MY “FIRST DAY” AT SCHOOL IN NDSU

Tired after working a night shift, I still managed to get to campus to begin my school-day which doubles as the first day of classes for the Fall Semester. But little did I know that Gate City Auditorium, a venue for my second lecture in the morning, got its new name just a couple of weeks ago. In fact I drove in front of it earlier this same day looking for a place to park. After parking at some 20-minute-walk away, I strolled back right in front of the said venue again but my dumb ass would simply not allow me to read the inscription that had been printed boldly in front of the structure: GATE CITY AUDITORIUM. 

 Well, I got to the venue of the first lecture of the day where I was reminded that classes in first days of semesters start at 4pm, so I decided to walk around campus to locate this Gate City Auditorium and that is where the drama began.

First, I spoke to a gentleman. He seemed to know but with a bit of uncertainty. Nevertheless, he gave me the directions using the popular African style; “go on this sidewalk to where those notice boards are, and then turn right…” He pointed while doing his own version of “GPS-Africa”, though his complexion would give him away as a Caucasian.

I walked to the spot as directed but instinct told me turning right would just send me back to where I began the search but wait! Two young ladies showed up! I could tell they were returning from some sports training. I stopped them and asked if they knew where Gate City Auditorium was. But it turned out that these were fresh students and I probably knew the campus better, having spent the past couple of semesters locking horns with some College Physics, Applied Calculus and what have you. They suggested I walk up to the notice board that showed the campus map and look it up. In principle, I agreed with the idea and I think I nodded to confirm the usefulness of their suggestion, but there is this little bit of me that was already saying, “it’s gonna take you longer, Julius…you better find someone else who can point to the place!”

Not only did I choose against looking up Gate City on the campus map, I also made a left turn, violating both directives I had been given -- the gentleman’s left turn as well as the ladies’ campus map search. I walked past some few more lecture halls and some Halls of Residents reading their names with keen interest: Sudro Hall, Ladd Hall, Seim Hall….

I later came by a young flashy lady. My bit to stop her and make my inquiry was based more on her flashy sunglasses and her unique modeling footsteps than on my present need to locate Gate City. After all, classes don’t start until late in the afternoon, I thought to myself.

“Hi Madam, did you know where Gate City Auditorium is at all?” I believe she understood me perfectly, regardless how awkward that would sound in the ears of my compatriot English Professors. She first took off her dark glasses – a thing that helped me to predict without fail she is a Chinese. I don’t possess the vocabulary to describe the layout of that smiley face she displayed but, shoot; she had no idea where Gate City was!

I kept walking up north of the campus. I knew I was heading to the northern limits of the campus but some sort of voice kept convincing me to walk up front until it was all done along that direction. By this time I had spent close to 30 minutes already, all in my unfailing will to locate Gate City. I must say I would have been awfully late if classes had started that early on the day. A couple of guys rode their bikes past me. I saw some young and energetic ladies and gentlemen working out. People drove past. It was quite a morning to be out there!

I finally crossed path with this dude… an athletic-looking dude who, in this early hours of the day, seemed to have been possessed by whatever it was he was listening from his I-pod.  This time I didn’t need to get close enough to him to identify him as an African. I simply knew!

“Hello, I’m trynna locate Gate City Auditorium,” I spat out those words with certain levels of blatancy. As a matter of fact, I knew he had no choice but to show me Gate City…that is, if he knew at all. “Oh, Gate City is right behind one of those high-rise buildings over there,” he replied. “Let’s go, I’ll show you,” he added.

This latest development would cause me to make a 180-degree turn, but this time in a company of “someone” who turned out to be my classmate back home in Ghana, West Africa! Yup, you read me right! At last, I had stumbled into “someone” who knew Gate City Auditorium, but also knew all there is to know about St. Augustine’s College, my alma mater.

WHAT HAPPENED NEXT PRINTED SOME LASTING IMPRESSION I’D LIKE TO SHARE WITH YOU. STAY TUNED-IN!

