Building Bridges

Terry Teachout writes in the Wall Street Journal Five Myths, Direct From Pyongyang about the recent performance of the New York Philharmonic in North Korea. Basically he feels that we enhanced Kim Jong Il’s hometown prestige without meaningfully impacting our image with the average North Koreans.

I remember almost 30 years ago I moved from Los Angeles to an almost rural suburb of Houston to open up a business. I hired about a dozen 18-20 year olds. After a few weeks, one of the girls came up to me and confided that I was the first Jewish person she had ever met and she was surprised at how normal I seemed. This was apparently true for the rest of the team as well. I would like to think that, in a small way, their world was expanded to allow for the possibility that they could share values and interests with people different from themselves. Since mine was a service business, I thought it essential that my staff learn to give each customer the benefit of the doubt in all interactions.

To me it is always worthwhile to interact with people with whom I disagree. Because we can discover those areas in which we do agree thus making the conflicts seem relatively less intense. Some fraction of the Philharmonic’s audience may soften to the idea that the USA may not be as much of a threat as they have been lead to believe.

But almost as important is the audience in the rest of the world, including allies and moderates in oppressed societies, that sees the USA making the effort to reach out to adversaries, to try to build a bridge.