Aaron's Musings Page Two

And now, page two	Spare Me	Not Spared
Open Letter to Thabo Mbeki	Open Letter to George W. Bush*New

AND NOW...PAGE TWO
Really, if you want the truth, this entire website is only for Laura and I. That's the truth. Now, you are cordially invited to view our little website, just like we might own our home and live there, but invite you over for nachos. Ah, nachos. Laura asks me if we should continue to work on our website, now that we are so close to going home. I say, absolutely. The website is part journal, part diary, part photo album, part scrapbook, and we will want to peruse it when we are back to working too much and fighting for time. The Aaron's Musings page came about because as I was writing the Minneapolis section, I wrote something about God being evil or something like that, and Laura did not want her extended family to think she was an atheist, so I moved the more controversial things over to Aaron's Musings. Now I write the little essays when I am moved to do so. And of course, the last week, I will write one and call it Going Home. And I have to write one about Globalization because that has been a recurrent theme. So there will be at least two more musings, but most likely, there will be more. I would write a letter to my own president, George W., but I don't think he would be able to read it. And I'd mention too many foreign countries and that would confuse the poor man.

One more thing, when I was working on these essays, I started to over edit them and make this all a big deal. I'm working on a novel, getting the text of the main website is hard enough, and then we are still on the world trip and we are still touring. So, I said, forget it! Let them stand. The essays ramble, they go in and out of the subjects, and they could use a lot of work. If I wanted to publish any of them, it would take a lot of work. So they are rough, but the beauty of a website, you can just click away, back to something that grabs you more. I am Paul Harvey. Love me.

Spare Me
I pray to God, "Spare me." Haven't I been spared enough? I grew up in a pretty nice family with parents who tried to do the best they could, and I never went hungry, I was always taken care of for clothes and such things. I have my health, I was lucky enough to save enough money to see the world and not work, and I married a wonderful woman who makes all of those things even better. I have been spared most of the problems that face most of the people on this planet, and that is a stone cold fact. In Paris, I had such fear of Africa. Again, I thought of sixteen year old boys with AK47's, waiting for some rich Westerner to come upon them so they could teach them the harsh realities of life. I wanted to be spared from that. Before I came to Africa, I would sing from Jesus Christ Superstar, "Take this cup away from me...I don't want to taste it's poison." But then, I am choosing this. I am choosing to come to these places to see them and to think about them. Most likely, my death lies ahead of me, on the soil of the U.S., very unromantic, and very far from Africa.

I had studied Africa, I knew that it was decades beyond naked "savages" living in the bush, but South Africa, I had no idea. Laura said that it was strange to say, but she never thought Africa would have so many Black people. We both grew up watching movies about 19th century white-skinned heroines owning farms and walking around with other white-skinned costumed people. So I write that, but at the same time, that's really all we have seen. We have seen the-fenced-off-for-tourists-only-Africa, and we drive by the shanty towns and the people watch us drive by, and I might as well be in Colorado, watching them on T.V. We are separated by worlds and worlds and worlds. I guess I should have known that the first time I gassed up our rental car at a Shell Ultra City station, complete with a grocery store selling snack food, a fast food restaurant, and a sheltered place for drivers to stop and rest. Again, I could have been stopped at those gas stations on I-70 between Denver and Fort Collins. But I wasn't, I was in Africa, praying to be spared.

Crime in South Africa is well publicized. I read an article on rape in South Africa and it seemed there were wolfish men around every corner, and when we got off in Johannesburg, we were on guard, and we stared in wonder and apprehension at all the high walls, all the barbed wire, razor wire, and electric fences around houses. Most of them, but not all of them, houses that belong to European immigrants, the Whites of Africa. We joked with our friend, when we borrowed his camera, that it would be stolen, definitely, it would be stolen. Now I see that we are safe here, not as safe as Asia, I don't have that sense, because we are safe behind high walls, barbed wire, razor wire, and electric fences. However, that safety can easily be breached, easily. So I again pray, spare me, spare me so I can go home and struggle with a job and doing too much and keeping a budget and trying not to eat so much. Trying not to eat so much. What a stupid, modern, Western, problem.

I've written this a lot before, that I feel blessed, that I am grateful for my experiences, but that there is an impending sense of doom. I can't be lucky for this long. I can't be. At any moment, the forces of fate will come along and I will be hurt, Laura will be hurt, and I will face the demons that inhabit this world. I want to be spared from that, but it's funny, that this is so much in my mind, this fear of violence. I can only think that it harkens back to my days at O'Connel Junior High School, when the demons were lose. It's a dog-eat-dog world and I'm wearing, and I did wear, milkbone underwear. Our guide to Soweto, Willie, says that crime is the home of the those with nothing to lose. I told Laura that if we were robbed, it would come out of the tithe from our income, and that instead of giving to the poor, the poor were just being more assertive. The irony is that so far we've only been robbed in Paris, very White, very West.

