David:
Let me preface what I’m about to say by telling you that I am a fan.
Your knowledge of public issues is encyclopedic and your insights into the major challenges facing the United States today are fascinating.
Although partisan Republicans and Democrats may look askance at you for having served President Clinton after having served Presidents Reagan and Bush 1, I’ve always admired your willingness to use your considerable talents in service to country irrespective of an individual president’s party.
Last night though, you frankly perturbed me. You were talking about concerns you had about the Republicans’ nomination of Alaska Governor Sarah Palin for Vice President. There are, of course, legitimate concerns that can be raised about Palin. While her experience as an administrative decision maker surpass those of Senator Barack Obama, her resume admittedly has “thin” areas. And she has no experience in foreign policy.
But you expressed concern that Governor Palin hadn’t been to many other countries, stating that this, in effect, marked her as one lacking curiosity about the world. You went on to say that Harvard University and the University of Oklahoma, among other institutions, are today encouraging their undergraduate students to spend time living in other countries as a means of becoming well-rounded persons in a world dealing with globalization.
I’m glad that colleges and universities are doing that, David, and had I been able to afford going overseas back during my undergraduate days or for most of my life, I would have loved to have done just that.
But you see, David, while going to college full-time at The Ohio State University and later to Trinity Lutheran Seminary for graduate work leading to ordination as a pastor, I worked between twenty and thirty-five hours a week. When, during my sophomore year, the opportunity arrived for me to do a study tour of the former Soviet Union, I looked at my bank book and decided that, though I would have truly loved to have made the trip, I couldn’t afford it.
As the years have rolled on, though I have served three different congregations, I’m told capably, averaging working 60-hours a week, while my wife has worked roughly the same number of hours, foreign travel hasn’t fit in with our family budget.
I doubt that my experience is rare. It isn’t that I have ever lacked curiosity about the world or that I haven’t wanted to understand other cultures and peoples. In fact, I’ve always been deeply curious about the world. But as a member of the lower middle class, I knew that travels to other places would necessarily be in that category called “hopes deferred.”
I was forty-six before I had the chance to take my first trip abroad. The high school choir in which our two kids performed went to England for a ten-day concert tour. My wife and I went as chaperones. A year-and-a-half later, after a lot of scrimping and saving of the income my wife and I gained from my income as a pastor and her full-time job as a school librarian and part-time work as a Hallmark Store clerk, my daughter and I visited her pen pal in Germany. I had the privilege of preaching during worship in a Lutheran congregation in Schleswig-Holstein where I was able to tell folks, in December 2001, how grateful we Americans were for their prayers, support, encouragement, and love. While there, we also went briefly to Denmark.
That was the last foreign excursion I took and I dearly hope that one day, I can visit places like Namibia, for which I was an advocate–through the Free Namibia Emphasis of the former American Lutheran Church–when the apartheid regimes in South Africa held it by the throat. I hope to visit France, whose language I learned in high school and whose artwork, cathedrals, and countryside I want to see. I want to go to Japan, with its industrious people and fast-pace. I hope to go to Israel, where I believe Jesus lived, died, and rose. I want to see for myself what Palestinians, Zimbabweans, Russians, and others perceive about our world and see what they experience each day.
But all of those hopes will have to await more opportune times. For now, I strive to inform myself of the life of the world beyond US shores and interact with as many folks from other places as I can.
That may not pass muster with you, David. It may mark me as one lacking curiosity. But my circumstances will admit of no foreign travel for awhile.
From what I’ve learned of Sarah Palin over the past several months, I surmise that her background is a lot like mine and a lot like that of many Americans. Nose to the grindstone, living each day, working to educate themselves and later, to provide for their families, they can’t always hop on a jet to visit or spend a year in other places, much as they might want to do so.
Your comment, whether intentional or not, was elitist, David. It wasn’t worthy of you.
I’m still a fan, by the way. You can’t be right all the time. I know that from personal experience.
Mark Daniels
[I regularly and irregularly blog here.]