Sports tragedies

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about the threat to women’s athletics that Title IX poses, especially as it relates to policies around permitting transgendered individuals to compete with women.  And for both men and women, boys and girls, I have been a lifelong advocate for the benefits of participating in athletics.

Participation in sports promotes teamwork, discipline, promotes physical health habits and respect for your body, and forges lifelong friendships.  It teaches perseverance, resilience and how to perform under stress.  It often keeps kids from engaging in other, riskier behaviors.  A few years ago, when the Chicago Teachers Union went on strike in the late summer, football coaches urged them to settle---if kids weren’t on the football field, they said, they would start losing them to gangs.

But athletics are not entirely risk free.

College athletic programs in Chicago suffered three devastating losses in recent months, and two in the same program.   In January, Northwestern University lost Jordan Hankins, a talented sophomore on the women’s basketball team to suicide.  In March, a member of the men’s crew team at Northwestern University drowned in a canal where the team was practicing in a tragic accident when he fell overboard into the cold water of the North Shore Canal.  The circumstances of Mohammed Ramzan’s death are still under investigation.   And last week, a student volunteer at Wheaton College was killed when he was struck by a hammer at a track and field meet.  That incident is also under investigation.  Two out of those three deaths will likely involve litigation.

Football, of course, has come under scrutiny in recent years because of the residual effects of head injuries that have shown up in former NFL players.   Last year’s film Concussion raised public awareness regarding head injuries.   Schools, programs and the NFL are doing research, changing rules and coaching techniques and looking to technologies to make the game safer.  Despite these efforts, high school football participation in the sport has declined nationwide.   But football isn’t the only sport that is under scrutiny.   Soccer also has high rates of head trauma, and incidents of concussion in soccer and hockey are higher than in the men’s versions. 

In Chicago, we have become numb to the daily litany of news about youths being gunned down in gang and drug related activity or in the crossfire.   We assume that when we send our kids out to an athletic field, they are relatively safe.  These three tragic deaths of young people coming so close together are unrelated.  But they are a message.  We need to do more in every sport to keep them safe, mentally and physically.    These three deaths occurred in “safe” sports—basketball, crew, and track and field.  What parent could ever imagine that their son would be killed at a supervised track and field meet at a Christian college in a leafy suburb of Chicago?  There couldn’t possibly be a safer place for a young person to be.  But this tragic death happened, and shouldn’t have.  

A group that I have been following is Smart Teams (smart-teams.org), a not-for-profit dedicated to youth sports safety and best practices.  It has a knowledgeable team of contributors that advocate for youth sports leveraging science, medicine, and best practices, to keep kids physically safe and to rid sports of physically, emotionally, or sexually abusive coaches.  I urge my readers to follow this organization (@SmartTeams) and its contributors on social media and to contribute financially if you are able. 

In our tumultuous society, sports can be a real anchor for our young people.  But we need to make it safer, and that’s not just limited to football.    These three terrible tragedies are telling us that more needs to be done, and I applaud the work of the professionals associated with Smart Teams for their part in keeping youth sports  a truly “safe space.”

A World in Disarray

The world is a mess.  No matter on what side of the great divide in American politics you reside, there appears to be great consensus that something has gone awry, or so says Richard Haass, President of the Council on Foreign Relations and former George HW Bush advisor in his new book, “A World In Disarray.”  In remarks before the Chicago Council on Global Affairs, Mr. Haass said he hoped that his next planned book won’t be entitled “A World In Chaos,” but the “arrows are pointed in the wrong direction.”

Things looked quite different twenty-five years ago.  The collapse of the Soviet Union ushered in an era of hope.  The superpower tension that brought us to the brink of nuclear annihilation in 1962 suddenly relaxed.  The apogee of the World Order 1.0 was probably reached in 1991 when a united coalition of countries successfully repelled the annexation of the sovereign country of Kuwait by Saddam Hussein.  Brent Scowcroft envisioned a world in which, “…a new era, freer from the threat of terror, stronger in the pursuit of justice, and more secure in the quest for peace.  An era in which the nations of the world, East and West, North and South, can prosper and live in harmony.”   People spoke of a “New World Order” and “The End of History.” 