NEW WORLD ORDER – I’VE GOT TO HAVE THE NUKE! PART - 2

                                                   THE LITTLE BOY:

On July 16, 1945, the first nuclear bomb (called Little Boy) was tested in the deserts of New Mexico, an event Truman [president, U.S.] reported to Stalin [of Soviet Union] at Potsdam. Stalin was not surprised. Klaus Fuchs, a Soviet spy at Los Alamos, the center of U.S. weapon research in New Mexico, had been supplying Russia with atomic secrets for years. After his conversation with Truman, Stalin instructed V.M. Molotov, his foreign minister, and Lavrenty Beria, the head of the Soviet atomic program, “to hurry up the work” on the Soviet bomb. In 1949, the Soviet Union exploded its own weapon. (Nau, 168)

A race that started up between the U.S. and Germany has now changed course. It’s now between the U.S. and its Second World War ally, the Soviet Union. But hey, hold on a bit! At the end of World War II, Germany was split into East Germany (a province under the control of the Soviet Union) and West Germany (controlled by the U.S.). Nuclear devices had been deployed in to Germany, courtesy Cold War. Under the Non Proliferation Treaty (NPT), Germany agreed not to go into nuclear weapon development, despite its capability to do so. Up to date the Nuclear weapon states in the world include the United States, Russia, United Kingdom, France and China. These are members of what is now called “Nuclear Club.” But I must add here that India, Pakistan and North Korea are known or believed to possess nukes too. These three state are however non-members of the NPT! North Korea was a member until 2003 when it withdrew from the club.

We are now living in a world littered with terror organizations as well as nations that potentially have nuclear weapons but not under any close international nuclear regulatory body. What is worse: these terror organizations are no longer acting as individual groups but are now forming linkages making the entire terror market a kind of international network in itself.

The calculus of fighting nuclear proliferation and most importantly terrorism has definitely changed with the coming into being of nuclear arms.

In the concluding part of this paper we will look at Deterrence Theory and ascertain whether it’s really of any use in today’s world at all.

NEW WORLD ORDER – I’VE GOT TO HAVE THE NUKE!

PART - 1

Routing my mind through history particularly regarding what has become dubbed as “nuclear proliferation” , I got to some point, paused for a moment and said to myself, “there it is; It’s the Germans! They started it all!”

This got me thinking about the World War II, the Cold War and the Deterrence Theory, and what have you, but one question that pricked my keen interest was, “what would the world be like if Russia had leaders such as Adolf Hitler and Uncle Saddam, or even Colonel Muammar Gaddafi during the Cold War era?” Well, you can go ahead and do the Calculus of that, but for now I’d like to share a little about how Albert Einstein, the Germans, and the United States plunged the world into this era of nuclear arms race…

Summer, July 1939:

Albert Einstein was on holiday at the coast outside of New York. He had fled the Nazi Germany. Einstein gets interrupted by a visitor, Leo Szilard, a friend who had also fled the Hitler’s Nazi. His news; German scientists had been able to split the atom, and the Nazi had seized some uranium deposits in Czechoslovakia. Hitler could be on his way to obtaining nuclear weapon, aka nuke!

It is quite understandable why Leo Szilard would seek the help of Einstein to help him write the letter to President Roosevelt warning him about the atomic bomb the Germans were developing and the need to do something before it was too late. Szilard definitely knew that the German bomb that he feared so much is a product of an idea that Einstein himself discovered, and hence, his option to seek Einstein’s assistance to get the message across to Roosevelt.  Einstein published his equation, E=mc², in 1905. 

Interestingly, Einstein himself remained dismissive of the possibility of releasing the energy in atoms according to his equation. "The likelihood of transforming matter into energy is something akin to shooting birds in the dark in a country in which there are only very few birds,” Albert Einstein was reacting to the question, whether it was possible to release the energy in an atom, during a press conference in Pittsburgh, 1935.

But Szilard and a colleague Fermi would later discover that if the neutron was used to split an atom, not just energy would be released but also some other neutrons which could sustain the process in what scientist came to call CHAIN REACTION. This means Einstein’s equation could be harnessed to make nukes! Szilard then approached Einstein again, but this time with his discovery, wondering what would happen if the German scientists get to discover what he had just found. But not just that; what if the Nazi dropped one such weapon in the center of New York? And that is a thing great minds feared Hitler could do without thinking twice!

White House, October 11, 1939:

Einstein’s letter gets to the office of President Roosevelt. Roosevelt studies the letter and decides that something should be done! This then sets up a very competitive race between the Nazi and the U.S.A. It was a question of “who gets to have the nuke first!”

