World events mirror domestic events

As I piece together dates and places from the past, my best guess is that it was the Christmas of 1969 when I was given my first shortwave radio. We were at Sheppard Air Force Base that year, and Santa brought me an ICP Nine Band-Portable that he probably picked up at the on-base Air Force Post Exchange. Santa didn’t like to pay sales tax.

The radio was about the size of a small briefcase and was fairly simple in design, but it opened up new worlds for me. I could listen to broadcasts in Spanish, French, German and Chinese. I didn’t understand any of those languages, but it was a novelty just to be able to pick those stations out of the ether. There were also English-speaking stations, including Voice of America and the British Broadcasting Services, but the real treat was to pick up an English language broadcast from Radio Moscow.

The Cold War was in full stride and so was the rhetoric. According to the Soviet broadcasters, we in the USA were imperialist dogs, capitalism was a myth, and we were fighting an illegal war in Southeast Asia. At the time, my favorite television show was a sitcom about a WWII prisoner of war camp called “Hogan’s Heroes,” where allied POW’s outsmarted their German captors for a half hour every week. Those Radio Moscow broadcasts were so clumsy and over-the-top, they sounded as hapless and inept as the guards at the fictionalized Stalag Thirteen. Knowing what I do now of Soviet involvement in Vietnam and other proxy wars, it doesn’t seem as funny, but I was a kid discovering the world. Naivety is a privilege of youth.

That was, in many ways, the beginning of two life-long interests for me: amateur radio and politics, or more appropriately, news in general. Sadly, now that I am an adult and have much better equipment to listen on, many of those broadcasters, VOA, BBC and what is now called “Sputnik Radio” have downsized their radio broadcast operations and opted for cost-efficient digital streaming to all but the most remote and internet-restricted regions.

I still, nonetheless, enjoy news from diverse sources, which brings me to the genuine belly laugh it gave me this week. I was listening to Al Jazeera English, which is a news network owned by the State of Qatar and is usually a good way to find out what the Arab world is thinking about middle eastern affairs without the militant Islamic spin. Al Jazeera is a world-wide network that offers news stories from all regions, and on Tuesday, they ran a story about the president whose political rivals accused him of acting too slowly in response to COVID-19. Those critics also believed that he was too anxious to discontinue precautions. They alleged that he was more interested in the economy than in the health and welfare of his citizens and that he was particularly cruel and uncaring because the virus disproportionately affects minorities and the poor.

As familiar as that sounds to us, the president they were referencing was President Jair Bolsonaro of Brazil. Word-for-word, the narrative sounded exactly like our domestic partisan spat. The only difference was that a Brazilian Judge had ruled that Bolsonaro’s choosing to not wear a mask in public was a violation of his constitutional duties. The Judge then threatened to fine the President 2,000 Reals (about $400) for each day that he appears without a mask. I suppose Brazil has a 9th Circuit Court of Appeals just as we do.

That’s not the only time I have witnessed other countries playing out dramas remarkably similar to our own. The UK is in the process of gradually lifting coronavirus restrictions just as we are, and England is taking the lead, while Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland are being more cautious and extending some restrictions. Were you aware that Boris Johnson held daily briefings just as our administration did? Of course, that’s when he wasn’t in the hospital with the virus himself.

According to the BBC, the tragic George Floyd incident has resulted in civil unrest throughout British cities and aroused a demonstration in London that was estimated at more than 20,000 citizens. Just as in US demonstrations, there has been commentary pointing out that in the midst of protest, social distancing was not observed and that a wave of illness might follow.

What we have not seen in other first-world countries is a situation like that in Seattle, where law enforcement ceded several blocks of the city to an angry mob, including their own police station. The exploits of CHOP (the Capitol Hill Organized Protest), formerly known as CHAZ (the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone) are not entirely unique in the international community. Places like Somalia and Syria have organizations like CHAZ and CHOP, they just don’t have to reorder letterhead as often.

I understand that Seattle is a very different place from McCook, Nebraska, so I won’t pretend to know what local government officials were thinking when they let that happen. We obviously don’t want to have a Tiananmen Square massacre in any of our cities, but it’s a national embarrassment and trust me, the folks who don’t like us are reporting it as such. I don’t mind when we have the same problems as other western, first world countries, but when we begin to resemble failed states, we should all take notice.