My 12-year-old grandson Devon announced recently that he is to be a student ambassador to Australia this summer, having been nominated by one of his teachers. Delighted that he wouldn’t be wasting a fortune and two weeks at paint-ball camp, the family rejoiced.
The Ambassador program is sponsored by People to People, the organization founded by President Dwight D. Eisenhower at the peak of the Cold War to promote peace through understanding. As the world seemed to be racing down the road to annihilation, Eisenhower saw a solution forged by personal contact between American and Soviet citizens through cultural exchange.
In a British radio address, he said, “I believe the people want peace. Indeed I believe that they want peace so badly that the government will just have to step aside and let them have it.”
This from the same president who warned us not to let the growing military industrial complex take over our foreign policy.
Devon can earn one high school semester elective credit in social studies through the Washington School of World Studies for completing the program.
Part of the extensive preparation for the actual travel involves monthly meetings for student and parent with current events assignments. That’s how I got into it, naturally, being the family news junkie.
Students must choose and write a summary of one local or national news story and one current article for the destination country. The choices for Australia the past few weeks were limited. Banning “the wave” at cricket matches appealed to the sports fan in Devon, though he didn’t understand that obnoxious cricket fans can’t seem to execute an orderly “Mexican wave” without hurling bottles and shoes. Pro-wave activist Matthew Newton, we read, is regularly ejected from games for instigating waves that deteriorate into drunken melees.
Melbourne Age columnist Andrew Dyson proposed the ” ‘royal wave,’ a restricted circular motion of the right hand, that does not obstruct the view of those behind and is ill-suited to the propulsion of rubbish.”
Devon decided the story would have limited appeal here, where nobody understands cricket or why anyone would be a fan of such a tedious game.
Then there was Australian Prime Minister John Howard’s criticism of U.S. Sen. Barack Obama’s plan to withdraw troops from Iraq, which he said would “create chaos and victory for the terrorists.” Obama responded that Australia has sent only 1,400 troops and that if Howard believed the war was critical, he would send another 20,000. We decided together that such divisive rhetoric between the two countries is contrary to the Person to Person mission.
So that narrowed the subject matter to the global warming issue, finally in the mainstream media and being taken seriously by those who formerly denied it was even happening, much less that human activity was involved. It seems Australia is banning incandescent light bulbs. The government said it plans to have the entire country converted to energy-efficient fluorescent bulbs within five years. Consumers who have resisted buying them because they cost more and give off harsher light, will have to get on board, consoling themselves that the bulbs last 10 times as long and can save up to 14 percent on the annual household electric bill. Howard said the plan would help Australia cut emissions from greenhouse gases.
Devon chose to write his summary on the plan, but wondered how different light bulbs cut greenhouse gas emissions. I explained that if you use less electricity, you save emissions from the power plants that produce it. What the news articles haven’t addressed is how they will control the disposal of fluorescent bulbs, which can emit mercury into the air when broken in landfills. And that, of course, is something we should be working on here. Recycling by the manufacturers might work, but a light bulb is an easy thing to break, releasing mercury into the air.
Anyway, Devon’s current events summaries were well received at the monthly meeting and he announced that three other ambassadors-in-training had chosen the same story.
This speaks well for our country’s burgeoning interest in the environment after six years of stultifying government obstruction of environmental law.
It also speaks well for Eisenhower’s prescience, a military man whose crusade for world peace helped quell the saber rattling, redbaiting and spying that could have triggered our mutual destruction. Instead, he convened an international conference at the White House in 1956, recruiting100 business leaders, Walt Disney among them, to help form the organization called People to People.
Learn more at www.studentambassadors.org