[Congressional Record Volume 148, Number 63 (Thursday, May 16, 2002)]
[House]
[Pages H2602-H2604]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                              SAYING GRACE

  The SPEAKER pro tempore (Mr. Jim Miller of Florida). Under the 
Speaker's announced policy of January 3, 2001, the gentleman from 
Washington (Mr. McDermott) is recognized for 60 minutes as the designee 
of the minority leader.
  Mr. McDERMOTT. Mr. Speaker, people often have the opportunity to do 
things which bring attention to themselves that they did not really 
expect, and one such person is a woman named Barbara Kingsolver, one of 
the most eminent authors in this country.
  During the days after 9/11, she wrote a number of essays about what 
was happening in the United States and was, in some instances, very 
poorly received by people, and I think that, having met her and 
listened to her at the Physicians for Social Responsibility 2 weeks 
ago, I thought it would be good for the House to have an opportunity to 
think about Ms. Kingsolver's words.
  The speech she gave there was entitled ``Saying Grace,'' and it goes 
this way.
  ``I never knew what 'grand' really was until I saw the canyon. It's a 
perspective that pulls the busy human engine of desires to a quiet 
halt. Taking the long view across that vermillion abyss attenuates 
humanity to quiet internal rhythms, the spirit of ice ages, and we 
look, we gasp, and it seems there is a chance we might be small enough 
not to matter. That the things we want are not the end of the world. I 
have needed this view lately.
  ``I've come to the Grand Canyon several times in my life, most lately 
without really understanding the necessity. As the holidays approached 
I couldn't name the reason for my uneasiness. We thought about the 
cross-country trip we had usually taken to join our extended families' 
Thanksgiving celebration, but we did not make the airplane 
reservations. Barely a month before, terrorists attacks had distorted 
commercial air travel to a horrifying new agenda, one that left 
everybody jittery. We understood, rationally, that it was as safe to 
fly as ever, and so it wasn't precisely nervousness that made us think 
twice about flying across the country for a long weekend. Rather, we 
were moved by a sense that this was wartime, and the prospect of such 
personal luxury felt somehow false.
  ``I called my mother with our regrets and began making plans for a 
more modest family trip. On the days our daughters were out of school 
we would wander north from Tucson to visit some of the haunts I have 
come to love in my 20 years as a desert dweller, transplanted from the 
verdant Southeast. We would kick through the leaves in Oak Creek 
Canyon, bask like lizards in the last late-afternoon sun on Sedona's 
red rocks, puzzle out the secrets of the labyrinthine ruins at Wupatki, 
and finally stand on the rim of the remarkable canyon.
  ``I felt a little sorry for myself at first, missing the reassuring 
tradition of sitting down to face a huge upside-down bird and counting 
my blessings in the grand joyful circle of my kin. And then I felt 
shame enough to ask myself, how greedy can one person be to want more 
than the Grand Canyon? How much more could one earth offer me than to 
lay herself bare, presenting me with the whole of her bedrock history 
in one miraculous view? What feast could satisfy a mother more deeply 
than to walk along a creek through a particolored carpet of leaves, 
watching my children pick up the fine-toothed gifts of this scarlet 
maple, that yellow aspen, piecing together the picture puzzle of a 
biological homeplace? We could listen for several days to the songs of 
living birds instead of making short work of one big dead one, and we 
would feel lighter afterward too.
  ``These are relevant questions to ask in this moment when our country 
demands that we dedicate ourselves and our resources, again and again, 
to what we call the defense of our way of life: How greedy can one 
person be? How much do we need to feel blessed, sated and permanently 
safe? What is safety in this world, and on what broad stones is that 
house built?
  ``Imagine that you came from a large family in which one brother 
ended up with a whole lot more than the rest of you. Sometimes it 
happens that way, the luck falling to one guy who didn't do that much 
to deserve it. Imagine his gorgeous house on a huge tract of forest, 
rolling hills and fertile fields. Your other relatives have decent 
places with smaller yards, but yours is mostly dust. Your lucky brother 
eats well, he has meat every day--in fact, let's face it, he is 
corpulent, and so are his kids. At your house, meanwhile, things are 
bad. Your kids cry themselves to sleep on empty stomachs. Your brother 
must not be able to hear them from the veranda where he dines, because 
he throws away all the food he can't finish. He will do you this favor: 
He'll make a TV program of himself eating. If you want, you can watch 
it from your house. But you can't have his food, his house, or the car 
he drives around in to view his unspoiled forests and majestic purple 
mountains. The rest of the family has noticed that all his driving is 
kicking up dust, wrecking not only the edges of his property, but also 
their less pristine backyards and even yours, which was dust to begin 
with. He has dammed the rivers to irrigate his fields, so that only a 
trickle reaches your place, and it's nasty. You are beginning to see 
that these problems are deep and deadly, and you will be the first to 
starve and the others will follow. The family takes a vote and agrees 
to do a handful of obvious things that will keep down the dust and 
clear the water. All except Fat Brother. He walks away from the table. 
He says God gave him good land and the right to be greedy.