So what is my job? Do I hide behind walls, do I chain my things up so I'm not robbed? I think about the raw natural world, because that's what's in the-fenced-off-for-tourists-only-Africa that I've seen. I see the big game parks, where death is a definite reality. The lions have to eat and the Springbok are good at reproducing. Is that just what the world is? I have money and power, you don't, tough darts. I think about the environment, the animals that are being driven into extinction, and I think, is that it? Humans are just better at the game than spotted owls. Humans are just better hunters than coyotes. So let's build golf courses for our human hunters and if the coyotes die out, well, the dinosaurs couldn't keep up. You see, this makes sense to me, and I would love it if I could think and exist in that completely savage world. Why fret about the disappearing Bushmen? Well, they just couldn't compete. If they are scrubbing floors for pennies and losing their culture, who cares? Better them than me, I promise you. As long as I have mine. And then when I grow afraid, I beg God to spare me, to keep me safe. And if that doesn't work, well, I am an American. I can arm myself and put up a sticker that says "This propery is insured by Smith and Wesson." In the words of Van Halen, "the hunter becomes the hunted...gonna hunt somebody down." And who has time for spotted owls or whale sharks or cheetah or elephants. we have enough of them in zoos. And if they can't procreate in zoos, who the hell cares? World history is full of extinct animals that couldn't keep up.

If I am hurt? If I am crippled? If I go home and can't find a job? Well, as Norm from CHEERS says, (I quoted him once, I'll quote him again) "It's a dog-eat-dog world and I'm wearing milkbone underwear."

But the problem is that I can't just live in that Darwin world of dog-eat-dog. I feel all of the world's trouble. The tribal people are disappearing from the earth. I don't want them to have to abandon their culture. Whole species are dying out. I don't want my people to be the cause of such death. I feel it all deeply and I can't not feel it. I read about the disappearing green parts of Holland and I get too mad and hurt to just shrug it off. I rail out to the world, "Let's just pave over the whole thing. That's what we want, right? Cows and farms don't bring in enough revenue. We need Barnes and Nobles on every corner, right next to the Jamba Juice, Noah's Bagels and Starbuck's Coffee. A world of strip malls." The reality is that if you went to the CEO of Jamba Juice and said, "Here, we can make you billions, all we need to do is pave over every green space on earth. What do you think?" I would hope, and, really, I know, he would balk. But it all happens so slow, and that's the problem, it is all so slow. We'll put up strip mall by strip mall, but slowly, so slowly, in fact, that once the green is gone, we'll wonder at how savage humans really are.

Before, when I studied Africa, I couldn't understand how things like slavery and apartheid and colonization could exist. It seemed like some tragic mistake that could never happen again. But now, now it is so clear to me. Slavery, apartheid, colonization, they all made sense at the time and people could justify them. I am going to write a letter to the president of South Africa and I will use a lot of ideas that the colonizers used. Western society is efficient, we can do business really well, we can cut costs, we can keep trains running on time. We are organized! I would venture we are more organized and more driven than most other cultures, but the problem is, that what makes life good, the Western world fails at. Religion. Christianity is a joke. Family. In America, family is a joke. Relationships? Yeah. An internal life? Keep talking because we fail at that too. Our trains run on time, we are very good at organizing, we are motivated and we can work and work, but at the heart of our culture, there is nothing. We are lonely, self-obsessed, "driven by a hundred forms of fear and self-delusion." And this is what we want to give to the rest of the world. Sure, globalization, free markets, all of that might mean more money per person, but it will do nothing to address the crucial problems that humans face because we need a spiritual solution, not an economic solution. And spiritual solutions dry up once you try and codify them. Spiritual solutions are chaotic, enigmatic, paradoxical, and completely beyond us all. You can't dictate that. You can't force that. Spirituality is loving the killer and killed, loving the vile child-pornographer as well as the children he has tortured. It is love and tolerance of everyone and everything. Hate sells more papers and fear fills more church collection plates.

I ask God to spare me because I am afraid. I hope that the powers of the universe do not listen to that selfish prayer, and I think such selfish prayers go largely ignored. Kind of like when your dog barks but you know that it doesn't mean anything. Just the post man going past. A better prayer is "guide me". A better prayer is "help me do Your will and not my own." I hope that those prayers rise like the alarm barks of all the guard dogs guarding all the houses all over South Africa. That is what I want. And I have the faith that the Will of God is for all of us to be taken care of, fed, loved, and safe. I don't think God is some big Zeus type father in the sky. I think God is every one of us, and most of the people I've met, if they were God, they would want a nice world not only for themselves, but also for everyone else. No matter how bad we can be, we're still better, kinder, than we think.

The problem with me is that I only practice my spiritual program when I am in need. Then I pray and meditate and read and try to be of service. But when I am in trouble, that's when I need the work I've already done. Just like baseball, if I don't practice between games, when the games come, its iffy whether I'll be able to handle the big plays or not. Spirituality is working on your fielding and throwing, so when the bad times come, you can scoop the ball up and turn that double play. Spare me. Just like Adam Sandler's right fielder, screaming out against the other team, hoping, nay, praying the ball doesn't come to him. Better to be grateful for the good days and use them to practice, so when the big left-hand hitter comes up, I'm ready for the trouble because the trouble always comes. What better way to show God's power than to pluck that line drive out of the sky and then throw the runner out at first even as he goes back to tag up?

