Essay #3

Former Swiss Ambassador Explains Putin’s Russia

            As a young Swiss boy walking the streets of Zurich, Dr. Walter Fetscherin came across a group of young men speaking a foreign language he didn’t understand. He soon came to learn the men were speaking Russian, and from that point forward Fetscherin developed a passion for the language, having to convince his parents along the way that he wasn’t turning into a communist. He found a career as the Swiss ambassador to Russia from 2000 to 2003.

            Fetscherin has also had 13 years of experience as a Swiss Ambassador to other countries like the Republic of Korea, the Czech Republic, Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan. He explained to a group of students, faculty, and community members at the SunTrust Auditorium in Rollins College that Russian history is important in understanding the culture and the people in the society.

“70 years of absolutist regime and isolation from the rest of the world has had an enormous impact on the Russian population” Fetscherin said. After the demise of the Soviet Union in the early 90’s and the end of communism, many people became separated from their homelands and lost a sense of national identity. “95 percent of the Moscow population had no ancestors in Moscow,” said Fetscherin. “This chaotic situation had an impact on the thinking and feeling of the people.”

            Between the newly elected president Borris Yeltsin in 1991 promoting a new era of democracy and economic freedom, former President Gorbachev’s idolization in the west, and the opposition from the radical reformists, Fetscherin explained that the people were looking for someone to lead them. The people had been used to a strong Soviet Union as a superpower; they needed control. “It was a characteristic in the 90’s that the population wasn’t really free, everything became privatized,” he said.

According to The Economist, in the 1990s privatization in Russia was meant to be a way to erase the traces of the Soviet economy and to create a new class of property owners. It had some success, but created a very rich class of oligarchs that both weakened the state and planted seeds of resentment among Russians.

            “When I served as an ambassador in Russia they asked me to travel to a different city to speak in Russian at the grand opening of a new Swiss company. It was very hard to travel during this time in Russia, there was no money, no fuel, the airplanes just sat at the airport,” Fetscherin said.  “This is the trauma of a world power that becomes weak.” 

            It wasn’t until 2000 when Putin came into power that the Russian population started to feel some sense of relief, explained Fetscherin. “He started to create order, there was security in their country again, it was a relief for the population,” he said. Fetscherin had been one of the first ambassadors handing out credentials at Putin’s election.

            “He started in a very positive way, but if you have too much power for a long time you start to stray away from reality,” said Fetscherin. As Mr. Putin sees it, according to one Oligarch, maintaining as much control over the economy as possible “gives you the feeling of security in turbulent times”, The Economist reported.

            Fetscherin described Putin as a president who was very critical of the people who spoke about him and that he wanted to be accepted by the U.S. as an equal. At the same time the U.S. didn’t have a great taste for Putin after his impulsive invasion of Georgia in 2008.

 In the beginnings of his power Putin wasn’t aggressively anti-American, he craved membership in the world economy and its institutions. The New Yorker reported that in 2009, when Putin invited Obama to Russia, former United States Ambassador to Russia Michael McFaul recounted Putin lecturing the President on the history of American deceptions. He also demanded that the U.S. cede to him the former Soviet republics, and that he felt that America had pushed Russia around and exploited its weaknesses after the Cold War; his speeches became full of hostility, lashing out at the West for betraying its promises.

            The “Russian mentality” was Fetscherin’s description of Putin’s attitude. “It’s where you have the impression that you are surrounded by enemies,” he said. This was the case for Russia who used to be such a powerful part of the world. Fetscherin mentioned an old friend of his who was a famous writer in Russia and claimed, “We are still the best of the worst.”

            When asked the question about the attitude of the general public in today’s Putin Russia, Fetscherin replied that he thinks that the people would still like to try to have a democratic country, but before in the 90’s, they thought democracy was comparable to the chaos that they had once lived in. “The people need security, they need a degree of wealth, they would like democracy, especially the young people, but they have to get used to it,” said Fetscherin. “It is hard for the people to trust someone to take over the responsibility, especially someone they are not familiar with.”

