© 2012 Michael Swickard, Ph.D. It was a defining moment for me. I was standing at a train station in Tokyo when a man approached me and said, “Oh, you’re from America, aren't you… do you know Harvey McClelland?” I thought hard but had to admit I did not know the person. He thanked me and walked away.
Afterwards I wondered what he would have done had I known a Harvey McClelland in America, that is if it was the one Harvey McClelland that this man was talking about to me. But I did not know any Harvey McClellands, and frankly, I still do not know one.
This man on the Tokyo train station might have instructed me to, “Tell him François says hi.” Or maybe he intended to hand me a twenty and tell me that the very next time I saw Harvey to pay it back to him since he, François, was not coming to America any time soon. Or maybe all he wanted to do was to relate the story of Harvey and him back during Second World War.
The more I thought about it the more I was a little put off by the man’s notion that because I was from America I would automatically know someone, unless it was Elvis. I could have said I did not know Elvis, but I had seen him once and I did not do a bad job myself singing, Love me tender.
Harvey McClelland was just an ordinary name and we are a big country. We feel isolated by our bigness in America. You can literally spend days driving across Texas, weeks if your vehicle runs like my old truck I had in college. Our land is so immense that when things happen in other parts of the world many Americans do not feel as if it has any bearing on us here in our country. Many people think that the wars and troubles in far off lands are just something to watch on television while we wait for Wheel of Fortune.
While the guns are firing and people are dying our momentary interest and attention turns to Sarajevo, Afghanistan or Mogadishu. Americans like to watch the news to see the pyrotechnics. If the cameras get too close to the effect of the guns we look away.
When the cameras move on, our interest also moves. But when the echoes of gunfire end, the real damage to that area of the world is just beginning. We see the overt actions which harm people, but after those actions there are the lesser seen problems.
In Afghanistan, the problem is that the education system has not restarted fully with the pressures of war. With the education system in turmoil, Afghanistan will have a generation of citizens with less or no formal education. It should matter to people living in the heartland of America that people on the other side of the world are sinking back into the dark ages.
And it should not be the way we feel when we see a dead dog on the road. It should be the way we feel when a close relative suddenly dies; it is a personal loss when part of our world is injured. When a whole region of the world sinks back into the dark ages, the collective ability of the entire world is degraded. Further, the danger is that a whole region of the world will begin thinking with brains educated in the dark ages.
I was thinking of this now that our latest election has just concluded. Now, we can turn our attention to places in our world where dark ages thinking gets innocent people killed. We can rejoin the one world we are a part of and often ignore. America must help by sending teams of educational facilitators to assist them in the task of restarting their educational system.
First, though, we have to heal the wounds from this last election where members of families are not speaking and on the social media, people are not being very social. Harvey, somewhere in America and François, in France, may someday benefit from these people's actions across the globe. That’s assuming these people get an education.
Dr. Michael Swickard is co-host of radio talk show News New Mexico 6 to 9 a.m. Monday - Friday on a number of New Mexico radio stations and through streaming. Email: michael@swickard.com
