Reading Matters, Even If It's Only One Book

A lovely photo of a boy reading a hefty tome in a bookstore in Afghanistan grabbed my attention recently on social media, and without thinking I typed my comment: "He is reading the Koran." Someone promptly responded saying that my remark was hateful, and that it did not matter what the book was as long as the boy was reading. I can see why someone could consider the comment mean, but it was not meant to be. The picture of the Aghan boy reminded me of a visit to the Darul Quran Madrasa Azmatia in Kolkata, India, more than 15 years ago.

About 150 boys were attending classes at the madrasa attached to Kolkata's largest mosque. When I saw the students during the break they seemed reticent and looked at me as I imagine they would look at a Martian. But within minutes their natural curiosity and friendliness won over, and some of them were even ready to make silly poses for the camera.  

The imam told me through an interpreter that poor families from all over India sent their boys to the madrasa. Their tuition, board and lodging was paid by the charity. The school was more than 100 years old and the number of students was growing.

"Two reasons," Imam Qari Fazlur said, "one is the population growth and the other: people are bending toward religion. People like to see that their children learn the Koran and the Koranic teachings and the practices followed by the Prophet Mohammed."

But there were other reasons, I learned. India's constitution guarantees children's education in their mother tongue, but speakers of minority languages, such as Urdu and Bengali, often complain that the official language Hindi, spoken by the Hindu majority, is enforced in schools throughout the country. So when possible, speakers of other languages send their children to private schools.  But the vast majority of Muslims in India are poor and instead of sending their children to any school, they are sending them to work. Some families who cannot feed their offspring feel lucky if at least one child is accepted at a madrasa where it will get a clean bed, food, clothes and education free of charge. 

The education at a madrasa consists largely of learning to read and recite the Koran.  By the time they finish school, most boys know the holy book by heart.  There is nothing wrong with that.  The problem is that they learn little else and once out of the madrasa, these young men are not prepared for gainful employment, and the cycle of poverty continues.  

More than 120 million people aged 15 to 24 in the world cannot read or write. Close to a half of them live in only nine countries: India, Pakistan, Nigeria, Ethiopia, Bangladesh, Democratic Republic of Congo, Tanzania, Egypt and Burkina Faso. Poor education is linked to poverty in these countries, regardless of religion.

So, as my angry commenter remarked, it is important to read, or to be precise: to be able to read. With a literacy rate of 28 percent, Afghanistan is the second most illiterate country in the world after South Sudan. Therefore, the picture of the barefoot Afghan boy in a library, engrossed in a book, is heartening. What is disheartening is learning - as I have at a Library of Congress event - that bookstores are disappearing from the neighboring Pakistan. The only "reading" available to ordinary citizens are tape-recorded sermons by local imams, sold outside the mosques. One can only hope that Afghanistan has many bookstores like the one in the charming photo with a young reader.

A Letter From Costa Rica

A few weeks ago I received an e-mail addressed to a Rick, forwarded by my friend Dan Rupli. The e-mail seemed to be sent from Costa Rica, a country which impressed me with its beauty and tranquility during last year's visit. Since I do not know this Rick, but I do know that Dan was buying property in Costa Rica, I was not sure if it was spam or not and so I checked with Dan in a separate mail. He confirmed being the sender and agreed that I can post his letter on my blog.  The content was not what I expected and it may surprise you too.

From:  Dan Rupli

 Tuesday,  June 16, 2015

Subject:  To my new friend Rick, with gratitude and admiration

I am watching the magical cloud formations at 5,000 feet altitude at the entrance to Mt. Chirripo Nabetional Park in South Central Costa Rica. Chirripo reaches a height of 12,000 feet, which is Colorado Rocky class and is the tallest mountain in Costa Rica.

I am staying with my wife and a close friend in a small jungle house that I am about to purchase, which is bordered by two wild cascading rivers which join at the property after tumbling out of Chirripo and rushing South toward magnificent Pacific beaches about 45 minutes South of here.

Sitting here on the patio after a wonderful breakfast with good Costa Rican coffee listening to the river sounds all around makes me feel like I am in a kind of Eden with birds, butterflies, flowers, and hummingbirds dancing all around me. I have had the good fortune to travel extensively around the world, but this small magical place in the cloud forests of the Talamanca Mountains, populated by “the happiest people on earth” is the most wonderful place I have ever been.

Costa Rica could forest

You would be right to conclude that this ought to be the source of almost unlimited joy at the moment, but I am of this world, with a blessed life experience, and I must vent some deeply felt feelings that were unleashed by a chance encounter with a Vietnam veteran that I have befriended since my arrival. Please indulge me.

