Michael Perelman wrote: > Very nice letter, but as a victim of a bait and > switch scheme, you should not expect much.
As a candidate, Obama made it clear that he planned to escalate the war on Afghanistan. I'm not surprised in the last that he's actually doing it. I am not as naive as to believe that he is going to read my letter. But it's still nice to think that some White House staffer is going to think that a demographic group that strongly supported Obama is unhappy about his pursuing the war in Afghanistan and their reasons can be made compelling to others. This demographic group though, to which I belong, is still a minority in the country. I accept that as a fact. (Note: Check the latest Gallup poll on this for some evidence.) No. The readers I really had in mind -- aside from my non-radical neighbors, friends, relatives, and members of my wife's church, who sometimes read my rants -- were my students and ex students with whom I still communicate. A few of them are Whites from northern New Jersey. Another tiny group are Blacks from Brooklyn segregated neighborhoods. The majority of them come from White working-class neighborhoods in Brooklyn and Staten Island, Jewish, and Catholic Irish and Italian, with friends and relatives in the first-response institutions and in the armed forces. They were 100% in favor of the bombing of Afghanistan when it was launched. I remember when, on 9/12 or 13/2001, I was talking about the terrorist attack to my economics students at a college in Brooklyn, mostly from this demographic group. One of the students, the son of a firefighter, felt so insulted that he left the classroom in rage when I said that terrorism wasn't the result of sheer evil (as pundits were claiming on TV), that there were social, economic, and political factors that had to be taken into consideration, and that the policies of the U.S. towards the rest of the world had to be thought through as well, for their unintended consequences. I clarified that to fight terrorism well (because it was not excusable), we had to understand it well. "No, -- one of them said -- we don't need to understand them. We have to kill them." I had never in my 15-year life as an instructor felt more disconnected from a group of students as when that happened. Nowadays, students from that very demographic group have a somewhat different attitude towards the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. That process of disillusionment with the ideologies pushed by conservatives and Republicans in their families, neighborhoods, churches, and schools began years ago, when the conditions in Iraq proved to be much different than expected. When this disillusionment began, I remember being very surprised by how quick the turnaround was. It took only a few years for this shift. Today, the financial and economic crisis is hitting them real hard. So, they are much more willing to listen to views that, not long ago, they regarded as anathema, views that challenge to the core the ideologies in which they were raised. Just to give you an idea where they are ideologically and how far we still need to go: A few months ago, when the car makers in Detroit went hat in hand to Washington to ask for public money, I posed a question to one of my classes: "What -- I asked -- are the main factors that explain such failure?" I was fishing for answers like, Detroit is producing cars that suck, that consume too much gasoline; people are becoming more aware of the environment or energy problems, etc. "No." They said the reason why Detroit car makers was in trouble was the labor unions! This is not Texas or Oklahoma, but Brooklyn, New York. On the basis of that observation, I can extrapolate, adjust, and imagine how things are out there. And I'm not going to give up on my need to communicate with them. If we are only going to talk to those who share our beliefs, then we better close the shop. _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
