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There's been a lot of discussion, this week, about whether President Obama has fulfilled enough promises or expectations of change since his election a year ago. "I voted for him, and I really thought everything would be different," one disappointed voter from Iowa said in a televised interview. It would be easy to dismiss the expectations of such voters as unrealistic or naive, but we often expect more from big watershed events, and in more sweeping, immediate fashion, than life dishes out. Consider, for example, another important anniversary coming up on Monday: the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall.
On November 9, 1989, after weeks of protest and slow chiseling away of the East German Politburo's power, the East German government announced that henceforth, East Berliners could travel freely to the west. Faced with massive crowds at the border checkpoints, the guards opened the gates, and people streamed through. A party erupted on top of the wall, and people started hacking away at it with hammers and picks.
It was a celebration and global party; the end of an era that had brought incalculable pain to millions of Germans separated from family members and death to thousands, over the years, who had tried to cross over to the west anyway. I wrote about some of the sacrifices, and the lingering legacy of the Wall, in an essay on this site last May, after a German artist released an exhibit sparked by the anniversary of the Wall's demise.
Given all the damage and fear it caused, the fall of the Wall was truly an historical watershed moment to cheer. But then the celebration and festivities ended, and the real work of reunification began.In the moment of celebration, it seemed all good. The rift was healed; the country would be united again. Cue the trumpets and national anthem. Roll credits. If the story had been a Hollywood movie, it actually would have ended there, because the morning after is always messier and less satisfying than the triumphant night. Every screenwriter worth their salt knows that.
There were, of course, some things that did change immediately. People could travel back and forth across the border. Restrictions ended. But national, economic, and social integration and change proved far more challenging than perhaps even anyone in 1989 would have predicted.
Many in the West resented the tax they had to pay to upgrade the infrastructure, buildings, and resources in the east. And "Ossies" (Easterners, from the German word "Ost" for East) found themselves in a no-man's land between cultures. They were suddenly without the social security of the Russian/East German state system, but were still often considered second-class citizens by their western counterparts. Their knowledge of Russian and German didn't help them in an economic world where English had become the common language. For all the celebration on November 9th, change brought with it a disruption of the world they'd known ... and gave rise to fear.
In 2004, 15 years after the Wall came down, I spent some time in the eastern German village of Krausnick, in the Spreewald, or Spree Forest. Krausnik was founded in 1004, so it had seen a lot of changes. It has also seen a lot of battles. In 1945, more than 30,000 German soldiers and 10,000 civilians from the area were caught by the advancing Russian army and slaughtered over the course of a week. Looking at some of the dilapidated houses and crumbling stone walls in the area, I could imagine the Russian soldiers advancing over the land, and the terror that sight must have bred.
One would think, after a massacre so terrible, that the Russians would have been hated forever. But when I visited, there was still a memorial in the center of the village celebrating the Red Army heroes who had died there "in the war against Fascism, 1941-1945." The same soldiers, mind you, who had killed so many of the local people. And as I watched, a couple of older villagers carefully cleaned the memorial and planted new flowers in front of it. The Russians had been gone for 15 years. And still the villagers preserved the memorial with loving care.
When I asked about it, several people told me that, in truth, they actually missed the Russians, because at least then, you had security. You didn't have to worry about losing your job or not being able to pay your rent. All you had to do was keep your head down and your nose clean. It was nice, they acknowledged, to not have to wait 20 years for a bad car. But you had new burdens of figuring out how to pay for that car, now.
Twenty years after the Berlin Wall fell, Germany is still struggling to fulfill the promise of that event. And that's a change that, at least in theory, everyone in Germany wanted. Imagine if the country had been deeply split on the basic premise of reunification?
Consider the events of July 2, 1964. On that date, President Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act into law. Its passage was the result of years of effort and struggle, and the signing of that Act separated American history into "before" and "after." As with the Berlin Wall, some things changed immediately. On July 3, 1964, discriminating against a person on the basis of the color of his or her skin was suddenly illegal. But life did not change with the stroke of a pen. Four years later, not only had glorious change not triumphantly come to pass, but both Martin Luther King--who had been present at the signing ceremony--and Robert Kennedy, one of the Cvil Rights movement's heroes ... were dead at the hands of assassins.
Change--especially nationwide change--is a slow-moving train. Power shifted with the Civil Rights Act, and the wheels of change were set in motion. But a year later, a black person--especially in the South--might not have noticed that much tangible difference in their life. Forty-five years later, we still fight some of those battles, as the events of the past year have certainly illustrated.
