It seems I’m not the only person to struggle with the competing claims of my faith and my love of country. President Andrew Johnson said, “I do believe in Almighty God! And I believe also in the Bible…Let us look forward to the time when we can take the flag of our country and nail it below the Cross, and there let it wave as it waved in the olden times, and let us gather around it and inscribed for our motto: “Liberty and Union, one and inseparable, now and forever,” and exclaim, Christ first, our country next!”
Category: politics
In Honor of Memorial Day: How we make military public policy decisions
I saw a fascinating book this morning on the Today show. It’s called AWOL: The Unexcused Absence of America’s Upper Class from Military Service – and How It Hurts Our Country. Quite a long title. It’s co-authored by two educated northeast elites whose husband and son unexpectedly joined the military. It details their ‘conversion’ experience and calls for more upper-class sacrifice in the name of better military policy and a bit more national growing-up. Fortunate Son, indeed. You can read the Today Show’s excerpt of the book at http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/12990432/.
This issue is meaningful to me as a veteran. I read the 9/11 Commission report and think about military policy differently than I did had I not spent almost 6 years of my life serving our country.
Later this morning we’re going to a Memorial Day observance at a cemetery in Kingsburg. I’ll take some photos and post them if they turn out well. Today I’ll be thinking about Nathan Bruckenthal, the Coast Guardsman who died in Iraq and left his unborn daughter behind. The child is typical of many whose lives bear the marks of military sacrifice. For his entire life, he’s owed the thanks of a grateful nations. Heartfelt though it may be, it’s scant replacement for the father he’ll never meet.
Walking yet another line
As I’m reading the 9/11 Commission report, I’m constantly frustrated by the frequent opportunities the U.S. had to stop Usama bin Laden before the September 11 attacks. We were stopped by small things like a lack of logistical support for covert operations or our standing national policy against assasination. These things seem so petty in hindsight. Those in charge seem guilty of lacking the political will to act. I keep feeling like I’m reading a story with the end written first, and the lead-up written as one long flashback. I keep wanting to yell to the key players, “They’re all going to die in the end unless you do something!”
Fast-forwarding to the present, our country is engaged in a lot of practices in our efforts against terrorism that draw legitimate questions from within our borders and throughout the global community. I’ts been recently revealed that the CIA has a network of prisons worldwide at which the United States ‘detains’ people without trial and uses questionable interrogation methods. I stand in a long line of people claiming to abhor that practice. But I can also imagine reading about the next attack in another commission’s report and wondering why we didn’t do more. I can imagine wondering why we were so squeamish when innocent lives were on the line and why we lacked the political will to act when so many lives were in danger. For now, I’ll suspend judgement and not choose a position for or against our government’s practices. Questioning such practices is healthy. Specifically, I ask you this question: How far is too far in trying to stop evil? It’s a classic ethical question with very observable outworkings. Are we going too far now? Should we have gone further before September 11, 2001?
I’ll keep reading the commission’s report. But I know how the story ends, and it saddens me. They all die.
On Developments in International Politics, Unexpected
Lots has been happening for all of us lately. Lisa and I got a dog (Maggie!), we held Shinn Photo’s launch celebration, Max (our cat) decided the world is his litter box and was thereby quarantined to his own private infirmary at our house, I decided to start a business in South Dakota, Lisa went to a spelling bee with several of her students, Max recovered and regained (mostly) free reign of our house, we subscribed to Time and Sunset magazines, I discovered Sudoku and decided not to start a business in South Dakota, Maggie learned to sit, and some other stuff happened.
But it’s been a big couple of weeks for the rest of the world, too. Ariel Sharon had a stroke, throwing into question future prospects for Mideast peace. Hamas, a group founded as a terrorist organization, was taken by surprise when they won the Palestinian elections. No one’s sure quite how to react to that. And Google made a controversial decision to officially open operations in China, complying with the Chinese government’s desire to censor search results.
Both Hamas’s entry into legitimate politics and Google’s entry into China ring some similar-sounding tones for me. Both were unexpected paradigm-breaking head-scratchers. Terrorists don’t win elections, especially in nations teetering on the brink of peace. And it’s long been assumed that the freer flow of information into communist countries would tear apart the red fabric of socialism instead of serving socialist demands. But beneath each of these news articles lies an additional layer of complexity.
