How Building a Saudi City Made a Lefty Out of Dick Underhill, VFP

[punpirate]

Concerns Cindy Sheehan/Peace House/Dick Underhill:

http://www.commondreams.org/views05/0810-28.htm

The foundation of Underhill's Goldwater Republicanism was an economic conviction born out of his background as a working class juvenile delinquent who made something good of his life. Anybody, said that conviction, can pick themselves up by their own bootstraps no matter what. If Underhill had done it, so could everyone else.

But the foundation of Underhill's economic conviction began to crack during the seven years (1978-85) that he spent working for the Parsons Corporation building the Saudi Arabian city of Yanbu from the ground up. Since he was single at the time he could travel quite a bit, so he saw the worlds of SouthEast Asia, India, and the Middle East. Whenever he saw extreme poverty, he heard the same formula for economic opportunity: get access to USA markets. But that wasn't quite the bootstrap of his convictions, so he began to question his economic theories.

<snip>

Even Underhill thought the scene looked pretty desolate when he passed through Crawford Sunday afternoon (was that just two days ago?) and saw this one lonely tent pitched against the Texas prairie. Although by that point Underhill knew that the Crawford Peace House had thrown open its doors and CodePink had mobilized its network, 'It didn't look too powerful.'

'But you know what?' says Underhill, pausing for a while at home between his support trips to Crawford. 'I think this has shaken the whole globe. I have a friend in Germany and he says it's on television there. This has blown wide open.' Tuesday morning campers watched ABC camera crews hang through the rain to get dawn shots for the evening news. Something about Cindy Sheehan is bringing out the poetry in everyone's imagination.

[Wickerman]

1. Great story! and a nice paragraph here

'You have heard about PTSD, haven't you?' asks Underhill in a telephone interview Tuesday afternoon from his Austin home. 'That's Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. Well, I have a name for something else that I call PASD. That's Post Awareness Stress Disorder. It's what happens to you when you've been raised all your life to believe the story that the slaveholders and merchant pirates who founded the USA were good people and that the government of the USA is the best in the world. When you find out that's not true at all, it does leave you under stress.'

[punpirate]

2. Yeah, PASD...

... wish a few more people would get it. :)

But, then, the prerequisite for that is awareness.