Like many of my generation, my life was shaped by giant and consequential events; the Civil Rights Movement, the advent of Rock and Roll music, the multiple assassinations of great leaders who chartered my own course and beliefs, and the war in Vietnam.

Two days ago I met a man of my age named Rick who spent his early years in Utah, before enlisting as a helicopter pilot in Vietnam. Rick is a gentle soul and a chain smoker who, like me has been married more than once, and who recently met and married a newly widowed Tica lady who is appropriately known as Gabby. They are in the process of putting together a tourist business here locally. Over lunch, Rick and I talked about politics, particularly the unfolding mess in the Middle East. We both drew parallels with the current experience to the horrors of our involvement in Vietnam.

It is not my purpose to discuss the President’s Middle East foreign policy. I happen to believe that he and John Kerry are right to focus on obtaining a workable nuclear weapons ban treaty with Iran, and if that doesn’t meet the approval of the thug who is running Israel at the moment, or the ultra cruel and corrupt Saudi Royal Family, then I think that Obama may have it just about right.

But this morning I focus my rage on the Chicken Hawks who engineered through lies, deception, and cooked intelligence our very presence in Afghanistan and Iraq. These right wing cowards, creeps and criminals have names: Bush(W), Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, and others. The common thread that binds each of these “armchair patriots” to one another like perps chained together after a drug raid is that all of them favored and promoted the war in Vietnam, and all of them did everything they could to duck service in that war. George W. Bush actually deserted his National Guard unit for over a year to get out of serving after the considerable cost to tax payers for his training as a pilot. Of course he was never prosecuted for desertion because of his father’s extensive connections. Dick Cheney received no less than seven deferments while hiding under his bed from service in the war, like Bush and the others.

Costa Rica, Arenal area

I have experienced a certain guilt in not having served in Vietnam like many of my friends, but early on I supported the idea of trying to “defend the South Vietnamese people from their marauding Communist neighbors from the North.” I even tried without success to join the Marines in order to avenge the death of a close high school buddy of mine who was an early casualty of that bogus War, But I was prevented from enlisting because I was married with a child.

Today those same draft dodging Chicken Hawks who let less fortunate people fight and die in a war that the cowards supported and never served in are harping about the Administration’s “weakness and lack of resolve” in a tangled Middle Eastern morass that is entirely of their own creation. To date those Middle Eastern wars have lasted beyond a decade, cost the lives of thousands of Americans - the flower of a generation, cost trillions of dollars in national treasure, and resulted in the death and dislocation of hundreds of thousands of native innocents, and they show no sign of winding down. And still the Chicken Hawks continue to put complete hypocrisy on display without a tiny shred of shame attached to it.

This narrative seeks to tie the same culprits with their “lapel pin patriotism” to both the wars in Vietnam and the Middle East, but most importantly it is a tribute to my new friend Rick whose suffering and sacrifice for a questionable cause goes way beyond ordinary military service.

Rick was landing his helicopter in a “hot zone in the jungle” to pick up wounded soldiers on a hot and sunny day during the height of the Vietnam War. When he landed he said that the jungle was so dark that he couldn’t see his hand in front of his face. After loading the wounded, he lifted the chopper with its precious cargo up to the bright sunshine above the treetops. At that moment he said that his entire life went into a kind of slow motion as he saw the flash of a rocket tearing toward him from the jungle floor. He banked the helicopter violently to the right. The rocket missed the main body of the helicopter but severed the main rotor from the rest of the vehicle. The copter didn’t have far to fall back into the darkness of the jungle, and Rick’s only thought was to not die in a fire, so he leapt into the treetops and fell to the ground as the helicopter exploded nearby into a fireball of human anguish. Rick was severely injured by the fall, but instinctively rose to his feet “running like hell” in total darkness and in no particular direction until he ran into a tree breaking out all of his front teeth. At the same time he heard the sound of an automatic weapon and felt three bullets enter his body - one under his left eye, the second under his left armpit exiting his neck, and the third hitting him square in the sternum. He remembers hearing a loud buzzing sound in his head before passing out. When he awoke he was being dragged by a GI through the jungle who had mercifully administered large amounts of morphine to this fallen soldier. Rick was medivacked shortly afterwards, not fully knowing whether he wanted to survive the events that laid him so low.

It took Rick over a year of intensive care to partially recover from his hideous wounds, which continue to cause him great physical and emotional pain to this day.

Costa Rica, Samara beach

My reaction to Rick's story on all that has transpired in those last couple of days in Vietnam: if there is a Creator, may God bless you Rick, not just for your service but for your suffering and sacrifice for someone else’s hollow patriotism and terrible errors in judgment. And may God damn you George Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, and all the other creeps and scoundrels who visited havoc and suffering on so many people of different generations by supporting, lying us into, and promoting endless wars for profit in the name of National honor and patriotism. You are all war criminals and worse, each of you have earned a place in the history of infamy.

