Commentary
Debate over the importance of "role models" and "mentoring" touches on everything from the behavior of professional athletes to the trumpet call to men sounded by Promise Keepers. Charles Barkley claims no responsibility to be a role model, while a Million Men march to proclaim they ought to be.
A steady stream of unsettling incidents involving young people helps propel the discussion on the impact of role models—positive and negative—on impressionable youth and formative children. It's an especially urgent topic in urban America, where the social and economic fabric continues to unravel. The plagues of racism, violence, poverty, and environmental degradation have some obvious linkages to the more muted crisis of the declining number of healthy, intact families.
The end results of disintegrating family structures are obvious in our troubled Buffalo, New York neighborhood. Adult models of responsibility, maturity, and employment are hard to find on the West Side. Of the 50 or so children and teens that attend our church's youth programs, only one family is headed by a married, employed couple. Pain and disruption mark nearly all of their homes. Missing father, alcoholic mother, poor food, siblings fathered by different men (all now absent), drugs, violence.
"You are now entering the village of El Mozote." Harold Recinos, a community advocate from Washington, D.C., led a band of U.S. seminarians and clergy on a three-mile pilgrimage this spring that precisely followed the route of the Salvadoran military's Atlacatl Battalion some 15 years ago.
In December 1981, the U.S.-trained and funded Atlacatl entered El Mozote and massacred a village of evangelical Christians. The group of pastors and students that entered the village this spring was met by dozens of small children who spontaneously surrounded them—reaching out in a mysterious depth of hospitality that was especially poignant in light of their town's past.
In some ways El Mozote, crucified by war but with a tenacious will to survive, symbolizes the nation of El Salvador after four years of so-called peace. In January 1992, the government of President Alfredo Cristiani and the commanders of the FMLN, the umbrella guerrilla group that waged civil war against the U.S.-backed government throughout the 1980s, gathered in Mexico City and signed an agreement to end the 12-year-old war that left more than 75,000 Salvadorans dead.
Among other things, the 1992 peace accords provided that the army be purged of "known human rights violators" and be reduced by half; that the guerrillas disarm and some of their number join a new civilian police force; and that the Atlacatl and other rapid-reaction battalions be disbanded. The agreement also provided for a Truth Commission that would investigate "serious acts of violence" since 1980.
In Bosnia, there are no easy answers. Any question naively put forth by outsiders prompts a history lesson that usually begins at the time of Constantine if directed at a Croat, the 1389 Battle of Kosovo if toward a Serb, and the fall of the Ottoman Empire if speaking with a Muslim. For Americans who can't remember what they watched on television last night, this can be a bit disconcerting. However, while history does not predetermine a country's direction, it does highlight possible futures.
In the aftermath of genocide in Bosnia, the fundamental question is, Did this have to happen? The answer is no. Here at the end of the 20th century we have participated in a global dramatization of the adage, "All that evil needs to triumph is for good [people] to do nothing."
Contrary to the propaganda of the U.S. media, the former Yugoslavia is not genetically encoded for violence; nor did the collapse of communism preordain civil war. The mass graves that NATO forces are opening in Srebrenica, Jajce, and Tuzla are not only filled with sons, fathers, daughters, and friends, but with the coldly pragmatic, morally vacuous remnants of empires' attempts to save themselves.
Serbian President Milosevi´c, a very intelligent Communist hardliner, had no future in the age of democracy, so he initiated a violent land grab, particularly for Bosnia's military-industrial factories. Croatian President Tudjman had a small-minded Nixonesque craving for power. After Croatia's relatively successful secession from Yugoslavia, he took advantage of the chaos created by the Serb aggression to indulge his greed and extend the Croatian borders.
How political fortunes change. Just two years ago, the Republicans swept the 1994 midterm elections and declared the beginning of a new conservative "revolution." Newt Gingrich, the most powerful man in the new Washington and self-proclaimed leader of the revolution, was seemingly omnipresent in the media.
Ralph Reed and the Christian Coalition claimed credit for the Republican success and purported to speak for all or most Christians. Reed proudly announced his organization to be "a permanent fixture on the political landscape for people of faith."
As I write 19 months later, the Republican candidate for president is 20 points behind in the polls and there is talk about the possibility of the Democrats retaking both the House and the Senate. Republican candidates distance themselves from Gingrich, their former philosopher king. Reed has become a principal Republican Party operative (a "ward boss," as one evangelical leader recently described it), and the Christian Coalition played a decisive role in anointing Bob Dole as the party's presidential candidate, only to have the consummate compromiser waffle on some of their most important issues, like abortion.
Other things have changed as well. Because of efforts like the Call to Renewal, Reed now admits the Coalition doesn't speak for all Christians and has admirably counseled his followers to a greater "civility" in their political holy warfare. Most important, key evangelical Christian leaders are turning away from the Religious Right. The highly politicized Christian Coalition has gained considerable power, but at the cost of moral credibility among a growing number of church leaders. When all is said and done, most Christian leaders, regardless of their political leanings, prefer a politics more independent, spiritual, and prophetic than one that is too partisan, ideological, and caught up with the pursuit of power.
When President Clinton vetoed a bill this spring that would have banned a specific method of late-term abortion, many people were outraged.
[Demi] Moore's strong flair for taking risks for jumbo-sized payouts showed up clearly when she dared to pose nude and pregnant on the cover of Vanity Fair....