Two Wonderful Things (three, if you count codeine cough syrup)

This isn’t exactly a Tao Sunday (I suppose I can call it that again, now that I spend 4-6 hours a week at a Taoist temple!) — but it is cool stuff that I’ve been waiting for a chance to post, and lo! The chance cometh.

First, I give you The World’s Most Fantastic Idea for Winning the Iraq War, courtesy of Prof. Lawrence Lessig, whose blog is a wonderment of educational goodness.

http://www.lessig.org/blog/archives/003614.shtml

I may spend too much time thinking about this, but how is it one reverses the hatred of a people after war? WWII was no doubt very different. But interestingly, Germans talk about this a lot — about the brilliance in the American strategy after the war to rebuild (what we weirdly call) “friendship” between the German and American people.

That strategy had a government component (2% of the GDP spent on the Marshall Plan) and a private component. The private component came largely through the delivery of “CARE Packages.” As described on CARE’s website, these packages were originally surplus food packs initially prepared to support a US invasion of Japan. Americans were invited to send these packages to victims of the War. Eventually, over 100,000,000 packages were sent by Americans over the next two decades, first in Europe, then throughout the world.

A German friend this afternoon was recounting this story to me — he too is obsessed with how to reduce Iraqi anger. But the part he emphasized that I had missed originally was how significant it was to Germans to know that these packages were sent by ordinary Americans. It wasn’t the government sending government aid; it was American volunteers taking time to personalize an act of giving.

CARE has given up the CARE Package. So too has it moved far from the individual-driven model of giving that marked its birth. But I wonder how current victims of war would react to a repeat of 1945-giving. A related idea has been taken up by a 10-year old from New Jersey. But what if every city in America selected sister cities throughout Afghanistan and Iraq, and individual volunteers from the US repeated what our parents and grandparents did 60 years ago?

Isn’t that an utterly fantastic idea? You know it is. I think I might send a package myself, from my friend who was killed in Iraq last year while guarding a Red Cross convoy. He would appreciate that. But I still wish I had the time/organization to set it up on a bigger scale. Well, I’ll keep it on the tip of my frontal lobe and maybe I’ll tell it to someone who can, right?

Anyway, on to Thing Two: This is a piece of art by a girl I know who’s not technically a professional artist, though she takes great pictures and does case-mods that would make you cry. (Ask her about the Lego box, and how long it took her to get my drool off it.) She’s also a ridiculously good musician who doesn’t play out enough and you should harrass her for that if you get the chance. I dug this piece and she agreed to let me post it, yay!  The picture links to her LiveJournal for your convenience. ;)

…And that’s about all I’ve got in me, tonight. This stupid plague has sunk into my chest now (don’t you just love how illnesses migrate?), so I have a rocker of a sore throat from coughing and a nasty herbal tea addiction. Oh, and it makes me cough my head off to lay down, so while my schedule is definitely in shambles, I am sleeping polyphasically, because I can’t sleep longer than 1-3 hours anyway! *sheesh* (I’m really trying to use it to massage my schedule back into place, but at the moment it’s “sleep when you can”. I bet I fall right back into it when I go back to work, though. *ugh* nevermind; I don’t wanna think about work!)
Have a nice rest of the weekend, everybody.

-PD