Not Spared
Yesterday, while I was typing up "Spare Me", Laura and I were robbed. While Laura was in the bathroom, washing her hair, she heard the door close, thought I was home, and then walked out. At first she didn't notice what had been stolen. Later we found out that he stole her shoes, a folder that held our plane tickets and extra visas as well as the Rand we had left over from South Africa. We were holding bags for a friend we met on the Crazy Kudu tour name Sherri and he stole one of her bags, the best bag to steal, and he got away with her cash, passport, two cameras, a pair of binoculars, and other such things. The same man had walked unannounced into another of our friend's room, Miriam of Miriam and Peter, but Miriam had been in the room and had caught him, and he had left.

So, we have been robbed. I have not been spared.

As I left the Internet Cafe yesterday, I was feeling down. I was far from home, lonely for family and friends, missing the familiar, missing my routine. I just wanted to be held by Laura and soothed. I get back, and suddenly I have a life again. I have things I HAVE to do. I have to check to make sure we really were robbed. I have to cancel the visa cards. I have to replace the bus and train tickets. I have to call and try and get the airplane tickets re-issued. I have to take care of business, and my grief and loneliness are forgotten. My first reaction was kind of numb, dumb shock. We were going to tithe and I told Laura, if we get robbed, that's the universe's way of telling us where our money should go. We either give it to the universe, or the universe takes it from us. Either way, it's 10% of what we have. After that, I began to count my blessings. In some circles, I began to write what is known as a gratitude list.

1) Laura was not hurt. She was not raped. The robber grabbed our things and left her unscathed.
2) For some reason, he didn't take our camera bag or our money belts. If he would have looked under a backpack, he would have seen most of our valuables.
3) For some reason, we didn't have our passports in the ticket holder. Usually, they are in that folder, and at any other time in our trip, if that folder had been snatched up, we would have lost our passports.
4) For some reason, we didn't have our driver's licenses in the ticket holder. Same with the passports, they should have been in the folder. We will need our driver's licenses in the Fall, when we rent a car for France. If they had been stolen, I don't know how we would have had new ones re-issued.
5) We had our American Express cards in our money belts, so we only had one visa to cancel.

I was ticking through that list not knowing that our friend's bag had been stolen. Once I found out, I was crushed. I had been spared after all.

We told Sherri about our tithing, and we offered to help her with the money she lost, her cameras, the binoculars, but she wouldn't take anything from us. I understand that. If someone said that the universe was going to reimburse me after getting robbed, I would say that the money is better spent elsewhere. Well, if it was another person and not the actual universe giving me the money. So knowing that Sherri got hit a hundred times harder than us, and her bags were in our room, that was hard to take. Losing Laura's boots, that fit her, that were all broken in before a five day hike, that was hard to take. Knowing our old Visa receipts from our other Visa were in the ticket holder, that was hard. And we lost some addresses, some mementos, our out of date AAA cards, and the ticket holder itself. That ticket holder was handy! Now, it is gone, gone back into the universe. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust. Twenty-four hours later, we have new bus, train, and airplane tickets. Only one of which we had to pay for and that cost us, or the universe, rather, twenty-five dollars. New visas are being sent out, new airplane tickets will reach us in Durban, South Africa, and we will only have to pay for the Fedex charges. Laura bought new boots, and since my shoes were wearing out and the boots I found were only $50, leather, Hi-Tec hiking boots, $50, I bought a pair as well. We are all set, all taken care of. In the end, we were spared. And I have a new pair of boots.

I wrote in the other essay that I had been spared enough, but here I am, spared again. And as I walked to get donuts this morning, they have homemade, fresh donuts here outside of Café Schneider in Windhoek, Namibia, I was thinking that that is the way it works. Crime is just another form of tithing. We either give our money to the poor or the poor take it. Either way, it is money and resources in motion. And we were so lucky. Again, I am grateful that Laura was not hurt. I am grateful that Miriam wasn't hurt. I am grateful that all of the things that could have been in the ticket holder weren't there, and that we got off okay. We were spared and we weren't spared.

You know, I have this movie mind. I went rafting, years back, and I had mental images of me falling out of the raft and being swept down the river, but gloriously catching hold of a tree limb before plummeting over falls. It was all dramatic and I could see it all happening with perfect clarity. When I actually did fall out of the boat, it was fast and muddled and I had no idea what was going on. It was as different from my image of falling out of a boat as day is from night. As the reality of getting robbed is from the movie version of getting robbed. In my movie mind, I see the five rough black men, black men of course, because that's the movie, right? You're in Africa, you will be robbed and beaten by blacks. The closest we've been to being beaten up was from a truckload of White, South African rugby players who screamed for our blood when I made a wrong turn. Anyway, the five black men come forward, full of sneers, knives in their hands. They demand money. I am full of Larium and indignant rage. I tell them they'll have to take it from me. I push Laura away, tell her to run. The first one comes forward, I grab his knife, cut him, and then, well, yes, I am Rambo, they are the Vietnamese, and it is First Blood Part 2 all over again. I die fighting to protect my woman and my money. In thirty seconds yesterday, a smooth man in his forties took a pair of shoes, a bag, and a little black nylon folder, and walked out the front gate of our hotel. It might have been a movie moment, but only for a short movie, most likely a foreign film. In America, we like our crime big.

