Society

I am impressed that the oil divestment movement is doing so well, but while I applaud the commitment to divest, I argue that for every stockholder that divests there must be a stockholder that invests. In other words, quite simply there must be a buyer as well a seller.

The risk is that the ones who step in to buy are the ones who don’t care what the companies do – so the worst traits and behaviour are given more free rein – more shortcuts – more Gulf Of Mexico oil spills.

In other words, the unintended consequences of oil divestment may be worsen the situation, not improve it.

Or perhaps the tack is different – make oil the bad actor and thereby make it easier for businesses that are already in the oil business to move to green energy. That might work.

Ernie Pyle was an American war correspondent during World War II. He was very well known across a great cross-section of the American public – a real celebrity in his day – and very well liked.

In his newspaper columns and in his book Brave Men that was published in 1944, he describes the minutiae of army life in wartime from the perspective of the common soldier.

He described the way the war machine works – from engineers pulling captured tanks off the line with giant earth moving machines, to bomb loaders preparing bombers for a mission, to cooks cooking up thousands of meals for the troops.

The book describes the push from North Africa and up through Italy, then the waiting period in England before D Day, and then the invasion and the battle through France.

One cute image that he describes is of the American soldiers stationed in London in the lead up to D Day, and how the US Army established rules for one-way foot traffic for soldiers when walking along the pavements.

It was done in order to minimise how often soldiers would have to meet and salute one another while approaching from opposite directions.

Apparently, there were so many soldiers that before the rule was in place soldiers were having to salute every five steps or so and getting sore arms from all that saluting.

Another scene that he describes is of captured German soldiers on D Day standing on the cliffs and staring in disbelief and resignation at the sheer number of Allied ships that stretched from horizon to horizon.

The final chapter of Brave Men was written in August 1944, and Pyle talks about the war being more or less over.

That was, of course, before the German counter-offensive in the Battle of the Bulge in the Ardennes in December 1944, which was the last major offensive against the Allied forces in Europe.

It’s hard to tell you exactly why or how the book is so touching and sad. Certainly the tone changes when Pyle goes with the invasion forces on D Day, and he becomes more sombre and in the end, lyrical.

I started the book Brave Men about a year ago, and then put it aside while I read some other books. I picked it up again a couple of weeks ago and I have been reading a few pages at a time, mostly over breakfast.

I finished it today.

One passage is particularly poignant. It is about the jeep ride that he and another journalist and the photographer Robert Capa took into a town near Cherbourg.

The Germans has only just been pushed out of the town, and there was always the risk of snipers or of Germans left behind – manning a machine gun somewhere by the roadside. So Pyle was nervous, and he talks about the fearless Capa, who would push on whatever the risk.

Robert Capa was one of the original Magnum photographers. I know his work well and I also know that Capa was killed in 1954 when he stepped on a mine in South East Asia, in what was then called Indochina.

What I learned a week ago when reading up about the background to Brave Men, is that Ernie Pyle was killed in 1945 by Japanese machine gun fire on an island off Okinawa.

There is something strange about reading in a book published in 1944, the author writing about his companion, Capa, who I knew would be killed in 1954, and knowing also that the writer himself would be killed even before that, in 1945.

And there they were in his book Brave Men, described as large as life and nervous as kittens – riding into a town during the Allied invasion of Europe.

Coda

After the war, the Takarazuka Theater in Tokyo was taken over by the US Army headquarters and renamed the Ernie Pyle Theater – which remained its name until 1955.

Why be lonely? Many reasons, such as losing a partner or a close friend; breaking up with someone; being tied to the house through having to care for someone; getting old and finding that the world is rushing past.

Or moving to a new area far from family or friends; being marginalised because of race or colour or disability; recovering from abuse and feeling unable to trust anyone.

Or feeling unlikeable, or being shy or afraid to make contact.

Imagine a single parent or a carer who comes into money and can afford to hire someone to give them a break so they can go out and meet people. How would they feel?

