Bill Both, US citizen, educator, and veteran married to a Canadian national and living in Terrace, BC near the Alaska panhandle.
What does the future hold as we face the 21st century? I believe the key lies with Africa. To secure Africa's future, the Developed World and the African Union need to cooperate in establishing a permanent African peacekeeping force to bring stability and an African Marshall Plan to enable Africa to grow and prosper.
As with the original Marshall Plan, this isn't a matter of largesse. By creating conditions essential for Europe's security and prosperity, the US provided for its own.
The Developed World can do the same with Africa but it lacks the needed political will. George Marshall and his cohort had a leg up on us in that regard. They had millions of American voters who had been to Europe and had seen its devastated condition first hand. These voters were thus fully engaged.
By contrast, few Westerners have been to Africa. Fewer still have been to places like Soweto or Inkandla. For most, Africa's troubles are abstractions.
One World, One Community will engage Westerners with Africa in an intimate way--through the best and brightest of our secondary school students.
We have already seen it done. Linda Hooper of Whitwell Middle School in rural southeast Tennessee and Erin Gruwell of Woodrow Wilson High School in urban southern California have both shown how whole schools and even communities can be transformed by an intimate understanding of the Holocaust.
More recently, President Clinton has highlighted the story of Maya Amoils and the NGO Help Other People Endure or H.O.P.E. that she and her fellow Cincinnati-area classmates have created. Working together, they have aroused their US community, raised hundreds of thousands of dollars, and transformed the life of an impoverished South African town.
If we provide funding for such an effort throughout the Developed World democracies, we can not only transform African communities, but also the hearts and minds of our best young people. We can involve them in their world and their government and prepare them for a century of struggle with the growing power of traditionally authoritarian China.
Defense Secretary Robert Gates, in a recent speech, highlighted the need for "having robust civilian capabilities available [that] could make it less likely that military force will have to be used in the first place, as local problems might be dealt with before they become crises."
"One World, One Community" isn't just the right thing to do, it's the required thing. In the words of George Marshall regarding the original Marshall Plan: "To be quite clear, this unprecedented endeavour will be neither sure nor easy. But there is no doubt whatever in my mind that if we decide to do this thing, we can do it successfully. And there is also no doubt in my mind that the whole world hangs in the balance."
His words ring propetically across the decades as we face the challenges of a new century.
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