Getting Inspired

As my academic visit at Harvard is approaching to its end, I have hard time splitting my time between work and enjoying Cambridge and Boston. On Wednesday I decided to devote my limited time to the latter. I took the metro (or “T” (train) as they call it here) to Southern Boston where you can find state archives, University of Massachusetts and JFK Presidential Library and Museum. My destination was the museum celebrating the inspiring leadership of John F. Kennedy. Obviously, an important and almost obligatory destination for someone studying at the Harvard Kennedy School (JFK himself graduated from Harvard in 1940).

I.M. Pei has designed the great building at the banks of Columbia Point Peninsula (the same architect who did the glass pyramid of Louvre). You can easily spend three hours in the museum and the views over Boston Harbor islands are also worth contemplation.

I think it is difficult to make an interesting museum dedicated to a political personage but JFK Museum was a success (see their excellent website to have a glimpse of the museum and many sources about JFK). I guided myself through the rooms following his career from being a senator to a presidential candidate and to becoming the 35th President of the USA, discovering his vast political as well as ideological legacy. The collection consisted mainly of interesting videos of his speeches, photos, and gifts he received from other heads of states. I don’t know if it was the fact that I knew he would be assassinated in a few years that his speeches seemed somehow extremely emotional and meaningful, I was probably partly reflecting on them in the context of his short presidency. All in all, the museum did a good job in turning me to a JFK fan…

The museum opened in 1979 and a new wing (also by I.M. Pei) was built in 1991. Now a huge American flag hangs there at the end of the museum tour.

Of course the 1960s were full of amazing political happenings from Cold War, discovering the space to finishing racial segregation and Cuban missile crisis, so JFK had many opportunities to make these memorable speeches in a context that in itself was something spectacular. I doubt that passing the health care bill will ever be as emotional event than the moment when the first two black students entered the University of Alabama signalling the end of segregation in the Southern states. However, JFK somehow managed to turn these historical events even more touching using excellent rhetorical tricks and words that even after 40 years make you admire him. His inauguration speech in 1961, during the craziest years of Cold War and increasing recognition of developmental issues in faraway countries, pleaded for peace, freedom and welfare with an idealism and conviction that Obama can only dream of (although you can find many similarities in their discourses, such as the emphasis on hope). It seems that America of today is far from what he stated then: “If society cannot help the many that are poor, it cannot help the few that are rich.” The speech is probably more known of the phrase "ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country" that I heard small school kids repeating in the museum.

Skip to 4min30 where it starts to be more interesting and still relevant for our societies!

So when, after watching these inspiring speeches he gave next to Berlin wall or in Washington, the museum visitor arrives to the room dedicated to the 22^nd November 1963, one cannot avoid some tears emerging. He was the youngest president in the USA to have been elected and the youngest one to die.

Considering his short presidency, this part of his inaugural address seems even truer and above all, even sadder.

Education in America

In last week's New Yorker, author Peter Hessler writes about how it was like moving back to the USA after living in China for a decade. He enjoyed again listening to Americans telling stories, whereas the Chinese never lingered on interesting details or took pleasure in narrating a good story, in general they avoided personal topics. Instead, Hessler noted, there is no “reliable” small talk in America, any discussion can turn out to be personal, even tragic. I remarked the same thing when I was attending course on poverty and social policy at Harvard. I was more interested in the interaction in the class and how students perceived the issues we were tackling than learning about American social policy programmes. Personal stories and anecdotes about their experiences were common when they were articulating their opinions or questioning the efficiency of country’s social policies. These were often stories that I would have been very surprised to hear in a classroom in Europe, stories that people would consider too intimate, or even shameful secrets, to share with forty other people. One girl didn’t hide that she was a teenage-mother that used to live on welfare (the most stigmatized thing you could think of in America), another girl told us about her growing up in family with substance abuse problems. Maybe they actually were proud of these stories: “Look at me, I was disadvantaged but I fought my way to Harvard!”

This discourse on working your way to the top is unfortunately not imaginable to all Americans. My friend’s American flatmate here told us (European audience) about his background during our late-night dinner. He grew up in Brooklyn where schools are of extremely bad quality and, while many people continue to state college afterwards, he was one of the very rare cases that had advanced to Harvard and MIT, the best universities in the USA. His success in climbing the social ladders was part of luck, good behaviour, and involved parents; some of his smarter classmates lacked especially the last ingredient and didn’t make it as far as he did. It is not just a matter of standing out as a potential Harvard candidate that actually can make you one. When he met other students from Brooklyn in Harvard, he knew that they studied in private schools in Manhattan.

We, as Europeans, were extremely curious about his experiences and the environment in his Brooklyn school. What shocked us the most was the presence of police in the school and the interventions by criminal justice system. He told us about a girl who had scribbled her name on the desk with a knife and was prosecuted of vandalism. At the age of 13 her future was partially determined, with a criminal record, she could never have federal funding for further education; any social mobility would be really difficult after this act of vandalism. Around the dinner table, we were thinking that maybe we wouldn’t have come this far if we had faced similar control at school, if our intellectual capacity had been neglected due to actions that are not that unusual for teenagers. Was the policeman thinking that he was deciding of her future, did he care? The restrictive environment, where the fear of violence increased the teachers’ authoritarian behaviour and possibly unnecessary police interventions made school yet another prison for children who often came from poorer or otherwise disadvantaged families.

