Who Would You Like to Meet?

At a luncheon in Chicago, I was seated next to Jesse Owens in 1956. We didn't reminisce about his track and field victories at Hitler's 1936 Olympic Games in Berlin. We discussed why attitudes toward race were different in suburban Chicago and other areas of the city.

     The Atlantic magazine ends each issue on its last page by asking readers to respond to a question. In June, 2018, the question was: "Which two historical figures would you most like to introduce to each other?" It is a question young and old anywhere in the world can and should pose to each other.

     Reader responses reminded us to recognize the enduring influence of people from diverse backgrounds, such as Julia Child, Albert Einstein, Louis Braille, and Mother Teresa.

     Why readers wanted to hear the conversations of the people they introduced revealed interesting topics. One wondered what Alexander Hamilton would tell Lin-Manuel Miranda he got right and wrong in his prize-winning musical.

     Another wanted Barack Obama to show Abraham Lincoln "the fruits of his enormous accomplishment."

     What would Leonardo da Vinci and Nikola Tesla chat about over coffee, a woman wondered. And then, someone thought William Shakespeare and Mae West would realize they both live on through their quotable remarks.

   

How to React When You've Been Wronged

Colombia's new President, Ivan Duque, will come to office facing a population that suffered hundreds of thousands killed by rebels who now are allowed to hold public office under the terms of a 2016 peace accord. Instead, many of his wronged constituents want retribution for crimes against their families.

     In The Monarchy of Fear, Martha C. Nussbaum writes about Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and the valid anger he faced as a leader of once-enslaved African-Americas in the United States. She also sees anger growing among those whose standard of living is threatened by automation and outsourcing of jobs, while others thrive from globalization.

     When President Obama was asked to deliver the Nelson Mandela Annual Lecture in South Africa this year, he too reflected on the way globalization and technology can benefit the rich and powerful while facilitating inequality. But he reminded his audience about how Mandela responded: 1) to his over 20 years of captivity under an apartheid structure that defined the artificial domination of whites over blacks by studying the thinking of his enemies, and 2) to his election as President of South Africa by abiding by the constitutional limit of his presidential term and by not favoring any group.

     Obama acknowledged, IT IS HARD to engage with people who look different and hold different views from you. But you have to keep teaching that idea of engaging with different people to ourselves and our children, he said.

     Each of us has to hold hard, as Nelson Mandela did, even while he was in prison, to the firm belief that being a human entitles each of us to a human inheritance. All people are created equal and endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights, Obama reminded his South African audience. What flows from that firm belief in the equality of rich and poor, woman and man, young and old, and every other human difference is Mandela's conclusion: "It's not justice if now you're on top, so I'm going to do the same thing that those folks were doing to me, and now I'm going to do it to you."

     Nussbaum expresses the same idea. Saying something is wrong and should never happen again is valuable, but deciding to fix it by making the doer suffer is not helpful. Put another way, an African-American, speaking on a panel at a forum, observed it is more productive to go forward with an attitude based on the Civil Rights movement than an attitude derived from slavery.

     Once you concentrate on your own value as a human being and that of all other humans and vow not to repeat past failures, there's hope for a better future.

   

   

   

Picture This

Maybe Kim Jong Un's first glimpse of a promising future based on something other than purging all his military and political competitors, starving dissidents in re-education camps, and destroying Seattle with a nuclear missile was the video President Trump showed him when they met in Singapore.

      Unlike President Obama, who grew up inspired by the vision of multicultural ethnic and religious groups living side-by-side in Indonesia and Hawaii, Trump's New Jersey-New York line of sight was much different. How would things be different if his eye had been schooled to see something other than sites for beach-front condominiums, golf courses, and ice skating rinks?

     Bob Baffert, who grew up around horses in Arizona, looked at Triple Crown Winner, "Justify," and said he loved watching him run with his long strides. Abby Lee Miller's Broadway bound eye spots young girls with both dancing and expressive talents.

     In Vogue (June, 2018), Alexis Okeowo wrote how she grew up in the late 1990s watching Jackie Joyner-Kersee and Surya Bonaly on TV. Her conclusion: strong, beautiful, successful black athletes also could have style. Young women watching Serena Williams these days might have drawn the same conclusion, when they saw her attending the wedding of Meghan Markle and Prince Harry.

