Dreams of Rain

Water is an incredible thing. For at least 3 billion years, water has existed on the planet. It has become one of the most powerful forms of nature. For some reason, all life is dependent completely on water. It is far more precious than food. Water carves rock and shapes mountains. Its rains create forests deep in the center of continents in which 2/3 of all plants and animals live. Today, so many issues are centered on water. In the Middle East, control of water is power, as the dispute between Palestinians and the Israelis centers around who controls access to drinking water and irrigation. Glaciers store about 75% of the world’s fresh water supply. Recently, Canada and Russia have claimed control of the Arctic Ocean as it becomes more and more navigable through global warming. Water also has the power to destroy, as America unfortunately learned with the destruction of New Orleans in August 2005. Today is the two year anniversary of the devastation. It is also almost three years since one of the world’s most deadly tsunamis in Indonesia in December 2004. Some people suggest, though, that water is a receptive vessel for our emotions. Dr. Emoto, a Japanese researcher and physician, determined through exhaustive experiments that water responds to our emotions. By photographing water crystals and then directing thoughts, words or actions at the water, he has shown that the crystals change shape and form, because of us. Water is also an environmental concern in our industrial world. As industry expands, the pollution of our groundwater supply and the need for wastewater cleanup becomes more and more of a necessity. Even the drinking of purified bottled water is a pollution problem, since the demand for such water has created millions more tons of plastic, overloading recycling projects and filling landfills. Water is life, and no one knows this better than people living in the third world. Political activists have even called for water to be a free commodity around the world, since all people need it to live. The United Nation’s 2006 Human Development Report focuses entirely on water related problems and policy, and what the world can do specifically to improve life through access to water. Water has even shaped my own life in profound ways. Both my mother’s and father’s families were connected in some way to the ocean, as shipbuilders and fishermen. I grew up on the coast, almost always in or on the water. As a teen, one of my favorite books (and series) was Dune, by Frank Herbert, which centers on the dreams of and struggle for water on a desert planet. Perhaps it will become that important on our own planet in the future. For now, the glass is half full.

Tech & Tiananmen Square

Yahoo today had a lawsuit filed against it for aiding the Chinese government in supplying information on dissidents. Why is this important? There are a lot of reasons China is at the center of many events and issues in the world today. China is soon to surpass the US as the world’s largest polluter. China is also due to host the Olympics in 2008 in Beijing, an honor they have been preparing for years. China’s military has been in a process of modernization for over a decade. Hundreds of millions of its people have risen from extreme poverty since the 1980’s. Since then China has adopted what it calls ‘market socialism’, allowing it to participate in global trade. It has had nuclear weapons since 1964. China’s leaders are still Communists, leftovers from a not-so-distant age when the world’s most populous nation was ruled ruthlessly by one man: Chairman Mao Tse Tung. A recent biographer claimed that Mao was responsible for the deaths of over 70 million Chinese, in peacetime. It is not an exaggeration. Still many millions suffer in absolute and dire poverty in China’s eastern provinces. China has become the golden jewel of international capitalism as the world’s largest corporations fight for the right to sell their goods in China. Cigarette manufacturers sell millions of packs while Disney seeks to become a cornerstone of Chinese media and Yahoo and Google provide the Chinese government with computers and heavily regulated internet access. China also has one prized possession the world desperately wants: cheap human labor. How many goods sold in the US have been made in China? How many of those products now are considered unsafe? China’s also has had, for the last ten years, the world’s fastest growing economy, at almost 8% steady growth in GDP each year. The US is happy when it reaches 2%. What does this really mean for the future? Well, the world is changing. As Yahoo is brought to court, new precedents are set. Will technology aid oppression or fight it? Will Yahoo only follow the money, as international diamond companies did (and sometimes still do) in Africa, supplying women around the world with ‘blood diamonds’? Is access to the internet in China worth the government’s heavy-handed control? Consider the sacrifices of student demonstrators in June 1989, as thousands of protestors were brutally oppressed by China’s military as other Communist governments in Eastern Europe fell. One image always comes to mind to those who saw these events unfold on CNN: the Chinese man who refused to move when tanks stormed the square. Blocking them with his body, he became the symbol for resistance to cruelty around the world. Inside China, however, the crackdown had its desired impact. Even now, almost twenty years later, Yahoo and others are helping the government keep the voice of the people down. So what’s the future look like for China? Some believe democracy is inevitable. Others believe that globalization in China (and India) will tip the balance of power in the world. Still others believe China may become, eventually, a military threat. It does have one of the world’s oldest cultures. It’s influence is growing in Africa, South America and the Middle East. What we know now is that this court decision involving Yahoo will set an important example.

American Rocks

Jess was reminiscing today, remembering times when she explored different places on a whim. I’m not sure how we got on the subject, but she brought up the Boulder Field of Hickory Run State Park in Pennsylvania. I had never heard of it, but it triggered cool memories of my own: running really fast on breakwater rocks by the sea, jumping instinctively from ledge to ledge. Then I began thinking of the geological and oddities of the United States, because that’s kind of the person I am apparently right now. In New Mexico, the Lechuguilla cave system contains one of the world’s largest systems of natural crystal. It’s only recently been discovered and is still being explored, with over 100 miles of caves and tunnels. Jess and I actually came across it in the Planet Earth series by the BBC and the Discovery Channel (a must-see). Bryce Canyon is also just a bit freaky. Although not actually a canyon, it has lots of hoodoos, which are giant pillars formed from millions of years of erosion. The area forms its own natural amphitheatre. America even has its own Stonehenge, claiming to be the oldest man-made structure in the United States (over 4000 years old). It’s located at a place called Mystery Hill in New Hampshire. We’ve even sculpted mountains to make monuments. Almost everyone knows about Mount Rushmore, with the four heads, but few people know about the Crazy Horse Memorial. This is a project dedicated to carving an entire mountain into the figure of the famous Native American who fought the US Army to protect his lands. Some Native Americans believe it is sacrilegious to scar the earth in such a way, especially the Black Hills that Crazy Horse sought to protect. Others do not, as Judith Dupre points out in her upcoming book, Monuments: America's History in Art and Memory.

