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Why I think that the Wild West elements' next big discovery is Karma

Posted: 18 Aug 2021, 22:59
by Naga Tuma
David Gergen, a former Presidential Adviser to Nixon, Ford, Reagan, and Clinton, summarized for me this morning on TV what I had been thinking the last few days about the unraveling of the Wild West put in motion by its wild elements. He had to say that the credibility of the leadership in the White House is on the line. In addition, he stated that running the White House is complex.

That is where experience, which doesn't come easy, matters. He is one of those experienced analysts that I listen to closely when I get a chance. After all, he was an adviser to four former U.S. Presidents.

After I arrived in the U.S. years ago when Bill Clinton was President, one of the people I met early on in the University I went to was a British professor. During one of my conversations with the professor, the name of the international aid agency CARE came up. I do not recall what exactly prompted for the name to come up except having a faint memory about what help my country of origin had in order to come out of underdevelopment. After the name came up, I heard for the first time that CARE was also called crazy Americans running everywhere.

The professor was also cognizant that it takes money to build dams when I told him about the many rivers that the country has naturally. He is someone who took the time for a full-day trip with his friend to give me my first ever experience of seeing and touching snow. He is someone I had imagined working with on my graduate studies if I didn't later stumble upon a figure in a handbook authored by another professor and then approached him. It was a number showing earth's water resources quantified, which wasn't in my wildest imagination at the time.

Some other time in my then early days, I was standing with a graduate student American friend when some American undergraduate students at the same university were talking loudly so close to us. Overhearing one of them say "I don't care," the friend turned toward me and said with some level of desperation: "These frats." I did not know at the time what the term frat meant and didn't ask my friend its meaning at the spot. However, in response to my friend, I said: "I care." I understood the meaning of frats later and went on to register icare.org under my name only to find out that it was already taken.

Also during those days, an official in the International Student Office of the university would say to me that the American generation of that time was spoiled compared to those before them. When I asked why that was said, I got a mention of those in the 1960s that built a lot of infrastructure under harsher natural environments.

I bring up my encounters with these three individuals in those days with due respect to all of them. They confided in and shared with me their observations.

I bring up here these encounters and conversations reminded that they happened when David Gergen was a Presidential Adviser at the White House.

I can't imagine what contributory role his advisory then may have played into the credibility of the leadership today that is on the line as he observes from a distance.

As a passant observer, I am one of those who thought that Vice President Al Gore would succeed President Clinton to become the 43rd President of the U.S. The decision of the Supreme Court of the U.S. at the time was and remains to be counterintuitive to me.

Be that as it may, I have long wondered if Osama bin Laden would make the decision to attack the U.S. if Al Gore and a Democratic Administration were leading the U.S. I don't know if anyone can ever get a conclusive answer for this question unless there is a primary source of information that can be attributed to Bin Laden.

If there is a possibility that the attack would not have happened if Al Gore and a Democratic Administration were in charge of leading the U.S. wouldn't it be fair to question if the decision of the Supreme Court of the U.S. at the time may have contributed to, by some stretch of the imagination, the decision-making process of the man who ordered the attack?

History may have some answers to this question when historians do their professional works.

The Taliban that was complicit with Osama bin Laden's conflict with the U.S. is now back in power in Afghanistan. As a mere individual who wishes democracy enjoyed by any people in any State, including by the people of Afghanistan, I do not know how the people of Afghanistan can come to terms with both Malala and the Taliban at the same time. I am with Malala.

Here, I can't help asking what responsibilities the U.S. leadership in Afghanistan over the last twenty years, which has eventuated in the squaring off between the Taliban and Malala bears, metaphorically speaking. Just because of this squaring off, it seems to me that the Kabul moment is more than the Saigon moment. I am not sure what the late Senator McCain would say about it if he were alive. Even as he stood as a Statesman in the U.S., he was belligerent at one point to say that he can fly to anywhere he wanted to do so. Saigon said no and now Kabul appears to be saying you may fly to Afghanistan but you may not land and stay long in Afghanistan without the permission of the Taliban.

I don't know if there can be any solace with the possibility that the conflict that began under a Republican Administration twenty years ago can be deconflicted under a Democratic Administration twenty years later.