All told, the robbery cost us around two hundred dollars, not counting the new boots on my feet. For Sherri, it is a different story, but I can't speak to that. I have a hard enough time with my own life. So yesterday I was tired, hurt, lonely. It was a 10:30 softball game, and all I wanted to do was be at home, getting ready for bed. But there I was, on first base, and then the play came to me. I was robbed. The ball was zooming past the pitcher, down between me and the second baseman, was I ready? Could I make the play?

When I played softball, I never practiced every day, though I needed to. And I don't practice my spirituality every day, though I need to. But I guess I've done well enough so that when the ball came to me, I scooped it up and touched first. It wasn't the end of the world. It was simple and hard, like much of life is. That's it. I'm still paranoid. I'm still overly cautious. I'm still hurt, not so much by the robber, but by the whole set up of life. Crime makes perfect sense. I don't have something, you do, I will take it from you. Not committing crime is up to the individual person, and no law, no punishment, is going to convince a person not to commit crime. I thought about the thief, pressing charges against him, throwing him in prison, all of that. What good does that do? Most of the people on earth won't steal from you. There are some that will. Maybe that's just that. We give those people free reign. You want to steal, steal. Go ahead, here, have my shirt. You want that, here is my coat too. Punishment and all of that. Useless. If someone ought to be punished, it should be God. He/She/They set the whole thing up.

So no, I don't want to see this man punished. All I want would be for Sherri to get her personal things back, her journal, her address book, her postcards that she painstakingly filled out, all of that. What should happen is that I go to the man, I figure out why he robbed us in the first place, and then we address that. But I don't have the time. I am not a citizen here. I am just a traveler, on my way to another land. How sad. In the States I wouldn't do that either. I would go back to my job, continue on working, continue fighting for time, and this criminal, he would go to jail or whatever happens when people steal. The causes and conditions of his theft would be ignored. And I know why they would be ignored and it's not just my own self-centeredness. The entire system of capitalism, the entire basis of the American system of economics is based on the haves and the have-nots. To eradicate crime you would have to eradicate poverty and despair. You would have to eradicate de-humanizing jobs and low salaries. You would have to slash the profit margins and that ain't gonna happen. So the rich get richer, the poor either take their tithe or receive at the end of a breadline.

Which brings us back to me, my favorite subject. I see the unemployed, I see the beggars, the newspaper people, selling The Namibian, more copies of the Namibian than anyone could ever read, and I think about them for a long time. I am an American. I am driven. I believe that if I work hard I will get ahead. I have been given gifts, and if I use those gifts, I will be successful. I am not a businessman, but I am smart and I can learn quickly and comprehensively. If I can learn quickly and comprehensively, I can use that knowledge to get a salary. Sure, I might not be rich, but I will be able to support myself and my family because I can also save money when it is necessary. On top of that, I have social skill so I can get along with people. I have friends and a family that can help me when times are tough and I am loyal enough that they can trust me. Put all of that together, and the breadlines are a long way away for me. Others are not so fortunate, but I can't speak to that. I can't even speak to my being a long way away from a breadline because the whim of the universe can't be known. Ill health, brain injuries, mental illness, my depressive nature, the free market system, it's all beyond me, but I am an American. I believe in hard work and using your noodle and fate be damned.

My weakness on the baseball diamond, I'll tell you, is in hitting. I can field okay, I can throw well enough, not great, mind you, but well enough, and I can play defense pretty well. I can wait for the bad things to happen. I can catch the errant ball and make the play, usually. But I need help on offense. I've writtne a bunch today about dealing with being robbed. I've conjectured about how I might be able to help the world be better, but what have I done? Where is the offense? How am I, right now, making the world a better place?

I can only pray for the willingness to step up to the plate when I am called. I can only keep an open-mind how I might be of service to the world. And I have to be honest about what role I can play. I doubt I am Ghandi. I pray for guidance a lot. I just hope when the guidance comes, I can allow myself to be guided. I hope that when it's my turn, I can go out to the plate, wait on the right ball, wait for it to come, and then sink my bat into that ball and knock it over the second baseman's head, just a little drop and it rolls into the outfield and I get on first. Speaking of which, Sherri got her passport back in the end. It was found in a field by a maid who turned it into her employer. Man, that simple woman hit a freakin' homerun.

An Open Letter to Thabo Mbeki

Dear Mr. President,

I must say, I have been a unwilling student of South African history. I took African history in college, but I wanted anthropology, not history, and instead of social structures and rituals, I was given the European invasion history of Africa, which is only five hundred of the three million years of the human history in Africa. And most of the five hundred years of history was South African history. South Africa got special attention because it was 1992, Apartheid was still alive and well, and there was a lot written about it. Europeans love their history to have dates, and books, and statistics. I would have preferred stories, but my teacher did use African novels to teach the history, so that's something. And mostly we talked, and that was also nice. Anyway, I studied, with regret, South African history. I learned about the Afrikaaners coming into power, I learned about Steven Biko, the Pan African Congress, the African National Congress, the Inkatha Freedom Party, Nelson and Winnie Mandela, de Clerk, and all the rest of the players in the drama. I studied and read and it was the early nineties, and the White man was to blame for the world's troubles, the White, Heterosexual, Christian man. At the time I was White, Christian and Heterosexual, and hence, I was the Devil. I accepted that with ease. Sure, I'll be the Devil. Blame me. Later, when I started planning a trip to Africa, I had visions of me being tortured and I would yell out, "Take my blood for the millions killed. Take my blood for the tortured in John Foster Square. Take my blood for those killed in the Vlakplas. Take my blood for the missionaries who murdered cultures while the businessman murdered the soil. Take my blood for the enslaved. Take my blood for the cheated and hated and killed." It was all very romantic and dramatic, and I wanted to pay for being the Devil.

