Inspirations

Well, it’s been a pretty good week here for me this week. For whatever reason, the stars all were in my corner, in both tangible and intangible ways – which is pretty cool to look back on.

Do you ever hear or see or learn something that just overwhelms you with the “rightness” of whatever it is? The song that just grabs your heart and squeezes, or the dance performance that takes your breath away or the "click" when something suddenly makes sense? I had a couple of those experiences this week.

First, I read “Three Cups of Tea” by Greg Mortenson and David Oliver Relin. WOW. If you haven’t read this book, please, read it. Then donate to his efforts. It is not often that a book can bring me to tears of pure joy and happiness – that overwhelming “rightness” of being. This is a man who is truly fulfilling his destiny – and is helping thousands of others to fulfill theirs. Having been exposed to similar conditions here in Southern Afghanistan to what he describes in Pakistan and Northern Afghanistan, I know the truth that he speaks. It is so simple, yet so profound – education is the answer.

One of the basics I learned in a Physics class somewhere was “Nature abhors a vacuum.” This applies to education. The one thing common to all humanity is the innate desire to learn and grow, to become something more than we already are. If there is no formal process or curriculum for education, superstition, folklore, and myth will fill the resulting vacuum. This vacuum in predominantly Muslim countries has led to the rise of the Wahhabi Madrassas system, “schools” funded by a very narrow minded sect of Islam that teach nothing but victimhood and hatred, using select passages from the Holy Koran to justify and reinforce their teachings. Often, these Madrassas are little more than pre-paramilitary schools, designed to do nothing but create potential martyrs for Islam – and a very narrow slice of Islam, at that. As Mortenson and Relin explain in Three Cups of Tea, these Madrassas don’t teach reading, writing, and arithmetic, nor do they teach geography, chemistry, biology, or physics. They teach the “Lesser Jihad” through rote memorization of the Holy Koran, in Arabic, a language that most of the students never really learn to speak as a language, just becoming able to recite suras from the Holy Koran. (The “Lesser Jihad” is the challenge of bringing Islam to the uninitiated – most often seen as war on non-believers. The “Greater Jihad” is the battle within to become a better Muslim by following the Holy Koran and the teachings of the Prophet Mohammed, PBUH )

The saddest part is that the Wahabbi financiers, generallywealthy Saudi and Gulf State individuals, seemingly practicing ‘zakat’, or the giving of charity - one of the five pillars of Islam,get it better than we generally do. They are pouring their money into building these Madrassas because there is no competition for the young minds and bodies, no other education system to counter them – until Greg Mortenson comes along, at least. The end of movie Charlie Wilson’s War said it all – we had been pouring in almost a billion dollars in military aid to the Afghan Mujihedeen per year, then the Soviets quit and withdrew. The next year, Representative Charlie Wilson tried to get a million dollars appropriated for reconstruction aid, some of which would have gone to schools, and was flatly turned down. We had “won”, doncha know. And in winning the battle, we began to lose what eventually became the war we are now fighting. I have to wonder if we had pursued reconstruction and education efforts in Afghanistan and the border areas of Pakistan through the 1990s, whether Osama bin Ladin would have found such ripe ground here when he was expelled from the Sudan in 1996. Three Cups of Tea should be the basis for how we help Failed States (and Nearly Failed States).

The second inspiration this week was much smaller in scale, but almost as moving. It was watching the performance of a 47 year old unmarried, unemployed woman named Susan Boyle on “Britain’s Got Talent”. Here is a middle-aged woman who has the courage to go out and sing on this potentially cruel program. She is not attractive in the conventional sense that is so important on television. You could see the audience and the judges preparing for a big laugh at this woman’s expense. She announces the song she will sing ("I Dreamed a Dream" from Les Miserables- an inspirational song in itself) and you can see the judges rolling their eyes, girding themselves for what, from all appearances, must be a terrible performance. And then something absolutely magical happens. Something that happens often in movies, but so seldom in real life... the music starts, and she begins to SING! And I mean SING, with every ounce of her being – and it is wonderful, powerful – I mean she NAILS IT! The gasp from the audience is audible. The raw emotional impact literally brought audience members to their feet. Even Simon Cowell, notorious for his biting wit, is completely blown away, his expressions and body language while she sings show that he is moved as well. Check it out for yourself… http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9lp0IWv8QZY . Thank you George for sending it to me - and thanks to Mark for forwarding it to make sure I saw it.

So there they are, my two inspirations for the week. They are completely different in form and function, but share the common thread of the triumph of the human spirit. I am still shaking my head in wonder at both of them, but I am extremely happy for the experience of them both, for they both touched me profoundly - I am a better person than I was before this week.