An Enemy Is Nothing to Fear

An enemy is someone to study. During 27 years of captivity in South Africa, Nelson Mandela studied the Afrikaners, descendants of South Africa's Dutch settlers, who created the apartheid system that made blacks second class citizens in their own country. He learned their language, studied their leaders and made friends with their prison guards. South Africa no longer has an apartheid system.

     My old home town of Chicago has a lot of local problems, a high murder rate is one. But Chicago also is enrolling more high school students in International Baccalaureate (IB) programs. (There also are IB programs for younger students.) These programs enable students to look out at the world with confidence, not fear.

     Students who can trace the Yangtze River from the busy port at Shanghai to the lake district at Wuhan and westward to China's largest city, which IB students are apt to know is Chongqing, rather than Beijing, are not afraid to learn about China's economic and military expansion. They also know the Chinese Communist Party is struggling to block the exercise of constitutional guarantees, attendance at religious services, democracy protests in Hong Kong, tax evasion by its movie stars, Gobi Desert sand storms from adding to air pollution and climate change's rising seas from swamping its artificial islands.

     International Baccalaureate programs, begun in 1968, originally were developed for the children of diplomats, military officers, and business executives frequently transferred to different countries. By satisfying rigorous IB standards, students are prepared to satisfy entrance requirements at colleges and universities wherever they might live. To learn more about IB programs and to find schools that offer them, go to ibo.org.

(Also see the earlier post "Introduce Disadvantaged Kids to the World.") 

   

A New Start

As 2019 approaches, it's time for a new start. An African-American panelist discussing race relations in America observed the Civil Rights Movement offered a more promising starting point from which to consider future race relations than the era of slavery. Nelson Mandela emerged from apartheid and 28 years in prison in South Africa with the same idea. Basically, he asked, what is gained by doing the same thing to whites as they did to blacks, when blacks are in power?

     When blacks gained power in neighboring Zimbabwe, the government ignored Mandela's advice, seized white farms, plunged the country's economy into a rapid decline, and left the population dependent on food aid to avoid starvation.

     The point is, at the beginning of 2019, we are free to choose where we want to begin. There are some great starting points: the 10 Commandments, the U.S. Declaration of Independence's declaration that all men are created equal, and the UN's Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Beginning 2019 with this 70-year-old declaration in mind, countries could avoid pre-World War II conditions: genocide, refugee migrations, Middle East conflict, abortion, proliferation of weapons, human trafficking, squandering natural resources, and polluting the environment.

     Happy New Year!