           

           

                                                    

Essay #2

The Value of Business: Father Oliver Williams

By: Sarah Flores        

            “What is the purpose of business?” Father Oliver Williams asks a crowd full of students and faculty from the Peace and Justice Institute at Valencia College. “If you ask a lawyer what the purpose of business is they will say to seek justice, if you ask a doctor they will say to heal people, if you ask a professor they will say to educate young minds and hearts; but what is the real purpose of doing business?”

            Father Oliver Williams has led a multifaceted life: a former Naval Officer, a Catholic Priest, a business ethics professor at Notre Dame, and a director of the United Nations Global Compact Foundation are just a few of his larger accomplishments. He has taught for 20 years in Cape Town, South Africa, in that time having personally worked with Nelson Mandela, as well as teaching in South Korea. His purpose? To teach business leaders, new and established, how to create sustainable business practices on a local and global level.

Father Williams says, “The real purpose of business is to create sustainable values for all stakeholders in a company”. He recounted a story of his initial meeting with the CEO of Starbucks, Howard Schultz. When Howard Schultz started his company he wanted to provide healthcare to all of his employees, but his stakeholders didn’t like the idea. His argument was that his employees were very important stakeholders just as his suppliers that picked the very coffee beans that consumers have enjoyed so frequently were very important stakeholders. He gave them all a living wages and taught farmers how to get more yield from their crops.

 Father Williams says “Companies have to take responsibility for sustainability all over the world because most Governments cannot, where there is power there is also responsibility”.

“People are poor not because they don’t have money but because they don’t have management skills”, Father Williams explained. He described how it is the larger corporation’s duty and responsibility to provide sustainable practices to consumers and to society as a whole.

He tells another story about Coca-Cola Co. and how they created sustainability. The head of Coca-Cola in Africa used big, commercial trucks to deliver to the rural villages, and they decided that they would not only be delivering their product but they would also take medics and medicine with them on their routes. “The CEO explained, if people are sick they don’t buy coke,” the Father said with a smile. Father Williams carried this notion of sustainability with him when he was appointed a charter member of the three-person board of directors of the United Nations Global Compact, back in 2006.

“I wrote a letter to the U.N. telling them that I thought what they were doing {with the Global Compact} was a great idea and that I wanted to help, I was very surprised when they wrote back asking me to join them and recruit big companies to help the initiative”, Father Williams stated.  The U.N. Global Compact created 10 principles relating to human rights, labor rights, corporate corruption and concern for the environment, with the notion that companies would subscribe to the principles, make clear statements of support, and submit an annual report showing these practices as an example for other companies to imitate.

“Do people trust business today? The answer is not much”, says Father Williams. According to multiple reports shown by Father Williams, consumers that live in wealthy, developed countries want companies to do more in society. “The purpose of business is to create value, part of that involves money but it also involves many other things”, he states. “We trust a company when we think the company isn’t just concerned about themselves but about our stake as well”.

When asked about the future and what we can say and teach to the future generations about business ethics Father Williams replied, “In my own teaching I make a distinction between a job, a vocation, and a career. You have a job to make money, a career gives you internal satisfaction, and a vocation is being a part of something, knowing you are a part of making a difference”.

When asked “If the purpose of business is not just to make money then why is there such a debate over minimum wage and taxes?” Father Oliver Williams replied, “We have a lot of power as consumers and we need to use it to make a change. The largest shareholders in our society are pension funds and educational endowments, I think we need to push for shareholders to change their habits, to spend more investing in sustainable business practices and less in some of these CEO’s larger salaries”.

According to a report published by Father Oliver Williams “A Global Compact for Sustainable Development at the United Nations”, the Pope’s visit this past September accompanied by his speech pushing for peace in a troubled world, was important for the United Nations. The 193 Member States of the United Nations adopted 17 Sustainable Development Goals, which targets to help the poor and aspires to develop a world without poverty, harmful inequality, and injustice.

