paulmuses

After the 9/11/01 Al Qaeda attacks against the USA that killed 2977 and injured more than 25,000, I developed a course on terrorism titled Terrorism and Democracy. I thought I would teach the course one or two times but it turned into a popular course that I offered every year until I retired in 2018.

From 2002 through 2015 I lead five January term three-week study groups to Northern Ireland to study the conflict between Catholics and Protestants that included terrorist attacks by groups acting in the name of each community. The 1998 Omagh bombing by The Real IRA killed 29 and injured 220. These trips together with my own study encouraged me to include a unit on terrorism in Northern Ireland in Terrorism and Democracy.

In 1995 in Oklahoma City Timothy McVeigh parked a truck full of explosives outside the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building that when detonated killed 168 people and injured 680 others in what was until the September 11th attacks the deadliest act of domestic terrorism in American history.

Even without the Oklahoma City attack, American history provided ample examples for my course of violence against innocents in pursuit of a political goal, the definition of terrorism, including the 4743 lynched between 1882 and 1968. American domestic white Nationalist terrorism has killed more Americans since 2001 than Islamic jihadists.

Whether perpetrated by Al Qaeda or ISIS, the Irish Republican Army or Ulster Volunteer Force, America’s home grown lone actors or domestic terror groups such as Aryan Nation or The Order or Klu Klux Klan, terrorism is the logical end point of fanaticism. Of the 50 books I used over the almost twenty years I taught Terrorism and Democracy, the author and book that offered the best insight into fanaticism was the late Israeli novelist Amos Oz’s How to Cure a Fanatic.

To Oz, the essence of fanaticism is

Righteousness entrenched and buttressed within itself, righteousness with no windows or doors, is hallmark of this disease.

Terrorists driven by fanaticism are not interested in argument. They are not interested in you or I as persons. They see us solely as instruments. They want change now and are willing to kill to get it. They pretend to be altruists, knowing what is good for you and I but not interested in our point of view. Oz is surely right when he says fanaticism is an “elemental fixture of human nature…a bad gene.”

Fanatics and fanatic groups live and operate at the margins for good reason. Fanaticism is a purely defensive reaction to the world. The fanatic has to give up too much of what truly makes us human. As Oz suggests, fanatic asks us to shut all the windows and doors so that we can stew in his/her little world.

How to cure the fanatic? Oz offers several solutions but the one that resonated the most with my students and I was the power of curiosity and imagination, primarily focused on how others live. Literature and film are especially good at this. I started watching international (we called them ‘foreign) films as a college student, after being introduced to Ingmar Bergman’s films.

To this day, I love exploring the lives of others, in other places, through film. The 2006 German film The Lives of Others that won an Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film shows that even spying on others can lead one to not only an understanding of their lives but to a change in behavior by an officer of the East German Stasi, a cog in the fanatical East German state that terrorized its citizens.

On one of the Northern Ireland trips, a former IRA member spoke to our group and stated that he began to change his perspective when he learned more about the actual lives of Protestants in his community, especially the fear their culture would be swallowed up by a Catholic state. This fear, of losing one’s culture, was exactly why this former IRA foot soldier joined the IRA. A window in his righteousness had opened.

There is a line in Leonard Cohen’s “Anthem” that expresses this: “There is a crack in everything, that’s how the light gets in.” In my life, I am continually looking for the cracks, the doors and windows, of the world I fashion in my mind.

Fanatics, and the little fanatic that lives in all of us, live small, pinched-up lives. Their simple, black & white, no argument worldview asks too much from this complex, grey and conversational world.

This is the failure of fanaticism.

About a year ago Rebecca and I walked through two condo construction sites in Decorah, Iowa. We never worried that what happened to Ahmand Arbery who also walked through a construction site in Georgia might happen to us. That a call to the police dispatcher would be picked up by two white men with a loaded shot gun who would come looking for us, engage, and gun us down.