     Bethenny Frankel saw suffering from a hurricane in Puerto Rico and an earthquake in Guatemala and hired private planes to bring relief. Sometimes pictures of suffering are too painful to watch, especially if we don't have a place for an abandoned puppy or extra funds for a charity. In the Tony-winning musical, "A Band's Visit," Jewish settlers and a few Palestinian band members spend a chance meeting wistfully thinking about what could be. In contrast, Amnesty International's founders launched a creative campaign to write letters protesting human rights abuses. Pope John Paul II and Lech Walesa founded the Solidarity labor union movement to overthrow Communism in Poland.

     On "The Golden Girls" TV series, master storyteller, Sophia, used to begin her tales by saying, "Picture this." Right away, she engaged more senses. A science teacher showed students a video of a firecracker to attract immediate attention. But the video also inspired students to question why the sparks were different colors and much more, all the questions she was going to ask. 

       

You Have To Be Carefully Taught

If a child has never met a blind student from Peru, a Muslim actor, or a rich Chinese businessman, how will he or she feel about these people? In the musical, South Pacific, the U.S. soldier who begins to fall in love with an island girl he meets during World War II sings "You have to be carefully taught."

     Lucky children like Meghan Markle might have a black and a white parent, and a young President Obama even had a mother from the United States and a father from Kenya, got to spend early years in Indonesia, and grew to a young man in the diverse cultures of Hawaii. Lucky kids might get to know Hispanic, black, and white kids while playing basketball together on a neighborhood court. Korean and Italian kids could meet singing together in a church choir. And before a teen in a wheelchair and the school's aspiring ballerina publish their first comic book, they might have worked together on the school's newspaper.

     All sorts of robotic, marketing, math, trivia, and forensic competitions bring together kids with different backgrounds and genders. Yet, news events constantly show the danger of relying on luck to form children into adults who acknowledge the similarities and respect the differences of others. The fact is, children have adult mentors who influence them to think about people in ways that help or harm the world.

     In the United States, children are about to honor their Mothers on Mother's Day this weekend and their Fathers on Father's Day next month. Around the world, mothers and fathers should be honored, because they are in a powerful position. They can pass on their prejudices or open young minds.

     When trendwatching.com reports the Mexican startup company Sign'n, uses software to employ artificial intelligence that translates speech into Mexican sign language, we suspect someone nurtured a young inventor's concern for those marginalized because of their hearing disability. Likewise, visually-impaired  Brazilians employed to use their enhanced smell and taste senses as beer sommeliers have someone to thank for helping a young person learn to consider and remedy the needs of others.

     A Muslim friend recently introduced me to a book, Crescent Moons and Pointed Minarets, that uses rhymes and English translations of Arabic to present various shapes and to convey Islamic traditions and terms. At the end of the book, a Glossary provides definitions of the Arabic words used and a phonetic guide to their pronunciations.
     As an example of the way the book's author, Hena Khan, and artist, Mehrdokht Amini, combine words and art, picture how, under an arch embellished with complex borders and patterns of flowers and vines that resemble those in Persian rugs. readers learn:

Arch is the mihrab

that guides our way.

We stand and face it

each time we pray.

In contrast to picturing Muslims as over a billion religious people known for the early contributions of their mathematicians and astronomers, today's news reports Boko Haram added to its Nigerian terrorist kidnappings and killings by bombing a mosque and market. And Islamic fighters in Iraq commit genocide and sell Yazidi women and girls into slavery or hold them as sex slaves. Somehow these Muslims have not been carefully taught right from wrong. 

     Regimes, like those in Iran, China, and Russia, seem oppressive because they censure the broadcast and social media they allow their populations to see. But aren't we doing much the same thing, when algorithms select the books we read, the films we watch, and the news and ads we see, or when we self-censure by only watching the cable news stations that agree with us? Teaching ourselves and our children to keep open minds takes work, work both needed and worth doing...very carefully.

   

Follow the Interest

Just as criminal investigators are advised to "follow the money," "follow the interest" is good advice for those hoping to engage young people in world affairs.

     A variety of interests might draw a student to Africa. Consider fashion. What inspired Ruth E. Carter, the costume designer for Black Panther,  the comic book-inspired movie kids are eager to see? Like Carter, who studied African tribal patterns, colors, and silhouettes, fashion conscious movie goers will be inspired to think about how they too could incorporate the Ndebele neck rings Okoye wears in the movie into their outfits.

     Students interested in film careers won't think twice about casting people of color from any country in the movies they plan to make. They know Lupita Nyong'O, a young Nigerian-raised star won an Academy Award for her supporting role in 12 Years a Slave.