From today’s perspective, all that appears to have been hopelessly naïve.  A few commentators pithily predicted in 1990 that we would someday yearn for the good old days of the Cold War.  It appears that vision may have come to pass.  The world has passed from the bi-polar world of the Cold War to a largely unipolar one, and into one where several powers are once again competing for power and influence.   On top of that, we have nonstate actors that are wreaking havoc.

Under World Order 1.0, countries were more or less free to do what they wished as long as it was done within their own borders.  The classic view of order is “a respect for sovereignty,” and an aversion to “the use of military force to achieve foreign policy aims.”  The order that followed the Second World War (even though dominated by the Cold War) was enabled largely because the defeated Axis Powers were transformed into functioning democracies rather than punished, as they had been after WWI.

 But now,  merely respecting sovereignty is not sufficient as problems within a state’s boundaries have a way of leaking out: pollution and contribution to global warming, refugee crises, and pandemics are just some of the examples of problems that threaten to spill across borders.  He calls for World Order 2.0, in which the world recognizes that it is permissible to intervene when such issues present themselves.

Haass argues that the Cold War brought with it its own kind of discipline, which has since eroded.  American leadership and prestige has also been diminished by its intervention in Iraq and its precipitous withdrawal, its action in Libya without concurrence from Russia or China, and its inability to show internal discipline with its dysfunctional politics and deficit and debt problems.    Finally, he sees the unenforced “red line” with Syria’s use of chemical weapons as a terrible blunder.  A more chaotic world has been worsened by U.S. policy missteps.

Haass does not present an optimistic view of where this is all headed.  He does not see the Israel/Palestinian problem to be ripe for a solution, nor does he see peace breaking out anywhere in the Middle East anytime soon.  As to nonproliferation, he also takes a dim view, “If  a state is determined to  go nuclear, it is very difficult to stop them.”  Likewise, he is not entirely hopeful about the European project, “In a span of little more than two years, Europe has gone from being the most integrated and stable region in the world, the region most resembling ‘the end of history’ ideal, to one that appears to risk being overwhelmed by history returning with a vengeance.’ And while he does not lay all blame at the feet of the United States, he asserts that we made errors of both omission and commission that have made things worse in a number of different theaters.

Haass’s work is indispensable reading for those that wish to come to a greater understanding of how our world is evolving.   It is short and digestible.  It has its flaws—it all but ignores South America and gives short shrift to the challenges posed by radical Islam.  Yet, his work methodically frames our foreign policy challenges in a largely nonpartisan way.

I highly recommend A World in Disarray, but it should be read with a large glass of wine.

Lesbian bars

Krista Burton wrote an unusual essay that appeared  in the Sunday’s New York Times entitled, “I Want My Lesbian Bars Back.”  In it, Burton bemoans the fact that so many lesbian bars have gone out of business.  “I love hanging out with my people, but these days I hardly ever go to lesbian bars,” she whines.  “I want clear, dedicated spaces where queers hang out, places that sneering teenagers can drive past and secretly wonder about.”  She acknowledges that society has become more accepting, “But there is still a need for queers to have a community with spaces of their own.”

Just as astonishingly, over 50 years since the passage of the Civil Rights Act and over 60 years since Brown v. Board of Education, African American students at a number of different universities are demanding—and getting--- segregated dorms for blacks.  Black students at Oberlin College recently sent a letter to the president of the college demanding, among other things, that the college provide them with a “blacks only” recreation center.  California State pushed this concept even further and held a “blacks only” retreat, as did Columbia University.

So after a multigenerational battle to achieve acceptance and mainstreaming (more recently for gays), it seems that some LGBT and African Americans are waxing nostalgic for the good old days of separatism. In one of the scenes in the movie Hidden Figures, one of the African American mathematicians has to take long breaks because the “coloreds only” women’s bathroom is way on the other side of the NASA complex.   Is that the world that they want to return to?

