Looks Good So Far

Following up on my Mauritania post, the news so far is promising.

The final paragraph speaks to the uncertainty yet ahead:

The critical moment will come when the army must return to the barracks, according to Cedric Jourde, a political scientist at Ottawa University who closely follows Mauritanian politics. He said it remained to be seen to what extent the military would "accept to be subordinated to a non-military head of state" and civilian government.

Good Luck, Mauritania

And sometimes luck has more to do with outcomes than people like to acknowledge.


In just a few hours the West African nation of Mauritania will begin holding its first legitimate presidential election. In this case Mauritania's good fortune was the good will and integrity of Colonel Ely Ould Mohamed Vall, who took the reins of power in a military coup in August of 2005, ousting strongman Maaoya Sid'Ahmed Ould Taya who was in Saudi Arabia at the time, attending King Fahd's funeral. Vall pledged to bring democracy, liberate the press, and hold national elections within two years.

True to his word, the press is no longer muzzled, an independent judiciary appears to be established, and a constitution is in place guaranteeing basic liberties and intended to prevent dictatorships. Many involved in the overhaul have urged Vall to stay, but like our own George Washington who refused to stay in power, Vall will not hear of it.

"The problem for Mauritanians is that for the first time in their lives, they don't know what the outcome of the election will be ... Psychologically it's very hard. It terrifies them," said Col Vall, who before the coup headed the country's national police."But it's a fear that must be overcome."

Promises are cheap, and dictators frequently refer to their nations as democracies, holding phony elections periodically to fabricate legitimacy. It's no wonder Mauritania was presumed to be no different, showing as red for undemocratic on this map I created a year ago based on the research of OTFord at the Stewardship Project. Perhaps it can follow in the footsteps of Liberia, Nigeria, South Africa, and Malawi which have made progress toward democracy in the last 15 years, and soon be colored blue.

What I really don't know is whether the institutions Vall has created in 17 short months are strong enough to withstand the temptations of a newly elected president to return autocratic rule to a country where such has been the norm. A dense field of 19 candidates (none constitutionally allowed to be associated with previous dictators) complicates the equation as this West African nation approaches its new day of hope.

Mauritania, good luck!

National Humility

Once upon a time I dreamt that perhaps hundreds or thousands of people would regularly stop by here to soak in my pearls of wisdom, but there are advantages to relative anonymity. It's less of a big deal if I take extended breaks from writing (sorry though, to those of you who wish I would post more often), and I really don't need to worry so much about delivering messages that will backfire, and hence be used against the causes that I care about. I've also come to realize just how many excellent writers and thinkers there are out there, most of whom never get the lucky break to become widely read. It's wonderful that we have this vehicle for sharing ideas, and I'm pleased to see the current widespread outcry from disparate corners of the blogosphere to protect "net neutrality" from undue corporate control.

Recent revelations about the atrocities apparently committed by a few Marines in Haditha got me to thinking about the national humility we need to adopt, a subject which gets far too little attention precisely because any politician approaching it would fear a swift and strong backlash reaction and accusations of being unpatriotic. The mere fact that many such subjects become politically taboo damages our ability to have honest and open dialog, because politicians are constrained to finding popularly acceptable frames within which to make the case for whatever it is they are advocating.

It's quite acceptable for ministers to preach about humility as a virtue, and for individuals to seek an appropriate balance between positive self esteem and humble recognition of their own limitations. But to talk about the need for our nation to find such a comparable balance between marketing the ideas which have made us great and recognizing that we don't have every answer and often have much to learn from other cultures and other experiments in governance is a sure way to be dismissed by many as unpatriotic and unworthy of attention, if not traitorous.

Why can't we celebrate that which is wonderful about our traditions and simultaneously seek to improve on them and recognize our limitations without worrying about drawing such vitriolic scorn? In fact what is wonderful about our system of government is that it attempts to grant great freedom to the individual while providing checks and balances against any one group or portion of government gaining too much control. This brings me back to that wonderful quote by James Madison:

If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary. In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself.

But people today confuse the greatness of our system with the goodness of our people. While growing up in a democratic context in which respect of our fellows is an inherent value can provide a template for decent behavior, at heart we are no more or less human than anyone else on the planet. In the stress of war, Americans are no different than anyone else, and some will tragically misbehave. Abu Ghraib and Haditha should be wake up calls for a little national humility. The justification of torture, or at least of inhumane and degrading treatment of suspects in custody is born of a misapprehension that Americans can be trusted, simply because they are Americans. If national humility were accepted as a desirable counterweight to our national pride, then we would likely avoid such hubris.