     Fashion designers-in-the-making also have seen Nyong'O modeling African-inspired clothes in Vogue. The magazine also introduced them to Nigeria and the Lagos-based Maki Oh, the designer responsible for the dress Michelle Obama wore on a trip to Johannesburg, South Africa, in 2013.

     Paul Simon's interest in music caused him to sing with Mama Africa Miriam Makeba in South Africa in 1987 and to record his Graceland album with South Africa's Ladysmith Black Mambazo choral group. The British hip hop grime of Ghana's Stormzy draws the current generation of music trend setters to Africa.

     With the Olympics approaching on February 9, student downhill skiers, cross-country skiers, bobsledders, figure skaters, and speed skaters might want to learn more about what produces champions in Austria, Germany, Russia, Canada, and Sweden.

     Those interested in soccer, already follow their favorite sport in Barcelona, Madrid, Manchester, and Brazil.

     And if students like food and cooking, those interests can take them anywhere in the world.  

   

Exotic Farming

If Xi Jinping, Kim Jong-un, Vladimir Putin, and Bashar al-Assad suddenly planted vegetable gardens in the front yards of their residences, that would be exotic farming. When she was the US First Lady, Mrs. Obama did encourage young people to eat nutritional vegetables by planting a vegetable garden in the White House's backyard, and she invited students from Wisconsin and other States to help harvest the crops.

     Looking around the world you can find other examples of exotic farming. Until late in 2018, Pakistan kept eight buffaloes to provide milk for its prime minister. To grow alfalfa for nearly one million cows, Almarai, the largest dairy producer in oil-rich, water-poor Saudi Arabia, paid $31.8 million for 1,790 acres of land in California. Unfortunately, growing alfalfa there diverted water from the Colorado River that was needed by drought prone California.  Transporting heavy, bulky animal feed thousands of miles also required burning fossil fuel that emits the greenhouse gases that cause climate change.

     Other examples of exotic farming offer better options. A London warehouse has become an aquaponic vertical farm that grows salad greens and herbs and produces fish. On the roof of a former factory in The Hague, Urban Farmers, a Swiss aquaponics system does the same. Berlin's Infarm modular, indoor hydroponic systems grow herbs, radishes, and greens right in Metro Cash & Carry supermarkets.

     Look up aquaponics and hydroponics on the internet. These exotic new urban agricultural projects can be near consumers in shops, restaurants, schools, and hospitals. They can provide job opportunities for those trained to find balconies and roof tops with micro climates that have sun and little wind, to decide what crops to plant, to monitor quality, and to find customers.

   

Posts about TIME's 100 Most Influential People

• Lin-Manuel Miranda and Stephen Curry: "Stage Your Life"
• Pope Francis: "Why Is the Pope Going to Philadelphia?" "Warning to Students: Don't Cheat," "Good News from Cuba," "We Have a Pope"
• Christine Lagarde: "When to Buy/Sell in the World Market"
• Angela Merkel and Hillary Clinton: "What Are You Wearing in the New Year?"
• Jin Liqun: "China's Corruption Crackdown, New Bank Backing, and Release of PR Activists"
• Barack Obama: "Good News from Cuba," What Moscow Could Learn from History"
• Xi Jinping: "Time to Revisit China's and the World's Foreign Currency Exchange Rates," "China's Corruption Crackdown, New Bank Backing, and Release of PR Activists," "Let's Visit China"
• Aung San Suu Kyi: "Who Are Your Country's Super Heroes?" "Hope for the Future"
• Hillary Clinton: "It Takes a World to Raise a Child"
• Vladimir Putin: "What Moscow Could Learn from History," "Hearing Voices from Mexico and Russia," "Hope for the Future"
• Kim Jong Un: "Corruption Has Consequences," "Nuclear Straight Talk," "Reasons to Celebrate Global Victories," "Hope for the Future"

Diamond Flaws

President Obama will visit one kind of diamond, when he takes in a baseball game in Cuba this week.* And June brides have a many-faceted diamond on their ring fingers. For the independent miners paying the violent armed groups who control access to the rivers in the Central African Republic (CAR), the diamonds they find represent a treacherous way to scrape out a living.

     These miners are far removed from those who wear the diamonds and gold found in the CAR, Zimbabwe, Burkina Faso, Angola, and Mexico and the precious stones from Afghanistan and Myanmar (Burma) and from those who rely on the mobile phones, cars, computers, and other products that contain tungsten from Colombia and tantalum, tungsten, and cobalt from the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Before these raw materials become part of finished products, they change hands often in secretive and poorly regulated supply chains that span the globe.