  ``The ancient Greeks adored tragic plays about families like this, 
and their special world for the fat brother was `hubris.' In the town 
where I grew up, we called it `getting all high and mighty,' and the 
sentence that came next usually included the words `getting knocked 
down to size.' For most of my life, I have felt embarrassed by a facet 
of our national character that I would have to call prideful 
wastefulness. What other name can there be for our noisy, celebratory 
appetite for unnecessary things, and our vast carelessness regarding 
their manufacture and disposal? In the autumn of 2001 we faced the 
crisis of taking a very hard knock from the outside, and in its 
aftermath, as our Nation grieved, every time I saw that wastefulness 
rear its head I felt even more ashamed. Some retailers rushed to 
convince us in ads printed across waving flags that it was our duty, 
even in wartime, especially in wartime, to go out and buy those cars 
and shoes. We were asked not to think very much about the other side of 
the world, where, night after night, we were waging a costly war in a 
land whose people could not dream of owning cars or in some cases even 
shoes. For some, `wartime' becomes a matter of waving our pride above 
the waste, with slogans that didn't make sense to me: `Buy for your 
country' struck me as an exhortation to `erase from your mind what has 
just happened.' And the real meaning of this I can't even guess at: 
`Our enemies hate us because we are free.'
  ``I'm sorry, but I have eyes from which to see, and friends in many 
places. In Canada, for instance, I know people who are wicked cold in 
winter but otherwise in every way as free as you and me. And nobody 
hates Canada.
  ``Hubris isn't just about luck or wealth, it's about throwing away 
food while hungry people watch. Canadians were born lucky, too, in a 
global sense, but they seem more modest about it and more deeply 
appreciative of their land; it's impossible to imagine Canada blighting 
its precious wilderness areas with `mock third-world villages' for 
bombing practice, as our Air Force has done in Arizona's Cabeza Prieta 
Range. I know how countries bereft of any wild lands at all view our 
planks for

[[Page H2603]]

drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, the world's last 
immense and untouched wilderness, as we stake out our right to its 
plunder as we deem necessary. We must surely appear to the world as 
exactly what we are: A nation that organizes its economy around 
consuming twice as much oil as it produces and around the profligate 
wastefulness of the wars and campaigns required to defend such 
consumption. In recent years we have defined our national interests 
largely in terms of the oil fields and pipelines we need to procure 
fuel.
  ``In our country, we seldom question our right to burn this fuel in 
heavy passenger vehicles and to lead all nations in the race to pollute 
our planet beyond habitability; some of us in fact become belligerent 
towards anyone who dares to raise the issue. We are disinclined as a 
nation to assign any moral value at all to our habits of consumption. 
But the circle of our family is large, larger than just one nation, and 
as we arrive at the ends of our frontiers, we can't possibly be 
surprised that the rest of the family would have us live within our 
means. Safety resides, I think, on the far side of endless hunger. 
Imagine how it would feel to fly a flag with a leaf on it, or a bird, 
something living. How remarkably generous we could have appeared to the 
world by being the first to limit fossil fuel emissions by ratifying 
the Kyoto Agreements, rather than walking away from the table, as we 
did last summer in Bonn, leaving 178 other signatory nations to do 
their best for the world without any help from the world's biggest 
contributor to global warming. I find it simply appalling that we could 
have done this. I know for a fact that many, many Americans were 
stunned, like me, by the selfishness of that act, and can hardly bear 
their own complicity in it. Given our societal devotion to taking in 
more energy than we put out, it is ironic that our culture is so 
cruelly intolerant of overweight individuals. As a nation we're not 
just overweight, a predicament that deserves sympathy; I fear we are 
also, as we live and breathe, possessed of the Fat Brother's mindset.
  ``I would like to have a chance to live with reordered expectations. 
I would rather that my country be seen as a rich, beloved brother than 
the rich and piggish one. If there is a heart beating in the United 
States that really disagrees, I have yet to meet it. We are by nature a 
generous people. Just about every American I know who has traveled 
abroad and taken the time to have genuine conversations with citizens 
of other countries has encountered the question, as I have, `Why isn't 
your country as nice as you are?' I wish I knew. Maybe we're distracted 
by our attachment to convenience.