I am not wholly unsympathetic to this desire.  It is part of human nature to want to commune with people that share common interests, characteristics, and problems.   This need can manifest itelf in different ways—both informally and formally.   “Girls night out,” or “Boys night out,” rarely raises an eyebrow, even today.  Many professional and trade organizations have women’s groups.  One of the professional organization to which I belong has both a women’s group and a group devoted to networking activities for young people—a Next Gen group.  The Booth School of Business, for instance, has an African American Business Association and even a Pakistan Club. These associations and clubs do address certain segments of people with certain commonalities. 

But the new push by some African Americans for separate facilities in universities and the opinion piece by Ms. Burton raises certain issues.   While these associations are formed out of a common bond, they are also implicitly or explicitly exclusionary.  To what extent are we ok with them and who gets to exercise this exclusionary privilege?    To what extent may we exclude by race, gender or sexual preference?   Does the preference always flow one way?   Almost all the bastions of white male bonding have been torn down.  Country clubs and eating clubs no longer exclude by race or gender (although many still are at least implicitly exclusionary by religion—there are Catholic country clubs and Jewish country  clubs).  May only perceived “victim classes” have their own places and clubs?  A liberal friend of mine was surprised and a bit disdainful to learn that my Catholic parish still had a men’s club (although I am sure that many of his friends belong to Jewish country clubs), as he saw that as a vestige of archaic patriarchy.   What makes it ok for a lesbian to yearn for the good old days of lesbian bars but if a man rues the day they permitted women to become members of his country club, he is derided as some sort of knuckle-dragging misogynist.   And now that we have learned that mortality rates for white middle aged males have contracted recently (mostly as a result of stress, alcohol and drug use and suicide),  perhaps they now qualify for their own victim class and can return to their historical segregated communal groups.  

But I am not too rigid about this.  I was generally supportive when Milwaukee introduced the concept of a limited number of schools for black males (although it got shot down by the courts) and I believe that HBCU’s still have a role to play and a place in our society.  I have been supportive and helpful to the Network of Women and the Minority Business Development Agency Capital Center at our local business trade organizations.  But the demands of black students for a separate dorms  and rec centers and the desire of LGBT folks for their own bars smacks a little of wanting to have it both ways—of wanting to be both mainstream and segregated and just picking and choosing when it suits them,  without the reciprocal privileges offered to people outside their group. 

It would be a perverse thing if university presidents started overturning Brown v. Board of Education piecemeal.  Returning to lesbian bars and segregated dorms are, I think, a bridge too far.

Danger

We are in the most dangerous period since the 1930’s.  One misstep could threaten the lives of tens of thousands, maybe more.  It is not inconceivable that within the next few days, the world could face its greatest conflagration since WWII.  Only this time, it could unfold over hours, not months, as it did following Germany’s invasion of Poland in 1939.

No shots have been fired as of this writing, but the Carl Vinson and a battle group are steaming towards the Korean peninsula.  Kim Jung Un has not conducted a nuclear test (his 6^th) but continues to threaten to do so.  Dear Leader celebrated the founding of the DPRK with a military parade that showed off new ballistic missile hardware.  It tested a submarine based missile launch last year and while there are doubts as to whether he could actually hit the continental US with an ICBM, he is only a few years away from having that ability in the best case scenario.

Here’s why I believe it’s different this time:

·         We’ve tried everything over decades.  Bill Clinton negotiated a deal under which the North Koreans pocketed the concessions and continued on unimpeded.  George W. Bush was too preoccupied with Iraq to do much of anything.  President Obama, not a confrontational sort anyway, tried “strategic patience”  (which, like “leading from behind” is a meaningless, flaccid phrase).  A negotiated solution is no longer available.  If Donald Trump attempted that, he would appear gullible on the world stage.  A Chinese call for a freeze was promptly and justifiably swept away by the Trump Administration.

