Books not Bombs

I have had a fabulous two weeks of reading alongside working in Utah and helping Sal run the speech camp back here in California. Two books: Barack Obama's Dreams of My Father and a book co-written by Greg Mortenson and David Oliver Relin, Three Cups of Tea: One Man's Mission to Promote Peace...One School at a Time. Both books reinforced my most core belief system: secular humanism, or the belief that it may just be fine--actually possibly more miraculous and life-affirming-- if the closest thing to divinity we ever experience in this life or the next is the power of human compassion, here on Earth.

Obama's book was written long before he launched his political career, fresh out of law school, and documents his early life. He splits the book into three phases and labels them according to the four geographic centers where he grappled with his racial identity as the son of a black father and white mother: Origins (Hawaii and Indonesia), Chicago, and Kenya. In reading about his years spent between his undergraduate work at Occidental in California and law school helping with a community development social program in Chicago, I was a little nervous that his main goal was to paint a picture of his achievement of bringing religion and liberal social efforts into one by documenting his path to religious conversion. He did manage to achieve the former by taking advantage of the organization and humanitarian elements of the churches in this struggling Chicago neighborhood to help improve the lives of its struggling working-class inhabitants, but he demonstrates marvelous restraint from wearing his religion on his sleeve, managing to avoid alienating readers with ideological rhetoric while still affirming the power of faith in a general, non-specific sense. I was struck primarily by how his own background almost fated him to be the perfect messenger for this kind of balance, as I read about the influences of his Muslim biological father from Kenya, his Buddhist step-dad from Indonesia, his first Jewish supervisor urging him to work with the Christian churches to transform their focus Chicago neighborhood, and his humanist mother from Kansas.

I think the last seems to have had the most influence on him, though. Early in the book, he writes, "My mother's confidence in needlepoint virtues depended on a faith I didn't possess, a faith that she would refuse to describe as religious, that, in fact, her experience told her was sacrilegious: a faith that rational, thoughtful people could shape their own destiny. In a land where fatalism remained a necessary tool for enduring hardship, where ultimate truths were kept separate from day-to-day realities, she was a lonely witness for secular humanism, a soldier for New Deal Corps, position-paper liberalism." It is this influence that I hear most prominently in a passage near the end of the book, speaking to his dead father: "You, the son, might have taught your father that this new world that was beckoning all of you involved more than just railroads and indoor toilets and irrigation ditches and gramophones, lifeless instruments that could be absorbed into the old ways. You might have told him that these instruments carried with them a dangerous power, that they demanded a different way of seeing the world. That this power could be absorbed only alongside a faith born out of hardship, a faith that wasn't new, that wasn't black or white or Christian or Muslim but that pulsed in the heart of the first African village and the first Kansas homestead-- a faith in other people." In the name of...HUMANS, amen.

Obama would definitely find a cause for affirming his faith in humanity in the account of Mortenson's work building schools in Pakistan and Afghanistan that I read immediately after reading the last lines of Dreams. Greg Mortenson began the project on a very small scale after stumbling into a small village at the foot of K2 when he got lost after finding himself forced to turn back before reaching the top of its peak many years before 9/11.

After he was nursed back to health, he asked the village elder to show him the school and was amazed to find unsupervised students sitting quietly on the ground, diligently studying work given to them by a teacher in a neighboring village who was only able to come and check in with them a few times a week because the pre-Musharraff government had failed to extend its promised funds to build a school and pay the dollar-a-day salary of a permanent teacher. From fulfilling his promise that day to build one school, he has continued building and funding more than twenty schools and women's vocational centers through the years that took us to war with Afghanistan, up until today's current reported resurgence of El Qaeda activity in Pakistan.

Finally, a story of an American HUMANITARIAN effort to gently show communities who are at-risk for breeding terrorists another way, giving students thirsting for an education an option other than the extremist Islamic maddrassas that were otherwise the only choice. Mortenson's story inspired a Taliban contingent in Afghanistan that had at first imprisoned him when rumors began circulating about his efforts to educate girls alongside boys in non-maddrassa schools to not only release him, but to throw him a party in the process, and quietly undercut-- through the power of the story of his work alone-- two fatwas initially issued to expel him from the regions where he was working. As he wisely advises, "If we try to resolve terrorism with military might and nothing else, then we will be no safer than we were before 9/11. If we truly want a legacy of peace for our children, we need to understand that this is a war that will ultimately be won with books, not with bombs."

I still find myself yearning to be doing something large like these men, but this week with Sal has been fantastic. Favorite snapshot of an experience diametrically opposite the one I found at Fairmont:

Me: So, Aaron, when I started calling you to remind you about speech camp, your mom said you were working. What were you working at?
Aaron: Nothing much. My mom just doesn't want me inside watching TV all day.
Sebastian: You have a TV? You're so lucky!
(No response from the car, as if this is the norm.)
Aaron (comforting): Well, we only get a few channels and the cartoon channel comes in fuzzy anyway.

Hurray for kids who don't take life for granted...