by Rev. Thomas Disrud

A sermon given November 2, 2003

First Unitarian Church

Portland, Oregon

A few years ago, I was visiting Europe for the first time. I was in London and I was on the tube—the subway there. As the subway car door opened and the mysterious voice reminded all to mind the gap, four women got on. Right away they seemed to stick out—they had big hair, big jewelry, at least a couple of them wore clothes with a lot of red, white and blue—and maybe even images of the American flag. And what made them stick out most of all was the volume of their collective voices. They were a whole lot louder than anyone else on the train.

No mistaking it. These folks were Americans. As their conversation continued, they started to talk about those people, as in those people whose country they were visiting. As they carried on about the habits and quirks of the English, one by one the locals were getting up and moving away from them. They talked about those people as if those people could not understand them. One of the things you need to be careful about in England is that they share the language.

If I wasn’t sure where the phrase ugly Americans came from before that, I did after witnessing that little scene. These women were, in fact, poster children for ugly Americans. As I saw one and then another local person slowly move away from them I, too, wanted to move away. I actually wondered if I should say something to them, but I wasn’t quite sure what that would be. Whenever I have traveled since that time, the image of those women has been the guiding light of what I hope not to be as an American traveling overseas.

As I prepared for a three-month trip in Asia as part of my sabbatical leave, those images were in the back of my mind. It was not only that I was thinking about how important it is to be respectful of the places and the people I was visiting. Lately it seemed to be even more important to be respectful. In the two years since the terrorist attacks here on our own soil, the questions that have come up for me about America and its relationship with the rest of the world. These were some of the questions that called me to travel in the first place. But I did go with an awareness and questions that I had not had before. The question that has been present for me since those attacks has been, “Why do they hate us so much?” trying to understand was a goal of this journey.

Right after the attacks, there was an outpouring of goodwill from people around the world. The response was enormous. But just a couple of years later, it seems to be just the opposite. Polls taken last year and again this year in countries around the world show dramatic decreases in the number of people who view the United States favorably. In Indonesia, 61 percent viewed us favorably in 2002. This year that number is 15 percent. In Russia it was 61 percent last year and 36 percent this year. This has been reflected in one degree or another around the world.

When I thought about places I wanted to visit, I found myself drawn to Southeast Asia where our country has had so much influence. I had a desire to learn more about how that influence has played out in the lives of the people there. What would it be like to be in a place like Vietnam, which for centuries has been battling the other countries on its own soil—the Chinese, the Japanese, the French and the Americans? What were the lasting effects of the war and almost thirty years after it was over, how do they feel about the United States and about Americans? I didn’t know whether there would be hostility or welcome.

What I found is that generally, people not only like Americans, they love us—especially the money we bring to their countries. I found the people in Southeast Asia to be very welcoming and friendly. But they make a clear distinction between Americans and our government. What they don’t like is much of what our government does around the world.

My travels took me to Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Thailand and Indonesia. At the time I was traveling—from the beginning of February to the beginning of May—there weren’t many Americans around. It was the time leading up to and during the Iraq war. For every American, I swear I met four or five Canadians. I have to note that Canadians seemed to all have very prominent patches on their packs with large maple leaves on them. They seemed to want to go out of their way to proclaim that they were Canadians. But that might be a whole other sermon. I will say that I met few, if any, ugly Americans. And it was refreshing to know that Germans, Brits, Italians, French and Australians have their fair share of ugly travelers.

But American influence in this part of the world is hard to miss. As I got off the airplane in Taiwan, on my way to Vietnam, there was the ubiquitous Coca-Cola machine in the airport. More than any other image, Coca-Cola is present around the world. So is Kentucky Fried Chicken and other fast food enterprises. That is all on the surface but as I was there for a few days I started to see more subtle signs.

The world, more and more, is connected through technology. In Vietnam, all over the place, there are Internet cafes. Most people cannot afford them in their homes so they come and buy time at these mom and pop businesses. In the evenings, when activity slows down in most of the places in town, these places are hubs of activity. They seem to represent how life is changing in these places. The connection is terribly slow by our standards, yet people plug away at their terminals, looking for how they might be connected to this world. But there are young people lined up navigating their way around the World Wide Web. For them it seems to be a connection to the larger world that transcends the boundaries of their own country.

And it is clear that English has become the language of choice. Some speak French, but English is where the action is. I found that throughout Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos people wanted to talk with me just because it gave them an opportunity to speak English and to get to know it better. They want to practice. One of the things that I found as I had these conversations was the awareness that speaking English was the path to opportunity. In places where people live in a lot of poverty, the chance to work with foreigners, the chance to translate, means opportunity.

When I would have conversations and the subject would come around to what they hoped to do in their lives, in almost every case the answer was that they wanted to work in some kind of business that brought them in touch with westerners there. Those connections meant money and opportunity. It was in these encounters, when I got some idea of where people saw their future, that I could better understand the influence that we have.