Symbolically, many things can change in a day. A law is passed, a wall comes down, a couple gets married, or a person is elected President. The event that initiates the change is called a watershed, because it marks the moment and place where the course of things turn in a new direction. But even in the best of circumstances, it takes a while after that event for any visible shift to become evident. Especially in a deep, complex, and layered environment where all the currents aren't headed in the same direction.
It's a point worth remembering. Too often, we look to those big, symbolic events as magical tonics that will change everything overnight--maybe because we were fed so many "and then they lived happily ever after" endings. More than one person has imagined that when they got married (or became a parent, or got that new job, or that new ... fill in the blank) they'd magically become happy ... only to discover that it takes a lot of work, patience, and time to make the promise of that symbolic change anything close to real.
The truth is, even events as big as the demise of the Berlin Wall don't change a country or the world overnight. They just make a new kind of change possible. Even if the journey turns out to be longer, rockier, and more complex than we wished or imagined ... or a Hollywood screenwriter would have written it.
Photo Credit: Flickr User antaldaniel, wikimedia commons
Photo Credit: Flickr User antaldaniel, wikimedia commons
A number of years ago, I spent some time in Africa with members of the Kenyan Wildlife Service whose mission was to protect endangered and protected wildlife from poachers. The job was hazardous; poachers were generally armed and willing to shoot. And the penalties, if the poachers were caught, were severe. But, the KWS rangers said, it wasn't a clear case of good guys versus the bad guys. Yes, the poaching was terrible. And the big money it offered didn't even go, in most cases, to the hunters themselves. They might make $200 for elephant tusks that their "employers" would turn around and sell on the global market for many, many times that amount. "But it's hard to make the case that we need to preserve the elephants," one of the rangers explained to me, "to a Masai tribesman who is so poor that $200 could make the difference between his 6-year-old son living or dying. He's not going to sacrifice his son to save some wild animal." No, of course not. No parent would. Part of the challenge, then, was to try to convince the tribesmen that the tourism the elephants would bring to the area would provide as much or more income, at far less risk, than poaching.
It's a point that was highlighted earlier this week during Secretary of State HIllary Rodham Clinton's visit to India, when her upbeat comments about being partners with India in fighting global warming were countered, almost immediately, by Jairam Ramesh, India's environment and forests minister. The Indian minister said that India was not in a position to take on legally binding emission standards, and already had one of the lowest carbon emissions rates per capita, in the world.
Roughly translated, Ramesh was saying, pointedly, that the U.S. could well talk about reducing emissions, because it already had a developed and basically well-fed society ... a position it had attained because it didn't have to worry about carbon emissions as it developed. India, with a population of over 1 billion, a poverty rate (living on less than $1.25 a day) of somewhere around 40%, doesn't have that luxury. The rich folk can worry about saving the elephants; the poor have more urgent problems at hand. When most Indians can afford clean transportation, are well fed and safely above poverty levels, come talk to them about reducing emissions.
It's a point echoed in "Mr. Gore, Your Solution to Global Warming is Wrong," a feature in the current issue of Esquire magazine. Written by Bjorn Lomborg, the director of the Copenhagen Consensus Center and a professor at the Copenhagen Business School, the article offers an interesting perspective on the global warming debate. Or, rather, the global warming solution debate. Professor Lomborg does not believe that reducing carbon emissions will solve the problem, and argues that our focus on emission reduction is misplaced. In part because of the minor difference that approach is projected to have, over time, but also because of the punitive consequences of that approach for a large percentage of the world's population.
Global warming may harm your grandchildren's chances of survival in sub-Saharan Africa 50 years from now, but if you don't use that poorly maintained, diesel-guzzling truck you somehow got lucky enough to have access to, your children may die next week. And rather than investing billions in reducing carbon emissions, you'd much prefer the powers that be invested in mosquito nets.
When and how does that change? One way, according to Lomborg, is for the poor to become, well ... less poor. "Once a country achieves a certain standard of living, with their kids healthy and educated, citizens invariably begin to shift their focus toward the environment, and pollution starts to fall," he notes -- a dynamic known as the "Kuznets curve."
Consequently, Lomborg advocates a number of nutrition and economic initiatives that may not seem directly related to global warming, but could aid the effort by increasing the number of people with enough margin, or luxury, to care. Lomborg also argues that significant change needs to come from developing alternate fuel sources and eliminating the need for fossil fuel; an approach he believes would have a greater impact over time, and would also eliminate the punitive carbon-reduction-without-other-substitutes problem for the poor, or developing countries.
