Dear Editor,
Americans say they want a president with principles. But everybody has principles, don't they? What Americans really want is a president with THEIR principles, and that's where all the problems arise.
To be clear, I'm not talking about principles like honesty, hard work, dedication, and loyalty. We can agree on the value of all of those. But since we Americans DON'T agree on 'principles' regarding gun-control, abortion, and gay-rights, we need to support our 'opinions' with facts and evidence, because the more emotional the debate becomes, the less gets settled.
Both principles and ideas can be informed by the past, but ideas do the better job of adapting to the future. Also, ideas are not so identified with the person who suggests them, and so become more easily understood, and able to be explained with civility.
But often, we're held back by our desire for consistency. We don't like change, even though we know that maintaining the world we're used to creates its own set of problems.
Once I heard a diplomat on Charlie Rose describe how to change and compromise wisely with the example of a married couple.
A husband who likes fresh air wants the bedroom window to be open, but the wife doesn't like the draft. An unimaginative solution would probably result in the window being half open, and nobody getting what they want. But the thinking solution is to open the window in the hallway. Then both
can get their way.
This extends to the wider world. President John F. Kennedy was a hardliner on communism in the 1960's, but he put aside those principles during the Cuban Missile Crisis. Some hawks among his generals were unwilling to be flexible, but Kennedy's creativity and willingness to contradict his formerly predictable stance may have saved the world. He and his staff even crafted the perfect language to help defuse the ticking bomb by calling the naval blockade a 'quarantine.' Giving a hearing to all the ideas in the room, and giving himself the time to reflect, we were all saved by good
thinking when millions could have died for a principle.
In our age, religious principles are the ones most likely to excite emotion, and lead to conflict. When George Bush talks about principles, like 'God is my guide', or 'I have to make America safe', he's trying to drive pilings into the shifting sands of the desert. In such domains, ideas form a more appropriate landscape than fixed principles. Plus, claiming that he makes only us Americans safer is a poor prospect for other nations, and for potential enemies. It creates no carrot and is not a win-win situation. If the U.S.A. wins 'safety', what's the benefit for Moslems? What do they win?
The same goes for relationships among other nations. However desirable it may be for American business to have a climate of peace and stability around the world, we can't dictate the terms to sovereign countries. They'll have their own ideas of managing their own foreign affairs.
There is one exception to a nation's managing its own relationship with other nations, however. And that would be with surviving primeval cultures or extinct ones that once inhabited the same space that moderns now occupy. Modern nations have no claims over cultures of the past; the only
relationship should be that of caretaker.
For example, where 1) a pre-modern society remained the marsh Arabs of southern Iraq, its survivors were being eliminated or marginalized by Saddam Hussein. Or where 2) the artifacts of a culture of the past still existed, the cliff carvings of the Buddhists, they were being blown up by the Taliban Afghanis. We in the world community missed a chance that we'll never have again. yet it's even more shocking that our own country is responsible for the loss of artifacts from the Baghdad Museum in the Iraq War. We intruded on a modern nation and an ancient one at the same time!
So will we continue to fall back on old principles rather than looking forward to new facts and realities? No, in our future there will be a million new ideas we're exposed to, and another million that we come up with on our own. We're a challenge-meeting species, and are supposed to be adaptable. Look at what President Kennedy accomplished, and then imagine what we can do.
Regards,
James Gavin
PENNSYLVANIA
U.S.A.
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