Thousands of Cups of Tea

It was January 2009 and I had been reading the NY Times Best-Seller, Three Cups of Tea, after seeing it's author interviewed on CBS Sunday Morning, a show I watched religiously on Sunday mornings. I was living in Indiana and his story so inspired me, that I began raising funds to send to the Central Asia Institute. Here's what I wrote (February 4, 2009) on a friend's Facebook timeline:

I just finished reading "Three Cups of Tea" about Greg Mortensen and the Central Asia Institute. They are combating terrorism in upper Pakistan and at the Afghan border by educating impoverished children that would otherwise attend madrassas (basically becoming jihadists that hate America). 

We can support a teacher's annual salary over there for just $260, so I've plegded my $10 and I'm looking for 25 friends to match that. Are you in?

I was all-in, you could say. Inspired by this man's work, I wanted to do what little I could to help his organization educate, primarily girls, in remote parts of the Himalayas. I was even enlisting my friends' help.

According to Wikipedia, his first book "stayed on the New York Times bestseller list for 220 weeks [and] has been published in 47 languages." It was followed by a sequel, Stones Into Schools, which I also read. I'm surprised to find that I didn't blog about any of this in 2009 or thereafter, because it turned into a scandal.

In April 2011, CBS News which had introduced me to Greg and his book, did a damning expose on it's "60 Minutes" program. It interviewed Jon Krakauer who'd written a conspiracy theory claiming all of Greg's first book was a lie, that he didn't stumble into a remote village and share three cups of tea with tribal elders after failing to reach the summit of K2. The program that aired in 2011 called into question everything I believed about Mortenson and the Central Asia Institute, who I'd given my money. It even led to a criminal investigation in Montana which did NOT result in charges, but did show some impropriety. That investigation led Mortenson to repay $1M to CAI. He had been a bad manager of the non-profits money, but he wasn't a thief or a liar.

My curiosity over this story led me to recently Google Mortenson and Three Cups of Tea. What I found really surprised me. Not only was Krakauer a crack and just trying to get rich on Mortenson's coattails, but CBS News hadn't even done their due diligence to verify his claims. Not once did Steve Kroft or his crack team of journalists travel to these schools located in remote mountain villages and talk to the natives!

https://vimeo.com/86945374 (video link)

My Internet search this morning led me to a new documentary, 3,000 Cups of Tea, by Jennifer Jordan and Jeff Rhoads. It attempts to tell the real story of what happened and show evidence of the success of the schools that Greg Mortenson founded. The documentary team actually does the journalistic work that CBS News failed to do by going into the schools and into the villages to talk to the beneficiaries of Greg's dynamic work. They talk to men in the village where Greg shared his "three cups of tea" and documented on film their eyewitness accounts of seeing him stumble across the bridge fresh off his K2 climb. The film also calls into question the journalistic integrity of the American media and how irresponsible they have become in telling people's stories or getting to the truth.

Greg's reputation was nearly shattered in April 2011 by Steve Kroft and his colleagues at CBS News. I found it greatly ironic that the same news source who introduced me to him and his work was the same who attempted to shatter his reputation two years later. Were they THAT afraid of having egg on their face? Well, guess what!

You can learn more about the 2016 documentary film here. I can't wait to watch the whole thing! I'm surprised that CBS News hasn't done a second follow-up to apologize to Mortenson and the CAI, but where are the ratings in that?

Black Lives Matter. Period.

#blacklivesmatter

It's sad that we have to have a campaign with the above hashtag. But it's sadder, still, that we see black lives snuffed out on a semi-regular basis on social and other media. The recently released footage of the Castillo murder by Minnesota cops comes to mind. Traffic stops of gun-carrying white people don't go down like that!

I fear that some of the backlash to the Black Lives Matter campaign is rooted in ignorance. I also fear the the younger generation, and I'm talking here about GenY'ers and those after them, are unaware of what the world was like in the decades before they were born...in the years I grew up. So let me set the stage for you...

I grew up in the 1970's. Born in 1968, I grew up on Sesame Street, Mr. Rogers Neighborhood and Captain Kangaroo. I'm part of the generation that grew up watching a lot of pre-cable TV. In those days, you didn't see a lot of black people or black families portrayed on television, or in mainstream media in general. There was no black Marlboro man. In fact, unless you read an ethnic publication, like Ebony magazine, you basically saw NO PEOPLE OF COLOR in any advertising, print or electronic, whatsoever! The first shows featuring black characters that I remember are Sanford and Sons and Fat Albert, both of which came on TV in 1972. Both shows were largely centered around junkyards. No implied message there!






Back then, we had 3-4 channels to choose from, so getting even ONE show with an all-black cast, tackling the issues of urban life, was a big deal. We didn't have shows like Blackish, channels like Black Entertainment Television (BET), or game show/talk show hosts like Steve Harvey. When I was very little, we had two shows! After that, Good Times, the Jeffersons and others became popular, but they were an anomaly. In all of TV History, prior to the 70's, you were hardpressed to find major characters who were anything but white.