Bush Goes to Vietnam

President Bush connected the Iraq War to the Vietnam War last week in a way that has forced many people from that generation to scratch their heads and many historians to throw objects at their laptops. Really at stake here is how we use history to justify the actions of the present. Politicians do this all of the time. It’s not just Bush, and it’s not just now, but his comments were really interesting in any case. So what did he say? Bush stated that there was still debate about the reasons we entered Vietnam and the reasons we left. This is not actually the case. The documented reasons are very clear. All someone has to do is remember the 1954 Geneva Conference, the Gulf of Tonkin incident and resolution and the Pentagon Papers, what they meant, and how the government tried to prevent the public from knowing about them. Bush’s argument is that withdrawal is and was equal to failure. Because we withdrew from Vietnam, we lost. If we withdraw from Iraq, we lose. Before considering the merit of that claim, consider how many Vietnamese died then and how many Iraqis have died now. Consider the cost of the Iraq War. First, the argument against withdrawal concedes the argument against entering. No one is trying to defend that decision now, even Bush. Weapons of mass destruction are selectively forgotten. Second, withdrawal raises all kinds of worse scenarios: Iran controlling Iraq, more terrorist attacks against the US, weakness and dishonor in the face of the Muslim world, strategic loss of military bases in the Middle East, and more. All of these arguments, however, use the ‘trap’ argument. We can’t leave because the alternative is worse. That sounds like we’re trapped by our choices. Now, let’s get back to Vietnam for a bit. That war affected a whole generation. I was born right near the end, but my father served in the middle of it. So did many people I met later in life. Very few people speak of that war with pride in their country now. But let’s not confuse the issue. The soldiers did what they were ordered to do, even those in My Lai. Decisions during the Cold War and during the ‘War on Terror’ are made at the top.

So what does Bush mean now? The reality is that, as a ‘lame duck’ president, Bush is stuck with hard choices. On one hand, he doesn’t want to weaken his foreign policy at the end of his term. On the other hand, he doesn’t want to weaken the Republican position in the 2008 election for whoever their pick is. He knows Iran is watching, waiting for any opportunity. He knows the potential for another terrorist attack in the US is unfortunately a possibility. He does not want to leave Iraq, for all of the reasons stated above, but like Vietnam, an occupation coupled with a war does not succeed (some suggest it can never succeed) without internal change and support. Can the Sunni, Shiite and Kurd people work together to create a democratic society with stable political, economic and legal institutions protected and reinforced by law? No ‘surge’ of military force can guarantee that. Ultimately, victory or defeat is up to them, not us. It was the same in Vietnam. It was a hard lesson to learn, but by 1968, it was fairly clear that the US had lost support for the war both inside South Vietnam (the people we were supposed to be helping) and inside the US with more and more protests. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. came out against the war. Thousands of intellectuals and hundreds of thousands of youth also protested. It became the decisive issue of the 1968 election campaign. What will happen now? Will the US retreat to its bases in the south and west of the Iraqi desert, leaving the chaos to the Iraqis (and Iranians) themselves? Will we try to maintain police order, rebuild their infrastructure, run their government through proxies, and fund our military occupation indefinitely? The answers lay in how we understand our own past and in this case, the Vietnam War.

Google and Galileo

How's this for a coincidence? Apparently, Galileo developed an advanced telescope on this day in history over five hundred years ago. Yesterday, news reports around the world announced that Google Earth was adding another feature to its program. Now, you can enter an address and click the Google Sky button to see the night sky above you. What is mind-boggling is that you can zoom in, pivot your camera and move the mouse around to your heart's delight. Galileo was thrown in jail for refusing to refute (initially) his writings. For looking at the rings of Saturn he was tortured. Just the mere act of peering through a telescope challenged the institutional power of the Catholic Church at the time. Pope John Paul II formally forgave Galileo only recently too. Now comes Google. Is it possible that Google destroyed the telescope for amatuer nightwatchers? The night sky is as available as an interstate highway. But is it closer or farther away? In the coming year, the Japanese are going to expand the International Space Station with an addition, called Kibo. Moon bases are being planned, as is a US mission to Mars. The Pentagon is even eyeing the weaponization of space. Maybe as technology, like Google, makes space more accessible and corporations and nations see investment in space as profitable and strategically adventageous, we will move ultimately up and out. But at what cost? More or less than what Galileo paid?

Why this?

Well, first I have to say that I have been inspired by my former students (without their knowledge) to create a blog. Credit has to go where it is due. This blog should round off most of my efforts to innovate my teaching techniques in the coming year. For years, I have been creating web sites for students to complete assignments and explore historic research on the web. Last year, I established a discussion forum for my students to share ideas and assignments online. Over the summer I created a wiki for my students to submit their work in the coming school year. Now, as the last summer weeks tick slowly away, I thought that the creation of a blog would allow me to create a space for thoughts, historic connections, teaching moments, and other daily ideas that came in between the moments. We'll see. On to the teacher-babble...