(HOST) Commentator Willem Lange has been contemplating the idea that in order to explain our country to others, we’ve first got to understand it ourselves.
(LANGE) My wife and I travel whenever we can afford to. We don’t spend much time googling at scenery. We’d rather stop and talk with people. This is difficult when we speak different languages, but it’s always rewarding. Almost invariably the conversation turns to events occurring in the United States’ spheres of influence.
So I’ve been at pains, in order to explain us, to first try to understand us – not an easy task. This has led me back to an old high school text, Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America.
I’ve also just read my wife’s copy of Greg Mortenson’s Three Cups of Tea. It fell open at the author’s incredible photograph of K-2, which entranced me for half an hour. Then I tackled the text, and hardly put it down for two days.
Tocqueville, whose ancestors fought beside William the Conqueror in 1066, was an aristocrat with liberal republican impulses who, when push came to shove in the 1848 Paris Uprising, sided with the conservatives against the socialists. But he was a keen observer, and on an official visit to America in 1831 he recorded his impressions of our unique new nation and its citizens. He was here during the turbulent presidency of Andrew Jackson.
Among other things, he predicted a severe civil upheaval over slavery, which Jackson supported. He foretold the conflict between the United States and Russia. He saw Americans as disputatious, impatient people enjoying a form of government whose value not many understood, as they scrabbled for economic security and dominance. He noted our frequent resort to religion and our contempt for intellectuals, aristocrats, and government authority, and feared that American-style democracy might lead to tyranny of the ignorant prejudices of an unenlightened majority. He notes several times our impatience, which Jackson, of all people, practically embodied.
Which prefigures the present, in which official United States policies, both domestic and foreign, display, above all else, impatience. We all seem to be looking as far ahead as the next quarterly report, the next stockholders’ meeting, the next election.
Meanwhile, in the high mountain valleys of Pakistan and Afghanistan, Mortenson is building schools, especially for girls, who in a land of madrassas are often suppressed. He’s paid teachers, drilled wells, and built irrigation systems. His life is often threatened – sadly, mostly in America.
To read Mortenson’s story of his mission is to appreciate the value of education, which is a more patient path than we have so far taken. For a fraction of the cost of flying deadly drones over the heads of civilians and Taliban alike, we could educate both boys and girls. Fundamentalist insurgencies must wither when the people become educated. Only then will we be truly secure.
This is Willem Lange in East Montpelier, and I gotta get back to work.