If you're watching CNN on a regular basis I'm sure you are convinced that most of the world never heard of this season of peace and goodwill to all men. There seem to be wars and examples of man's inhumanity to man springing up all over, along with more than the usual personal dastardly deeds that deranged and unfulfilled human beings can inflict on each other.
I'm tempted to rant to the skies, as seniors through the ages have done, that the world is going to that hot place in a handbasket and what are these young'uns doing to themselves. But every once in a while, something happens that makes my eyes pop open and awakens a whole new perspective about which direction civilization is headed. You simply have to live long enough to see the bigger picture.
For instance, I was born the year Japan dropped some small bombs on Pearl Harbor, and before I started school, the United States had bombed Japan into the dark ages. But lo and behold, here they are 66 years later making money hand over fist on our technology, traveling the globe with their little cameras and holding $582 billion of the U.S. debt.
I grew up listening to my parents tell me that I had to eat everything on my plate because there were children starving in China. Now those children make about 30 percent of the things we buy every day and China holds $400 billion of the U.S. debt. (And there are fewer children starving.)
And Germany — I remember the airlift to keep the people in West Berlin alive when the Russians cut off access from West Germany. Hard to believe that now they are a unified country and the people of West Germany are paying major taxes to bring the eastern half up to speed.
Consider Vietnam — the atrocious war of my generation. Horrific because so many were killed and we lost — ran for our lives with our tail between our legs while everyone cringed at what was going to happen to those poor people who were forced into becoming communists. Forty years later, former soldiers can go back and visit the children they left behind, and the economy and political situation are progressing quite nicely.
How about communism? I taught children to get under their desks and kiss their soon-to-be-toasted little behinds goodbye. By now we know that behind the Iron Curtain was a system that could not work, with cardboard tanks on display, people starving, inefficient systems, corruption — a real paper tiger. So much money was wasted because of our misdirected fears and competition. And now who holds $13 billion of the U.S. debt?
I marched and demonstrated with Martin Luther King Jr. for civil rights in the South. I was shot at, run off the road, hit with high-pressure water hoses and went to jail more than once trying to change old customs and attitudes. Last spring in a restaurant in Savannah, Ga., I witnessed a white singer entertain patrons with many of the songs we sang to give us courage, and no one batted an eye. Last week at the movies, I saw Morgan Freeman and Jane Alexander passionately kissing as they portrayed a married couple. I vividly recall the Lovings — an interracial couple who were arrested in Virginia in 1958 — for being married. Wasn't it just yesterday that Sydney Poitier shook the whole country in "Guess Who's Coming to Dinner"?
In the '70s, I sat in Town Hall many an evening listening to Gloria Steinem, Betty Freidan, Bella Abzug and other "women's libbers" discuss equal opportunity, abortion rights and equal pay for women. While there is still a discrepancy in pay, women have come a long way — higher percentage of college students, almost equal number of doctors and lawyers, excelling in sports, beginning to manage major companies, breaking through the glass ceiling in one area after another. Once we were given a chance there was no stopping us; we may even see a woman president by 2009.
Time has given us a different perspective on many things: Korea, where men died for years trying to figure out what they were fighting for — last month the border was opened to traffic between North and South. Remember Castro's Cuba, that "dangerous" little country in our midst with the best medical system in North America? John F. Kennedy's race for the moon — which many thought was pure insanity at the time — has brought us the computer chip and the computer age. Apartheid in South Africa was brought to an impossible peaceful conclusion by Nelson Mandela, one of the noblest men of the 20th century. Or did you ever think you'd see the day when OPEC decried the fact that oil is valued in U.S. dollars because the Euro would make them more money? Makes you rethink a lot of things you always believed, doesn't it?
This is not to say that we have nothing to be concerned about — the next few years are going to bring very serious challenges in the world, in the United States and certainly on our little islands in the Caribbean. But I feel confident that those of you who live long enough will be able to look back and say, "That wasn't the end of the world — look how we handled that — things are really getting better after all."
Editor's note: Carol Lotz-Felix — educator, writer, community activist — lives on St. Thomas and volunteers in activities that improve literacy and children's educational experiences.
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