A few days ago on Decorah’s Trout Run bike trail I was almost run over by a biker on an E-bike. This particular biker had done the same thing to Rebecca a week or so before. E-bikers are able to go faster and so they have to pay particular attention to bike trail etiquette. Rebecca and I talked later about flagging this guy down the next time we saw him to remind him to follow the trail rules clearly stated on signs.

We never worried that what happened to Christian Cooper in New York City’s Central Park might happen to us. That the Decorah e-biker might respond to our request the way Amy Cooper (no relation) responded to Christian Cooper’s request to follow the park rules, by calling 911 with the words “an African-American man is threatening my life.” It doesn’t take a great leap of imagination to consider how this situation could have resulted in Christian Cooper’s death. Especially given what would happen to George Floyd in Minneapolis one week later.

On Monday night in Minneapolis, a shop employee called police on George Floyd for alleged fraud. Floyd died after being handcuffed and pinned to the ground by a police officers knee. Twice as a young boy I went through episodes of stealing items from a local drug store, caught both times. Once as a young man I was part of a group drinking illegally along a country road when two police cars appeared behind our car. Stupidly, we thought if they didn’t catch us with the beer in the car they couldn’t charge us so we started throwing the beer cans out of the car and I can still remember the cans bouncing up against the patrol car.

Whether as a boy, a young man, or an old man, I never thought I could die as a result of these or similar incidents. The more I think about Ahmaud, Christian, George, the more I realize I am

STILL ALIVE BECAUSE I AM WHITE

Masks in place and with help from friends and neighbors Ed and Carol, on Tuesday Rebecca and I planted several River birch trees just outside the back door of our Decorah home. Later that day in a Zoom happy hour with Mike and Maggie – after five if you really must know – Master Gardener Mike explained that for every inch diameter of a new trunk, it takes a sapling one year to root in its new soil, preparing it to grow upwards.

It will take our trees around twenty years to look like this tree. Will we both live to see our trees in full growth? Planting a tree in the fall – I am thinking of Clarinda’s fall as it tends to be longer than Decorah’s – of one’s life encourages a bit of reflection on topics too easily ignored unless prompted by a reminder of natural life and death growth patterns, outside one’s back door.

The birch mortality trees and a book tape story with a sudden death we listened to on the way from Decorah to Clarinda, prompted us yesterday to walk through a Clarinda cemetery and talk about where we wanted to finish-up this earth time journey. We have had this conversation many times before and so coming up with a plan was really not so difficult. Details will be worked out in due time but for now we like cremation, tombstones in Clarinda and Decorah, with remains divided as well.

Our partnership has always involved conversations about important matters. In a Place of My Own Rebecca told you about how our “we” is strengthened by the time we give to our “I’s.” For me, it is not so much place but time, as I carve out 4am – 7am every morning wherever we are.

In thinking about our personal and partner end-times, we want to leave a tangible reminder in both our communities of who we were, as persons and as partners.

Those of us who have learned to manage our anxiety disorders may have useful lessons in this day of Covid. This is my contribution.

Have you ever tried to stop a feeling? Or a thought? What about a thought-feeling combination? For example, for me the thought ‘I will get the Covid – 19 virus if I go the store today’ is followed almost instantaneously with a feeling of anxiety, a tightening of my stomach.

Sometimes its the other way around. An anxious feeling leads my mind to search for reasons. These reasons or thoughts worsen the anxiety leading the mind to continue its search for reasons or what often happens to me, to latch onto a thought, what then becomes an obsession. To rid myself of this uncomfortable feeling I decide not to go the store and almost immediately my stomach loosens, as my anxiety retreats. Unfortunately, I have also retreated from life, even if only just a bit.

In my circle of family, friends and acquaintances I know too many people whose lives are in some way lessened by anxiety, just as mine is. What do I mean by lessened? There are things we do not do because our anxious feelings shout out there is danger ahead. This feeling – for me it is a tightened stomach, for you it might be some other physical sensation – stops us in our tracks. Something must be wrong, otherwise why would I feel this way?

