Book Recommendation: Why Do People Hate America? Sardar & Wyn Davies and some whining

I haven’t posted much lately.

Work has been rather hectic for me. In the last two weeks I’ve fired one person, had another go out to begin a two month medical leave, had another two go out on vacations that I’d approved before I knew I was firing one guy and before I found out about the medical leave issue. Oh – and my Brian has been promoted to a Data Operations position at our company – he still reports to me but is no longer doing customer tech support; instead, he supports the internal PC’s and users now.

What this means, in practical terms, is that my normal staff of eight had to operate for most of this week with only 4 people. That is four people to cover phone and email support from 8am until 9pm weekdays and 9am until 6pm weekends. Four people to support over 23,000 dialup Internet users, hundreds of DSL users, and a couple hundred customers with dedicated circuits ranging from ISDN through DS3s.

We got through it and this week ending is the one I’ll be short-staffed the most for this whole summer so it can only get better. I gotta say how much I love most of my current team. They are, for the most part, warm and caring people with bright active minds that can handle an amazing load and are not at all arrogant or afraid to ask for my help when they get out of their depth.

At the same time, late in the week I discovered that one of my best friends and offsite wife is dealing with a problem that occurs this time of year with alarming regularity. She has posted to LJ about it and it’s not my place to provide details, but when I found out that this year is a repeat of other years I just shut down internally. There was a lively set of posts on her LJ page about the subject and I did not contribute at all. I just couldn’t bring myself to post ANYTHING. I’m sure she knows she has my love and support in however she handles it, but I just feel that over the years I have said all I can say.

Instead, this week, whenever possible I’ve been reading. It has always been my chief mechanism for unwinding or otherwise disconnecting a while.

I’ve just finished a short book, “Why Do People Hate America?” by Ziauddin Sardar and Merryl Wyn Davies – published by disinformation

This book is a collection of seven long essays that try to break down the question that was all over the media following 9-11. The question simply cannot be addressed in a short segment on CNN or MSNBC. However, the question does lend itself well to oversimplified sound bites.

“They” Hate: (pick one or more) 1. Our freedom of speech 2. Our freedom of religion 3. Our democratic way of life 4. Because they are “fundamentalists” 5. Because they are Muslims 6. Because they are jealous. 7. Because they are pure evil.

All of these reasons were given by various “experts” and guest commentators on the 24 hour news channels in the weeks following 9-11. People seemed to honestly believe that the forces of history, cultural clashes, economics, and many many other forces can be summed up in a sound-bite. As long as people think in terms of simplistic answers there will never be a full dialogue that truly examines what can be done to reverse this trend. Hate Simplifies. The antithesis of hate – trust and confidence – cannot be simplified.

This book breaks down the whole question. What is meant by “They” – what is meant by “Hate” (generally fear and frustration) – and what is meant by “America”. It points out that the hostility towards the US Government is not limited to “Islamic Fundamentalists” as the much of the American press would have you believe. The hostility is also found among European environmentalists, and native coffee farmers in Kenya who live in a country that must allow US corporations unrestricted access to its markets, but must also pay a tariff on coffee sales to the US.

I’m going to include a paragraph from the final chapter here. This chapter is titled: Hating America and Transcending Hatred I just read it three times.

“Clearly, it is not in the world’s best interests for this hatred to continue. But can there be transcendence? Hatred, as we have already argued, is a body of opinion and ideas with an emotional baggage of prejudice that operates in an ongoing relationship, as part of a context of interaction. But hatred always simplified. So from the point of view of the less-developed world, we have America – the Great Satan, the hyperpower, the motive factor in all that is wrong, that everywhere prevents sensible and responsible self-determination and humane solutions. And we have, from the American point of view, the only answers to the human future: freedom, democracy, liberty, free speech, and free market forces, all under attack from evil enemies who are beyond moral persuasion and therefore must be rooted out and killed for the preservation of the good, which is endlessly vulnerable to attack because of its openness and honesty. This is a cartoon version of reality on both sides. But in a world dominated by sound-bites and short attention spans, and tightly controlled media, the cartoon version goes from strength to strength because it looks like a believable, gripping narrative that explains everything. The antidote is to learn to love complexity and refuse to be frightened by stories of bogeymen and monsters under the bed. We have, as a wise man once said, ‘nothing to fear but fear itself’. The entire purpose of simplified narratives is to make us, and keep us, afraid of the great big complex world out there.”