If just thinking of that possibility fills them with pleasure then they are lonely. It’s just force of circumstance that is the problem.

People who are lonely through force of circumstance – too old or infirm to leave the house, or marginalised because of poverty or race or colour, or being far from family or friends – need other people to reach out to them and would welcome the contact if it happened.

If, on the other hand, the thought of meeting people fills them with dread then there is a more serious problem.

If they experience being with other people as a trial, they would want to avoid it. Or they might put on a mask and go through the experience but be isolated from it.

They might fear that other people would detect that there is no substance to the relationship.. nothing beyond the politeness and the jokes… no down-time in which to get close and to share inner feelings.

Or maybe the person doesn’t think much of the people they are in contact with and takes the position that they are waiting for the other people to step up to the plate and be deeper and more meaningful in their interactions.

Yet when the person who suffers from loneliness asks themselves whether maybe they should make the first move to deepen relationships, they are inactive and retreat and play the same record of the inadequacy of other people, over and over.

This is bordering on a mental health problem and if someone is clinically depressed then they need treatment just as much as they would if they had a physical disease that can be treated by medication.

But perhaps it is not clinical depression, but unhappiness caused by dissatisfaction with one’s situation.

Right back as far as the Old Testament one can read:

Be happy with all the good that your God has given to you and to your household and to the Levi and to the stranger who lives in your community. [Deuteronomy 26.11]

I think the reference to ‘the Levi and stranger’ are to people who are better off and to those who are worse off than you.

A person who is not content will look at their situation and recoil from it. And they won’t be happy because they are always in a state of recoiling from their situation.

There’s a danger too for the person who takes the advice to be happy to heart but doesn’t think it through.

Being content with what one has doesn’t mean being satisfied with anything and everything.

The message is to be happy with the good. It doesn’t say to be content and to sit like a sloth.

What the advice from countless sources surely means is that being happy with the good in one’s life is a firm foundation from which one can explore what life has to offer.

As for what to explore, the question is what will bring real rewards and what will bring rewards that are illusiary.

And trying to figure that out ahead of time may be wise, but equally it is the journey of discovery that makes the person.

Stepping back a moment, there is another more fundamental message in the advice to be happy with the good. The implied message is that people need to be told that because they don’t do it.

People don’t need a law or advice to tell them not to chew stones. But people need a law and advice telling them not to steal.

And in the same way, people need to be told to be happy with the good because the tendency is to be unhappy.

I read an interesting angle on depression recently but unfortunately I can’t find the source or I would give the attribution. What the writer said was that depression is sometimes the result of poor planning.

The writer gives the example of a young man who wants to date a popular young woman.

He knows she likes dancing so he invites her to a dance. She refuses and he is depressed.

The writer says that the problem is that the young man gave all the power over his happiness to the young woman.

And, of course, he can’t control her.

Instead, he would be better served by taking dancing lessons, becoming a good dancer… one that young women want to dance with. Then the chances are much better that he’ll have success with someone he wants to be with.

That’s the message: do things you can control to make your life better and don’t get lost in dreams that depend on something or someone one cannot control.

And a second message is that making a bad decision that gives over one’s happiness to circumstances or to someone else isn’t necessarily going to cause a depression that’s terminal, but it is one piece in a jigsaw of pieces from which a person can build a prison for themselves.

People who are trapped in negative thinking tend to extrapolate from single events to a world view. A bad interaction convinces them that they are no good. A more balanced view would be to recognise that it was just one interaction and that they can learn for the future.

Of course, being in a positive la-la land is just as unrealistic.

Anything that helps people get a greater understanding of the relationship between their thoughts and feelings and how it plays out in their behaviour, is going to be helpful. It’s all good if it shows people that their negative thought patterns are creating a prison… and gives them a way out.

Let me finish with a message from the famous psychologist Viktor Frankl, the author of Man’s Search For Meaning.

Frankl says very forcefully something that I also believe – that optimism is an obligation because it is realistic to look to the highest in people in order to get the very best out of what is actually there in people.

