America:
At age 48 I have consciously experienced Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan, Bush the father, Clinton, and Bush the unutterable. Let me start from the beginning.
In the Sixties, I adored you.
Tanks were largest and loudest machines passing my tiny village in Germany. Shivering in our yards, we children were luring for those green cans with those crackers, the white and black soldiers would throw on the lawn for us. Peanut butter remained to be a nutrient only available in the tracked-vehicle-store.
In the Seventies, I hated you.
You had engaged in a war which you could not win. And you did not understand. Instead, you killed millions of people and 58,000 men not much older than I was at that time. Later, President Carter chose to liberate the Americans held hostage in the embassy in Tehran. Operation Eagle Claw started in Kena, Egypt, in April of 1980. I travelled Kena the same day the aircrafts started to Iran. „Not even able to keep helicopters in the air“ I colported. President-elect Reagan’s deal to hold the hostages until he was in power added the rest to your reputation.
In the Eighties, I differentiated my views.
Most of the original scientific work I had ro read was done in Boston, Houston, or La Jolla. I learned: I have to learn from you. And I did eagerly. My first boyfriend was American. His Messiah-College-Education did not prevent him from doing, well, wht some of you call „sodomy“. However, he suffered from what bible-belt-teachers had done to his generation’s brains. By the end of the decade I decided, I want to experience you with my own eyes.
In the Nineties, I loved you.
You gave me boost in my professional career and showed me a way of life which I adore so much – with all the contradictions I had to whitness. I understood, we can barely do without you. Friends of mine survived the Scuds raining on Israel in February 1991. My (then still) unknown husband survived an impact in the Western outskirts of Jerusalem. And a suicide bombers attack in Tel Aviv in February 1996. You guaranteed the survival of the tiny country on the Mediterranian shores and helped to keep the scary and so rapidly changing World reasonably balanced. Economy and science blossomed. I was pround having been able to go along with you for a while. I owe you a lot.
And in the last decade?
Personally, I was happy to meet the the grandson of the man, who sold his house to my grandfather in 1936 – the same where I was born. This encounter ended my sublime feelings of guilt I used to carry around for many years. After mourning with you it did not take long to loose all respect for you. I used to (verbally) defend your right in the Hindukush hideouts. But, while I did science in Havana, Cuba, you lied to the world. And still you sit in the middle of the disaster. Only God knows, whether Iraq will be the next trauma of democracy.
Learn, America, learn, that there are more important things than abortion, gay rights, and the euphemism: „intelligent design“. If you want to fight abortion, then enable billions of Asian and African woman to feed and educate their otherwise neverborns. Gays in many parts of the Muslim world are arrested if not killed on the spot. Do you want to give up the principle: „The Land of the Free“? And, will you need 500 years to accept evolution like the Pope acknowledged that Galileo may have had a point about 500 years after the genius passed away?
See the World map above. I have visited or lived in the countries marked in red. I talked to and exchanged e-Mails from all over there in the last weeks. All of my friends and aquaintences are hoping for a better America.
Help me to adore you again in the next decade of my life. Go and vote for Sen. Barack H. Obama and help making him the 44th President of the United States of America.
Believing in you,
yours,
Ottmar