·         The North Koreans have capability beyond nuclear.   The cyberattack on Sony and cybertheft from major banks have given us a clue about their capabilities in this realm.  Our power grid and perhaps other systems remain vulnerable and the North Koreans know this.  North Korea also has the biological and chemical capabilities that it can marry up with its missile technology and threaten our bases and our allies in the region.   As David Sanger reported in the New York Times a few weeks ago, we have already been at war with Korea for a couple of years in cyberspace.  Many of their missile failures are attributable to U.S. efforts at sabotage.

·         President Obama discontinued our two theater war policy.  From the end of the Second World War to 2010, the military policy of the United States was to maintain readiness to fight two major conflicts simultaneously.   So, for instance, if war broke out on the Korean peninsula, we would still have sufficient troop strength to deter the Russians in Europe.  Obama ended this policy, and we can only fight a major war in one theater (if that, given the Obama depletion of the military).  We have Putin threatening in Europe, troops engaged in  Syria and Afghanistan.   And do not discount the possibility that the North Koreans and Iranians are acting in concert, at least at some level.   With Trump promising to bolster our military, Kim Jung Un may calculate that he will never again have an opportunity like this to face down the United States.

·         The U.S. is as divided as it has been since the Civil War.  In a speech that I attended that was given a few years ago by Dick Gephardt, he noted that what made American democracy special was that election losers accept the outcome.   This is no longer necessarily the case.  The post-election riots in Portland, the “resist” movement, the claim that President Trump is “illegitimate” and that the “election was hacked,” and yesterday’s riots at Berkeley attest to the erosion of our nonviolent transition of power.   The general rule that Americans will rally around the president during wartime is no longer a given.  Kim Jung Un likely sees this condition as an important weakness to exploit.

Most disconcerting is that actual war may be the most rational choice for both of these actors.  John McCain’s statement that Kim Jung Un is a “crazy fat kid,” is wildly incorrect (and unnecessarily provocative).   Just as Obama mischaracterized ISIS as “not Islamic,” the assumption that Kim Jung Un is not a rational actor is likely false.  He may be very rational, given his reality as he sees it.  He is not interested in his people.  He is only interested in perpetuating the iron rule of his family over his country.  He has also seen what happens to dictators that don’t have nuclear weapons.   Muammer Gaddafi, who voluntarily gave up his WMD program, was a particularly poignant lesson for him.   Because past efforts have demonstrated that the regime is willing to cheat, and because he has little else to leverage, Kim Jung Un will never negotiate away his nuclear forces.   Unfortunately, his rationality clashes directly and irresolvably  with America’s.  We have run out of time.  With North Korea’s program nearly able to deliver an ICBM to America, the status quo is no longer acceptable.  Adding to the direct risk is the possibility that North Korea may sell nuclear devices to Iran or some other bad actor.  The Trump Administration cannot sign on to another deal that either preserves the status quo or permits North Korea to cheat once again.

I do not have high hopes for a diplomatic solution, and that is because a permanent solution would not be palatable to the North Koreans.    A bribe for a freeze of the program should not be acceptable to us.  We have already done that.  Any deal that addresses North Korea’s nuclear program must also address their conventional arsenal.   An important aspect of the tension on the Korean peninsula is the North Korean artillery that is trained on Seoul.  Most analysts estimate that civilian casualties would be in the 50,000 range even without a nuclear detonation.   That reality couple with the risk of Chinese assistance has permitted North Korea to adopt a “porcupine strategy,” i.e., you may eat us but it will be so costly to you that you won’t want to.

But the cost curve has shifted.  The cost of doing nothing has gone up dramatically and appears to be rising daily.

Sadly, the elements of an acceptable negotiated solution do not seem to be there.   The odds of a military confrontation are very high.  If the 20^th century taught us anything, it is that war in Asia is a tough, grinding thing.  Asians fight stubbornly.    We have not won a decisive victory in that theater since 1945 and all of the war gaming, scenario planning and modelling that the Pentagon has done says that this one will be the toughest since then.