A few years ago, I bought a book authored by Hillary Clinton. While reading it, I came upon a theme that she may have thought to be virtuous in doing and getting it published, which I found repulsive to read. In the book, she admits to having a group of people around the Taliban, if I remember correctly, divided into two and fight each other. Having come across that theme in her book, I had to ask at a moment's notice should she wonder if she isn't a natural politician. In my book, virtue is not in having people divided to fight each other. It is in reconciling a divided people that fight each other.

In some cultures that I know and have heard about, the concept of Karma, ጩቡ፣ ግፍ, are prevalent. For a long time now, I have been looking for a word in the English language that is equivalent to any of these words: Karma, ጩቡ፣ ግፍ።

These are simple words that have profound meanings and historical implications. In short, they signify ingrained consciousness of what someone does or fails to do when one feels free that no one, including the almighty, is not watching.

If it is substantiated that an equivalent word for Karma, ጩቡ፣ ግፍ do not exist in the English language, how did an Indo-European claim of word origins miss such a profound concept in "Indo?"

Years ago in professional practice, I was approached by a colleague to participate in a local Toastmasters club in order to improve my speaking skills. I accepted it promptly. Having observed the manners of some of its members, I made a conscious decision to make my topics of speech about words and concepts that might remind them of their distant heritage that they might be unaware of before I made those speeches. One of them, which I thought would be an eye-opener, was the evolution of the word eye itself. I witnessed only another of them, the best of them, acknowledge a spontaneous original thought process at a moment's notice.

After I delivered several short speeches, the same colleague that had invited me to attend the club had the following to say: "You always have something new."

I didn't have anything new in those short speeches. I only talked about some words and concepts that exist in the languages and cultures that I know, which they hadn't captured through the English language and possibly British culture.

Because of that and other observations in different cultures, I think of the old days when the energetic young people go out hunting leaving behind the wiser older people at home. Learning the skills and crafts of surviving in the wilderness from what nature has to offer, they go back home to lecture the wise that they have gained better wisdom in the wilderness. They are conquerors of the wilderness for sure.

That is what Jeff Bezos did by going into space and coming back bearing his Blue Origin banner. I do not know where he sees the words Karma, ጩቡ፣ ግፍ in his origin, if they are missing in it, why they are missing, or if he thinks of what he sees as his origin predates these words and failed to incorporate them in it. That is for him to explain without making a simple logical error of chronology.

Granted that no logical error will remain uncorrected, I imagine that that correction is the Wild West element's new discovery.

Should these elements fail to correct such simple logical errors, I can only be a witness to the height of their hypocrisy.

Such a community of cadres would fail the litmus test to criticize communism.

I was a very young man when I observed how cadres under a socialist government in Ethiopia made inaccurate reports about a tree-planting project on a widely recognized hill in a rural Kebele in which I grew up. I was sent to plant trees as a substitute for my late dad. I was enthusiastic about it and tried to give it all of my youthful energy. I imagined the hill, which was already green, getting greener down the road. Then, we were told that we had done enough planting and were sent back home. I thought that we did less than I had expected, even as a young man.

That was one of my negative impressions of a socialist government administration in Ethiopia at an early stage in life.

If I observe as an adult that a community of cadres tampers with and falsifies productivity data, I can't help asking what makes this kind of communism different from that kind of communism. If the business enterprises of the Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, and so on of the world are run by a community of cadres, what makes such enterprises different from the State-run enterprises under the discredited socialist system. Such characters may report about their bounties to the American people and the world at large without disclosing that they are run by a community of cadres. Does that make them any less than communist enterprises of their own?

So, doesn't David Gergen's observation that running the White House is complex and that the credibility of the current Administration is on the line, that the U.S. is having the Taliban and Malala square off in Afghanistan after involvement in its leadership for twenty years, that some Americans were expressing desperation about some in its future generation when David Gergen himself was a Presidential Adviser at the White House, that one of its forerunner conquerors bears the banner origin while missing such original ideas and concepts like Karma, that some of its forerunner enterprises are run by a community of cadres while criticizing communism all boil down to the greatest hypocrisy of all time? If it does boil down to hypocrisy, Karma must be the new discovery by this community of cadres.