I met Rick again today for coffee and very little was spoken between us. Our first conversation had taken a lot out of both of us, and I don’t think that either of us had the energy to continue it.

We sat there and marveled at the rapidly changing cloud patterns, the incredible sunbursts that punctuated a gentle rain and the beauty that totally surrounded us in this precious little piece of mountain paradise. Here we were, two aging men of different backgrounds and experience, one a casualty of war, seeking only to find peace, order, justice, and happiness in a world that continues, after all these years, to be turned totally upside down by the folly of false patriots.

Despite Flaws In Foreign Policy, US Leadership Role Remains Unshaken

May 30, 2014

As the world's only remaining superpower, the United States is under pressure to respond to demands from its allies and to threats from its adversaries. Political analysts say that despite flaws in its foreign policy, the United States is the only country able to handle these conflicting pressures.  The oppressed, the poor and the vulnerable first look to the United States for support, and analysts say it is likely to remain so for years to come.

The economic rise of China and Russia's territorial ambitions are no threat to the U.S. position as world leader, said Klaus Larres, an expert on international relations at the University of North Carolina.

Klaus Larres, Univerity of North Carolina, Chapel Hill

"Russia is in the end a declining power, said Larres. "I cannot see that Russia will remain among the great powers of the world."

China is focused on exerting control over its immediate neighborhood and on silencing voices of discontent at home, he said.

The European Union is bogged down in its own woes, including stagnant economy, youth unemployment, illegal immigration and others. So there is no comparable power on the horizon to take over global leadership from the United States, said Larres.

Conservatives in the United States have interpreted President Barack Obama’s moves to share the burden of leadership responsibilities with other western nations as a sign of weakness. But Larres pointed out that Mr.Obama is not the first American president to do so.

"In 1969, President Nixon gave a big foreign policy speech on the island of Guam that became known as the Nixon doctrine. He announced that the United States will continue to lead in the world, as [President] Obama has said recently, but that the burden needs to be shared more equally among the allies."
 

One of the burdens Mr. Obama wants to share is combating terrorism. This is also a much criticized area of the U.S. foreign policy.  The use of drones and spying has garnered dubious success in his anti-terrorism efforts, but has added to the simmering anti-American sentiment abroad. What’s more, the concerted campaign to destroy major terrorists’ camps in Afghanistan has not eradicated terrorism, said Omar Samad, a former Afghanistan ambassador to France and Canada.

“Everybody admits that Al-Qaida is still a phenomenon, says Samad. Everybody admits that it’s maybe decentralized, but the hub, or one of the main sanctuaries of terrorism, still is in the vicinity of Afghanistan and mostly in the tribal regions of Pakistan, and occasionally they venture into Afghanistan. They have linkages not only to the Taliban, the hardcore of the Taliban, but linkages to many other Jihad type organizations in our region."

Samad added that the United States was withdrawing its forces from Afghanistanat a time when the nation’s own law enforcement is not capable of defending it from a possible new insurgency.

President Obama has said that a counter-terrorism effort in one place is no longer an option because the world now has to deal with a myriad of radical fringe groups springing up in the Muslim world and elsewhere.

Barry Pavel, vice president of the Atlantic Council, said Mr. Obama recognizes “that we are in a new era of history in which individuals and groups with global awareness are becoming powerful actors, alongside nations, on a rapidly changing global stage.”

Larres said the president’s idea to set up an international anti-terror fund of $5 billion is a good one, especially if it is to be used for education of young people in places like Pakistan, Afghanistan, Yemen and other parts of the world where unemployed youths are vulnerable to jihadist recruiters. In the long run, he said, soft diplomacy may be more useful in defusing terrorism than drones and spying.

While analysts seem to praise Mr. Obama’s avoidance of military entanglements in Syria, Ukraine, Africa and other places that do not touch directly on U.S. security, many complain that both the United States and Europe have turned a blind eye to military coups ousting democratically elected governments worldwide.

"We now have military dictatorships in Egypt, which also treats its opponents in a very crass way -- not what a democratic country like the United States should stand for -- and also in Thailand," said Larres. The Obama administration should have unequivocally condemned those coups and urged the military to restore democracy, he said.
 

“The United States must always lead,” said President Obama in his new major foreign policy speech, delivered at West Point graduation ceremony on May 28. And it should, said Larres. “The United States has more political, economic and military power to lead than any other country in the world. But it must use it more to help those that need it."