My wife and I planned our trip to Africa, and India had wearied us of the third world, wearied us to the very bone. Okay, we'll go to Africa, but we wanted as much of the first world in Africa as we could find. Friends of ours from France, out of all the places they visited, said that South Africa was their favorite. We heard that a lot. South Africa is wonderful. It's like Europe in Africa, and my wife and I, we were ready for that. No beggars, no poor, no hawkers, just good roads, good hotels, and the scenery of Africa. Once again, I found South Africa playing an uncertain role in my life and we planned for a month long visit. Originally, it was going to be two months, and we thought we might even live in Capetown for longer, but all in all, we gave it a busy month. We had a car because we wanted to see as much as we could, and all of the South Africans we talked to told us to get a car. And all of the South Africans we talked to, surprise, surprise, were very white and very nice. Now in Lethal Weapon 2, the South Africans were the villains and that made sense. Afrikaners were racist and bad, the scourge of the world, people who legislated oppression and tortured to keep it. They were Christian, many were Heterosexual, and despite four hundred years under the African sun, they had White skin. They were the Devil themselves. I was just a lesser little demon in comparison.

We wound up going back to South Africa after seeing Namibia and Botswana because we met a family of devils that took us in, gave us a hatchet to chop firewood in the Drakensberg mountains, and fed us around their fire. They showed us great trails to hike around, and they were delightful, and we loved South Africa. I was given a lessen in the real history of the world. The real history of the world, just as it is the real history of South Africa, is that most people are nice, even the most devilish can be very, very nice, and the bad things that are done are usually done by nice people. It would be great if the world were as black and white as many people think it is. Black people are good, White people are bad, and the coloreds are just around to make money. A little joke. I learned that the white people who made such good villains in the movie were actually a hard working, resourceful, salt of the earth kind of people. Those damn Afrikaners, they are made out of biltong, and the South African family we met were teething their young daughter on the stuff. No wonder the Brits had trouble with them. The Boers are sometimes called the White Tribe of Africa, and I think they are just that.

While we there, Mommar Khaddafi came out and said that Africa was for Africans and that all the White people should leave, including the lost White tribe down south. I think if we start re-arranging people, then the Bantu speaking people also need to go back where they came from, and I've already been packing up to return to my roots in Germany. However, if we all go back to where we came from, we'll all wind up back in Africa anyway, so those damn Afrikaners should stay. I bet the San would be pleased to get their land back from the Zulu and the Xhosa, but that's probably not going to happen anytime soon. People move around and there's trouble. The problem, and the reason why I am writing this letter to you, is that the Afrikaners are leaving South Africa, and not just the Afrikaners, Indians, and other of the elite, and I find it all troubling. What does a country do when their educated elite leave for other shores? Sure, there will be people left, but what does that do to an economy and a society? The brain-drain, and it's not just South Africa that is having the problem, it is India and other countries around the world. There is a rush to go to Australia, to America, to Canada, but what happens to the country when the educated leave?

After my short time in South Africa, it seems to me that the greatest drama of the coming century will be played out in your country. South Africa, in the micro view, has all the problems that the world has, and I think I said the same thing about India, but well, India seems hopeless. South Africa, South Africa has a promise we have not felt in any other country we've visited. Despite the barbed wire, the razor wire, the electric fences, the high walls, the huge guard dogs, the private, armed security response teams, the poverty, the potholes, the accusations of corruption, the AIDS epidemic, the crumbling school system, the questionable legal system, the plummeting value of the Rand, despite all of the troubles, there is a hope still alive in South Africa, and that hope must live on. After our tour of Soweto with a wonderful man named Willie, we all stood around, tears in our eyes, while we talked of the future and what might be. In other places, there isn't that hope. Without a single man dying, South Africa opened its government to all its people. When I studied South African history in 1992, there was no hope of Apartheid being tossed out, but a couple of years later, Nelson Mandela becomes president. It was a true miracle, unknown in most of the other countries on your continent. There is hope.

While my wife and I were there, we talked with a lot of different people. Some white, some Indian, some colored, some leaving, some staying, and there was hope, but there was also fear. And I think their fears are similar to the world's fears, to the investor's fears, that South Africa will lapse into the kind of government that plagues other African countries. There are whispers, with the land grabs in KwaZulu-Natal that you might be another Mugabe, a foe of the White man, corrupt and power hungry. One woman quoted you as saying, "If the Whites don't like what I'm doing, they can leave." I think you have a responsibility to all of the people in your country, all the African tribes, even the White ones. South African's diversity is one of the reasons why I think it will be the country to watch in the coming century. If South Africans can live and work together, maybe Americans can, maybe the Europeans can, maybe we all can. If the Blacks and Whites can live in harmony, if the poor and the rich can work together, if the First and the Third world can come together and learn from each other, well, then maybe I'll be able to believe in God again. Maybe the world isn't just a sewer filled with the hunters and the hunted. Sure, the idealistic world where we all work together, but on a purely utilitarian point of view, you have those damn Afrikaners, those people teethed on biltong. Those Afrikaners will work for you if you let them.