Consider that. As a kid growing up 40 years ago, I still didn't see as many blacks represented in the media as I saw all around me in Indianapolis. And worse still, the swim club closest to my childhood home restricted access to non-Jewish whites only! My parents refused to join or to let us go there with our friends. Even then, I understood why.

A decade removed from the victories of the civil rights movement and there still wasn't much equality in America. I was shaken from my white superiority by the Roots miniseries that aired on ABC when I was 8. I'm glad my mom let me watch it. It made me look at my neighborhood friend, Gerald, through different eyes.

I share all that because I fear that teens, twenty and even thirty-somethings today don't realize that the world was still very segregated just 30-40 years ago. In fact, I was bussed to a different school across town in 8th grade as part of Indianapolis Public School's desegregation efforts. That was 1981-82! Things didn't magically get better with the civil rights movement in the 1960's. It's been an ongoing fight. It's taken decades just to get where we are today.

I had a well-meaning friend on Facebook give me his .02:

"The problem that i have with that slogan is that i should be able to say all lives matter, but i can't. I have been verbally attacked for saying it. Why? As long as society and people keep saying "white this" and "black that" we will never be free of racism. Both sides have it... but, there shouldn't be sides. My 5 year old daughter doesn't see skin color. She sees people. So, why are we as adults perpetuating the segregation?  It's time to be humans or earthlings.  Btw, i totally get what you're saying. I'm not saying that black lives don't matter, but please try to see what I'm saying as well. All lives should matter, except for terrorists. They should be destroyed"

The manifold problem with this "white people logic" begins with it's foundation. It wasn't blacks who created the divide amongst humanity. By and large, it was white people. It began with the premise that races OTHER THAN white were somehow inferior. In the case of Africans, they were classified subhuman. The African slave was classified chattel. They were no different than livestock and often treated WORSE! So white people created the US v. THEM culture between themselves and everyone of a "lesser race" (blacks were often referred to as "mud race"). This culture has been so prevalent, even in the last century, that the American public got a rude awakening with the civil unrest of the 1960's.

That's the culture into which a great percentage of today's African-American was born. They were welcomed into a world of inequality onto an unlevel playing field that was stacked against them. And just because the field is a bit more level today, it didn't make their lives any easier in the last fifty years. They had to overcome obstacles. They faced cruelty and injustice that many in the fairer race can't even comprehend. So when they say "black lives matter," it is rooted in the deep, dark history of civilization where their lives really DIDN'T matter to white people.

The phrase itself doesn't imply anything other than what it says, "Black lives matter." Period. End of statement.

What it DOESN'T say?
"Black lives matter more."
"White lives matter less."
"Cops matter even less."

It's simply a fight for equality...a fight that began ions ago and continues today. Why it puts those of other races on the defensive is beyond me.

But it does prove that white privilege still exists. It is so ingrained in us, that we feel slighted by the exclusion from the motto "black lives matter." Why we feel the need to argue, "What about us?" Well, white friends, our lives have ALWAYS mattered! We didn't have to fight for equality. We didn't have to suffer attack dogs, gestapo police tactics, terrorists (like the KKK and irate Southerners) and a government bent on keeping us marginalized just to maintain our civil rights. No, those have never been threatened or in question, not in any way. So why do we feel threatened by the fight for black equality?

I'll save my comments on "color blindness" for a different post, but the above statements pretty well sum up my feelings about non-blacks who have a problem with #blacklivesmatter.

You may wonder why this issue resonates so much with me. I'm not just some do-gooder white dude looking for a cause. I'm not suffering from white guilt. I simply want my daughter, my niece and my nephew, who are all or part African-American, to grow up in a world that seems 100 YEARS AHEAD of the society in which I grew up. We need to see RAPID progress where civil rights are concerned, not just racial equality, but sexual, gender and in every other way! I care because I love my kid and her cousins, dearly. I want a better world for them. And ever since I was a little kid, racism has made my blood boil.

Thank you for reading my blog post.

Are we really that gullible, America?

I don't usually weigh in on politics, but I'm surprised to see Obama's policies finally getting a reality check from a mainstream media outlet, not owned by Rupert Murdoch. I was wondering when someone would get around to looking "behind the curtain" of spin to discover what Obama's really saying.

After all, he's a government-can-fix-everything sorta Democrat who likes throwing good money--our money--after bad. He's going to fix Washington from the Oval Office and make it run more efficiently by cutting ineffective programs. Do you know how many huge federal agencies he'd have to cut in order to pay for his health care system alone?

The straight skinny is that you can't have hugenormous government AND huge tax breaks. Are people really gullible enough to believe that 95% of us can pay less into the government and get more in return? REALLY?

Unless Obama's plan is to eliminate the Dept. of Defense, Dept. of Treasury and the Postal Service, there's no way he's going to fund his trillion-dollar budget. There's a new term being bantied about on the Internet to describe this fantasy. It's called OBAMANOMICS.

It is about time the American public gets over it's fascination of the rock star, Obama, and digs a little deeper to see what he's really about. At least the media is finally pulling its collective head out of its backside on this one, although it could be a little too little too late.