Appeal to people's hope and aspirations

An Easy Burden
Andy Young, 1996

Young, a principal of GWI Consulting and former UN ambassador and Atlanta mayor, describes his development as a community leader.

After serving with the National Council of Churches (NCC) and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), in 1972 Young was elected to the US House of Representatives.

All politics is local and my campaign was no exception. But I was campaigning in a national political atmostphere that was being poisoned by the politics of fear and division. Throughout the campaign I tried to appeal to people's hope and aspirations rather than their fears. This had always been the challenge in the SCLC's campaigns for social change - to help people grow toward their hopes and aspirations rather than letting a fear of change overwhelm them.

The Root of Wild Madder

Chasing the history, mystery, and lore of the persian carpet
AP correspondent Brian Murphy describes his exploration, geographic, historical and cultural, of persian carpets.

He is able to have a conversation with a not-yet-married 15-year-old weaver in in Bagdis, in northern Afghanistan:

"How do you see your future?"
"Why do you ask these things?" She shrugged. "God decides, not me."
"But you have some role, don't you?" I pressed.
"Maybe in your country there is planning like this," she replied again, looking me square in the eye. "Here, there isn't."


"Asli", I said. "Do you know that some people think there is something very sacred about carpets - "

"If you mean do I think I am special in God's eye, then no. That is not right," she cut me off, clearly becoming tired of my odd questions. "If you mean do I sometimes sense God while I'm working, then the answer is yes. There are times when I finish a difficult border or gul and must stop just to look at it. It is like a small world all alone and separate: perfect and peaceful. God must be guiding our hands, I think. This is how he gets us to look beyond this world. This is what I feel sometimes."

We Should Never Meet

A book of interconnected short stories from Aimee Phan about Operation Babylift, which brought orphans, many of them mixed race, to the US from Vietnam just before the fall of Saigon in 1975.

Inshallah

From Oriana Fallaci's 1990 novel Inshallah, set in the last weeks of Italy's participation in the Multinational Peacekeeping Force in Beirut in 1982-3

Then, all at once, the stunning silence that had petrified the quarter broke. And from every street, every alley, every lane, every house, every hovel, every shanty, door, roof, terrace, window, from every hole, a tremenduos chorus arose. A lugubrious chorus of groans and howls and voices that called the dead. The Bashirs, the Ismahils, the Sharifs, the Alis, and the Barakaats killed in Shatila. The Leydas, the Fatimas, the Jamilas, and the Aminas killed beside the Bashirs and Ismahils and Sharifs and Alis and Barakats. And along with that lugubrious chorus, an unusual sound. The inimitable sound that Arab women emit by drumming the tongue against the palate and gurgling a shrill gurgle, a piercing scream made up of infinite screams whose significance changes according to the circumstance, so at times it expresses protest, at times jubiliation, at times grief, and in the last case it is the most unbearable sound you can hear. A sound that seems like a weeping of Cyclopes, a sobbing unuttered by hordes of tortured animals.

Four Freedoms

from the State of the Union address delivered by Franklin Delano Roosevelt, on January 6, 1941


Many subjects connected with our social economy call for immediate improvement. As examples:

• We should bring more citizens under the coverage of old-age pensions and unemployment insurance.
• We should widen the opportunities for adequate medical care.
• We should plan a better system by which persons deserving or needing gainful employment may obtain it.

I have called for personal sacrifice, and I am assured of the willingness of almost all Americans to respond to that call. A part of the sacrifice means the payment of more money in taxes. In my budget message I will recommend that a greater portion of this great defense program be paid for from taxation than we are paying for today. No person should try, or be allowed to get rich out of the program, and the principle of tax payments in accordance with ability to pay should be constantly before our eyes to guide our legislation.

If the congress maintains these principles the voters, putting patriotism ahead pocketbooks, will give you their applause. In the future days which we seek to make secure, we look forward to a world founded upon four essential human freedoms.

• The first is freedom of speech and expression -- everywhere in the world.
• The second is freedom of every person to worship God in his own way -- everywhere in the world.
• The third is freedom from want, which, translated into worldterms, means economic understandings which will secure to every nation a healthy peacetime life for its inhabitants -- everywhere in the world.
• The fourth is freedom from fear, which, translated into world terms, means a world-wide reduction of armaments to such a point and in such a thorough fashion that no nation will be in a position to commit an act of physical aggression against any neighbor -- anywhere in the wold.

That is no vision of a distant millennium. It is a definite basis for a kind of world attainable in our own time and generation. That kind of world is the very antithesis of the so-called "new order" of tyranny which the dictators seek to create with the crash of a bomb.

To that new order we oppose the greater conception -- the moral order. A good society is able to face schemes of world domination and foreign revolutions alike without fear. Since the beginning of our American history we have been engaged in change, in a perpetual, peaceful revolution, a
revolution which goes on steadily, quietly, adjusting itself to changing conditions without the concentration camp or the quicklime in the ditch. The world order which we seek is the cooperation of free countries, working together in a friendly, civilized society.