If a single sentence is to
summarize the year 2014, it will probably be “I can’t breathe.”
Those were the fateful
words a 43-year-old black man named Eric Garner managed to utter before dying
when police officer Daniel Pantaleo applied a chokehold on him in Staten
Island, NY, on July 17. Just three weeks later, on August 9, 2014, an unarmed 18-year-old
black man named Michael Brown was shot dead by officer Darren Wilson in
Ferguson, Missouri.
Neither officer was
indicted.
The protests and civil
unrests that followed put America on edge as the distrust between police and
people, particularly African-Americans, grew intense. Almost inevitably, a
criminal named Ismaaiyl Brinsley, a black man, shot dead two police officers in
Brooklyn, NY, on December 20, before killing himself.
Can there be a silver
lining to these horrific events? Perhaps this: Brinsley tried to invoke the
killings of Michael Brown and Eric Garner as motivation for killing two policemen.
Both the Brown and the Garner families denounced and rejected his reasoning.
Racism lurks beneath the
façade of normalcy in America. We have progressed beyond Jim Crow but the
progress has been uneven and slow. Blacks have legitimate reasons to fear the
police for reasons both historical and structural. It is a tragedy that progress
in race relations in America occurs only after blacks die, mainly because it
forces us to question existing laws and attempt to make them less cruel and
more human.
Year 2014 has been a
difficult year. Murderous organizations like ISIS went on a killing spree,
beheading journalists and civilians who challenged their barbarity. In
Peshawar, Pakistan, the Taliban killed over 130 children in a single horrific
attack in a school.
Yet the fanatics are
steadily losing ground as Muslims overwhelmingly reject them and coalition
forces retake territories.
Every nation in the Middle
East unfortunately lived down to their unexceptional state. None showed any
imagination or daring to break out of the cycle of distrust and violence.
On December 9, the Senate
Intelligence Committee released a 6000-page report on the CIA's "Enhanced
Interrogation Techniques." CIA’s depravity against 9/11 detainees shocked
America. Yet there was something else too: In how many countries could such a
report see the light of day? America’s willingness to question itself is one of
its strengths, although its capacity to learn lessons from its failures gets at
best a c-.
It was not all dystopia,
of course.
The Nobel committee
honored Malala Yousafzay of Pakistan and Kailash Satyarthi of India with the
Nobel peace Prize “for their struggle against the suppression of children and
young people and for the right of all children to education.” The Taliban had
shot Malala in the head in 2012 when she was 15 but that only strengthened her
determination to secure universal access to education, particularly for girls.
Satyarthi, 60, had been waging a tireless war against the exploitation of
children for decades. The “Save the Childhood Movement” he launched in 1980 has
saved over 80,000 children from exploitation, bonded labor and trafficking.
Openings are always better
than closings. President Obama’s decision to restore diplomatic relations with
Cuba was welcomed by most Americans. “These 50 years have shown that isolation
has not worked,” declared the President. “It’s time for a new approach.” (Are
leaders in the Middle East and elsewhere listening?) Pope Francis played a
critical role in bringing the two sides together. This humble man has shown
that religion can be a catalyst for diplomacy when applied with the right touch
of humility and foresight. Transcending the naysayers was the euphoria that
gripped ordinary Cubans. “For the Cuban people, I think this is like a shot of
oxygen,” exulted a 32-year-old IT specialist in Havana. “It’s a wish-come-true,
because with this we have overcome our differences.”
Cynicism is supposedly the
hallmark of the modern man but even the most hardened heart has to acknowledge
that peace is a universal human longing.
In education, the Common
Core Curriculum (CCC) is going through its trial by fire. More parents than
teachers seem to be against it, only because CCC is forcing children to analyze
what’s going on under the hood – critical thinking - and that has shaken
parents off their complacency. For the first time in years, parents were forced
to confront the possibility that their children were perhaps not as smart as
they imagined them to be. Yet what they need to consider is that CCC can
actually make their kids smarter, if only they give the curriculum a chance.
In community colleges, the
tension between learning and relevance continues to frustrate students and
teachers alike. Students are convinced that education is important but they are
not convinced that what they learn at community colleges will help them in
their lives. “As soon as I am done with this algebra course, I will flush it
completely out of my brain, so I can make room for what will really help me,”
said a despairing student. Replace ‘algebra’ with any other subject and this is
a refrain one hears frequently in the corridors of community colleges across
America.
But teachers are stepping
up to the challenge. They are making relevance and connection with real-world
problems a priority in the student-centric learning environment they are
striving to create, recognizing that the main purpose of education is not to train
students for jobs but to kindle their passion for knowledge and for their
capacity to think independently.
Also laudable is the
effort by organizations like California Open Educational Resource Council
(OERC) to reduce textbook costs by making peer-reviewed quality textbooks
available to students for free.
What is perhaps missing
from our perspective is an awareness of the countless acts of kindness and
generosity that ordinary people perform every day to propel us forward. It is
the anonymous goodness of mothers, fathers, daughters, sons, teachers, nurses,
volunteers and others that animate our humanity. It is their sacrifices, and not
the antics of the headline grabbers, that keep the world humming. The source of
the extraordinary, we often forget, is ordinary lives. No one captured this
more eloquently than George Eliot in Middlemarch:
The growing good of the world is partly
dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as
they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden
life, and rest in unvisited tombs.
The world may appear more
unsettled and dangerous than ever but when we believe in the generosity and
selflessness of those “who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in
uninvited tombs,” our faith in humanity is restored. We sense that a new
beginning is ours for the taking, that the fanatics and the extremists will be
defeated by the humble and the resolute, that cruelty and stupidity will
surrender to kindness and reason.
We long for peace and
justice and hope that 2015 will be a year when we will be graced by both.
Perhaps 2015 will be our personal Year of Innisfree (W.B. Yeats – The Lake Isle of Innisfree)
And I
shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow,
Dropping from
the veils of the morning to where the cricket sings;
There
midnight’s all a glimmer, and noon a purple glow,
And
evening full of the linnet’s wings.