About 15 years ago I was diagnosed with OCD, an anxiety disorder. What Freud once considered an untreatable mental disease is now, along with other anxiety illnesses, very responsive to treatment. You and I are fortunate to be living during a time when a variety of cognitive, behavioral and pharmaceutical treatments with proven track records are available, even as we all deal with yet another anxiety-inducing phenomenon the world has thrown at us.

Below are insights from my journey of recovery that may help you in this anxious time. I am not a mental health professional and so at the end of this post I list the books by professionals that were most helpful to me.

1. Our thoughts and feelings are frequently outside our conscious control. I grew up thinking I could control what I thought and what I felt. This is a cognitive mistake. All of us have thousands of thoughts every day, most unbidden. Feelings come and go, often without rhyme or reason. Or with a kind of reason, upon reflection. The sun breaks through the clouds and my mood improves. Nothing else has changed. It dips behind the clouds again and…

2. Our minds, hearts, and guts are unruly and we ought not take them literally. For much of my adult life, I let my thoughts and feelings bully me. While walking along a cliff I have the thought, ‘why don’t you jump off.’ Immediately, my stomach tightens as anxiety sets in. What could such a thought mean? Do I really want to jump off this cliff? I take the thought and the feeling literally, as danger signals, and not only do I back away from the cliff but stop walking along cliffs. I lessen my life, just a bit. Worse, I begin to doubt myself.

Although I have no genuine suicidal symptoms, I wonder whether there might be something wrong with me, something deep inside me I am afraid to face. This directs me away from the world and others and toward myself and too easily results in unhelpful rumination.

3. What we resist persists. What happens when I give in to the thought and feeling and stop walking along cliffs? I am training my mind to warn me about this danger. Something similar happens when I ruminate about the thought and/or the anxiety that comes from the thought. I take the substance of the thought and the accompanying feeling of anxiety as a danger signal and so whenever I come upon a cliff, my brain and gut work in tandem to warn me of this danger.

While on the cliff, I might try to argue with the thought, as in ‘I am not really suicidal,’ but that does not work because the source of the problem, the amygdala, has no reasoning capability. Neither of my solutions, not walking on cliffs or arguing with my cliff-thoughts, work because both are forms of resistance to the thought and the feeling. Anything we resists persists unless we…

4. We can train our brains to ignore the noise of our thoughts and feelings. A lot of the thoughts our brains throw at us and the feelings that follow are better thought of as noise and not as signals (see below Reid Wilson’s Stopping the Noise in Your Head). Noise because they seem to contradict our basic values or lived experience, as in my fear that I really wanted to jump off the cliff, or seem irrational.

For example, when I was diagnosed with OCD one of my symptoms was a compulsion to check whether the stove top burners were turned off. I would often check 20 to 30 times – meaning I would walk out the back door, to the garage and back again – before my anxiety would go down enough to allow me to leave the house. I treated the thought, ‘the burner might be on,’ and the accompanying anxiety, literally or as signals of danger. The checking compulsion was a form of resistance, a way of me telling my brain I might have left the burner on. Thus the thought and anxiety would persist until I retrained my brain.

How did I retrain my brain? Describing the protocol I followed is simple although doing it was difficult and took a long time. The gold standard treatment for OCD is exposure, response prevention. I would expose myself to an obsession, for example, that a stove burner might be on as I go to leave the house, and instead of returning to the stove to check, a compulsion and my usual response, I would accept and tolerate the anxiety while I walked to the car. Eventually my brain learned that I no longer considered the thought ‘the stove top burner is on’ a danger and so it quit sending a danger signal to my stomach. This process took many months and even today, more than a decade later, I still occasionally get a little dose of anxiety as a leave the house and wonder whether the burner is turned off.

5. Living with our fears. Too many of us in too many ways limit our lives because we think we fear some thing, like a crowd or Covid – 19 or a cliff. What we really fear are the thoughts and feelings about that crowd or Covid – 19 or that damn cliff. Two years ago when I hiked in the Alps, I knew my brain would send me thoughts and my amygdala would send a danger signal to my stomach. I almost said no to Rebecca and our host-hikers and to be honest for much of the hike I wish I had. But the decade-long work I had done learning to manage my OCD somehow kicked in and I hiked the Alps with my fears alongside me, as companions. Of course, they were always between me and the ledge.

