Some Students Try to Bring the World Home

Some Students Try to Bring the World Home

by Richard Reeves
Yahoo! News
07/11/2003

WASHINGTON -- "What do you think of our Peace Corps?" a proud President Kennedy once asked the prime minister of India, Jawaharlal Nehru. A good idea, Nehru replied; privileged young Americans could learn a lot from the poor villagers of South Asia.

Kennedy was not amused. But Nehru, a prickly sort, turned out to be right. The greatest impact of the Peace Corps over the past 40 years has not been to bring sanitation or other modern wonders to the "primitive" of the Earth, but rather to create a core group of tens of thousands of Americans who came home with some sympathetic knowledge or knowledgeable empathy for the way much of the world actually lives. Peace Corps alumni have enriched the United States beyond all hopes in politics and government, education and business.

I was reminded of the Kennedy-Nehru encounter when I saw that the student group Americans for Informed Democracy, which I had reported on after its founding at Oxford University in England, was shifting its emphasis from telling foreigners about the United States to talking with Americans about the world. A good idea. Don't take it too personally, dear fellow Americans, but many of the problems we are having these days are because of our own uninterest and ignorance in how the other half lives and thinks.

AID, not to be confused with the United States' official foreign aid mechanism, the Agency for International Development, was formed at Oxford and publicized as a group standing up to the anti-Americanism that has been running wild around the world as American legions moved into Afghanistan (news - web sites) and Iraq (news - web sites), and the Bush administration began telling anyone who would listen that if you were not for us, we were against you. But both the problem and the group turned out to be much more complicated than that.

The Yanks at Oxford organized last year over two small incidents -- I am not making this up -- at the McDonald's in the middle of town. Just after Sept. 11, 2001, Jason Wasfy, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology (news - web sites) graduate studying politics as a Marshall Scholar at Oxford, was standing in line and a young woman behind him said: "Are you an American? ... Because I'm really so sorry about what happened, and I want you to know that all of us here in Britain were absolutely horrified."

Months later, another American, Seth Green, a Princeton graduate from Florida, was standing in the same line with friends when a British student grabbed one of the Americans by the scarf and said: "Is George Bush your hero? ... If I could get a bomb and get over to the United States, I'd blow myself up to kill you all."

That was the beginning of AID -- 250 of the 900 Americans at Oxford joined, and other young Americans abroad were recruited on the Web -- which held a series of high-profile conferences with titles that included "What Is Driving Anti-Americanism?" and "Clash of Civilizations or Common Ground?" (The latter was co-sponsored by another Oxford group, the Pakistan Discussion Forum.)

Now, with some of the organizers back home, AID is putting together a program called "Hope, Not Hate," scheduling Sept. 12, 2003, discussions on relations between the United States and Islamic countries at universities across the country. So far, 55 American campus groups have signed on for that day.

"Basically we are multilateralists coming home with a message," said Green. George Bush is not his hero -- he has written for the online edition of The American Prospect, a liberal magazine published in Washington -- but he says that what the group is about now is telling foreigners that the Bush administration is not America, and telling Americans that French president Jacques Chirac does not speak for everybody else. Actually, he added, the voice most likely to trigger knee-jerk anti-Americanism is that of Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, who oozes contempt for anyone not constantly pledging allegiance to America.

What is the rest of the message, I asked Green, who is 23 and headed for Yale Law School. His written answer was: "If America returns to unilateralism, it will be sowing the seeds of its future insecurity. My generation was not around when we won World War II, rebuilt Western Europe and protected South Korea (news - web sites) from communism. Even the fall of the Berlin Wall is a preteen memory. As my generation has begun to form opinions of America, it sees a generally unilateralist foreign policy that prioritizes force over diplomacy."

Rumsfeld, and President Bush (news - web sites) as well, might not like that phrasing, but they should start to listen to it. If they don't, it's going to be more and more dangerous to go to McDonald's anywhere outside the war capital.