As an American I don’t think I really had an appreciation for how dominant we are in the world. I had read about it, but I really didn’t get it until this trip. Since World War II we have emerged as a superpower. During the 1990s, our country became increasingly powerful—economically, technologically, militarily—more so than any country in the world, and probably in history. With the fall of the Soviet Union, with continued emergence of capitalism, with the Internet revolution that was centered here, the rise of globalization and the domination of multi-national corporations—all these things combined to make this happen. It has come to mean that American culture is dominant all over the world in more ways than it even was just a few years ago. A Pakistani diplomat once told New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman that the United States has become so dominant in countries around the world that America has begun to touch people’s lives “more than their own governments.”

That was a sobering thought to me when I first read it. It still is. But it also helps me to understand why there is such a love-hate relationship with our country. It helps me to understand some of what grounds the hostility that comes our way around the world. When people feel their lives are controlled in ways that they have no say in, when their culture is threatened, that breeds contempt. If that awareness is there for people around the world, and as we do it with the kind of arrogance that we’ve been doing it, it is probably not a surprise that people will resist that domination. As we exert that power around the world, it is not a surprise that people will resist. As we have more and more power in the world, it becomes even more important that we model appropriate uses of that power.

I didn’t know what I would find in a place like Vietnam or Laos or Cambodia. As I made my way around asking people questions about where they were with the war after all these years, in almost every case a slight grin would cross their face. They would say that most visiting Americans ask the same kinds of questions. And, they would say, that it is in the past and they have moved on with their lives. It is not so much that there is not still pain, I gathered, but for them lingering in the past may simply not be a luxury. For them, the American War was one of many they have endured. And for them, it is all part of history. One man I got to know in Laos told me matter-of-factly how he spent the first three years of his life living in a cave. He was born in 1972, three years before the end of the war, and his family lived in the part of Laos closest to Vietnam and therefore the part most heavily bombed during the war. At night they would live in caves to escape the bombs. It was part of how they lived.

Today life in these places is still not easy. Most of their energy now is spent on making a living. In Vietnam, the per-capita income is around $400 per year. In Cambodia and Laos, it is only about $300. Life, on the whole, is hard. Spending too much time thinking about the past may just not be in the cards.

But the influence is still very much present. Let me tell you a story from Laos.

For several days I stayed in a city called Laung Prabang, Laos. It is the old French capital of this country that is land-locked by Vietnam, China, Thailand and Cambodia. There is an almost immediate sense that this is a place where the spirit is very much present. The people are kind and observing their lives was a tremendous gift. The town is filled with temples and so all around the place are monks in their saffron robes. Their day begins before 4 a.m. with prayer and around 6 a.m. the monks progress through the town with their rice bowls and the people line the streets to offer them rice. The eldest monks go first and the youngest novices bring up the rear.

So one evening I made my way to the temple on the top of Mount Phousi in the center of town. On the top of it rises a beautiful gold stupa that is lit up at night. When I got to the top I found myself in a conversation with a novice monk. As we spoke, we looked out onto the peaceful countryside. Other temples with gold domes were catching the setting sun of the early evening. We were talking when an explosion went off in the countryside. It was a loud blast and I was shaken. This was particularly so because I didn’t know where it was coming from and rattled the sense of peace the I had come to feel in this place. What is even more surprising is that the novice monk didn’t even seem to notice. I asked him what it was and he matter-of-factly answered that what we just heard was an American bomb from many years earlier going off in the countryside. He told me that it is something that happens all the time. For people in his country, it is just part of life. Something that hardly gets a response.

The experience is one that I will not forget. I would come to learn that in fact it is something that happens all the time. Laos, I would come to learn, has the distinction of being, on a per-capita basis, the most bombed country in the history of human kind. Over 580,000 bombing missions dropped more than 2,000,000 tons of ordnance during the Vietnam War and an estimated 30% of that ordnance did not explode.

The experience at the temple shook me. I stayed and looked out over the countryside for a few minutes, then I slowly walked down the hill into the town. When I got to the bottom of the hill I saw two men from England who were also traveling there. They asked if I had heard the news. When I looked at them, they told me that not long before we had begun bombing Baghdad and that the Iraq war had been launched.

In that moment I think I felt more alone and more sad than at any other point in my journey. Here I was in the beautiful place amid all the gentle people and full of anger at the ongoing destruction happening so many years after the war was over. As I thought about the present war, the question that seemed to keep coming up was what the consequences of this war will be thirty years down the road. I do fear what that might be.

Over the next few days I traveled around the country that is Laos. As you fly over, you see what an amazingly green place it is. It is lush, it is full of life. But as you fly closer you also see the pockets where bombs have gone off and where there is still no vegetation growing. In one part of the country that was especially hard hit, all kinds of things are made from bomb casings, from other remnants of the war. I went by one house built on these large casings. In towns there are often things stacked up in the town. Children are playing on them. They seem to have simply become part of the landscape.