I've been around the world, and it seems to me God (oops, I'm an atheist at the moment, but just bear with me), made the world like it is so we can all learn from each other. The western world, the First world, the developed world, whatever, for the most part, we are really good at working and at planning. For the most part. Sure, we have our foibles, but we are an organized people. There are downsides to that. We can work too much. We can become greedy, we can become used to comforts that we can really do without, we can become selfish and self-centered. We can be cut off from our families, from our friends, from our selves. We have a lot to learn about community, about forgiveness, about spirituality being a daily part of our lives. Thus the Third World can teach the First world about such things. Your country, you have both the Third and the First, nestled together, and that can be a strength, but instead of alienating the businessman and communities that make up the heart of your industries in South Africa, you should woo them. Again, the Afrikaners will drive your economy if you let them. Hook them up and let them plow ahead. These are the same stock of people that fought the British to a standstill. In the history of England, more British troops were sent to South Africa than any other land, including both the world wars and all of their other colonies. Why? Because those damn Afrikaners are made out of biltong. When the world put up sanctions against those damn Afrikaners, what did they do? They stubbornly held on to their apartheid and they made their own industry. I think some of the best camping equipment in the world can be found in South Africa. And throughout Southern Africa, even as far north as Kenya and Egypt, you find South African juices, South African restaurant chains, South African products. Those damn Afrikaners might not be the brightest people on the planet, but they can turn a buck, build a road, and make things work. But they don't have all the answers. They need their work hours tempered by the Third World ability to kick back, talk with friends, and they need ubuntu, the African sense of the brotherhood of humankind. Western Christianity has failed us, miserably. We need a good dose of Africa's spirit in our tired, perverted religion. Maybe then I wouldn't be forced into my unwanted atheism, but I digress…

I am for affirmative action, but with affirmative action, you walk a fine line. One of the biggest problems with apartheid is that it convinced a whole population, the majority of your country's population, that they could not get ahead, no matter what, just because of the color of their skin. If you have a draconian system of affirmative action, you will be doing the same thing to those damn Afrikaners that built the industry in South Africa. Sure, I understand some of the economics. Like in America, South Africa industry started with a few entrepreneurs who had a huge pool of cheap labor and untouched wilderness. Those two things can drive an economy, and apartheid was a perfect system for growing your economy. Perfect economically, but imperfect because it was temporary and it was unjust. However, because of the work of the black man, South Africa stands ready to be the pearl of all of Africa, and where the Third and First world might meet, where human beings of all races and colors and religion can come together and build a future.

There is hope in South Africa, still, despite all of the troubles. And I will be paying attention as the drama plays out, but I desperately hope that it will be lesson in civics, a testimony to the goodness in humanity, and not a bloodbath, steeped in corruption and hopelessness. I wish you luck, Mr. Mbeki, you do not have an easy job. Your predecessor is no longer a man, he is a myth, and you are left as a flesh and blood leader who has to make some hard decisions. If I could give you any real advice, I would say, don't steal from your people, keep corruption out of the South African government, and show those damn, bullheaded Afrikaners that you are as committed to them as you are to the ANC and to your own people. Be colorless in your decisions and have compassion for both the rich and the poor. We all suffer in our own way. In my novel, I have an African leader who pulls together all of the countries of Africa by returning to the story of the bridge to heaven. Different African people have different versions of the story, but in the end, there was a bridge, things were good, but then the bridge was destroyed. That bridge can be built again, I think, but it will take every hand, it will take every color of skin, every religion, every human being on earth to build it. But it can be built again, if we work together.

Your's Truly,

Aaron Hauer

An Open Letter to George W. Bush

Dear Mr. President,

Originally, I was going to write a letter to Tom Friedman, the author of The Lexus and the Olive Tree, but then I watched the twin towers in New York fall. I don't think I could have been reading a more poignant book in these uncertain times, and I think it should be required reading by everyone on the planet, including people like Osama Bin Laden. I guess I decided to write you a letter, instead of Tom Friedman because you have more pull than he does, and I really have little to say to him. I have a lot to say to you and the American people. After I read Robert Kaplan's To The Ends of the Earth, I knew I had to write him, but after reading Tom Friedman's book on globalization, I knew I had to write you. The attack has brought to the floor the issue of America, oh what a great word that is, America, it brings up images of freedom loving people eating hamburgers under the bluest of mid-Western skies. America is money and glamour and hope and fame and violence and sex. America is baseball caps and America is missiles and America is the stock market and America is the supermarket. God bless America. Before my wife and I left on our little trip around the world, everyone said the same thing. You are crazy to go out there. They all hate Americans. The world hates Americans, even though the word "America" conjures up such wonderful images for me. For the past 14 months, I have talked to hundreds of people from around the world and I have not met one that hated Americans. Not one. I'm sure I could found some of the anti-Americanism I hear about, if I looked, but no, when we told people that we were from America their eyes would light up and they would say things like, "Oh, America is number one!" As my wife puts it, people see us as the longest running Super Bowl champions. We won the Cold War. We are number one. I met some people who said they liked Americans, they said that for the most part we were polite and kind and big-hearted, but they were also critical of America. I would say the world doesn't hate Americans, the world hates America. I wouldn't even say that. I would say that the world is critical of America and it has a right to be. Your administration has made some terrific mistakes that typify what is wrong with America. In the past year we have walked away from the Kyoto Accords, we have walked away from the Israeli-Palestine conflicts, we have walked away from the International Conference on Racism. We have not paid our UN dues, and it seems to me we have little respect for the United Nations. My father says the UN is a joke, and it seems like America the Great believes that also. Among its lesser sins, America refuses to take on the metric system and America refuses to call soccer football (by the way, I say we change the name of American Football to American Throwball, not to be confused with Australian Throwball). In America, many of its citizens like to boast that they don't have a passport (less than 10% do) and you yourself, a fifty year old multi-millionaire had never left the U.S., except maybe you went to a party in Britain, maybe. How can we be a world power when we don't consider the world that we are empowered over? The attacks on New York prove that there is a world out there, but I would like to repeat, that world does not hate Americans. It is critical of America, but it does not want to kill Americans. We cannot forget that people from 62 different countries were killed in the attacks. Sixty-two different countries were attacked on September 11, not just one.

