BEING AMERICAN (via Winfield Myers):

A LOT OF WHAT I LEARNED ABOUT AMERICA I LEARNED IN IRAQ (John Agresto, Ph.D., Democracy Project)

Let me tell you a story - a true story. Soon after I got to Iraq, I befriended a young Iraqi working for the Americans as a clerk. He had an undergraduate degree in pharmacy, but he quit pharmacy to work with us. He asked me for a favor - could I help his younger sister switch from one program to another at her university. This seems like the easiest request; but in Iraq, where everything is regulated and regimented, it verges on the impossible. Still, after many phone calls and some begging, I managed to get her sister transferred to the program of her choice - computer science.

Well, in this young man’s eyes I was both the symbol of American power and American goodness. (Remember, all I did was make a few phone calls.)

A week later he visits me again, with a report. He was trying, he said, to be like an American: he gave a poor man begging on the street some money, and he gave a ride to a mother struggling to get her kids to school. How, I asked, did this make him like an American? It did because, for the first time in over 25 years, he personally worked for the good of people he didn’t know.

Islamicism is doomed because it can not create a decent society any more than any of the other isms can.

Posted by Orrin Judd at August 10, 2004 2:11 PM