Hamas’s roots are in the Islamic Brotherhood, an Egyptian organization that also claims Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the architect of the 9/11 attacks, as an earlier associate. Part of Hamas’s 1987 charter is the destruction of the Israeli state. This hardly makes them a likely partner in the peace process. But they also come into power with anything but a single-issue platform. Hamas has spent the past several decades sponsoring suicide bombers and founding soup kitchens, charitiable hospitals, and schools. Their intention in fronting so many candidates in the recent election was to clean up corruption in the PLO-founded PA, or Palestinian Authority. The PA, dominated by Fatah, an allegedly corrupt political party, has been neglecting basic social infrastructure services like trash collection and traffic lights. But Hamas hardly expected to hold a sudden majority in government, and is now scrambling to figure out what to do with it. As a policy, I don’t advocate handing broad governmental power to terrorist organizations. But I do see the merits of bringing the disenfranchised into mainstream dialogue and addressing their real concerns. And as Moises Naim, editor-in-chief of Foreign Policy Magazine, said, “There is nothing more educational and transformational than running a government in a poor country.” Perhaps the shock of Hamas’s newfound political legitimacy is the biggest step that no one would have expected toward peace?
Speaking of new steps, Google, everyone’s favorite (advertising company, search engine, media company, and maybe future operating system vendor?) has once again stepped boldly where no (advertising company, search engine, media company, and maybe future operating system vendor?) has gone before: China. Google’s U.S. site, www.google.com, has been sporadically available to Chinese residents in the past. But the Chinese government worries that the free flow of information to 20% of the world’s population might result in, um, bad things. So Google has been blocked to Chinese internet browsers until now. But in exchange for reaching that same 20% of the world’s population, Google has agreed to filter out results containing such consipatorial keywords as fear, sex, democracy, and joke. Google submitted a well-reasoned explanation for their move to the U.S. Congressional Human Right Caucus, saying that they want all people to have unfettered access to information, and calling on the U.S. Government to address censorship as a barrier to trade in future intergovernmental communication with China. So maybe information will make the world free, even if it means short-term compromises.
Well, folks, I’m searched-out. It’s 11 p.m., and I need to get to sleep. Any comments or thoughts?
– Andrew
technorati tags: international affairs, terrorism, google, life updates, andrew shinn, lisa shinn, pets
On Judging Saddam
“I’m going out on a limb here, but I’d venture to say that judging a terrible, despotic leader who’s been controversially unseated is not a task for he faint of heart.”
– Andrew Shinn, upon hearing the news that one of the judges presiding in Saddam Hussein’s trial resigned this week.
Humility, forgiveness and terrorism
Previously, I wrote about terrorism and forgiveness. Perhaps I should have approached that with a little more humility. Let me be clear: I am not yet prepared to forgive the terrorists who attacked New York City and Pentagon and attempted to attack Washington D.C. on September 11, 2001. I was pointing to the cross as the only bastion of hope for stopping the cycle of violence. But I’m not ready to pull the handbrake on this sick carousel yet.When I think about forgiveness, I turn to the Sermon on the Mount. When Jesus said, “Love your enemies,” I wonder who he meant. I’ve always imagined that my enemy is probably a person across town who doesn’t like me. I think I may be able to take a stab (pardon the pun) at forgiving that guy. But Jesus seems to define one’s very neighbor as a person of a different, hated nationality in the parable of the good Samaritan. So I imagine that Jesus would define one’s enemy in even more extreme and uncomfortable terms.
Even though I’m not yet able to respond to the evil of terrorism with love, I aspire to being that kind of person some day. And it helps me greatly to know that even though I’m not supposed to seek out vengeance, our God is a Just God who does. In fact, his vengeance and his wrath are more terrible than anything I can even conceive. I’m sure God’s vengeance would make any payback humans could deliver seem silly and childish. It’s like a toddler toting a wooden sword to go after the man who killed his mother.
I’ve read a good bit of the Old Testament. I know if I can trust my God with anything, I can trust Him to take vengeance on those who truly deserve it. I just need to keep in mind what separates me from those I hate and strive to keep from being one whose actions deserve God’s wrath.
technorati tags: Christian response to terrorism, forgiveness, humility, terrorism, evil, Christianity
Terrorism in Munich and New York
I’m reading the 9/11 Commission Report right now. I’ll post a book report when I’m finished, but this is intended to be a meta-report of some of my initial thoughts on reading about the events of September 11 and an effective response to terrorism.
Reading about the details of the hijackings brings home to me how evil those acts were. It arouses my ire and makes me wish for vengance. I briefly fanasized about studying to become an expert in terrorism in order to strike back and make a difference. My initial conception of striking back against terrorism involves surgical strikes and very careful elimination of terrorist cells.