While eliminating poverty in the world is a noble goal, it might rate even higher on the challenge Richter scale than stopping global warming itself. Not that we shouldn't invest in mosquito nets, micro-finance and micro-nutrient initiatives. And not that we shouldn't, as a country that has more margin to play with, do all we can to reduce our carbon emissions. Just because the rest of the world isn't perfect doesn't excuse us from our own responsibility to be responsible.
But although Lomborg didn't explicitly make this point, it occurred to me that if the key to success is, in essence, to convince the Masai that they will economically benefit more by saving the elephant than killing it, there might be another benefit in his alternative fuels and technology approach. Investing in alternative fuels, versus focusing on carbon emission reduction, might reduce the punitive pressure on developing countries. But if there were somehow money to be made by alternative technology that could be developed, built, or somehow used to the profit and benefit of those people and countries, they might be more willing to work on keeping the elephant alive.
It's a complex issue, with more problems than answers. But looking at what would make the rest of the world want to get on board is certainly an angle worth considering in the debate.
(Photo: Flickr User Artbandito)
(Photo: Flickr User Artbandito)
The most stunning fact I discovered in the many obituaries written this week about former Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara was that he'd studied philosophy as an undergraduate at UC Berkeley. Stunning because it means that underneath the number-driven economic theory and modeling he learned and practiced after that, he actually had the knowledge that could have saved him the tragic and flawed miscalculations for which he is best remembered, and least forgiven.
How so? Because no philosophy student could have avoided the study of Aristotle. And the elements of McNamara's tragedy--both his fatally flawed thinking, and the antidote that could have countered it--stemmed directly from Aristotle's work.
In McNamara's defense, I'm not sure I'd have seen the connection so quickly, even though I, too, studied Aristotle in college, if I hadn't gotten a refresher course on the subject a couple of weeks ago. My refresher was courtesy of Tony Golsby-Smith, a teacher, Aristotelian scholar, and CEO of the 2nd Road training and consulting company, who electrified a Design Management Institute conference last month with his ideas about redesigning business thinking. Golsby-Smith argued that the reason many businesses don't do better at innovation or effective strategic thinking is because they focus too much on analysis, and too little on rhetoric--both subjects that Aristotle explored at length.
"The western world bought the wrong thinking system from Aristotle," Golsby-Smith argues. "Aristotle conceived two thinking systems, not one. We made the mistake of just buying one, and then allowing it to monopolize the whole territory of thought. We should have bought both and used them as partners." The first thinking system, which laid the foundation for western scientific thought, is what we generally refer to as deductive reasoning, analysis, or "logic." (If a=b, and b=c, then a=c.) The second thinking system Aristotle discussed was a more open-ended process of supposition, hypothesis generation, and argument, which he called "rhetoric."
Analytic logic--the rational, numbers-based analysis that McNamara prized and clung to so fiercely--has a lot of appeal, Golsby-Smith points out, because it holds "the promise of certainty and control." And it has an important place in the world. "The logic road underpinned the era of science, the era of science delivered us technologies, and technologies made the industrial revolution possible," Golsby-Smith says. "The industrial revolution delivered us untold wealth and capitalism, and sitting at the end of this beneficial trail lays modern management and its strategic processes, deeply indebted to the logic road."
The analytic method worked well for McNamara in terms of making Ford Motor Company processes and the Defense Department more efficient, which undoubtedly reinforced his belief in the approach. Unfortunately, as McNamara and many businesses have discovered, the logic road has its limits. The control and certainty it promises do not always materialize. But that, Aristotle would say, is because the analytic method is only the best way to truth in domains where things "cannot be other than they are" (e.g. natural science). There is only one answer, for example, to why a leaf is green. So a deductive, analytic approach to discovering that answer makes sense.
When it comes to planning for the future, or making decisions in domains where things can be "other than they are," Aristotle believed rhetoric was far more useful than analysis. "Humans have never predicted the future by analyzing it," Golsby-Smith says. Designing effective strategies for the future--especially in areas involving potentially irrational human actions and reactions--requires imagining various scenarios and perspectives on the truth, and then making judgments based on the persuasiveness of each one.
Of course, imagining valid alternate futures, from different perspectives, also requires an ability to see things from a point of view other than your own ... culturally and psychologically. Which is something humans are notoriously poor at doing, especially across international boundaries. But it appears that McNamara never even made the attempt. Part of the reason might have been his previous analytic successes. But he was also a product of his time. The analytic, scientific approach was coming into full bloom in the early 1960s. The space and computer ages were beginning, technology was giving "efficiency" a new level of importance, and science was the new frontier--even in business. (In 1959, the Ford Foundation released an influential study advocating a more "scientific" approach to business education.) And yet there were others, even at the time, who saw what McNamara failed to see.