It was in these days that I was faced squarely with the question of what it meant to be an American in this time in history. When I would get questions about how Americans felt about what was going on from people who live there and from other travelers, I found myself trying to explain that Americans, too, were divided about this, whatever the images they may have been getting on the television. I told them of the messages I was receiving about masses of people protesting in the city where I lived in America. I told them how I wanted to be there protesting myself. I found myself trying to explain and to apologize. I became very aware that as an American I bore some responsibility for the destruction and the healing of this place.

As I was having these conversations with people and as I would talk about the responsibility that I felt as an American, I found that people seemed to look a little puzzled. It was as if they were thinking, “So what does this really have to do with you?”

It took me a while to get it that it was not so much that they didn’t have some feelings about what America has done in the past, but their sense of citizenship really isn’t like ours. For them, their government is something they live with, more often than not, something they put up with. But what the government does is not necessarily something you feel much of a sense of responsibility for. For most of them, the government is outside of them, something they lived with.

But as I thought about this, I realized that I, as an American, am responsible. Like it or not, I am. It doesn’t matter whether I agree or not. I have a responsibility to be involved and to bring my voice into the process. With citizenship comes responsibility.

It was this experience that most brought home to me that it is really not an option to being involved. When I was there, there was part of me that needed to very much be here in Portland with many of you who were protesting the war. But I also needed to figure out that there was a reason for being in the place that I was. Part of what I was supposed to do was learn and also pray in this place where I was.

We live in a culture that makes it so easy to be complacent. For most of us our lives are pretty comfortable. The terrorist attacks two years ago were a wake up call and yet it seems that it is so easy to slip back into our complacency even with the loss of civil liberties and more and more bloodshed around the world. But we seem isolated and in response to the attacks have become even more isolated.

It is easy to think that we don’t have to do anything. It is easy to feel like we can’t make much difference. It is easy to not want to go to that rally for peace or write that letter to the editor. But what would it be like if we worried about our children stepping on a land mine when they go out to play? That is not something we think about happening in our world. As I became aware of the ways that we influence the lives of so many in the world, and yet those people really don’t have much to say about what it is our government does in the world. That brings responsibility to us. With the privilege we have comes responsibility.

Of course one of the paradoxes of all this is that we are privileged in this country but also that that privilege isolates us. Being somewhere where people have so little materially and yet their lives seem happier than ours calls up and questions all kinds of assumptions. In our culture the overwhelming message that we get is that we are what we consume and so often that consuming can leave us empty.

Towards the end of my trip, I was on the Indonesian island of Java. Most of my time in Indonesia was spent on Bali, which is primarily Hindu, in contrast to the rest of the country, which is majority Muslim. I was in Java in during the middle of the war and I felt like I was one of a handful of westerners there. The stares that I felt did not feel welcoming. Saddam t-shirts were selling well in the market. As I look back on that time I realize that I was coming from a place of fear here, not knowing how to be in relationship with these people around me. It was uncomfortable to be there.

On Easter Sunday morning, I found myself at the great temple called Borobodour. It is the world’s largest Buddhist temple built between 750 and 850 and considered a wonder of the world. The temple consists of ten levels that represent the 10 stages of the Buddhist cosmic system. As you go higher up the levels, the carvings become more and more abstract. If I was spending Easter in a Muslim country, this seemed as good a place to be as any.

Sundays are popular times for groups of Indonesian children to visit this temple. As I climbed from one level to the next, camera in my pack, I kept meeting people, but we did not exchange words. As I got close to the top level a student who asked if I would have my picture taken with her. And with that photo and the smiles we shared, something seemed to happen. Soon I was taking photos of students, soon they were taking photos of me. As it turned out I spent most of my time there talking with students and taking photos. A group of Muslim girls asked if I would spend some time with them. We found a shady spot under a tree and talked for a good while. They asked the questions that I might have expected. What do I do? What did I think of their country? Why was my country doing what it was doing in Iraq? What do people in my country think about people who are Muslims?

There I was, a rosy-cheeked American with a group of young women asking questions about how they, also, fit in the world. It was a nice moment, and the photos are lovely. And I was very glad to have known them. It turned out to be a very good Easter. As is so often the case, children have a way of breaking down barriers. Laughter is a good place to start. The challenge, I came to realize, is always in breaking down the barriers the separate us and not building them up.

The world is big, it is diverse, it is full of beauty and pain and chaos. Where we fit into that is a big question and not an easy question. Where we fit as Americans at this time in history is an even bigger question. But it is the one before us. As citizens, we have no choice.

As Americans, it is up to us to speak. It is up to us to listen. It is up to us to use our power to make good in the world. It is up to us to be engaged. We live in times that call for courage. We live in times that call us out of ourselves. But, as the writer Annie Dilland says, there is no one but us . . . there never has been.

PRAYER

Great spirit, we live in a world so full of brokenness, so full of pain. Help us to open to the knowledge that we are part of this brokenness, and that we are part of the promise of healing. Help us to bring our voices in the world. Help us that me might be agents of peace. Help us that we might be citizens always working for the good. Amen.

BENEDICTION

Bring yourself and your voice into the world. Open yourself to love. Amen.

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Copyright 2003, Rev. Thomas Disrud.  All rights reserved.