The American dream didn’t sound like a possible future for these children. In fact, the upward mobility seems possible only for middle-class children who have the necessary resources and support to make the “good” decisions. I’m not saying that things would be so much better in Europe. If you are born in a Parisian banlieu you are most probably stuck there for the rest of your life. But I guess the examples we discussed showed the contradiction in the American culture where people believe in hard work and equality of opportunity. If you don’t succeed, if you end up living on welfare, it is your own fault, you’re lazy – and you are stigmatized. In contrast, in Europe, many believe that it’s structural problems, government’s bad policies or lack of initial resources that make people “fail” and live in poverty, blaming the individual is less common (while more and more used in right-wing rhetoric). Thinking of the Brooklyn school, I can’t help but wonder how these children could be empowered in a system where they are controlled and often treated as potential juvenile criminals, if their families can’t provide them any resources, how could they fight their way to better universities, even surviving through high school is impossible to so many of them (drop-out rate is around 50 per cent in Brooklyn according to our friend).

Dolphin Watching

I just watched the amazingly terrifying documentary film The Cove that won the Oscar award for the best document of 2009. It certainly was an inspiring film and develops perfectly the theme I wrote about a few weeks ago, namely the animal rights of marine mammals. The film follows, in a half thriller-half conspiracy theory -style, the killing of dolphins in a little village in Japan where the sea water turns into red from September to March when 23 000 dolphins are slaughtered. As the film makers themselves say, they collect their own "Ocean's 11" (name couldn't fit their job any better!) with underwater cameras and two freedivers to gather evidence what is happening there.

While Japan's economy or culinary diet is not dependant on dolphins (or on whales for that matter) it refuses to ban this brutal activity or even tries to cover it up. The Cove shows well the politics behind the attempts to protect these animals on the one hand, and the insistance on "cultural tradition" and over-fishing of the oceans until they are empty, on the other.

Ric O'Berry who is the "hero" in the film partially blames himself for starting the fascination around dolphins as he was the dolphin trainer for the famous TV series of the 1960s, Flipper. After working a decade for the dolphin captivity industry, now a multi-billion business, he has since been working to free these animals. And after seeing The Cove, you really don't feel like going to Miami Seaworld (I've actually been there in 1992) - or even Särkänniemi's Delfinaario - where O'Berry worked and captured the dolphins for Flipper.

Below, you'll find the trailer for The Cove. Probably you'll be interested in watching the entire film, afterwards I'm sure you want to act, so click here for a petition (it's targeted to Obama but I guess the USA has more power in this issue than Matti Vanhanen, although in the film you can see a Finnish representative of the International Whaling Commission).

Welcome Spring, Welcome Bare Legs

When I complain about cold weather people always remind me that, as a Finn, I should be used to it. Well, I know what is cold weather and I know it can even get colder but being born in a cold country doesn’t make me somehow immune to cold. I guess Darwinism doesn’t apply to this case or it’s just that our efficient insulation of buildings has helped those who would have otherwise naturally been eliminated survive the cold winters – so despite the Northern climate even the weakest of us have survived.

However, the Americans seem to have gone through some kind of cold-immunity selection. There is some evidence that this might be even a larger-scale Anglo-Saxon phenomenon. This was especially visible in Florence where the American exchange students wearing flip flops during the most of the year could easily be identified. While their mini-shorts were tacky and inelegant, it didn't seem to bother the Italian men that the streets were suddenly crowded with half-naked American and English tourists when the Florentines were still using their black full-body uniform. I encountered the most extreme case of this phenomenon in Perito Moreno, a glacier in Argentina, where an Australian guy was admiring the sound of falling ice in his flip flops. I’ve never really understood the continuous use of Havaianas as they are ugly, uncomfortable and made for a Brazilian beach party. But the Americans love them and their use is not compromised by winter: you can see people using any kind of sandals or ballerinas even when there is five centimetres of snow on the ground. In the other extreme you have those who are wearing their rubber boots in the perfect sunshine. Though I have to admit that my stand on the rubber boots use – black ones only and exclusively for forest use! – was shaken by the rainy season here that pretty much destroyed my Italian leather boots.

The point I am trying to direct myself here is, however, that of the spirit of spring. The adagio of transforming into a lightly clad summer person should not be disregarded. Step-by-step you get rid of the excess of your winter clothes and you adapt to the new season. You need to enjoy the warming spring to its maximum, first just thinking of opening your coat and then a week later actually doing it, taking off your gloves when the snow starts to melt, and radically changing to spring coat when you can smell the nature waking up again. The American process of welcoming the spring is much too quick, jumping immediately from their North Face coats to a mini skirts and bare legs (some people skip even the North Face period). But you need to advance gradually, otherwise you miss that wonderful moment when you’re taking off the stockings in the public toilets and get blisters in your feet by suddenly changing to bare feet and new shoes (happened today) as you don’t fully understand or remember what kind of temperature is +20°C.

For the sake of the American tradition, I have to acknowledge the positive side-effect of their half-nakedness early in the year, and that is of course the greater production of vitamin D as larger parts of their body are exposed to sunlight (if this happens already in February it might increase the risk of a flu however).