Books by experts that helped me. Each includes material on all anxiety-related disorders, including OCD.

• Reid Wilson Stopping the Noise in Your Head
• Martin Seif & Sally Winston What Every Therapist Needs to know about anxiety disorders & Overcoming Unwanted Intrusive Thoughts
• Russ Harris The Happiness Trap
• Stephen Hayes Get out of your mind and into your life

Rebecca and I have been dreaming a lot the last few weeks. Anxiety dreams of all sorts apparently brought on by COVIT – 19 and its ripple effects. Every morning I ask Rebecca about her dreams and she gives me the details. If you were to observe this interaction, you would see Rebecca talking and me listening. You might even give me a ‘good listener’ point or two because I am making eye contact, giving positive cues such as nodding my head or muttering something like ‘uh huh’ or ‘yes,’ and even occasionally asking a question. To you, the observer, I am nothing like the kid in the comic strip who can’t wait to turn the conversation to what he wants to talk about.

Except that I am that kid, all the time. I just hide it very, very well. My mind is constantly urging me to turn the conversation toward what I know, what I feel, and what I want. When I observe me, when I look at me, I see nothing but selfishness or self interest. One of America’s Founders, James Madison, knew this characteristic of human beings well, and it formed the foundation for how he theorized about the structure of American government and especially the need for separating powers. He put it this way in Federalist 51.

If men were angels, no government would be necessary…in framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself.

By separating powers horizontally into three branches, executive, legislative and judicial, and vertically, into national and state governments, Madison and the other Founders used the human “me-tendency” to do the work of limiting the possibility of a tyrannical government.

But what about the tyrannical me? In every conversation I have, I see the little boy who wants his way. I am reminded of my selfishness. This observation, made over and over gain, allows me to anticipate. I have come to know what is coming and in knowing and accepting and not judging I am able to counter this selfish tendency by reminding myself to focus outward, outside myself, toward my conversational partner. Yes, I fail at this much of the time. But there is always the next conversation to try again.

Madison understood human nature and used that understanding to craft a governmental structure that has worked well for over 200 years. For you and me, learning to observe ourselves gives us insight into how well we handle everyday things like conversations. With observation we gain understanding and with understanding the possibility for change.

The next conversation you have, put your face on that fly on the wall and observe your words, gestures and thoughts. And then ask – is that person a conversational narcissist? The rest will take care of itself.

Brett and Kate McKay have written a terrific little article, “The Art of Conversation: How to Avoid Conversational Narcissism,” that contains lots of insights and techniques.

I woke up early Easter morning thinking about this Western Christian Holy-Day and my own religious journey. My mom was a committed Catholic and my dad, a self-described agnostic. He did not know whether a God or gods existed. He accepted my mom’s desire that their three sons be raised Catholic.

My mom’s religious gift to me, helped along by 16 years of Catholic education, was to embed me in one of the world’s religious traditions, a starting point of a journey. My dad’s religious gift was to unsettle me enough to never feel completely comfortable in the Catholic or any other religious tradition. Like him, I don’t know. Like him, I keep searching. Below are three insights I have picked up on this journey; links are provided to help in your own journey.

Pope Francis has said Catholics should not fear “that God allowed different religions.” Indeed, the fact of religious pluralism is all around us in this season of Beliefs. A very incomplete litany of religious celebrations for just the month of April would include: Western Christians & Easter April 12; Eastern Christians, on April 19; Jews & Passover , from April 8 to Thursday, April 16; Muslims & Ramadan, from Thursday, April 23 to Saturday, May 23; Buddhists & Buddha’s Birthday, on April 30 or May 8; Kerala Hindus & Vishu on April 14; and on the same day Tamil Hindus & New Year.

