As one of the many Americans who value the real Memorial Day as a very special occasion and who is a regular visitor to family and friends whose address is Arlington Cemetery, it is offensive that the disturbing trend of divisive dialogue in our country’s political life has punctured what should be an off-limits zone. Fox News, keep your hands off our Memorial Day. We want it back.
We Americans consider ourselves to be among the most generous people on the planet and when it comes to individual charitable giving that appears to be the case. Americans give three and one-half times more per capita than the French, seven times more than the Germans and 14 times more than the Italians, according to a television news magazine story by John Stossel. When asked about Americans’ giving in response to the Haiti earthquake in January, Cass Wheeler, who knows something about raising money as former CEO of the American Heart Association, said, “When you think about this country, the spirit of volunteering time and making contributions is really a part of our fabric.”
A wise man once told me that it’s much easier to sell people something “they think they want” than something “you think they need.” That dictum is especially apropos to the task of global affairs awareness – teaching people about the world. We are a nation awash in information resources that offer an endless stream of raw data, context and analyses of the world around us but most Americans are content to leave understanding foreign affairs, our interests abroad and international things to someone else.
The “Doomsday Clock” is not really a timepiece. It is a metaphor marking civilization’s proximity to a self-induced conclusion adopted by scientists at the dawn of the Cold War. In 1947 the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, the clock’s makers, set the time at 11:53 p.m., reflecting the danger of nuclear weapons, the sole province, at the time, of the United States. By 1953 with the introduction of an atomic bomb by the Soviet Union and testing of more powerful thermonuclear weapons by both America and Russia, the clock nudged to just two minutes away from humanity’s midnight.