One of the New Sheriffs in Town

Take a good look.   This is what a woman in a world leadership role  looks like.

While Hillary Clinton is busy running around still blaming misogyny and the Russians for her defeat in November, Nikki Haley is standing up and reasserting America’s moral authority in the world.  She is standing in stark contrast with the women of the prior administration and the prior administration itself.

President Obama spent much of his time in office reducing America’s role in world affairs, offering mea culpas for America’s sins and faults on the world stage.  And of course he filled his inner circle with people that reflected his worldview, like Eric Holder (“America is a nation of cowards”).    Obama’s view was summed up in a single sentence, “there have been times when America has shown arrogance and been dismissive, even derisive.”   Rarely, if ever, did we hear Obama or his inner circle extol America’s virtues.  There was little talk of a “city on a hill” or “the last best hope on earth.”  The word “freedom” and “liberty” rarely appeared in Obama speeches.

And while he did this consistently through eight years of his administration, our adversaries watched and noticed.    The world noticed when John Kerry cartoonishly announced, “This is what change looks like,” upon the opening of the U.S. embassy in Cuba, with Castro mocking him and announcing that nothing will change in Cuba as they continued to beat the Ladies in White.  The world noticed when Obama turned his back on freedom loving Iranians during the Green Revolution.   The world noticed when Russia marched into a sovereign nation and America failed to lead a concerted effort to repulse the aggression.  And every bad actor took note when Obama drew a “red line” on the use of WMD in Syria and then failed to act, a catastrophic choice that had far reaching ramifications, and even had Obama supporters perplexed.  

Last week changed all that.  A vital player in this drama is Nikki Haley, and she is doing a spectacular job of beginning to articulate and reassert America’s guiding principles.

Haley’s most important job is to articulate new American foreign policy principles for Donald Trump.  

Her first articulated principle is that the UN no longer exists primarily to turn Israel into a piñata.

And last week, she expressed an important  doctrine---THE USE OR THREAT TO USE WEAPONS OF MASS DESTRUCTION WILL CARRY IMMEDIATE CONSEQUENCES, WHETHER THEY ARE USED AGAINST A REGIME’S OWN PEOPLE OR THOSE OF OTHER SOVEREIGN NATIONS.   

Haley has been firm, steadfast, and unequivocal.  She announced that the United States would act unilaterally and quickly to respond to the use of WMD by Syria.  And just as important, she quickly rebuffed Bolivia’s attempt to have the UN Security Council meet in closed session, “Any country that chooses to defend the atrocities of the Syrian regime will have to do so in full public view, for the world to hear.”

Her firmness contrasts starkly with her predecessor,  Samantha Power.  I hold Power in particular contempt.   She piously excoriated the United States in her book (which I read cover to cover): A Problem from Hell: America in the Age of Genocide, in which she claimed that the U.S. was historically slow and timid in its reaction to instances of genocide in the 20^th century.   When she assumed the role of U.N. ambassador there were initial fears that she would lead us to intervene in multiple internecine squabbles across the globe.  Instead she stood mostly mute as ISIS rampaged the Middle East and radical Islam waged genocide against Christendom and the Judaic world.   She will be most remembered for her vote to withhold the U.S. veto of the UN demand to end Israeli settlements.

Nikki Haley has a difficult job of providing the moral and intellectual substance behind the foreign policy of a maverick president and articulating it both to the U.S. and the world.  It appears that she will be unveiling it piece by piece.

Since 9/11, we have grown a bit complacent in our acceptance of weapons of mass destruction.  The nonproliferation regime is fraying.   It’s bad enough that Pakistan has a nuclear arsenal, but now North Korea’s is growing and they have made overt threats to us.  With the failure of the Obama/Kerry/Rice deal with Putin with respect to chemical weapons in Syria, we now have reason to be skeptical about the viability of the nuclear deal with Iran.

Samantha Power may have written the book on genocide, but Nikki Haley is doing something about it.  I predict that she may turn out to be the best U.N. ambassador since Jeanne Kirkpatrick.   And I also predict that when things don’t roll her way, she won’t be blaming misogyny.

