"God Has a Dream" by Desmond Tutu

This book took way to long to read, in fact, my borrowing privileges at the library have been suspended. Oops!
Once I sat down and just read it, I realized what a powerful writing and speaker Tutu really is.

I'll just write some powerful fragmented ideas that have stuck to the inside of my brain.

We make people inhumane when we remove their moral responsibility for some action. 

All people are family.

Our fear of failure drives an ugly competitiveness which often leads to putting down other people.

"Love is more demanding than law. No law tells an exhausted mother who wants nothing more than to collapse in exhaustion that they must get up in the middle of the night to comfort their baby, walking for hours until their child calms down, but this is what she does, because this is what love commands" (p. 36).

Valuing strength over weakness is a philosophy which leads people to despise weakness and weakness in others. "We can love others, with their failures, when we stop despising ourselves, because of our failures" (p. 39).

Prejudice is ridiculous, no matter what it's based on.

"Theologically, biblically, socially, ecumenically, it is right to ordain women to the priesthood" (p. 48).

"Ending sexism and including women fully in every aspect of society not only ends its own great evil--the oppression of women--but also is part of the solution to the rest of the world's problems" (p. 49).

"Confession, forgiveness, and reparation, wherever feasible, form part of a continuum" (p. 57).

Change and growth almost always occur through some pain.

Love is an action, a choice of will, not a feeling, or at least not always a feeling.

I can be a center of love, an oasis of peace.

Children are small people.

Death is physical. The mental/spiritual part can be overcome.

The physical can be truly spiritual. It can be transformed from the profane into the sacred. All Hellenistic dualism has sought to refute this idea, making the physical principally antagonistic to and alien from the spiritual. 

Tutu is on to some Quaker principles with his emphasis on stillness and contemplation and on all of us being able to hear God. 

An authentic spirituality is subversive of injustice.

I am waiting for a leaders "who are willing to take risks and not just seeking to satisfy the often extreme feelings of their constituencies. They have to lead by leading and be ready to compromise, to accommodate, and not to be intransigent, not to assert that they have a bottom line. Intransigence and ultimatums only lead to more death" (p. 119).

"So remember you are a moral agent, capable of creating a particular kind of moral climate that is impatient with injustice and cruelty and indifference and lies and immorality" (p. 123).

Three Cups of Tea by Greg Mortenson and David Oliver Relin

Verbose verbose verbose.  Man o man, way too many words, too many details, too many words. Did I say there were too many words in this book?

Quite a beautiful story of a mountain climbing nurse turned school-building-community-empowerer.

I was inspired to continue my study of languages and never forget the interlocking importance of health and education which form the foundation for justice. Or the other way around. Chicken and egg.

Rich Dad Poor Dad by Robert T. Kiyosaki

I was thrown off by the casual writing style and poor editing, but there were some good points.

Rich people think about money differently than poor people. This is pretty obvious, but it was interesting to think about some of the reasons behind this and the effects of these attitudes. It is good that Kiyosaki is concerned about the growing gap between rich and poor but his concern stems only from self-preservation instincts. He does not cite the injustice of this gap but rather the danger to our "empire".

I dislike that Kiyosaki...

1 believes that paying taxes is bad. He states repeatedly that most people "work from January to mid-May for the government just to cover their taxes". This is not working "for the government". Those tax dollars provide services create the conditions necessary for having a job in the first place. Try making money in Afghanistan...

2 forgets about the peace of mind that forgetting about money can bring. Decisions to 'buy' or invest in such "liabilities" as art, academic knowledge and love are the foundations of happiness. Education is an asset!

3 assumes that the government is somebody else, somehow separate, not made up of people

4 his constant differentiation between rich and poor which begins to imply some intrinsic difference within people themselves.

5 assumes that only profit fosters creativity.

6 thinks of money working for him. It's not his money that works for him but other people's creativity and hard work that adds value to his investments. He completely forgets about the human aspect of financial growth.

7 considers buying a Porsche some kind of accomplishment (what a looser)

8 brags about pre-tax "expenses"

9 Kiyosaki describes being a landlord and what happens when somebody does not pay. "The court system handles that" (p. 119). Yet this is the court system funded by the very taxes which Kiyosak intends to avoid. 

It's very interesting how Kiyosaki...