                              {time}  1730

  ``Maybe we believe the ads that tell us the material things are the 
key to happiness, or maybe we are too frightened to question those who 
routinely define our national interests for us in terms of corporate 
profits. Then too, millions of Americans are so strapped by the task of 
keeping their kids fed and a roof over their heads that it is 
impossible for them to consider much of anything beyond that. But 
ultimately, the answer must be that as a Nation, we just have not yet 
demanded generosity of ourselves.
  ``But we could, and we know it. Our country possesses the resources 
to bring solar technology, energy independence, and sustainable living 
to our planet. Even in the simple realm of humanitarian assistance, the 
United Nations estimates that $13 billion above current levels of aid 
would provide everyone in the world, including the hungry within our 
own borders, with basic health and nutrition. Collectively, Americans 
and Europeans spend $17 billion a year on pet food. We could do much 
more than just feed the family of mankind, as well as our cats and 
dogs. We could assist that family in acquiring the basic skills and 
tools it needs to feed itself, while maintaining the natural resources 
on which all life depends. Real generosity involves not only making a 
gift, but also giving up something, and on both scores, we are well 
situated to be the most generous Nation on earth.
  ``We like to say we already are, and it's true that American people 
give of their own minute proportion of the country's wealth to help 
victims of disasters far and wide. Our children collect pennies to buy 
rain forests one cubic inch at a time, but this is a widow's might, not 
a national tithe. Our government's spending on foreign aid has 
plummeted over the last 20 years to levels that are, to put it bluntly, 
the stingiest among all of the developed nations. In the year 2000, 
according to the Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development, 
the United States allocated just .1 percent of its Gross National 
Product to foreign aid, or about one dime for every $100 in its 
Treasury, whereas Canada, Japan, Australia, Austria, and Germany each 
contributed 2 to 3 times that much. Other countries gave even more, 
some as much as 10 times the amount we do; they view this as a 
contribution to the world's stability and their own peace. But our 
country takes a different approach to generosity. Our tradition is to 
forgive debt in exchange for a strategic military base, an indentured 
economy, or mineral rights. We offer the hungry our magic seeds, 
genetically altered so the recipients must also buy our pesticides, 
while their sturdy native seed banks die out. At Fat Brother's house 
the domestic help might now and then slip out the back door with a 
plate of food for a neighbor, but for the record the household gives 
virtually nothing away. Even now, in what may be the most critical 
moment of our history, I fear that we may seem to be telling the world 
we are not merciful as much as we are mighty.
  ``In our darkest hours we may find comfort in the age-old slogan from 
the resistance movement, declaring that we shall not be moved. But we 
need to finish that sentence. Moved from where? Are we anchoring to the 
best of what we've believed in throughout our history, or merely to an 
angry new mode of self preservation? The American moral high ground 
cannot possibly be an isolated mountaintop from which we refuse to 
learn anything at all to protect ourselves from monstrous losses. It is 
critical to distinguish here between innocence and naivete: The 
innocent do not deserve to be violated, but only the naive refuse to 
think about the origins of violence. A nation that seems to believe so 
powerfully in retaliation cannot flatly refuse to look at the world in 
terms of cause and effect. The rage and fury of this world have not 
notably lashed out at Canada, the Nation that takes best care of its 
citizens, or Finland, the most literate, or Brazil, or Costa Rica, 
among the most biodiverse. Neither have they tried to strike down our 
redwood forests or our fields of waving grain. Striving to cut us most 
deeply, they felled the towers that seemed to claim we buy and sell the 
world.
  ``We do not own the world, as it turns out. Flight attendants and 
bankers, mothers and sons were ripped from us as proof, and thousands 
of families must now spend whole lifetimes reassembling themselves 
after shattering loss. The rest of us have lowered our flags in grief 
on their behalf. I believe we could do the same for the 35,600 of the 
world's children who also died on September 11 from conditions of 
starvation and extend their hearts to the mothers and fathers who lost 
them.
  ``This seems a reasonable time to search our souls for some corner 
where humility resides. Our Nation believes in some ways that bring joy 
to the world, and in others that make people angry. Not all of those 
people are heartless enough to kill us for it or fanatical enough to 
die in the effort, but some inevitably will be, more and more, as 
desperation spreads. Wars of endless retaliation kill not only people, 
but also the systems that grow food, deliver clean water, and heal the 
sick. They destroy the beauty, they extinguish the species, they 
increase desperation.

  ``I wish our National Anthem were not the one about bombs bursting in 
air, but the one about the purple mountain majesties and amber waves of 
grain. It's easier to sing and closer to the heart of what we really 
have to sing about. A land as broad and as green as ours demands of us 
thanksgiving and a certain breadth of spirit. It invites us to invest 
our hearts most deeply in invulnerable majesties that can never be 
brought down in a stroke of anger. If we can agree on anything in 
difficult times, it must be that we have the resources to behave more 
generously than we do, and that we are brave enough to rise from the 
ashes of

[[Page H2604]]

loss as better citizens of the world than we have ever been. We've 
inherited the grace of the Grand Canyon, the mystery of the Everglades, 
the fertility of an Iowa plain; we could crown this good with 
brotherhood. What a vast inheritance for our children that would be, if 
we were to become a nation humble before our rich birthright, whose 
graciousness makes us beloved.''
  Mr. Speaker, I hope all Members take the time to read this.

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