Are there common elements in this religious pluralism? Are the millions who celebrate these and other religious holidays bound together by anything you or I might latch on to? In The Heart of Christianity, Marcus Borg describes two worldviews relevant to this question, the religious and nonreligious.

In the religious worldview there is a nonmaterial layer or level of reality, an extra dimension of reality. This view is shared by all the enduring religions of the world. In a nonreligious worldview there is only the space-time world of matter and energy and whatever other natural forces lie behind or beyond it.

Similarly, William James distinguished between those who believed there was a “More” beyond the material world and those who believed there was only a “This.” The rituals, symbols, and beliefs pointing to “More” vary, by time and culture, but the constancy of the urge toward such guidance seems compelling to me. Comparative Religions scholar Karen Armstrong writes that religious traditions are…

“Like fingers pointing to the moon; so very often we focus on the fingers and forget about the moon.” –

Along with the millions around the world celebrating one religious holiday or another, I am unable to give up this search for the moon or the More. Religious traditions, however imperfect, offer the means many have used across time and space to look beyond the ‘thisness’ of the world.

Yet both the search and the end point are shrouded in mystery. Father Luigi Giussani in a quote cited by Irish author John Waters in Lapsed Agnostic writes this about the mystery of God.

Only the hypothesis of God, only the affirmation of the mystery as a reality existing beyond our capacity to fathom entirely, only this hypothesis corresponds to the human person’s original structure.

Humans have developed to pursue the unknown and to not take the easy path of certainty. This suggests a humility before that which we can never fully comprehend. Despite so much evidence to the contrary, true religion requires kneeling, in a prayerful gesture of submission. This gesture of humility is for me more than for God.

The recognition and welcoming of religious pluralism, the common search for a More, and the recognition of mystery are helpful companions during this season of Beliefs.

My mother’s commitment to Catholicism, my father’s skepticism, and my own refusal to say NO to a More join us together, again.

Another mystery.

A few minutes after I got up this morning I settled into my favorite chair, opened my computer and a soap smell wafted up from my hands. After weeks of thinking, with some resistance, ‘I should wash my hands,’ this morning I did it by reflex, with no conscious thought and thus importantly no resistance. COVID – 19 forced me to develop a habit I should have settled into long ago.

This noodling landed me on a quote I had put in my notebook yesterday from one of my favorite writers, Robert D. Kaplan. In a terrific book on Romania and the impact of travel on personal development, In Europe’s Shadow, Kaplan says the following about growing up.

You don’t grow up gradually. You grow up in short bursts at pivotal moments, by suddenly realizing how ignorant and immature you are.

How do these “short bursts at pivotal” moments work? The formation of habit is at play, as suggested by my mind linking the recognition that hand washing had become a ‘thoughtless’ routine, with Kaplan’s quote. Forks in the road are at work too, as in the most famous lines repeated below from Robert Frost’s most famous poem, The Road Not Taken.

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—

I took the one less traveled by,

And that has made all the difference.

I’ve needed a lot of growing up so there have been many short bursts that included forks and habits but the following one sticks out..

It was the summer of 1965, I was 15 and in my first real job at Baskin Robbins in the Bettendorf, Iowa Duck Creek Plaza Mall.  Wendall Ginsberg was my boss and the first words he said to me the first day of a two week probationary period were “Paul, wherever I am in the store I can see you.”  Over and over I practiced scooping ice cream so as to form a perfect 2.5 oz scoop.

55 years later I cannot walk into Decorah’s Sugar Bowl without judging the quality of the scoops and whether the tubs of ice cream are layered properly. Mr. Ginsberg’s constant gaze forced me to develop the habit of doing scoops correctly and this carried over to other tasks.

What about the fork? In the summer of ’64 I had started and then quit a life guard course. In the winter of ’65 I had started and then quit a youth umpire school. Baskin Robbins comes along a few months later offering another challenge and I stick it out. A definite growing-up burst forward.

