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?