Father Williams states one of his favorite sayings, “We can’t do everything, but we can do something”.

Essay #1

Brian Turner: Soldier Turned Writer

Sarah Flores

            Brian Turner, once a young man, with long hair and a single earring to match, took a poetry class at Fresno State College to advance his lyrical-writing skills for a local band he played in. Years later, little did he know, he would be writing two critically acclaimed pieces about his 7 years spent in the U.S. army, most of which in the war on Iraq. Years later he would also be sharing his real experiences from a brutal war and begin to explain the reasons why he chose this path in the most essential years of his life.

As Brian Turner stood up in a room filled with the faculty, staff, students, and community members of Valencia Community College, he reflected on his first published works of poetry in a book titled “Here Bullet”.  He explained, “There are some poems that we write, and look back at multiple times, and try to figure out what they mean.” This is what he did with “Here Bullet”.

Turner wrote the poems in Iraq on sheets of paper while sitting in his tent, headphones in his ears, listening to the band The Queens of Stone Age. When he returned home he typed them all on his computer and tried to find someone willing to publish them. Turner said at the time the words poured out and he didn’t fully comprehend what it was he was writing.

There is a poem in the book about a private in his platoon, Private Miller. While in Iraq Turner’s platoon returned from a mission one night and the Sergeant began to read off a list of men who hadn’t returned with them, Private Miller was one of those men.  Turner stated,

“It was a very poignant moment, and when I read this poem to different audiences I would have to kill Private Miller, bring him back to life, just to kill him again.”

Turner relives this moment from his past frequently and on that day when he read the poem to an audience full of accomplished and aspiring writers, he said he was shocked about the way a person is just erased from the war, about how we, as a country, can dismiss someone so easily.

“I think about this writer’s festival, a 3 day event, and on average during war there are 18 soldiers killed in a day; by the end of this festival my platoon would be gone,” he said. He stared out into the crowd and questioned “Our endurance for war is so great, it’s like breathing, isn’t that disturbing?”

Turner is often asked the question “Why did you join the army?”, and while he can’t fully answer that question he said that in his most recent memoir, “My Life as a Foreign Country” he begins to explain it.

 In this memoir Turner wanted to convey what it was like to be a professional solider. He began to read an excerpt from the book, stopped and said,

“At 3 am while most people back home would be sleeping, we would be in the small villages of Iraq, kicking in doors to do body counts,” that is the reality of being a professional soldier, according to Turner.

He asked everyone in the room to raise their hand if they had ever served in the military or were in some way related or connected to people who had served. Almost everyone in the room raised their hands.

“We grow up in America watching these brave young men prepare for this epic battle of war, then they go to fight and they come back silent and changed; and we look at these men and think that we have to go through something similar,” he said.  

Turner said that he is proud of his years spent serving and fighting for his country but he doesn’t fully understand this concept of idolization. He expressed an interest in changing this pathology and helping others “find the way into the rest of their lives”.

            Turner ended his speech reading a passionate and emotional excerpt from his book, “My Life as a Foreign Country”. In a deep and resounding voice he read about soldiers raiding the homes in the small villages of Iraq, seeing the families, and the children who were frightened and crying.

He jumped back and forth with the events happening in the soldier’s lives back home and with what was happening in the homes of these Iraqi families. The entire room was silent and intrigued, and after he was finished he closed his book, stared out into the crowd and spoke one last time as everyone clapped for at least more than a couple of minutes.

