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World Down Syndrome Day

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From The Publisher

PublisherFrom The Publisher
I think the Japanese must be the most cultured people on planet earth where their interpersonal behavior and traditions are concerned. This was the sense I gained upon reading the novel Shogun, by James Clavell. I actually read that novel twice, and the novel is about twelve hundred pages or more. I read it the second time on the instructions of Leroy Taegar, who insisted that I read it again, with an emphasis on understanding the role of the Jesuit, Father Alvito.
  
The most important point I want to make in this column is that Japan has a relatively small land area, and a large population. Japan is a very crowded place, but Wikipedia notes that, after Singapore, the Japanese have the lowest homicide rate in the world.
  
I didn’t take a single psychology course at Dartmouth, but the student who lived next door to me on my right, John Segelbaum, was a psych major. Segelbaum and I were not friends, but we were neighbours. In our few conversations, his psychology studies were often featured.
           
The study of psychology was a very big thing back there in the Sixties. Psychology concepts were all around you in the university environment. I am saying this so as to explain that, without taking a course, a college student would have known of the psychology experiments involving rats. The most fundamental of these experiments told you that when the space got tight, when things became crowded, the rats became more violent to each other. So it is with humans everywhere on earth, except in Japan.
           
The Japanese have developed a culture of such enormous respect for each other, and a culture of elaborate manners to go along with that respect, that their crowded conditions do not spark the amount of interpersonal animosity that we see in other societies.
           
One day in the weeks before I would leave Belize for America in 1965, my mother remarked pessimistically on my prospects because of the fact that I had no manners. Manners were one of the things I overlooked because of youth. Now in my grandfather days, on a daily basis I see what a powerful medicine some manners can be. Belize City experiences troublesome traffic congestion at certain “hot spots” during the course of each driving day. When drivers extend the smallest of courtesies to each other, both parties experience a small surge of well-being. On the other hand, as the newspaper columnist Niall Gillett so well described a few weeks ago, discourtesy rankles one when the source is another driver. It is worse when the source of the provocation is a crazy traffic bureaucracy seeking to gouge one at every twist and turn.
           
That said, I want to look at the fact that Japan, with the third largest economy in the world, which is a striking testament to the diligence, industry, brilliance, and drive of the Japanese people, is so much better equipped to deal with the cruel ravages of Friday’s earthquake than our Haitian brethren and sistren were last year.
           
On the other hand, beloved, the possibilities for nuclear catastrophe in Japan, as a consequence of the earthquake, are absolutely frightening. The Japanese use nuclear reactors as the source for much of their electricity. The irony of this is that the Japanese are the only people who have been the victims of nuclear energy, in the form of atomic bombs which the Americans dropped on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945.
   
Before the horrific national trauma of those two bombs, the Japanese had been one of the most militaristic people in the world. Their ancient samurai code of warrior’s honor was legendary, but after Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan “officially renounced its right to declare war.” (The quote is from Wikipedia.) And Japan, Nazi Germany’s most important and fearsome ally in World War II, is now a close ally of the same people the Japanese fought against seven decades ago – the British and the Americans, who have quickly sent material aid following Friday’s disaster.
           
In closing, I want to emphasize that this nuclear business is very serious business indeed, especially in the Middle East. If you have not read last weekend’s issue of Amandala completely, I urge you to look at page 38, where we reproduced a book review which originally appeared in The New York Times Book Review of March 6, 2011. The review is of Ron Rosenbaum’s HOW THE END BEGINS: The Road to a Nuclear World War III. The reviewer, Richard Rhodes, wrote in his first paragraph: “ …. in the old days humans lacked sufficient means to destroy themselves. The discovery, in 1938, of how to release nuclear energy changed all that. Humankind acquired the means of its own destruction. Even were we to succeed in eliminating our weapons of doomsday – one subject of HOW THE END BEGINS – we would still know how to build them. From our contemporary double millennium forward, the essential challenge confronting our species will remain how to avoid destroying the human world.”

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