitement
stirs your spirit and your body.
Laistrygonians and Cyclops,
wild Poseidon—you won’t encounter them
unless you bring them along inside your soul,
unless your soul sets them up in front of you.

Hope the voyage is a long one.
May there be many a summer morning when,
with what pleasure, what joy,
you come into harbors seen for the first time;
may you stop at Phoenician trading stations
to buy fine things,
mother of pearl and coral, amber and ebony,
sensual perfume of every kind—
as many sensual perfumes as you can;
and may you visit many Egyptian cities
to gather stores of knowledge from their scholars.

Keep Ithaka always in your mind.
Arriving there is what you are destined for.
But do not hurry the journey at all.
Better if it lasts for years,
so you are old by the time you reach the island,
wealthy with all you have gained on the way,
not expecting Ithaka to make you rich.

Ithaka gave you the marvelous journey.
Without her you would not have set out.
She has nothing left to give you now.

And if you find her poor, Ithaka won’t have fooled you.
Wise as you will have become, so full of experience,
you will have understood by then what these Ithakas mean.

Religion and Society

There always seems to be some degree of discussion about the role of God and religion with regard to the government and society in the United States. We often here of the US founders as being “god-fearing men” with divine providence as their guide. First and foremost, there is no question most of the Founders of the United States were for the most part Christian believers to some degree or another. However, many founders were also Deists, which was popular among many of the eighteenth century educated elite. Deism was a very generalized belief in a Supreme Being who created the Universe, but was no longer involved in the creation, and left natural laws in place to govern life on Earth inclusive of human beings who would use their abilities to reason as a way of discovering those natural laws and determining ways to live and prosper in society. 

The Founders, particularly the most influential ones such as James Madison, Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, and George Washington did not hold to strict denominational Christian doctrines and were Deists or otherwise culturally influenced by the Enlightenment, which was the reason the founders used such terms in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution as “Divine Providence,” “Nature’s God,” and “Supreme Judge.” The role of religion, much like the role of political philosophy was part of the educational background and culture of the U.S. founders, and of course did inform their moral compass and values, but it is difficult to pinpoint a single defining influence as the founders were not singularly ideological, nor religiously dogmatic. They considered themselves to be reasoned thinkers of their age and never intended nor publicly proclaimed the new United States as a Christian Nation in any of the founding documents. As the new nation’s leaders struggled to lead the fledgling country to victory during the revolutionary war against Great Britain and later as they struggled to formulate a system of government that balanced states' rights with those of a national government, they did so with a keen awareness of the dangers inherent in a country where there was an established national religion.

As educated members of society, the founders understood that Europe had gone through several centuries of religious wars and persecutions. The religious wars between Protestants and Catholics, and related persecutions of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, were bloody affairs that left an indelible mark on the US founders and influenced the way they embarked on the formulation of the governing principles of the new democratic nation-state in the late eighteenth century. The U.S. founders were thinkers steeped in the traditions of the eighteenth century Enlightenment and they were very careful not to create a nation based on any one religious tradition, which was the reason the first article of the Bill of Rights was the First Amendment:   

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.

We know that initially the young nation was governed by the Articles of Confederation, which gave most governmental power to the states at the expense of a national government, and, from the founders’ views, this put the young US nation-state in jeopardy of dissolving as there was no mechanism for creating and maintaining national cohesion. This fear of the Union breaking apart over differing states’ interests versus a national interest and the fear of being unable to respond to a national crisis, such as the case with the Shays or Whiskey rebellions in the 1780s, led to the Constitutional Convention culminating with the ratification of the Federal Constitution and The Bill of Rights (1790-91). The New Federal Constitution created a strong national government with strong state governments contingent upon states not contradicting national laws. Included in this new US Constitution, the one that continues to govern the United States in the twenty-first century, was the Bill of Rights. The Bill of Rights is the first ten amendments and was part of the compromise that created a strong national government while preserving individual liberties and rights. It is important to have just a bit more context on the Federal Constitution; it was designed for a country where citizen's rights were restricted to white males, where slavery was legal (the slave trade continued until 1833), and the entire population did not vote for the President, or Senators, and the Supreme Court was appointed by non-elected leaders, which means the only national body elected by the general population was the House of Representatives. However, in time, the constitutional amendment process was used to further democratize the United States making the President elected by the entire nation of citizens (white males) in 1826; and, the Civil War Amendments (13th, 14th, 15th) expanded the franchise to African-Americans, who continued to have their rights hindered by the Jim Crow Laws until Brown vs. Board of Education (1955) and the Civil Rights Acts of 1964, 1965. Additionally, women were not granted the right to vote until the 19th Amendment in 1920. These major changes occurred within the context of a secular U.S. Constitutional system working to further democratize U.S. Society by expanding rights and not abridging those rights over the course of United States history, nor intoning God or any religion.

The founding documents and cultural context of those who wrote them is very important to understand in order not to allow present day ideological currents to re-write history outside of the evidence. The U.S. system of government was not founded as a religious republic, but was intentionally secular. The United States was founded as a democratic nation-state by people within a common culture of the time, and this did include Christianity, but it also included a strong influence from the anti-religious aspects of the Enlightenment, which recognized Divine Providence, but was also careful not to assign a governmental role to that “providence.” The U.S Founders recognized the need to maintain a secular society at the same time as protecting citizens from religious persecution as well as protecting citizens’ rights to worship in accordance to their values, desires, and beliefs. Understanding the historical dimension of sectarian/religious conflicts in their own era, the Founders did their best to prevent such tensions and conflicts when the First Amendment to the Bill of Rights was approved in 1790-1791. Additionally, the establishment of the new nation-state was not proclaimed as a Christian country, but instead the founders were very careful to use the following language that set the tone for the new nation as evidenced by the Preamble to the U.S. Constitution. They did not call upon Divine Providence or God to ordain the new country, but proclaimed sovereignty and the authority to govern with these words:  

We the people of the United States, in order to form a more perfect union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.

It would seem that our Founders intended on a secular government and desperately so.  After all, the centuries of religious wars and persecutions in Europe's past were clear warnings for the founders who understood the perils of religious conflict and knew there was enough to divide the young republic, so the separation of church and state was a virtue enshrined in the new constitution, now over 200 years old.  Let's hope we keep this example in mind when religious institutions pressure society to erode those separations using a Christian history of the U.S. that just does not exist.