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8.27.2005
SATURDAY, AUGUST 27, 2005
John Bolton and the World's Poor
In a report today on John Bolton's far-reaching set of amendments to the new U.N. reform charter the Los Angeles Times states that, "The United States' 39-page revised draft eliminates nearly all references to the Millennium Development Goals adopted by all nations, including the United States, at a similar U.N. summit in 2000. Those goals pledge, among other things, to halve world poverty by 2015, and other nations are likely to resist that change most strongly. The U.S. draft significantly reduces a section on poverty in favor of bolstered sections on strengthening free-market values and spreading democracy."
As if the goal of ending hunger in the next ten years were not ten years too late already, Mr. Bolton intends to leave the fate of hundreds of millions of malnourished people exclusively to the winds of the free market. We would never have gotten to the moon that way. I understand the merits of the free market economy, but there are times when men and women must act too. There are times when a moral context is appropriate, and indeed in our best interests. This is one of those times.
This is a disgrace to everything America stands for, or should be standing for. We can do better. We can be great again. This is not the vision upon which John Bolton has his sights set. John Bolton speaks not for me. He represents neither the heart or the soul of my country. Upon whatever country's behalf he is acting it is not the one to which I recite the pledge of allegiance. Mine is the American flag. His is some other.
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8.26.2005
FRIDAY, AUGUST 26, 2005
Atlantic at Dusk
God your ocean is so great and my boat is so small. - From a Carving President Kennedy Kept on His Desk
What are we to do in the face of a problem so overwhelming as AIDS? What did Lance Armstrong do in the face of a challenge as great as winning the Tour de France seven times in a row? What did Martin Luther King do facing a nation of racial prejudice as a single man standing alone? What did President Kennedy do in the face of the moon, 400,000 miles away from the earth? What did Nelson Mandela do in the face of nearly two decades in prison? We must overcome it. This is the task for which human beings were made. This is our destiny and we must not shy from it. No problem is greater than the human imagination and the human spirit, for these things are God-given. Our spirits and imaginations are the spirit and imagination of God itself.
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8.25.2005
THURSDAY, AUGUST 25, 2005
The End of AIDS, 3
At the time Kennedy made the call we didn't know the first thing about getting to the moon. Alan Sheperd had just orbited the earth for the first time. We were behind the Russian space program by two years, and they weren't talking about going to the moon. People in the know thought Kennedy was a fool. Way out of his league. But it was a simple matter of vision. Nobody had ever looked that far before. Everybody's eyes were fixated inside a shell that covered an area just outside the earth's atmosphere. The moon was out there, but nobody but Kennedy saw it. That was his brilliance. Vision is called vision for a reason. Oxford defines it as "the act or faculty of seeing." Everybody else was looking down. Down at the things on the earth. Looking at their computers, their books, their slide rules. Kennedy was looking up. And he saw the moon. And pretty soon, everybody else did too.
We are collectively now looking down. Looking down at better ways of managing the disease. Better ways to improve the quality of life for those who are living with AIDS. Vaccines that are five, ten, fifteen years away from even being able to be tested. These things are important, but we must see that we have become entangled in the complexities of the existence of AIDS, at the expense of the simple vision of its nonexistence. We have now created huge entities for dealing with the existence of the disease. We are institutionalizing them, and along with them, the existence of AIDS.
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8.24.2005
WEDNESDAY, AUGUST 24, 2005
The End of AIDS, 2
AIDS exists for one reason and one reason only. It exists because we haven’t ended it. It doesn’t exist because there isn’t enough government funding, or because we don’t know enough about immunobiology, or because it mutates, or because HIV doesn’t really cause AIDS, or for any other “reason.” It exists because we have not taken it upon ourselves to end it. This is not a judgement. It is a fact. If we had not, as of today, yet put a man on the moon, we know from hindsight that it would not be because we lacked the knowledge, although many people would be clinging to that as a reason. Our minds want to cling to reasons in the face of failure or in the face of the absence of accomplishment. We are saddened by our own lethargy, and reasons are the veil that keep it from us. We know now because we have put a man on the moon, in fact we have put 12 up there, that if we hadn’t, it would be because we simply never made a commitment to it. Going to the moon wasn’t a miracle. We got there because we decided to go. If we want to end the AIDS epidemic by a specific point in time we will have to commit ourselves to doing it in precisely the same way we committed to the moon. In other words, neither ending AIDS or going to the moon is rocket science. It is a matter of commitment. And commitment is always a matter of courage. These great acts of courage lead to achievement that in the end people call "miracles."
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