Is Anyone from Tunisia, Egypt, Jordan, or Yemen Reading This?

If they are, I think I have something to say

A Contemporary Military Map of the battle of RI. Library of Congress ID g3772n.ar300400. Public Domain.

There's always a tendency to speak only of current examples, but the great democracies of the Western world had centuries of, often very bloody, legal and political history leading to their current status, a history that the Islamic world does not have. They also have a culture that held certain things as sacred, certain non-biblical things in fact, that the Islamic world did not hold to.

Instead, we see in the Islamic world a great desire to keep Islam in the government, even as separation of church and state is necessary, and a great desire for a morality and justice that Feudalism long ago hardened Europes heart against. We see in the Islamic world a desire at once for freedom and order, at once for individual and group dignity, and we see fights within society that must be resolved.

As such, I wanted to share the story of a former democracy, one that was absorbed in to America in 1776, its traditions and system destroyed in favor of the federal constitution. A democracy created by a pastor, a Puritan pastor, with freedom of conscience for all and a work ethic that made its small, rocky-soiled state an early center of industry and commerce in America. That democracy is Providence Plantations.

The pastors name was Roger Williams. He grew up the son of a wise and just merchant and trader, who gave to the poor in life and in his will. His home parish in London was the sight of great religious tumult, including the burning at stake of many puritan martyrs who died for nothing more then their belief in God. Graduating from Cambridge with a degree in theology and great life experience, Roger Williams headed across the seas.

He may well have been driven out, as he was already at that time quite controversial, and in 1630 he began his mission to the puritans of New England, only to find just as much controversy in America. Among the places he preached the longest and loudest was the town of Salem, which if it had fully received him, might have averted its horrendous infamy for burning withces at stake 60 years later. Salem denied him, and thus Salem carried its shame, and still does to this day.

Salem denied him so thoroughly that he was about to be deported back to England, at which time he fled southwest, to the lands of the Narragansett Indians. There he befriended many, and was given the gift of land. He named it Providence, in honor and thanks towards God. In later years, the colony would repay the kindness of the Narragansett by housing Quakers and Jews fleeing form their own persecution, thus demonstrating the true refuge, forgiveness, justice and charity of Christ.

In 1643 he headed back to England to acquire a charter for his colony. The toes he stepped on long ago forgotten, the English granted it to him, and he incorporated three towns, Providence the capital, Newport, and Portsmouth. He also, on the way there, wrote a book on the Indians he knew, titled "Key into the Languages of America," granting him respect on his authority for perhaps the first time in his life.

He was not unknown to commerce, starting afterwards a Indian trading post at Cocumscussoc, but when the needs of his colony called him, he gave it up, selling it likely at a loss in 1651 in order to head back to England to have his bastion of freedoms charter confirmed. Thus he showed, at once, a skill with Mammon, and a willingness to disregard it for what was more important. He actually failed, but his fellow John Clarke succeeded, gaining a full and correct charter by 1663, while he handled important family business that held him back until 1654.

Unfortunately King Phillips War (1675) did see his colony burned to the ground, but he also lived to see it rebuilt. He stayed a preacher always, and kept his colony a free refuge always, open to all religious beliefs, and all religious debate. The example he set and the sheep he led would become the tolerant, but comparatively pious, religious traditions of modern America, even though his democracy was later swallowed up.

Samuel Slater, in 1790, built the first successful cotton textile mill in America at Blackstone River. Manufacturing would grow more rapidly in Rhode Island then almost any other American colony. The people of Rhode Island kept that free spirit alive, striking against unfair merchants in 1783 and refusing to participate in the war of 1812, and did away with all slavery in its limits voluntarily under the State Emancipation Act of 1784. Thus they let their religion, true religion (Isaiah 51), guide them as their hearts and law were free!

Sources:

http://www.rogerwilliams.org/biography.htm

http://www.rootsweb.ancestry.com/~rigenweb/history.html

The Shortage of a Critical Resource

Picture of a Mosquito Net Tent, public domain byWikimedia user Malte

With all the attention on Haiti, there has been a tendency to forget other human tragedies, including one that takes more lives every year then the Port-Au-Prince earthquake took once.