We can no longer afford the Monroe Doctrine, not in our businesses, not in our politics, not in our culture. We must be a part of the world. The State Department has issued a warning on all citizens who travel outside the U.S., that they might be targets, and that fear will kill us. That fear of the outside world will do far more damage than the attacks on the World Trade Center. If Americans don't travel, if American politics refuses to take in account the larger world, if we pretend that our businessman can be our ambassadors, we are doomed to watch America die, culturally and financially. Tom Friedman's book on globalization does a superb job in outlining the politics, the economics, and the morality of this new age we find ourselves in. And it is a new age. I heard that Putin, the President of Russia, spoke to the German legislature in almost flawless German (he was a former KGB agent) about Russia wanting to be a part of the EU and also for Russia to be included in NATO. Russia in NATO, we do live in interesting times. You used the word war, the war on terrorism, and I think that was a tragic mistake. Wars don't work. Eritrea finally wins its war for independence and the first thing the new government does is ban free press and other political parties. Some independence. Your father's war on drugs, the war on crime, come on. If wars worked, maybe we could be done away with them. They don't work. We keep trying to make them work, but they don't work. And America doesn't have the stomach to fight a war on terrorism. To fight terrorists we would have to be terrorists, and we are too nice for that. Okay, the CIA could assassinate leaders in the Congo and we could do awful things around the globe, but hey, the average American wouldn't want to mine the harbors of Nicaragua. Americans are kind, but we're also naïve and ignorant a lot of the time. Which bring us to CNN. Mr. President, if you want to fight a war, fight CNN. I think you send in troops, kill Ted Turner, and then we can just have pretty newswomen reading the The Economist from cover to cover. Better yet, we'll broadcast BBC and scratch out the BBC and write CNN. Again, the attacks on the World Trade Centers were bad, but the fear and propaganda spouted by CNN is worse. Since the French won't allow English TV, I was subjected to CNN for days on end. Not once did I see the causes of the attacks talked about. Not once did I see someone pondering, "Why would these people want to attack the U.S.?" No, it's all very black and white. The terrorists are fanatical barbarians trying to overthrow civilization because the world hates Americans. While we should be talking about the effects of globalization, instead we are spreading fear about Anthrax and we're telling people if that they have the flu they better go to a clinic because most likely some terrorist has sprayed them with Anthrax because the world hates Americans.

Why did these people attack America? And let's not use words like terrorists or fanatics or anything like that. It was people on that went on the planes, cut the throats of the flight attendants, and then drove the planes into the buildings. They were people who liked pornography and beer, and who were loved by their mothers and probably they were people who even liked to pet little puppies. Hey, we all like puppies. That is what we need to investigate and ponder. We have already made a huge mistake in targeting Osama Bin Laden and the Taliban. The Taliban are a two-bit coup that will be gone in a decade and Osama Bin Laden is now a demi-god in the minds of his supporters and detractors alike. We have made him a myth, and myths are dangerous things. In The Economist, it talked about the causes, the reasons behind the attacks. U.S. military bases in Saudi Arabia, the U.S.'s support of Israel, the desire to overthrow various Middle Eastern regimes who seem to be too pro-Western and who haven't done enough for the people. But I think the main issue here is globalization, hence The Lexus and the Olive Tree. God bless Tom Friedman. Sixty-two countries and the economic capital of the world was attacked because free-market capitalism is the only game in town. You can play other games, I saw the Vietnamese playing communism, but free-market capitalism is the ideology that puts rice in bowls and improves lives. Uh oh, where has my socialism roots gone? France has cheese but no bandwidth, Norway is restructuring their economy so they can compete, and China is going to put the U.S. to shame when it comes to buying and selling because the Chinese know, intuitively, all about free-market capitalism. China's entry into the WTO was eclipsed by news of the terrorist attacks, but in a hundred years, that will be the headline people will still be talking about, not the World Trade Towers. They'll be rebuilt, newer, better, but think about the impact that Murdoch's STAR TV network being broadcast in China will have? Finally, the Chinese will be able to watch The Simpsons. God bless the Simpsons.