An addition to this story involves my first teaching job in the winter of 1973 at St. Johns Catholic Elementary School in Burlington, Iowa. I started December 1 because the teacher I was hired to replace was driven into early retirement by a notoriously difficult 6th grade class that as I recall numbered 44. Like most teachers in their first year I really had no clue about how to discipline this group. I remember in my mind quitting every night that first year. I stuck it out, learned a few good habits, mostly from strong women who wore habits, and until I wrote the paragraphs above did not realize the path I was traveling was chosen years earlier.

Growing up involves habit, decision, and mystery. Once habit is formed, a path chosen, the world somehow helps nudge one toward maturity. Therein lies the mystery.

Do you have a growing up story?

I ENCOURAGE COMMENTS AS MY THINKING ON THIS MATTER IS EVOLVING. FEEL FREE TO BE CRITICAL. WE ALL SEE THROUGH THE GLASS DIMLY.

How do you give Americans the freedoms to think, speak, worship, and organize and think that 330 million people will do this in a way that is anything but messy and at times just plain confounding?

Up until the 1960s, white, male, mainline protestants ran almost everything.  As a friend suggested in an email, even cheaply made westerns in the fifties and sixties taught viewers to see the country in a particular way.

That ‘consensus’ would begin to break down in the 1960s, when voices that had been ignored or pushed off to the side began speaking out, sometimes very, very loudly.   Future Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg finishes near the top of her law school class and can’t get a job at a top law firm in NYC because she is a woman and Jewish.

The Democratic Party until the mid 1960s includes liberals and southern conservatives who still despise the party of Lincoln.  The Republican Party includes conservatives and northeastern liberals.  This intra-party heterogeneity will slowly change beginning in the mid 1960s, with southern conservatives moving to the Republican Party and northeaster liberals to the Democratic Party.  Today the parties present competing visions of the country. This is what America’s polarization is all about.

The Christian Right will mobilize defensively against many of the cultural changes of the 1960s and 1970s, including abortion and the role of women, in the family and in the workplace.  The Democratic Party will gradually come down on the liberal side of these cultural changes and the Republican Party will come down on the conservative side.

Cultural differences are always harder to compromise than material differences.  Today, the biggest divisions in America are cultural, including the role of science and religion.

I have always believed politics is only necessary and needed when a group of people disagree about fundamental things.  If we agreed, politics would not be necessary.

 
In America today we are in the midst of massive changes.  Demographic changes that will lead to Euro-Americans becoming a minority, probably by 2050.  Cultural changes, such as gay marriage, representing different visions of the family.  Abortion, never really settled, is still a powerful source of conflict. Economic changes, leaving some, those with less than a college education, with flat wages for three decades.  These are globalization’s losers.  But there are globalization’s winners, many living in America’s large urban centers.

America’s politics is a mirror reflecting us back to us.  The ‘us’ or the ‘we’ in “we the people’ is bigger and more diverse than ever before.  No one wants to take a back seat.  No one anymore is ordered to the back of the bus. Everyone feels somehow the country is either slipping away from them or isn’t quite theirs yet.

 
The American ‘we’ is an evenly divided country where either side can win and so neither side has the incentive to cooperate or to compromise.

 
Until COVID – 19.  This virus doing what viruses do may help American political leaders temporarily suspend their winner take all perspective. Republican Governors (one example is Larry Hogan of Maryland) & Democratic Governors (one example is Andrew Cuomo of New York) have risen to the task.  Millions of people, self-isolating, have followed, doing their part.

All of this is taking place at a time of intense, penetrable and necessary polarization. Americans are treated to a real choice at the national ballot box, with each of its two major parties presenting a clear and coherent vision of what kind of country each envisions. The yearning for unity is understandable but except in emergencies a false and dangerous political idol. Division and conflict are the true friends of democracy because they are the true and faithful companions of human societies.

Democracy has never been harder in America.  This is because America has never been more democratic. 

Last night – what we didn’t realize would be our last night in Timisoara for now – we listened to Leonard Cohen’s Going Home. As I write my last blog from Timisoara the words below sit in front of me and capture my mood.