There's no lack of lessons to be drawn from the tragedy of McNamara and Vietnam. But certainly one of them ... a lesson Golsby-Smith is intent on conveying to as large a segment of the business world as possible ... is the importance of both of Aristotle's roads to truth. As Einstein himself once said, imagination can sometimes be even more important than knowledge.
Eve Ensler, the author of The Vagina Monologues, gave impassioned testimony last week to the Senate Foreign Relations Subcommittee on African Affairs about the violent war against women being waged, still, in eastern Congo. Testimony reinforced yesterday by Nicholas Kristof of the NY Times, in a column titled, simply, "After Wars, Mass Rapes Persist."
No sane person in the world would argue against the notion that a terrible travesty is being conducted against women in not only the Congo, but Liberia, Sudan, and other African conflict areas. Eastern Congo has the highest rate of violence against women in the world, at the moment. As many as 70% of the women and girls there have been sexually assaulted or mutilated, according to some estimates. The numbers boggle the mind.
We should do something, Ensler says. I agree. Wholeheartedly. Hear one woman's tale of brutal mutilation, and you want to throw up. Realize that behind the eyes of most of the women you encounter lies a similar, horrifying tale, and something inside you twists, screams, and goes strangely numb. There's simply no way to even absorb it. But having spent a little time in conflict areas in Africa, I also agree with Kristof that the problems are so complex that solutions are difficult to see, or even imagine, clearly. Especially by people on the outside.
In 2001, I spent a little time flying relief supplies into Sudan, in the 18th year of civil war there. The airlift into Sudan involved a bizarre mix of missionaries and mercenaries, and both authorized and unauthorized flight missions. The U.N. planes could only fly into areas authorized by the Sudanese government. But seeing as the conflict was a civil war, there were whole areas the government didn't want aid to reach. Hence the unauthorized flights by non-U.N. aid organizations ... like the one I was flying with.
On one flight, we dodged a couple of Northern-occupied towns and did a "quick turn" at a little dirt airstrip in the village of Akot, Southern Sudan, where there was a hospital and a school. We were on the ground less than 10 minutes because that's when we were at our most vulnerable. Not long before that, a Red Cross plane had been bombed by the Northern Sudanese on that very strip. Such are the hazards of war, of course.
Six years later, I went back to Southern Sudan ... in large part because I wanted to see what had changed since the 2005 Peace Accord had been signed. Unquestionably, progress had been made. Villages that had been decimated were being rebuilt, and people were returning home after years in refugee camps. Mine fields had been cleared and turned into outdoor markets.
But all was not idyllic. Southern Sudan's charismatic leader, John Garang, had died in a helicopter accident right after the peace accord had been signed, leaving behind feuding tribal factions and corrupt officials. In village after village, men told me that if the North didn't agree to independence for Southern Sudan, they would simply get their guns and return to their rebel hiding places. In one village, when I asked a group of teenage boys what they wanted, now that the war was over, one wordlessly took my pen, wrote the word "independent" on his hand, and held it out for me to see. There was no smile on his face, or in his eyes.
Two days later, I was flying with the same pilot I'd flown with six years earlier, when we got a radio distress call. There'd been an uprising at a local hospital, and hostages had been taken. The Sudanese People's Liberation Army (SPLA) had moved in, captured the kidnappers, and freed the hostages. But the conflict involved tribal rivalry, people were armed, and tensions in the area were running high. Could we fly in and take the hostages to safety?
We got security updates every 10 minutes on the way there, stayed high, and did a maximum performance descent to the dirt airstrip, to keep our exposure to any potential ground fire to a minimum. We taxied to the end of the strip, where our human cargo awaited us, and shut down the engine only long enough to load up. Four minutes later, we were airborne again, in a steep climb. As we reached a safe altitude, and my heart rate returned to something closer to normal, I realized with a sad shock that I'd been to that strip before. Six years earlier. And then, too, we'd had to do a quick turn to avoid violence on the ground. Because then, the nation had been at war.
All of that is to say ... the sobering truth of Africa--or, perhaps, anywhere--is that an absence of war does not equate to peace. And violence is a very hard habit to break.