     The UN, OECD, US, and EU all are taking measures to pressure companies to ask their mineral suppliers more questions and to notice warning signs. Berne Declaration, a Swiss non-governmental organization (NGO), knew Togo produced little or no gold, yet Swiss companies thought they were buying gold that originated there. Instead, their gold was coming from Burkina Faso. True to its advertising, De Beers is assuring consumers "a diamond is forever" by launching a pilot program to buy diamond jewelry and loose diamonds for resale, thereby reducing the need to buy new diamonds from unknown sources.

     Not only is there growing concern about the human rights abuses associated with the dangers independent miners face, but conflict in the world's poorest countries relies in part on financing from selling licenses to miners, collecting tolls on transportation routes to the mines, taxes, and mineral sales. In Zimbabwe, even the national security forces and secret police supplement their government budgets and escape government oversight by engaging in the mineral trade.

     There are money and jobs enough in the mineral trade for both miners and manufacturers to benefit by behaving responsibly.

*See the earlier post, "Good News from Cuba," for background on President Obama's trip to Cuba.

Nuclear Straight Talk

We talk casually about nuking our lunches until the remains of a bird or cat are found in a microwave oven. However small the amount, until the lingering radiation from the 2011 meltdown of three nuclear reactors at the Fukushima plant in Japan was measured on the West Coast of the United States in 2015, proponents lauded energy from nuclear power plants as clean compared to that from fossil fuels.

     Ever since the first atomic bombs killed over 100,000 almost instantly and another 90,000 to 140,000 from radiation in Japan seventy years ago, world leaders have both worked to eliminate death and destruction from atomic and hydrogen bombs and worked to acquire these weapons. While it is tempting to walk away from exasperating talks with an Iran or North Korea, the need to stave off a nuclear attack or Chernobyl-type accident demands persistence at the negotiating table.

     The Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, signed by Iran, five permanent members of the UN's Security Council, and Germany on July 14, 2015, aims to prevent Iran from enriching uranium at Natanz and from developing a bomb at its nuclear facility at Qom. The unanimous UN Security Council approval of sanctions on Kim Jong-un's North Korea on March 2, 2016 were designed to cut off financing for Pyongyang's nuclear and missile program. Yet "artificial seismic waves" detected at North Korea's Punggye-ri atomic test site caused a 5.0 magnitude earthquake on September 9, 2016. , Despite past cyber attacks that have caused North Korea's missile launch software to fail, in March, 2017, the country successfully launched four missiles that threatened Japan and claimed it had the west coast of the United States in its sights. In July, 2017, North Korea launched a long-range missile that made good on its claim. In addition to increasing the range of its weapon-carrying missiles, North Korea is working on mobile and submarine launchers that make it more difficult to detect pending missile tests/attacks.

      It might be wise to monitor travel from Iran to North Korea and back to make sure Iran is not using North Korea as a proxy to get around its agreement to discontinue its nuclear program. After all, Iran financed the transfer of North Korean nuclear technology to al-Kibar, Syria, where an Israeli air strike attacked Syria's nuclear reactor in September, 2007.

     At the website nuclearsecrecy.com/nukemap, students can select target cities and see the widespread effect, in terms of casualties and radioactive fallout, of various atomic and nuclear weapons.

     In an article in the Novembver, 2015 issue of the alumni magazine of American University in Washington, DC, Koko Kondo, an atomic bomb survivor known as a hibakusha in Japanese, described the human suffering caused by the first mid-air detonation of an atomic bomb. With nine nuclear states (USA, UK, France, China, India, Pakistan, Russia, North Korea, Israel) and the forty countries that have signed the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and have the capability to develop nuclear weapons, Kondo knows how important it is to abolish all nuclear weapons.

     When President Obama came to Hiroshina on May 27, 2016, he laid a wreath at the Peace Memorial and said, "the voices of hibakusha will no longer be with us to bear witness....But memory...fuels our moral imagination. It allows us to change."

     Kondo's memory of the August, 1945 attack starts with seeing a blueish-white flash and the collapse of a building on top of her. There were fires everywhere. People were staggering around holding fists full of charred skin, and their hair was standing straight up. The eyeballs of those looking at the sky when the bomb detonated melted.

     Speaking at the memorial service in Hiroshima's Peace Park on August 6, 2015, the mayor urged, "People of the world...contemplate the nuclear problem as your own."