Becoming a Professional
Hezel, Francis X. (2000-07-21). Becoming a Professional. Micronesian Counselor (Report). Kolonia, Pohnpei: Micronesian Seminar. pp. 1–4.
- Has attachment: File:W3ASSSW5.pdf
Abstract: At a mission conference in Aachen, Germany, about five years ago I had what was to be a memorable conversation with a West African man about the situation in his country. When I asked him how his country was doing, he replied, aggressively more than sadly, that it was not doing well at all. There was political instability, unrest about the poor economic showing of recent years, and many other problems facing his people. Before I could ask him about any of these problems, he started in on a long list of grievances–the depredations made by the early slave trade, years of colonialism, and the exploitation of his and other African nations by lending institutions leading to the enormous national debt that burdens them even today. From start to finish, he told me, his nation had been victimized by forces beyond their control. The slave trade and colonialism were evils perpetrated by Western nations, he said. AIDS was unleashed by natural forces just as malevolent as the first. No matter what problem was mentioned, my African friend regarded it as another crippling blow from the hand of fate. Racism, global forces, disease–all were drawn up against this man and his nation. What could he and his fellow citizens do? I walked away from the conversation thinking that whatever this man and his people suffered from, they were afflicted with an even more lethal malady–something that we might call victimization. What good would it do to work out strategies for restructuring the national debt? The nations of the world were aligned against his country. Political reform was not worth talking about, since the country had been hopelessly contaminated by its colonial masters. He was in the grip of a paralysis that had rendered him powerless over his life. He was a self-defined victim. Whenever I recall this conversation, I think of the Marshalls, which has had its share of misfortunes. Like other parts of Micronesia, the Marshalls was battered during the last world war. A few hundred Marshallese lost their lives during the hostilities, including about 140 on Jaluit during a single bombing raid. No added its bit to the disease burden, it was far from the most serious of the health problems in the Marshalls.
Even if tobacco use were responsible for destroying our population, whom should we blame for this problem? We can’t blame the American tobacco companies for introducing the weed to the Marshallese people, since that happened sometime in the mid-19th century. Pohnpeians were already using tobacco as a medium of exchange in the 1840s, and tobacco plantations were being cultivated in Palau by 1870. (Guamanians, the first in Micronesia to grow tobacco, already had plots in front of their house in the early 1700s.) When I first came to Micronesia in 1963, I found many people smoking although there were no billboards, commercials or other advertisements urging them to smoke. I would imagine that people smoked because they had seen others doing so, surely not because of any advertising campaign mounted by the tobacco companies. The basic question, then, comes down to this: Who is responsible for the toll taken by smoking? If we can point to someone else, then we can limp through life, drawing attention to our scars and blaming others for the damages we have suffered. We can continue to expect them, not ourselves, to see us through our future needs. The US dispossessed us of our lands, nuked us, and then poisoned us again through the tobacco they sold us. They did all this maliciously. Because what they have done has destroyed our past, they owe us our future....
Extra details:
DOI: 10.4324/9781315128108-4 MAG: 2921434918 CorpusID: 5258849 OpenAlex: W2921434918