Going home

Without my sorrow

Going home

Sometime tomorrow

Going home

To where it’s better

Than before

We met so many wonderful people in Timisoara and wish we could stay longer. As I returned a few books today to the American Studies library at West University in Timisoara and walked the empty corridors I was struck by how grateful I was to have this chance to spend time in this place with these people and to share this experience with Rebecca. COVID – 19 and its consequences are bigger than any of us and it is time to give in to the reality of the situation and join the many who have had their own experiences cut short or their lives changed in ways they are only beginning to understand.

I am going home “without my sorrow” because this experience will live forever in my heart. It will continue to give back to me and from me to others. Cristina, Ludovic, Karola, Horia, Titsa, Laura, Mihai and…so very many others. I will never look at a map like the one below in the same way.

We are going home “sometime tomorrow.” Early this morning we talked with a travel company working with the Fulbright program. A kind, patient, and very efficient agent put together an itinerary. Tonight we fly to Bucharest and then tomorrow from Bucharest to Amsterdam to Atlanta and to Kansas City, arriving around midnight Tuesday. Friends are bringing Rebecca’s car to the Kansas City Airport and we will drive to Decorah, stopping briefly in Clarinda. And then self-isolating.

“To where it is better than before,” somehow, I think this is so. A mess in America I know, just as it is in Romania, with people out of work, isolated, anxious and fearful. People have died, others will get sick and die. Maybe you, maybe me. I don’t know what to make of all of this. I have no answers so how could home be “better than before?” Except for this, when we go home we know we will have two weeks of self-isolation. Millions of others are doing the same, mostly without anyone following them around to see if they are doing the right thing, meaning the right thing for others as well as for themselves.

We left America as individuals; we are coming home as Americans.

In 2008, America elected Barack Hussein Obama, a racial minority, President. African-Americans make up 13% of America’s population.

In 2014, Romania elected Klaus Werner Iohannis, an ethnic German, President. Romanians of German descent make up less than 1% of Romania’s population.

I asked my two classes of American Studies students if they thought the election in 2014 and re-election in 2019 of Iohannis marked as big a leap forward in Romania as Obama’s 2008 and 2012 victories symbolized for millions of Americans, including me. They nodded yes in unison and several talked about how Iohannis’ German ancestry was used against him, especially in the election of 2014.

President Iohannis is the first ethnic minority to be elected President of Romania. Iohannis is also a protestant (a member of the German-speaking Lutheran Church) in a country that is 80% Eastern Orthodox. As I was thinking about how I am connected to two countries that broke with tradition in exceptional ways, I remembered the Luther College Alumni tour to Ireland and Northern Ireland Rebecca and I led last fall. And another tradition-breaking politician popped into my head.

In 2017, Ireland’s first gay Taoiseach (Prime Minister), Leo Varadkar, assumed office. Varadkar’s Hindu father was born in India, Catholic mother in Ireland where Varadkar was raised a Catholic.

I have lived or traveled in three countries this past year, with each collectively deciding to break with the past in ways I consider signs of progress. Race in America, ethnic identity in Romania, and sexual orientation in Ireland are no longer insurmountable obstacles to rising to the top of politics and other professions in each country. This is a better world in so many ways than the world I was born into in 1949. Some things that were considered impossible have now become reality. Racism, ethnocentrism, and homophobia are still with us, but with less-lasting force and mostly in defensive, backs-against-the-wall postures.

Of course, not everyone thinks the Obama, Iohannis and Varadkar stories are good news stories. What some call progress never comes without a struggle and there is always the possibility of backlash. That is the central argument of Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow. She writes about how when slavery, America’s first racial caste system, ends in 1865 it is followed two decades later by the imposition of Jim Crow laws across the American south. When the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 end Jim Crow, America declares a war on drugs, a new ‘Jim Crow caste system’ that disproportionately incarcerates African Americans.

Is the election of Donald Trump in 2016 another form of backlash against the two terms of America’s first African-American president? What do you think? It is a question my Romanian students and I will talk about in our next on-line class session. There is no simple answer and I am interested in what you think.