                         Hide-and- Seek with my lil pair of scissors

… So it turned out that morning that I was searching for a pair of scissors in my room. I did look in all my drawers, dressers, wardrobes … but after about 20 minutes of wild goose chase I stopped and wondered for a while. “What do I even need the pair of scissors for, in the first place?” I asked myself in disbelieve.  Good grief! Believe you me; I had totally forgotten what it was I needed the pair of scissors for!

“Well then, life must go on,” I said to myself, while I settled into my arm chair behind my PC and continued to read through my emails. But I have this funny habit of touching my mustache when I get sucked into what I’m reading – and it’s involuntary. 

So as I started reading. I got into it again and there it was! I had been searching for the pair of scissors to get rid of one strand of mustache that had out-grown the others making my reading life pretty uncomfortable.

“Ah-ha! I’ve got to have this scissors, and now…”

THE AMERICAN, THE MEDIA, AND MY “ASS”

I can approach a university graduate raised in the U.S. and tell him that all government officials in Africa ride donkeys and horses to work! Worse still, I can tell an average man brought up in the States that all Africans sleep in trees; and probably add that Africans graze the grass pasture fields for meals! That does not sound too good but if I did, the most popular – and perhaps the ‘the most educated’ – response I’m going to get would sound like: “Oh really!”

A gaffe, you might call of what you just read but believe you me, Americans could easily pass for the group of people who know least about the rest of the world.

Once I accompanied a compatriot to a car lot in Fargo, North Dakota, to pick up a car he had just bought. While my colleague was busy signing up for auto insurance on his new car, I got into a chit-chat with the sales associate, a mother of two, I learned. And a section of our conversation went like this:

“…so where do you come from?” The lady asked, apparently noticing that I was fresh in town. “I’m from Ghana,” I answered, and without waiting for any further questions from her, went on, “have you heard about Ghana at all?”

“No, but is it in Africa?” She queried while still searching through her mind, perhaps she could remember if, at all, she knew anything useful about Ghana. Indeed this lady looked smart and I thought to myself that it’s not a big deal if she had not even heard the name Ghana before—after all, she has nothing to do in connection with Ghana, and I was definitely not going to expect every single individual to know about the rest of the world.  But what followed after that brief moment of silence was rather a question that shocked me to the bone!

“Ghana,” she murmured to herself and looked me in the face, “is there a war going on there?” And she kept looking me right in the eyes with a facial expression that said it all: this must be one of the refugees from the war-torn zones of Africa!

Well, while I might be wrong reading the lady’s mind, I definitely hit the nail right on the head complaining that Americans know very little about the world outside their country.

Fact is the U.S. has had a policy of isolationism from the beginning, (of course, except after the attack of the naval base at Pear Harbor on December 07, 1941, by the Japs). This policy was made even clearer by George Washington in his fair well address when he minced no word saying, “It is our true policy to steer clear of entangling alliances with any portion of the foreign world.” But all that does not explain why American people know very little about the global world, because information is readily available these days, so much so that anyone who wishes to study could easily get the facts just by listening to the radio and hanging out on the net.

Citing my daily life encounters in the States to support my argument could cause me talking for days but what I figured could be the highest contributing factor to this mess is the media – yeah, the media in the U.S., I mean. Particularly, the skewed media reportage toward what they seem to think makes the news when it comes to matters overseas.

I would agree with anyone, that indeed, the U.S. has a lot going on every minute and that home news alone would definitely fill the bulleting each day. It is, however, interesting the way some of the national media quickly grab “the negative news” from the international community and actually make it the running news for days, and yet fail to see equally useful newsworthy events, especially when it has to do with Africa.

When the Tunisian uprising started up it was capture moderately well by CNN. The same network had enough incentive to even send a reporter to Egypt to file the mess that was going on there with Hosni Mubarak’s regime. And, of course, we all saw enough video of what happened to Saddam, all on the same network. It is interesting, however, that roughly a year after these series of events, the media would not fill us in with the aftermath of the news they made so popular to their audiences – and when they do at all it turns out to be a fragment of the whole show!

I wouldn’t want to believe that some of the western media are bias against the easterly world. Neither would I like to say that it is professionally lousy. If I did at all, the National Public Radio network would prove me wrong!

To put it in a nutshell, I’d say this ‘media tactic’ of making it big news when it’s about negative development in the third world and making very little of it if it’s a positive development must stop before the media end up creating dumb-thinkers around!