A new humanitarian effort: Save the Adults

GUEST OPINION, May 2

By: Anne Waldron Neumann
   If I were President Bush, I think I’d be having a terrible anxiety dream about now: I’m leader of the world’s greatest country, and I’ve suddenly been given total responsibility for the prosperity and safety of a second country — let us call it Iraq. I have a sinking feeling in my dream that things are not going well at all when suddenly my advisers rush in crying, "Afghanistan! What have you done with Afghanistan?" I wake in a cold sweat because I cannot quite remember what Afghanistan is or what I’m supposed to have done with it.
   I suppose we could leave President Bush to sweat over his neglect of Afghanistan. But I have an awful feeling he doesn’t sweat about Afghanistan. And, meanwhile, Afghanistan may need help. So I’ve also been thinking lately about programs like Save the Children.
   Suppose various American professional organizations initiated a sort of Save the Children fund for adults, allowing individual American professionals to support an Iraqi or Afghani counterpart and receive letters and photographs in return. It works best on airplanes, we’re told, if adults don their own oxygen masks first and help children afterwards.
   If the National Education Association sponsored a Support the Teachers fund, for example, any American teacher who joined could probably, for a few hundred dollars a year, supply an entire village school with paper and pencils, or collect and mail a small library of used books, or contribute a secondhand laptop — whatever the counterpart teacher wanted. Thus, while President Bush prepares to ship Iraq container-loads of politically approved teaching materials, one teacher’s actual needs could actually be met.
   Similarly, the American Medical Association could start a Support the Doctors fund, linking American doctors with Afghani and Iraqi doctors, hospitals and students. Equipment, supplies, journal subscriptions, invitations to conferences, encouragement and advice could all be offered. (And if my GP starts sending her plan partner cut-rate Canadian pharmaceuticals, maybe she could get me some, too.)
   Interestingly, some learned societies already suggest that American members pay dues for academics from impoverished countries. But why stop there? If members of the American Physical Society would join a Support the Physicists fund and share a tiny part of their salaries, they might double the salary of Afghani, Iraqi or even Russian physicists. Friendship and financial help would lessen the temptation for foreign physicists to peddle militarily applicable knowledge their own governments are no longer buying.
   Similarly, lawyers, nurses, policemen, farmers, psychotherapists — all could support overseas counterparts through funds established by their professional organizations. Some left-wing Americans may object that private charities like these shift the responsibility away from government, where it belongs. But if President Bush has a sign on his desk, "The buck stops here," he means no buck ever leaves his desk to be spent on social programs — in America or in some country nobody ever heard of.
   So let us show the world that we Americans remember where Afghanistan is — and what we were supposed to do with it.
Anne Waldron Neumann, author of "Should You Read Shakespeare? Literature, Popular Culture, and Morality," teaches literature and writing in Princeton and has completed a collection of literary folktales titled "Bedtime Stories for Grownups."