One trillion dollars of mineral ore found in Afghanistan is a lot of mineral wealth in anyone’s estimate. Who will benefit?

A news article in the New York Times reports on the previously unknown extent of mineral deposits in Afghanistan. A quote from page two of the article reads:

So far, the biggest mineral deposits discovered are of iron and copper, and the quantities are large enough to make Afghanistan a major world producer of both, United States officials said. Other finds include large deposits of niobium, a soft metal used in producing superconducting steel, rare earth elements and large gold deposits in Pashtun areas of southern Afghanistan.

The article also refers to “An internal Pentagon memo that states that Afghanistan could become the “Saudi Arabia of lithium,” a key raw material in the manufacture of batteries for laptops and BlackBerrys.”

As of June 2008, Wikipedia’s entry on Mining in Afghanistan states:

The country has extensive deposits of barite, chromite, coal, copper, gold, iron ore, lead, natural gas, petroleum, precious and semiprecious stones, salt, sulfur, talc, and zinc. Precious and semiprecious stones include high-quality emerald, lapis lazuli, and ruby.

A Reuters Report from March 16, 2009 states:

A U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) had shown that the war-torn nation may hold far higher amounts of minerals than previously thought, Mohammad Ibrahim Adel said.

“In the field of minerals, Afghanistan is the richest country in the region, much more, hundreds of times more. Except for diamond, you have all the other minerals that you find in nature, in Afghanistan,” Adel told Reuters in an interview late on Sunday.

Based on the USGS survey, he said, Afghanistan’s north is estimated to hold between 600 to 700 billion cubic meters of natural gas and the country has some 25 million tonnes of oil in four basins.”

According to the Afghan Embassy, Mr. Muhammad Ibrahim Adel is the Minister of Mines and Industries in Afghanistan.

On its page describing the Afghan Geological Survey, the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan Ministry of Mines recites:

Like other government institutions, the Afghanistan Geological Survey was seriously weakened during more than two decades of military conflict, and suffered from a lack of investment and skills development. Throughout this period of conflict and during the later rule by the Taliban, the staff of the AGS salvaged and protected documents, maps and samples, often at great personal risk to themselves and their families. After the Taliban left Kabul in December 2001 these precious data were returned to the Survey.

Following the fall of the Taliban regime, the Government of Afghanistan, with the assistance of international donors, began formulating a mining sector strategy and policies. Amongst many things, this recognized the need for the rehabilitation and restructuring of the Afghanistan Geological Survey to help it perform as a modern geological survey and implement a program of geological mapping and resource assessment using modern concepts and methods.

In response to this need, in 2004 the British Geological Survey and United States Geological Survey commenced collaborative projects with the Afghanistan Geological Survey and Ministry of Mines. These projects are funded by the Governments of Britain and the United States of America respectively. Together they are implementing a comprehensive program of capacity-building, geological mapping, evaluation of mineral and hydrogeological resources, and the creation of geological and mineral databases and geographical information systems. A mining cadastre office is also being established. These programs are providing comprehensive training for Afghans.

The site in turn refers to the United States Geological Survey and from there to the report #3063 Preliminary Assessment of Non-Fuel Mineral Resources of Afghanistan, 2007 which states:

Afghanistan has abundant mineral resources, including known deposits of copper, iron, barite, sulfur, talc, chromium, magnesium, salt, mica, marble, rubies, emeralds, lapis lazuli, asbestos, nickel, mercury, gold and silver, lead, zinc, fluorspar, bauxite, beryllium, and lithium.

The Minerals Law of Afghanistan 2005, drafted with the aid of the World Bank and recited in the publication issued by the Department of Minerals of the Ministry of Mines and Industries of the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan states at Article 4, paragraph (1)

“All naturally occurring Mineral Substances and all Artificial Deposits of Mineral Substances on or under the territory of Afghanistan or in its water courses (rivers and streams) are the exclusive property of the State.”