A Google search of "national humility" turns up a few interesting hits, but few American politicians since Lincoln who openly call for it. One exception I found extolling national humility was surprisingly Indiana Republican Senator Richard Lugar, who quotes former Democratic Senator William Fulbright who said:

Power tends to confuse itself with virtue and a great nation is particularly susceptible to the idea that its power is a sign of God’s favor.

I also found a portion of a sermon which acknowledges a practical reason for not extending such a humility too far, but nonetheless to apply some national humility wisely:

We must be careful to extend the analogy of personal humility to national humility with great care, for in many respects the analogy does not hold. Governments have a responsibility to protect that individuals can set aside in a spirit of self-sacrifice. Nevertheless, the American government can conspicuously put others first by making sure that profits on oil, for instance, are fairly distributed in a country before the oil is taken out, and can make sure that poor nations in Africa have the most advantageous condition for the development of their agriculture in a world market.

Finally, I shall leave you with this article in Common Dreams by Thom Hartmann in which we see that Jefferson like Lincoln understood the need for a national humility. It suggests to me that the current taboo against acknowledging that we don't have every answer is stronger now than it was in the first century of our nation's existence. This article was written in advance of our last presidential election in which Hartmann asks whether we will choose the path of empire or the path of democracy. We made a grievous choice, as I've noted before, but it's not too late for humbler choices to follow. Let us recognize that representative democracy by its nature is both noble and humble.

Brutal Truths & Bridges of Hope

Truth wears no labels.

Truth shows up in surprising places.

Truth cannot be cornered and packaged.

Of course, we all have our own truths, and we get comfortable with the set of truths we know; we hang out in certain crowds; we can't resist packaging the truth as we understand it; but we all get blindsided from time to time.

I suppose I take it as a point of pride that I repeatedly question my own assumptions. Why do I think that? How do I know that's true? What does that person with the opposite opinion know that I may not? It turns some people away. They think I'm wishy washy - a flip-flopper. But it hardly means that I don't have deep convictions.

One such conviction is that it is wrong to judge someone for a trait over which they have no control. Always. But it does not follow that someone who does so wrongly judge others is himself always wrong about everything. He may see a brutal truth to which I am blind. Still I'll more often look for truth among those who first demonstrate the most compassion. It just stands to reason that the odds are better there. But occasionally close examination will reveal them to be dead wrong - about some things.

So we need to confront the brutal truths which come from disparate perspectives. But hatred can sometimes come disguised as brutal truth, so healthy skepticism is necessary to accompany that willingness to listen to opinions which challenge our assumptions. But with no willingness to listen then all is reduced to argument and divisiveness will reign.

Hmm. I can imagine someone reading this as a lot of airy nothing. But humor me, and stick with it for just a little longer. Because I'm not just saying that we need the brutal truth tellers from all sides (and we do) - even as we need the listeners who will help filter out some of the accompanying nonsense and expose it as chaff. We need the doubters like me, and we need those who are really sure of their paths and will not waver - and sometimes I'm like that too. But we need something else.

We need the bridgers. Those who can show us the bridges of hope. The bridgers are my heroes. Bridgers are no strangers to the brutal truths - but they find brutal truths on both sides of the divides and can speak to groups of people who find it difficult to speak to each other.

Today I bought myself a birthday present. A Call to Conscience: The Landmark Speeches of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. On 7 audio CDs. King was the consumate bridger. Such bridgers are rare, but there may be more of them than we sometimes imagine. Few attain the profile that King did in his too short life.

Can a wealthy, idolized rock star be a bridger? It doesn't seem likely. But then there's Bono. I've long liked U2's music, but then I like a lot of rock and roll. What I really like is what Bono has done with his celebrity. Thanks to Bob Wratz of BrightEyesDimView for pointing me to Bono's homily (free subscription required) at the National Prayer Breakfast one week ago. I want to excerpt some highlights, but it's hard - it works best as a whole. You know the old "read the whole thing" exhortation. But here's a little after he is talking about how churches came around to confront the AIDS epidemic after a slow start born of judgmentalism:

But in truth, I was wrong again. The church was slow but the church got busy on this the leprosy of our age.

Love was on the move.

Mercy was on the move.

God was on the move.

Moving people of all kinds to work with others they had never met, never would have cared to meet...conservative church groups hanging out with spokesmen for the gay community, all singing off the same hymn sheet on AIDS...soccer moms and quarterbacks...hip-hop stars and country stars. This is what happens when God gets on the move: crazy stuff happens!

Popes were seen wearing sunglasses!

Jesse Helms was seen with a ghetto blaster!

Crazy stuff. Evidence of the spirit.