According to Amazon.com, a Mosquito net manufactured by Coleman can be purchased retail for 15 dollars over the internet, and no doubt even cheaper in bulk, but millions in Africa die ever year, including a child every 30 seconds according to Nothing But Nets, for want of a Mosquito net. Stretched over a year (2*60*24*365) that equals an absurd death toll of 1 million children, just that age group.

If any country should have Malaria, the Southeastern United States would be an ideal infection site. Hot, muggy swamps, massive populations of mosquitos, and vast stretches of underused lands, but somehow with our many resources, industries, cities, railways and factories, we have paved a path away from such ordeals from the sweat of our brow, the nerve of our spirit, and the cleverness of our mind. But in Africa, something that you or I could buy for not more then a meal at a restaurant is unavailable... to save children.

In this perverse world, a man is valued below a meal at a diner. But here's the other thing, can people from all over the world worry every second of every day about stuff happening on the other side of the earth? And just, exactly, how did Africa become so perverse and cruel to its inhabitants? Wasn't it where humanity originated? How did the Southeastern US, of all places, with its little more then 400 years of history under its current inhabitants, outpace a land with a several thousand year headstart?

Those are very complicated questions, and I am not asking them to discourage you from giving or caring. And, by the way, some (though not all) of the answer can, possibly, be traced to your own ancestors, if you are of White, Hispanic or Arab descent, your ancestors may have been the slave traders who ruined Africas economy by draining it of people at a ridiculous rate and destroying productive industry to instead fund and establish as business one of the most bizarre and horrifying of human cruelties, and even if they weren't, they have aided and abetted the society that did. Instead, I am asking these questions to make a point.

They need nets, but even more then this they need the industry to make their own nets. If you wish to support charity, also support free trade and getting the word out there on a need for an African renaissance, so that someday, just maybe, when all their troubles are through and our African friends hold good steady jobs at the mosquito net factory or the steel mill, Africa can help somebody else.

"Dead Aid" - A must read

Photo courtesy of Fanny Schertzer under GNU License 1.2

This article, by Heather Wilheim of Real Clear World, is a must-read for anyone interested in the slightly painful but very important subject of Africa. Although I feel a little funny writing a post about an article about a book, the advantage of this venue is that you can comment on it, and this particular article can easily stand on it's own two feet as a thesis-driven and successful argument without the accompanying book.

A few excerpts:

"One classic aid scenario Moyo outlines is the “micro-macro paradox,” which goes like this: an earnest Silicon Valley billionaire sends hundreds of thousands of mosquito nets to Africa, promptly putting the local mosquito net maker out of business—and, by extension, his ten workers and their 150 dependents. “A short-term efficacious intervention may have few discernible, sustainable long-term benefits,” Moyo writes. “Worse still, it can unintentionally undermine whatever fragile chance for sustainable development may already be in play.” In other words, that Britney Spears t-shirt, donated from good-hearted Westerners, may just put an African weaver out on the street."

"'Indeed,' Moyo writes, 'one could argue that the reason why Zimbabwe’s Mugabe has lasted so long is because he has been propped up by massive foreign aid receipts.'"

"As Moyo puts it, 'If other countries around the developing world have done it sans aid (generated consistent growth, raised incomes and rescued billions from the brink of poverty) why not Africa? Remember that just thirty years ago Malawi, Burundi and Burkina Faso were economically ahead of China on a per capita income basis. A dramatic turnaround is always possible.'"

Whether you agree with it or not, it makes many unique yet strangely common-sensical points almost never heard in the Africa undebate. The article, largely because the book is the same way, can be slightly over judgemental at times ("Bob Geldof wants to send money to Africa “even if it doesn’t work” because he doesn’t have to live with the results"), but otherwise is a nearly flawless rebuttal to the American orthodoxy that Aid = Good Charity. Perhaps we should consider focusing more on our own poor, who we clearly understand better.

Perhaps most damning of all to the African aid crowd is the simple fact (this part's mine) that the nations, in the developing world, which received almost no foreign aid (China, India, Eastern Europe, the Former USSR) are now the best off by far, to the point where they now attract more fear and insecurity then sympathy, and have production levels approaching the wealthiest developing nations. I suppose being an enemy of the United States has it's benefits.