ARIGATO (THANK YOU) FROM JAPAN EARTHQUAKE VICTIMS -- YouTube -- DIFFERING PERSPECTIVES

  

ARIGATO (THANK YOU) FROM JAPAN EARTHQUAKE VICTIMS – YouTube --DIFFERING PERSPECTIVES

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.

© February 28, 2012

REFERENCE:

It is the nature of my role to evaluate information, received directly or indirectly in terms of my admittedly limited perspective, but nonetheless a perspective that I share in the hopes that it stimulates thought.  It is always encouraging when that happens.

A READER WRITES:

Jim,

This reference is surely one aspect of American exceptionalism as it shows our treatment of former enemies.

J.D.

See: http://www.youtube.com/watch_popup?v=SS-sWdAQsYg&vq=medium  It is a video on YouTube of the devastating earthquake in Japan on March 11, 2011.

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DR. FISHER RESPONDS:

J.D.

This is touching.  And shows the US and others in a good light.  But what does it teach us, which I think is the more important question.

The morality of the times takes a backseat to our inherent connection to each other in natural disasters, circumstances we feel beyond our control, joining us together as one human species, where our collective response is immediate, comprehensive and humanitarian.

That tenuous connection, no matter how much we celebrate it and look to it for self-approval, does not always extend to our day-to-day lives in our quest to lift ourselves out of ourselves.  We look to these moments to self-forget.

Self seems forgotten when we operate almost instinctively as brothers and sisters across wide oceans and different cultures.  

Where is that moral fiber in the mundane day-to-day existence of ups and downs, loves and hates, hopes and despairs that visit us then?

Are we a race that is most comfortable in tragedy, when those victims of disasters could just as well be us?  That is my wonder.

The news today is the price of gas is up, the president is out to lunch, Dow Jones Industrial flirt with 13,000; then there is the daily scream of Iran’s nuclear ambitions, Syria’s civil war, NATO workers killed in Afghanistan, all of which are symptoms of global moral frustration with an inability to identify much less deal with root causes.  .

Is the only time we can get out of the rut of playing the same tune over and over again when tragedy strikes on a disturbing level, as it did today in Ohio in a small community when a sixteen year old walked into a school and killed one student, critically wounded two others, putting still two others in serious condition in the hospital.  

The talk is that the school didn’t have metal detectors for the school’s 3,100 students to go through.  Most schools, some estimates 90 percent of all schools in the United States have no such metal detectors.  Would that have made this school safer?  Would that have avoided this tragedy?  Have we reached the moral depravity that sixteen year olds take out their angst by killing others?  Have we come to worship guns as the ultimate avenger?

A nine-year-old boy in a local Florida school had a gun in his backpack and shot a nine-year-old classmate in the stomach, putting her in the hospital.  The boy’s bail was first set at $250,000 but reduced to $50,000.  

Where were the parents in this affair?  What’s more, what are the parents like that make guns an integral part of family life?  There are 310 million Americans in this nation and more guns than people with guns in the home.  Many women carry guns in their purses.  We have become an unlicensed army of personal defense, why?  Do we not trust each other enough to walk out of our homes and expect to return unarmed without carrying a weapon?  Has paranoia replaced moral authority?

Author Daniel Pink wrote a powerful book on creative thinking, “A Whole New Mind” (2005).  He has written a subsequent book that we are a less violent society.  Tell that to Chicago, Philadelphia, Baltimore, New York, Los Angeles, or tell it to my Tampa where we have gun violation virtually every day, often with police officers killing or being killed as our streets have become a war zone.  

My recent missive (“One Day It Will Be Writ, “America, What Have You Done to Your Children?”) disturbed some.  It was not meant to disturb but to indicate our decline in moral confidence.  Others reassured me that America was safe as a superpower for a while as China and India are years from becoming new hegemonies.  The piece was not about America’s power, but about America’s values, which I see in decline.  

The strength of a nation may be measured in guns and butter, but a nation’s survival is measured in its moral values and how healthy they are.  A nation can be glutted with guns and butter and still collapse like pin-pricking a balloon if it doesn’t have the helium of morality maintaining it to full inflation.  In anticipation of the question, yes, a nation’s morality is as tenuous as an inflated balloon.

A person like me writes out of anger and frustration, and is used to being dismissed as ranting and seeing the glass half empty.  A glass is not a suitable metaphor for a nation’s morality.  The index of morality is how it deals with what is, how it husbands its fears, how it rises out of its anxiety to think well of itself and therefore well of others, how it develops the ability to think and not let others tell it what is worthy of thought.

My problem is that we never seem to learn from our tragedies.  The Indonesian tsunami of 2004 with a wall of water a hundred feet high killed 230,000 people.  What was learned?  The communities along that fault line have been rebuilding commercial enterprises ever since as if it never happened.  