It was breathtaking. Literally. It stopped the world in its tracks.

When churches started demonstrating on debt, governments listened - and acted. When churches starting organising, petitioning, and even - that most unholy of acts today, God forbid, lobbying...on AIDS and global health, governments listened - and acted.

I'm here today in all humility to say: you changed minds; you changed policy; you changed the world.

Look, whatever thoughts you have about God, who He is or if He exists, most will agree that if there is a God, He has a special place for the poor. In fact, the poor are where God lives.

Check Judaism. Check Islam. Check pretty much anyone.

I mean, God may well be with us in our mansions on the hill. I hope so. He may well be with us as in all manner of controversial stuff. Maybe, maybe not. But the one thing we can all agree, all faiths and ideologies, is that God is with the vulnerable and poor.

God is in the slums, in the cardboard boxes where the poor play house. God is in the silence of a mother who has infected her child with a virus that will end both their lives. God is in the cries heard under the rubble of war. God is in the debris of wasted opportunity and lives, and God is with us if we are with them. "If you remove the yoke from your midst, the pointing of the finger and speaking wickedness, and if you give yourself to the hungry and satisfy the desire of the afflicted, then your light will rise in darkness and your gloom with become like midday and the Lord will continually guide you and satisfy your desire in scorched places."

It's not a coincidence that in the scriptures, poverty is mentioned more than 2,100 times. It's not an accident. That's a lot of air time, 2,100 mentions. (You know, the only time Christ is judgmental is on the subject of the poor.) 'As you have done it unto the least of these my brethren, you have done it unto me' (Matthew 25:40). As I say, good news to the poor.

Here's some good news for the president. After 9/11 we were told America would have no time for the world's poor. America would be taken up with its own problems of safety. And it's true these are dangerous times, but America has not drawn the blinds and double-locked the doors.

In fact, you have doubled aid to Africa. You have tripled funding for global health. Mr. President, your emergency plan for AIDS relief and support for the Global Fund - you and Congress - have put 700,000 people onto life-saving anti-retroviral drugs and provided 8 million bed nets to protect children from malaria.

Outstanding human achievements. Counterintuitive. Historic. Be very, very proud.

But here's the bad news. From charity to justice, the good news is yet to come. There is much more to do. There's a gigantic chasm between the scale of the emergency and the scale of the response.

And finally, it's not about charity after all, is it? It's about justice.

Let me repeat that: It's not about charity, it's about justice.

And that's too bad.

Because you're good at charity. Americans, like the Irish, are good at it. We like to give, and we give a lot, even those who can't afford it.

But justice is a higher standard. Africa makes a fool of our idea of justice; it makes a farce of our idea of equality. It mocks our pieties, it doubts our concern, it questions our commitment.

Sixty-five hundred Africans are still dying every day of a preventable, treatable disease, for lack of drugs we can buy at any drug store. This is not about charity, this is about justice and equality.

Ok, it was more than a little - but wasn't it worth it? At the National Prayer Breakfast, with Bush and Congressional and religious leaders in attendance.

Caring About Africa

Africa is all too easily ignored by much of the world, especially the United States, and in particular Presidents in their State of the Union addresses.



One of my favorite resources on the web is O.T. Ford's Stewardship Project, which ignores no place. While I've occasionally disagreed with some particulars of his opinions, such as his willingness to accept Bush's Iraq war as better than simply leaving Saddam in power, I have nothing but the greatest respect for the thoroughness and seeming accuracy with which he portrays the Political Status of the States of the world, with respect to the extent to which they exhibit majority control by the people or not.

While certainly there is a wide range between the most oppressive states and the most liberal democratic states, I am inclined to accept Ford's quick categorization of most states into one realm or the other. He is not prone to the typical temptation of assigning status based on their claimed or putative ideology. Africa tends to be a continent where autocratic or oligarchic regimes are the norm, though there has been some encouraging movement of late in nations such as Nigeria, Liberia, Malawi, and Burundi. The reader of the map should be warned that significant oppression, especially of certain minorities, may linger in many of the "blue" nations, while some of the "orange" nations do show some movement toward liberalization. Overall the state of human rights remains awfully bleak across the continent.

I've never seen this type of information captured on a map before, so I have used Ford's analysis to create a first glimpse of Africa as it stands today. Eventually I am interested in furthering this analysis. For instance we might subdivide those nations where some regions are acting autonomously, or more finely designate the status of the states, or look at recent or historical trends. But until now, I've never even seen a snapshot.

[UPDATE: An excellent diary, What's the Matter with Africa, appeared today on DailyKos which is well worth the read. I added my map in the comments, since lots of maps were included in the diary and the comments.]