Against a backdrop of these thoughts, I went to see the movie Munich by Steven Spielberg late last night. Munich follows my fantasy of assasination-type surgical strikes against terrorists involved in the terrorist attacks carried out by Palestinians against Israelis at the 1972 Munich Olympics. It follows a young Jewish man recruited to carry out these attacks in what amounts to Israeli state-sponsored terrorism. The movie, though violent, doesn’t glorify violence. It takes a very close look at the very real issues surrounding terrorism. As the main character kills those terrorist and suspected terrorists, he witnesses the rise of harder targets and enemies more vile than those he was killing. He also struggles with many complex moral issues attending to the attempts to serve higher purposes with lower means.
Driving home from the theater, I was forced to reject my previous ideas about striking back at terrorism as an effective means of stopping it. I reflected on the “you-killed-my-brother, I’ll-kill-yours” mentality seen in places like Northern Ireland, the West Bank, and my own heart. I realized that the only solution ever presented to this ultra-hard problem comes in the out-of-the-box teachings of Jesus Christ. Forgiveness, however hard, is demanded as the ultimate solution to the cylce of violence and death.
I don’t pretend to make these statements from a position of understanding, as I haven’t lost loved ones to the pain of violence. But God DID lose his Son to us who declared ourselves His enemies. And the cry from the cross, the one calling for forgiveness of Jesus’s tormentors, echoes today across West Bank and Northern Ireland and through the caverns of my dark heart. It’s the first and last solution to the extreme evils of terrorism. This isn’t a call to weakness or to laying down in the face of evil; it’s a call to carry out one of the hardest acts ever imagined. It’s a call to stand up to evil in the world and in our own hearts; and it’s the only weapon ever shown to stop the cycle. God help us.
technorati tags: terrorism, response, 9/11, Christianity, Christian response to terrorism, Munich, evil
Is it a small world after all?
Book report: The World is Flat byThomas Friedman
I just finished The World is Flat, thenoted New York Times journalist’s enthralling commentary on worldaffairs in every dimension from technology to terrorism. At 455pages, completing it is no mean feat, but well worth the effort.
It’s clear that Friedman is Jewish:besides implying so in the last page before the book’s conclusion,the imprint of the Jewish message of hope for and from humanityemerges strongly.
The entire work takes a fairly simpleform. It first describes the author’s discovery of some facts aboutthe state of the world and where the world’s headed. Then itbacktracks a bit to describe the background behind said facts. Allof this was clarifying and enlightening for me. The end of the bookdiscusses force that threaten to undermine some of the really neattechno-economic progress humanity’s attained. These forces includesickness, poverty, and humiliation (and the terrorism that results). Terrorism and the despair and lack of hope that give rise to it aretreated especially heavily near the end of the book. Sprinkledliberally throughout are recommendations for making the world abetter place. These include personal skills for Americans hoping tocompete in the global job market, solutions for feeding the hungryand saving the environment, ideas for eliminating terrorism andpromoting religious tolerance, and notions related to fosteringcontinued technological innovation. These recommendations were loftybut realistic for about the first three-quarters of the book. By theend, I began to feel that Friedman was offering the answer to everyproblem that plagues humanity. The enormity of this task alone jadesme to the possibility that Friedman may indeed have some goodanswers.
Despite this, the book is well worthreading, both for people who want to seek jobs in this brave new(flat) world or for those who direly need to think about how best toconduct American affairs in it. If you have a stake in either,you’re welcome to borrow my copy of the book and read it.
technorati tags: book report, Flat World, world affairs, globalization, terrorism, technology
Tool assesses the way you live
Friends,
Here’s an interesting tool sent in by reader Rachel Shinn. (Thanks Rach!) It helps you assess what kind of ‘ecological footprint’ you’re using. Check it out: www.myfootprint.org.
Heppy Toosday,
Andrew
The World is Flat
Shinnfans, I’m in the middle (page 260) of Thomas Friedman’s landmark book, The World is Flat. I read Blink, which was interesting. I’m reading Freakonomics, which is also interesting. But both are interesting in a merely trivial manner. The World is Flat is riveting because of its relevance. The new shape of the world is something that the young need to worry about in order to stay employable in the future. And it’s something that the old should worry about on behalf of their kids. Shocking, revealing, interesting. Here’s what was happening in the rest of the world while America stared at our collective navel.
Read it soon. If you’ve read it, comment here!
– AJS