The earthquake in Japan and the subsequent nuclear disaster is yet to prove that Japan has learned from it.  The land is so contaminated it will not be suitable to build there for hundreds of years.  Will Japan heed this fact?  We shall see. 

Nearly ninety percent of the world’s population hugs the shores of bodies of water across the globe.  Yet, people insist on living precariously along these waters.  As difficult as this is to perceive, we live more desperate lives person-to-person because of our fears, faulty moral compasses, and lack of responsive and reassuring centers, and I’m not talking about a center of gravity.

Be always well,

Jim

PS  J.D., I've never been comfortable with this idea of exceptionalism.  But I do like the moral authority we display when tragedy comes to others. 

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A PROFESSOR RESPONDS:

Jim,

Thanks for this note.  You have provided me the best counterpoint to something I want to share with you.  Here is a powerful questioning of what it is we do not as well as we could...http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kUEGHdQO7WA

This video is from Sam Richards a sociology professor at Penn State.   It is shocking and an unsettling presentation of how we as a nation are seen by others.

Now I have, thanks to you and John the other half of reality that will help my own students to see what challenges we have in creating a new future for the world.

 
I have been struggling in thinking of showing this video that is focused on Iraq and Oil since it is making a very strong case for what we must consider in terms of a future we want to create. 

Now with the second video, equally powerful, I can show my students what it is they can think and do about creating the future that their children will inherit.  

I am using each week more and more video links that are like these two.  Short and powerful in presentation but also helpful in framing a conversation of the roles my graduating seniors here at University of West Florida may be able to create for themselves in a world that needs their help.  

I call this new generation the next "greatest" and tell them that this is no more a choice for them than it was for my parents and their grandparents or for many of their parent's parents.  

We have to step up to the challenges and their lives may well be measured my how well they respond to the cries for creating a better world than the one they inherited.   

I must run off to class and so thankful, once again, that I opened your email.   These two videos side by side should create a space for learning; we must depend on this next generation so I want to do my best to prepare them as our next greatest generation.  

Ken

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DR. FISHER RESPONDS:

Ken,

Thank you for your comments, and as always, your upbeat and enthusiastic support for your students and their futures is reassuring. 

I listened to Sam Richards’s video, and have no problem with his concept of empathy.  

Empathy is not quite "self-forgetting" as proposed in my piece, and therefore not quite a complement to Professor Richards's thesis.  Tragedy is a spontaneous empathetic response whereas the professor proposes a reasoned behavioral response.  That gets a little tricky.

China, incidentally, was in 1820 far superior as an industrial/military complex than the United States so that historical reference at first threw me off in his presentation.  We were somewhere around ninth in the world in terms of Gross Domestic Product then with little prestige to boast about.  China, on the other hand, as you well know, feels where it is now is where it has always belonged.  . 

That said the professor was walking a risky course using generalizations vis-à-vis the US and Moslems, particularly those in Iraq, which have been since our “liberation,” as much involved in civil war between the Kurds, Shiites, and Sunnis as playing havoc with US troops.

Using coal with China and oil with Iraq as metaphor seems a little archaic.  Geopolitically speaking, dominant powers since ancient times have had the largest standing armies, not only to insure their stability, but also to control the distant aspects of their hegemony.

Empathy is good, but as Jon Huntsmen put it today on Charlie Rose, “We’ve lost our mojo, and need to get it back.”  He went on to say we are in a funk with stalemated wars, a stalled economy, a divisive government, and a lack of vision as to what the next step forward should be.

Ideas have always been more complicated for me than what I hear from sociologists. 

Before demonstrating empathy “to step into another shoes,” I would like us to revitalize our own center in self-acceptance, self-respect, and self-initiative.  That is where our moral confidence has always been, and where I see it presently lagging.  Listening to Republican candidates for president, especially Senator Santorum, you’d think we lived in a theocracy and not a democracy, something that colors the vision of those the professor would have us demonstrate empathy.     

Empathy for me means I will accept (tolerate) your values, beliefs, behaviors and interests if, and with me there is always an if, if I feel I can do it with safety.  But violate my safety, no matter how you argue my collective society is the focus of your scorn, and I’ll be of a totally different mind. 

Richards says he “understands” terrorism.  I don’t.  Nor do I apologize for being on guard when my tentacles forewarn me my safety is in jeopardy.  We aren’t one-dimensional beings.  Theocracy tends to look at us as being so.

Granted, it is a difficult void to fill with the correct behavior in all situations.  It is why I developed the “Fisher Conflict Model.”  Self-demands and role-demands make empathy multidimensional and problematically dependent upon the situation. 

It would have been nice if Richards had mentioned how difficult it is to be empathetic with ourselves.  The seven deadly sins cloud empathy on both sides of the coin.  It is why I salute you in your important work, and don’t envy you trying to do in person what I try to do with words.

Be always well,

Jim

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