Chilean election portends hope for US progressives

Chile's election Monday of socialist and former political prisoner Michelle Bachelet is being largely ignored by the U.S. press, but it is quite significant and hopeful on several fronts. The right in America probably wants to ignore it because they fear it signals a continuing leftward shift in Latin American politics following the election of Bolivian populist Evo Morales and the continued popularity of Venezuela's Hugo Chavez, whose anti-American and anti-Bush rhetoric has drawn not only outrageous commentary from Pat Robertson, but a consistently hostile treatment by a majority of printed opinion in the states.

Whether one buys the usual denigration of Chavez as a Castro-style ideologue or not, Bachelet is clearly cut from a different cloth, and could serve as a unifying force in acknowledging the importance of free markets, at the same time as insisting on fairness to those of less means.

My favorite part of this story is the clear about-face from the brutal dictatorial regime of Augusto Pinochet from 1973-90. As a former victim of his brutality (Bachelet was imprisoned, then exiled to Argentina, and her father died in prison), the president elect, like Mandela did in South Africa, is speaking the language of reconciliation which is all too rare in politics:

Because I was the victim of hatred, I have dedicated my life to reverse that hatred and turn it into understanding, tolerance and -- why not say it -- into love.

American progressives would do well to study this victory as an antidote to the naysayers who contend that the Republican talking points of the last two decades have eliminated any chance of a true progressive being elected to the U.S. Presidency. Chile remains a quite socially conservative nation, and yet it has elected an agnostic, divorced, socialist woman as president. To me this shows that an electorate is able to think past simplistic formulas, and acknowledge forward thinking which may diverge from their own in the particulars. It is also worth noting that constitutional reforms have eliminated designated military senators, which should enable the new center-left majority in both houses to enact most of Bachelet's anticipated reforms. Maybe this can presage a development in the US in which a progressive's message can ring true to the electorate in spite of an association with a few particular ideas thought to be "out of the mainstream". The faulty equations which have gained currency here between liberalism and decadence, or progressivism and extremism, or conservative religiosity and morality won't be simple to break down, but they can be broken down because they are false.

Like Chile, America in her internal policies has a history of moderation, rather than fluctuating between violent extremes like so much of the world. The recent experience with Pinochet was an anomaly for Chile, sadly brought upon her with the complicity of the United States. Ariel Dorfman, in his essay The Black Hole speaks to his almost giddy anticipation in the wake of the election of Salvador Allende, before that dream was cut short by Pinochet's rise to power.

It was then, in the midst of that multitude of men and women I had never met and did not know, it was then, as I breathed in the air that they were breathing out, that I had an experience which I hesitate to call mystical but which was as near to a religious epiphany as I have had in my life.

Allende was making a brief speech, something about how we were now going to be the masters of our own destiny, the owners of our own land and the metals under the ground and the streets we walked through...

Times have changed, and Bachelet's brand of socialism is likely to more aggressively seek accommodation with capitalist partners, fending off any immediate backlash. Both Bachelet and her conservative opponent catered to the middle in this election, and the conservative opponent was even gracious in defeat.

What a dream that would be! Proponents of distinctly different policies competing democratically without stooping to demagoguery and ridicule. Oh wait! That's what we're supposed to have. Let's make it so!

Wangari Maathai

There's so much to moan about with respect to the powers that be, that it's a blessed delight to realize that there is also much to celebrate on this planet. Powerful and inspirational people abound, and it's vital to rekindling hope to shine a bright light upon as many of these luminaries as possible.

Wangari Maathai, one such uplifting figure was interviewed tonight on PBS' NOW by David Brancaccio. Educated in biological sciences in the States and Germany in the sixties, Maathai, recent winner of the Nobel Peace Prize, returned to her native Kenya where after holding prestigious positions in Veterinary Anatomy at the University of Nairobi, she helped found the Green Belt Movement, assisting women in planting over 20 million trees on farms and school and church compounds. In 1986 the Movement founded a Pan African Green Belt Network, expanding the program across that troubled continent.

In her address accepting the Nobel Prize, Maathai intoned:

In the course of history, there comes a time when humanity is called to shift to a new level of consciousness, to reach a higher moral ground. A time when we have to shed our fear and give hope to each other.
That time is now.

The Norwegian Nobel Committee has challenged the world to broaden the understanding of peace: there can be no peace without equitable development; and there can be no development without sustainable management of the environment in a democratic and peaceful space. This shift is an idea whose time has come.

Not every effort will meet with success, but tireless individuals such as Maathai inspire us to keep trying.