Is there any hope? A little. Kristof points to progress being made in Liberia, where the Carter Center is working to prosecute rapists and President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf has sent strong signals that rape will not be tolerated. He also quotes a young girl there who, despite being brutally raped and mutilated, has determined that when she grows up, she wants to build shelters for abused girls ... and become President of Liberia.
Farfetched? Well, consider: in 1994 Rwanda suffered one of the most brutal, genocidal civil wars in memory. But in the vacuum that the chaos left, the surviving women had to start taking on roles they never had before. (At one point, 70% of the country's population was female.) In 2003, a country that only nine years earlier had nurtured a highly repressive culture toward women; a culture in which women were not allowed to inherit property or own their own businesses ... elected a parliament in which a full 49% of the representatives were women. Which gave Rwanda a greater percentage of women in its national government than any other country in the world.
How did that happen? In part because of international efforts to help Rwanda draft a new national constitution and electoral process. And in part because of the Rwandan women themselves. Can that happen in Congo? I don't know. But Ensler's right about Congolese women being resilient. In September 2007, as UN tanks rolled down the streets of Goma to try to repel an attack by rebel leader Laurent Nkunda a few kilometers to the southwest, I watched women in town continuing with their standard Saturday morning town clean-up. They were singing as they worked.
Illustrator Christoph Niemann's exhibit "Over the Wall," posted on the New York Times website this week, is a simple piece of work. In a captioned series of woven paper sculpture images, Niemann--who says the Berlin Wall was only an abstract notion when he was growing up in southwest Germany--describes his recent move back to Berlin. Living in the Bernauer Strasse neighborhood, which awoke on August 13, 1961 to a new national boundary running down the middle of the street, Niemann says the Wall has now become far more real to him, even though it's been gone for almost two decades.
I understand. For one thing, history almost always becomes more personal, and real, in the places it unfolded. But I also remember the Berlin Wall. I was an exchange student in Germany in 1978, and I remember the ghost stations Niemann talks about ... populated by soldiers, guns, and dogs, but no waiting passengers. I remember the eerily cemented windows along the mined and fortified border zone, and the memorials to people who had died trying to get across. I remember, after spending time on the eastern side of the Wall, my relief at seeing the checkpoint back to the western side. And my discomfort, even at the time, at recognizing how undeservedly lucky I was, to be able to pass easily through a barrier that no one else around me could.
As Niemann is discovering, a place like that, where so much anguish was spilled, bleeds its pain into the air long after any physical structures of its past are dismantled. Even now, Germans struggle with the Wall's legacy. Some western residents resent having to pay to rebuild the east. Some eastern residents still feel like second-class citizens. In 2006, I spent time again in the eastern part of Germany, and found some residents who even said that, while they liked the free access to consumer goods, they missed the security of the Russian state.
On some level, the impact of the Wall will probably continue to be felt in Germany until everyone who lived with it, and remembers it, has died. But while that day and shift will undoubtedly be a good thing for Germany's collective citizenry, it will represent a loss, as well. For there is something important, and powerful, in the remembered stories of the people whose lives were affected by the Wall ... a point Niemann clearly feels and understands.
Niemann talks about a couple of those individuals in his captions ... a woman who became the first to die while attempting to jump over the wall from an apartment window, and an East German soldier whose successful leap to freedom over the barbed wire, when the border was first closed, has become an iconic image from that day.
That photo, which has been widely acclaimed, is a terrific action shot, to be sure. And it reinforces all our most cherished notions of victory and a burning desire for freedom, even in the soldiers paid to oppose us. But for my money, the attention should have been given to another photo taken that day--one far less available and known in the world, but arguably far more powerful. (I came across it in Berlin, in 1978, but I couldn't even find a copy of it on the internet to link to here.) It's a photo of another East German soldier along the barbed wire barricades. But instead of leaping to his own freedom, he's reaching down to help a small boy over the wire. A boy who'd gotten left behind in the chaos of people fleeing and families caught on different sides of the border. The soldier is young, and his eyes, looking warily over his shoulder, are full of fear. And yet, he persisted.
The boy escaped. The soldier did not. He was seen helping the boy and, moments later, was taken away. And, at least as of 1978, nobody had ever been able to find out what happened to him.
The stories all matter. But of all the stories that I, like Christoph Niemann, found in the lingering shadows of the Berlin Wall, that's the one that's stayed with me. Because risking your life for your own freedom is one thing. Risking it, or sacrificing it, for the sake of someone you don't even know--someone you have orders to kill--speaks to something far more profound. Which is why even today, almost 50 years after his probably death, and 20 years after the Wall came down ... that soldier gives me hope.
Lane Wallace