Austerlitz

Stark, jarring, but subdued, Sergei  Loznita’s documentary,  Austerlitz is a must see for anyone that seeks to comprehend the Holocaust and its impact on the Western world.  It ranks next to Son of Saul as an important film work for serious thinkers and writers about that horrific event.

Austerlitz is appropriately filmed entirely in black and white, and echoes of two previous works—Memory of the Camps, the documentary film co-directed by Alfred Hitchcock and narrated by Trevor Howard that contained the raw black and white footage of film taken during and after the liberation of the camps.  It also is reminiscent of the Nazi propaganda film Triumph of the Will, by Leni Riefenstahl.

Contrasting with its black and white format, the film opens on what appears to be a beautiful, sunny summer day with throngs of visitors and tourists streaming into the sites of the concentration camps at Dachau and Sachsenhausen, in Germany, just as if they were entering into the San Diego Zoo or the Art institute of Chicago.   They are young and old, from a variety of countries, some sporting New York Yankees baseball caps, wearing t-shirts with “Jurassic Park,” or, almost obscenely,  “Cool Story, Bro.”  As the throng of visitors stream past the wrought iron gate like a river, marked with the ominous words “Arbeit Macht Frei,” one cannot help but think that over 70 years ago, innocent people just like these tourists similarly streamed into the camps but never left.

This unusual film has no narration at all (except the occasional docents conducting guided tours of the facility of torment and death), no dialogue, no music, and no historical footage or background,  but consists solely of an eye level view of the visitors to the camp (now a museum).   You are simply provided the perspective that a security guard might have on an ordinary day at the camp/museum grounds.  Most of the background noise is the shuffling of feet and murmuring of the crowds.  You are a people watcher in this solemn place.  You spend much of the film’s 90 minutes observing the facial emotional reactions of the visitors to this monument to inhumanity.  People wander through the barracks, on the grounds, and in a room where one assumes hideous human experiments were performed.   The only sparse narration is provided by the docents providing guided tours that you overhear that are punctuated by words like “extermination,” “screams,” “no hope.”

While most of the visitors treat the camp with the solemnity the site demands, there are some—especially some of the younger people that act with irreverence.   Several times visitors have to be reminded of places they are not to step, or where it is appropriate and not appropriate to each lunch (begging the question of who could actually have sufficient appetite to eat in this place).   Of course, everyone has a camera or a video recorder and several people are taking selfies, the act of which seems to defile this hallowed place.  Some sequences rattle the soul.  One fellow has his girlfriend take a picture of him in front of the large poles where prisoners were strung up and tortured as he crosses his arms over his head almost in mockery.   In another sequence that makes you grimace, a young woman has her boyfriend take her smiling photo in front of the crematorium. 

Still, there are other sequences—and mostly they are focused on some of the older visitors—where the people are appropriately horrified and revulsed by this monument to industrialization of death that the Nazi regime perpetrated.   You can see the anguished looks on their faces as they attempt to process the magnitude of the Nazi horror.

Austerlitz is a unique and powerful film.  It is meant to be a warning.  Yes, young people are often oblivious to propriety and demands of solemnity, but the film clearly that time has diminished the human horror of the events that occurred at this place, especially for the millenials.   As the Holocaust survivors die off, and their firsthand accounts of the Nazi genocide begin to fall silent, sacred places like Sachsenhausen become as emotionally remote to the next generation as a trip to the mummy exhibit at the Museum of Natural History is to us.  The “never again,” cry has gone unheeded since in Cambodia, Rwanda, Srebrenica, and now Iraq and Syria by ISIS, although those horrors were not on the magnitude of the Third Reich. 

Almost as if deigned by Providence, a cold, blustery, miserable March rain began to fall as I left the theater.   I pulled my cap down and tugged my coat tightly around my hunched shoulders and walked the three blocks alone, silently, in the chilly, dark mist to my car and wondered whether and when this may happen again.