1 separates your profession vs your business

2 knows that "the rich are not taxed" (p. 95). It is enlightening and sickening to know how people can use the legal structure of a corporation to shelter their assets from taxation (p. 98).

3 Realizes that government fails when it does not incorporate good business principles such as efficiency.

Native Son by Richard Wright

How much of this book was influenced by Crime and Punishment?
Brash and forward, an economy of words that I would like to emulate.
Wright expressed with power that exceeded the extreme situations described in the book.
Spectacular.

The Places in Between by Rory Stewart

I want to walk like Rory. Knowing a few Persian languages, and walking from village to village, seeing, listening and walking. 

His views on international aid and interference were quite striking.

"I now had half a dozen friends working in Afghanistan in embassies, think tanks, international development agencies, the United Nations, and the Afghan government, controlling projects worth millions of dollars. A year before, they had been in Kosovo or East Timor and a year later they would be in Iraq or offices in New York and Washington." 

"They worked twelve or fourteen-hour days drafting documents for heavily funded initiatives on "democratization," "skills training," or "protection issues."

The pure hopelessness of this observation, how quickly outsiders come and go, makes me wonder if community development really should have nothing to do with outside aid. 

"Most of the policy makers knew next to nothing about the villages where 90 percent of the Afghan population lived." And all of the villages and regions are different.  How could you please everybody?

"These differences between groups were deep, elusive, and difficult to overcome. Village democracy, gender issues, and centralization would be hard-to-sell concepts in some areas."   That's for sure.

"Critics have accused this new breed of administrators of neocolonialism. But in fact their approach is not that of a nineteenth-century colonial officer. Colonial administrations may have been racist and exploitative, but they did at least work seriously at the business of understanding the people they were governing. They recruited people prepared to spend their entire careers in dangerous provinces of a single alien nation. They invested in teaching administrators and military officers the local language. They established effective departments of state, trained a local elite, and continued the countless academic studies of their subjects through institutes and museums, royal geographical societies, and royal botanical gardens. They balanced the local budget and generated fiscal revenue because if they didn't their home government would rarely bail them out. If they failed to govern fairly, the population would mutiny. 

     Post-conflict experts have got the prestige without the effort or stigma of imperialism. Their implicit denial of the difference between cultures is the new mass brand of international intervention. Their policy fails but no one notices. There are no credible monitoring bodies an there is no one to take formal responsibility. Individual officers are never in any one place and rarely in any one organization long enough to be adequately assessed. The colonial enterprise could be judged by the security or revenue it delivered, but neocolonialists have no such performance criteria. In fact their very uselessness benefits them. By avoiding any serious action or judgement they, unlike their colonial predecessors, are able to escape accusations of racism, exploitation, and oppression.

     Perhaps it is because no one requires more than a charming illusion of action in the developing world. If the policy makers know little about the Afghans, the public knows even less, and few care about policy failure when the effects are felt only in Afghanistan."

The White Tiger by Aravind Adiga (2008)

I had high expectations after Liam's glowing review, but I was really not impressed by Adiga's writing style.

For some reason, it just felt forced, with good voice, but somehow over-polished.

It was perhaps that Adiga intended to shock or awe with his descriptions of Indian human rights violations. However I was not touched by his descriptions, or even disturbed by the murder scene.  Just not Heller's level, descriptively or emotively. 

I failed to develop any consistent relationship with the protagonist, and can't even remember his name now. "If you write, you must believe--in the truth and the worth of the scrawl, in the ability of the reader to receive and decode the message. No one can write decently who is distrustful of the reader's intelligence, or whose attitude is patronizing" (Strunk & White, The Elements of Style, 84). Perhaps Adiga did not trust me to accurately perceive the horrors of India, and because he denied me this trust, his premonition was accurate.

Candide, ou l'Optimisme by Voltaire (1759)

What a delightfully naive protagonist.

The atrocities described in the 18th century remind me or our own atrocities these days. That was disturbing. Many passages were laugh out loud funny as Voltaire uses satire to make some social commentary on everything from war to literature. The self-aware style of his writing reminded me of Mark Twain, and the pure openness, which could have been shocking in his day, was fresh and sharp.

I found myself reexamining some philosophies on happiness and economics. It was an easy examination made very entertaining by Voltaire's parodies on many stereotypes. So who has had the most horrible experiences in their life? Yeah, go ahead, try to measure that!