Okay, you used the word WAR, and now CNN's banners all run red with THE WAR ON TERROR. Okay, I can live with that. But put away the bombs and guns and missiles and aircraft carriers. Track Eight on the Lara Croft Tomb Raider soundtrack puts it perfectly. The revolution will be televised. It will be fought on cell phones, on palm pilots, on cable modems. And this revolution is not free. The revolution is not free. You want to attack terrorism, improve the quality of life for the average person in the Middle East. You want to wage war, wage war on the crumbling economies of Africa. You can't fight this war with troops, you have to fight it with people. Send tourists to spread the word that Americans might be hypocritical, egotistical, loud, ignorant and naïve, but we are also kind, polite, caring, and we have big, big hearts. If people want to die for this country, let them die while letting people ahead of them in traffic in some foreign country, let them die by over-tipping in India, let them die by taking pictures of sacred tombs in Thailand. Forget about intelligence operations, start by getting Americans in foreign chat rooms. If every American online had a Middle Eastern or African friend, well, it's hard to wage jihad against your buddy across the world. In the end, we will win, but it won't be because of bombs or CIA agents. It will be because Homer Simpson will show the Chinese just how silly we Americans are. We are not the anti-Christ, we are Bart Simpson, savvy when it comes to business, a little dumb when it comes to everything else. We will win this war because in the end, free-market capitalism will win, and when people get a full stomach and get to watch TV, well, it's hard to commit suicide on Tuesdays because then you'd miss Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

The attacks were on free-market capitalism and America is so often criticized, criticized, not hated, because we typify free-market capitalism. McDonald's and Brittany, Hollywood and Michael Jordan, we are taking over the world, at least our trademarks are. While I do believe that free-market capitalism will be our savior, God help me, I also believe that the market will destroy us if given the chance. Capitalism unmasked is horrifying and evil. Think about the worst parts of Vegas, greed, prostitution, gaudy signs, ten minute marriages, and that is Capitalism unmasked. Ugh. Everything is for sale, and if you can't compete, well, if it don't make dollars it don't make sense. It's a dog-eat-dog world, and I'm wearing milk-bone underwear. While we were in Zurich, Swissair stopped their planes and threw up their hands. The airline, a national institution of Switzerland, was about to die. We're not talking about Air Chad, we're talking about Switzerland here. In the words of capitalism, "If them can't keep up, fuck 'em." One of the wars you have to fight, Mr. President is against terrorism, and for that, I suggest American Internationalism. The other war you have is against the horrors of Capitalism.

I still have to read the websites and books of the anti-Globalizationists, but it seems to me, they are against the worst aspects of Capitalism, both here and abroad. They want to save the rain forests in Brazil, but they also want to save American forests. They want to stop the abuse of workers in Indonesia, but they also want to stop the abused workers in Los Angeles. They want to stop the Iban culture in Borneo from being swallowed up, but they also want to stop the hometown, community culture that is under siege in Middletown, U.S.A. And these whacked out anti-Globalizationists need to be listened, up to a point. While sure, no one likes the fact that we are killing our planet, we can't just stop business. I don't want to go back to farming, and I'm sure most of the protestors don't want that either. The middle way, with the rabid capitalists pulling us one way and the violent, tree-hugging radicals pulling us the other way. Amen to tension, Amen to struggle, Amen to freedom of speech. God bless America once again. If we don't stop the widening gap between the haves and the have-nots, if we don't stop the abuse of workers, if we don't have a living wage in the U.S. and around the world, the poor will get tired of watching the rich on T.V. and there will be a real war, with guns and bombs and the whole deal. And if we poison our planet to the point where there is nothing left, well, even war would be pointless then.

The real tragedy is that it took the death of nearly six thousand people to make us stop and think about these things, and consider them in a real way. People from sixty-two countries were killed, and I think because of their deaths, the world will become an even smaller place, and we all might be a little more kind for a while. I must applaud you, Mr. President. You have sent aid into Afghanistan, you are listening to your allies, you are making other allies in unlikely places. You have not rushed off to fight your war without considering the consequences. You and your administration is handling this far better than I would have imagined even in my most wildest dreams. The fact that Iran and the U.S. had their first diplomatic contacts in over twenty years because of this. The fact that trades sanctions have been lifted from the Sudan, the fact that Musharraf has not turned out to be the petty coup master dictator he might have been because of this, all of those things are amazing. Another little piece of unbelievable news is that France is backing up the U.S. and have included two of their own ships in the armada that is amassing, oh, who would have thought it was possible? We can turn this tragedy into a celebration, we can come together, and if we are all together on this, then that will be the true death of terrorism. And where better to celebrate our new world than at a McDonald's in Beijing? We must be careful though, to make sure that those Chinese workers under those Golden Arches are taken care of, because a resentful, poor, fast food worker is nearly as dangerous as a fundamentalist. In the end, I fear Fundamentalist Christians far more than I fear the Islamci, those who sell Islam for their own political gains.

Good luck to you, Mr. President, and keep listening your allies, both out there in that world that doesn't hate Americans, and in your own home where you have put some very good people around you.

Aaron Ritchey
Loyal American since 1970

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