“The writer in me wants people to clap and cry after reading that, but Brian in the field is disturbed and hears the claps as if they were small fires being shot"

Ironman

“Ironman”

Winter Park, FL

By: Sarah Flores         

            I have always thought, growing up as a small child, that funerals were sad events in which you traveled to say goodbye to your loved ones and commemorated the legacy that they left behind; this is based on the fact that I had only ever been to one, my great grandfathers’. At my great grandfather’s funeral, my family and I went to the funeral home where a memorial service was held, and everyone sat down to listen to others speak about my great grandfather and to mourn him. I couldn’t help but notice, at twelve years old, that at the end of every bench in that room sat a box of tissues. When I thought of tissues and what they were used for, I thought of wiping away tears or blowing a runny nose, and that day nearly everyone in the entire room used those tissues. Somehow something so soft and soothing held a connotation of sadness and sickness. I was heartbroken seeing everyone in that room crying with a tissue squeezed tightly in their hands, even my grandfather, who I had never seen cry before. These tissues were all ruined; they became dampened with tears and grief, and after that day I didn’t want to see a tissue for a long time. It wasn’t until the second funeral I attended, as silly as it sounds, that my outlook on tissues changed forever.

            The only other funeral that I have ever been to was this past June for our close family friend, Dale Kelley. Once again, I sat in a room at the funeral home with my family and at the end of the bench there sat more tissues. Except this time was different, this time everyone in the room wasn’t crying into the tissues. To Dale’s family he was known as Ironman, he was their superhero. Instead of tears and mourning, people laughed, people told happy stories about Dale, and posters of Ironman were set up all around the room, we were all there to celebrate his life. As I sat there and watched this beautiful scene, another close family friend to Dale proceeded to walk around the room and hand out more tissues. These tissues were also different, they were individually packaged with an “Avengers” graphic wrapped all the way around them, and in that graphic front and center was Ironman. I put these tissues into my purse and to this very day they have never been opened and have never left my purse; I carry the “Ironman” tissues with me almost everywhere.

            One of the definitions I found on the internet when I searched “Iron man” comes from the Cambridge Dictionaries Online and it says:

            Iron Man: “A person of great physical strength and the ability to continue doing something difficult for a long time”

Dale Kelley fought lung cancer for nearly 3 and a half years, and never once did he complain, never once did he share his burden with others, and never once did he treat others differently. Instead, Dale was always interested in you, he always wanted to know what was going on in your life and to know that you were living happily and healthy. This is the significance that I now relate to tissues. Every time I look into my purse fumbling for keys or my wallet I happen to cross the package of the Iron Man tissues and I am reminded that I am just as strong as Iron Man and that I can push on despite the difficulties that life carries every day. Tissues no longer insinuated sorrow and malaise; instead they suggested hope and resilience. From time to time I look into my purse and I see Iron Man, I see Dale and I smile. 

Asphalt, The Green Pavement

 “Asphalt, The Green Pavement”

In recent years the expectation of “going green” has become widespread throughout the world in all facets of society. Specifically, the demand for LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) buildings is becoming the market norm for building owners, tenants, and developers alike. These LEED certified buildings are saving money and resources while having a positive impact on the health of occupants, and promoting renewable, clean energy. It is this outlook on construction that is doing wondrous things for our economy and environment and becoming more appealing to communities everywhere. In fact, as of 2015, it is estimated that 40-48 percent of new non residential construction will be green.

So with this new green trend in construction, what does asphalt bring into the mix?

The materials that go into construction are the very core of the creation, the foundation. LEED certified buildings earn credits through the materials and resources that are used; they promote the use of recycled materials and materials produced. Asphalt is 100 percent recyclable and is the most recycled material in the U.S. That fact in itself would seem to make asphalt the perfect material for going green!

Warm mix asphalt allows for production and placement of asphalt pavement at lower temperatures rather than conventional hot mix. This technique creates environmental benefits such as reduced fossil fuel consumption and reduced greenhouse gas emissions, as well as reduced energy consumption making it cost effective.

Porous asphalt pavement has been shown to have a benefit on water quality. The asphalt works as a storm water management tool by being placed to collect the water, reduce runoff, and promote infiltration and groundwater recharge.

Asphalt remains to be an enduring and progressive building material that continues to advance in environmental and economical innovation every day. Asphalt contributes to sustainable development and balances the needs of people, nature, and the economy for future generations to come.