Wednesday, September 8, 2010
Which would you rather have, a fish or a fishing pole? We have all heard the timeless adage, but we largely ignore its applications to the recent issue of giving tangible rewards for charity. As students’ ideas of community and giving are still quite malleable, the message of charity must be delivered with the utmost care. The immediate incentive of a dress-down day, for example, will no doubt increase donations among the student body at this time. Yet, at what cost? The cost is a future where our charity is dependent on self-centered rewards and benefits, a future where the true meaning of altruism is forgotten. This is not to say, by any means, that we all rely on distorted motivations. There are indeed many who donate time, goods, and services to those in need out of love for their fellow man. In an educational environment, however, it is the duty of the administration to avoid situations where charity can be obscured, even superseded, by personal gain.
As Gilman students, we are certainly capable of making a difference in our society, but I would argue that our required community service and encouraged giving is not to change the world, yet. Instead, they are meant to foster a mindset of giving and selflessness, that when taken beyond Gilman, can hopefully affect the lives of many beyond our respective communities. Service learning is a vital part of our educational experience at Gilman, and corrupting it with the wrong objectives will be far more detrimental to our society in general, sacrificing the long-term benefits for the short-term ones. In a haze of physical rewards like dress-down days and pizza parties, the “learning” aspect of service learning and charity is all but forgotten. Let’s face reality: the potential good that we will be able to do in the real world significantly outweighs what we can do now. I hesitate to use the phrase “in the real world,” but I think that it is appropriate here. By fostering the notion that charity will be rewarded tangibly, the logical conclusion is that in the future, when there are no such rewards, altruism among today’s children will be diminished. This is simply not a risk worth taking. I am confident that as a school community, we are capable of coming through for the wonderful organizations that we support without being led by a seriously flawed impetus. We should all remember that we are not donating for a dress-down day – we are donating to learn the true meaning of service. Dress-down days are wonderful – but they should never be motivation for charity.
Put on your thinking cap on. It’s time for a riddle. How do we “defeat the terrorists”? How do we win the “War on Terror”?
If you suspect this is one of those trick riddles with no answer that everyone hates, you couldn’t be more right. We will never win. There will always exist people who hate us and try to attack us, even if it results in their own death. Terrorism, whether we like it or not, is an inevitable component of modern life.
Most of our leaders refuse to acknowledge this. Instead, they portray terrorists as members of a distinct, cohesive group, a collective that can be definitively defeated. As a result, we – the American people – are tricked into believing that we can win this “war” the way we’ve won all those other wars – with guns. These militaristic responses only make us less safe. Let’s look at Iraq as an example. According to the bipartisan 9/11 Commission, despite what Dick Cheney called “overwhelming” evidence, there was no collaborative link between Al-Qaeda and Iraq before 2003 (The Washington Post).
Fast-forward one year. An American-led coalition invades. Our soldiers make quick work of the Iraqi Army, but the country descends into chaotic sectarian violence. After years of urban warfare, Petraeus and his commanders begin to steer the country toward what now appears to be a state with some semblance of stability and democracy.
What did we gain for this military success? A stronger Al-Qaeda. Remember how there were no terrorists in Iraq before 2003? Not so after we invaded. Al-Qaeda saw our presence as a helpful recruiting tool, and promptly established a small contingency within the country. Think about that. That means some American men and women were dying to fight an enemy that would never have existed had we not sent those men and woman to Iraq in the first place.
The contradictions in Afghanistan are less explicit, but still exist. For over eight years, we have been fighting the Taliban. First we toppled the Taliban government. Now we’re engaged in a complex counterinsurgency operation to combat the Taliban rebels, who are supposedly fighting to rid foreign forces from their country. Meanwhile we’re struggling to win the “hearts and minds” of the Afghan people so they don’t turn to the Taliban for protection and assistance. These two operations cost a considerable amount of manpower and money, especially when they get in the way of each other, as they do when drone strikes kill both Taliban fighters and the civilians whose “hearts and minds” we are trying to win.
Surely, then, the Al-Qaeda presence in Afghanistan must be massive, posing a monumental threat to our national security. Well… no. In an interview with CNN, Obama’s National Security Adviser, General James Jones, estimated there were “fewer than a hundred” Al-Qaeda operatives within the entire country. This means, according to ABC News, we are committing one thousand soldiers and $300 million for each Al-Qaeda militant.
I know I’m a seventeen year old liberal, but am I missing something here? Suppose we eliminate every current member of Al-Qaeda. What then? There will always be more terrorists. We can’t get people to stop hating our country by shooting some people that hate our country. Furthermore, Afghanistan will remain vulnerable to takeover by groups with terrorist sympathies unless it grows into a stable nation. History would suggest violence, especially violence conducted by foreign forces, will rarely produce this stability. Schools, on the other hand, have a great track record for stabilization, especially in places like Bangladesh. Lt. Col. Michael Fenzel, who has served in Afghanistan for two and a half years, wrote this in support of a NY Times editorial entitled “Schools vs. Guns in Afghanistan”: “Granting an education and discerning view to the some 26 million farmers in rural Afghanistan is the most important step to giving the country a future that won’t be rife with violence.”
Back here at home, the same hysteria that’s blinding us to the absurdities of the “War on Terror” is wreaking havoc on our civil liberties. Bills like the USA PATRIOT Act and the Protect America Act essentially allow our government to intercept any form of electronic communication we use, or, even better, declare us enemy combatants and throw us in jail with no trial and suppressed access to a lawyer. This is all for our own protection, of course – you know, from the terrorists who hide in caves.
Really, that’s what we should imagine when we hear the phrase “Al-Qaeda.” This is not a team of supervillians. It is a group of men who hate us and spend a lot of time in the mountains along the Afghan-Pakistani border, a group that would have significantly less influence if we did not allow them to justify their actions to moderates by pointing to legitimate abuses of our power (i.e. Iraq, etc.). They will never win militarily. They will only win if their existence creates such an irrational fear that we allow our government to strip us of the freedoms upon which this country was founded. They only win if we let them.
From the New York Times:
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