There is a neighborhood in northern Buenos Aires called Flores. A number of my relatives used to live there. It is amid those early-20th-century Parisian-style houses and oaks hugging the cobblestone streets where you’ll find everything that went right and wrong in Argentina.

The majority of the residents of Flores despise time because they say it distances them from those they love and who were from European lands. The residents of the neighborhood use ingenious methods to halt time: They park vintage cars like Fords from the 1930s in front of their homes; hang up portraits of ancient heads of state like King Victor Emmanuel II of Italy, Spain’s Francisco Franco and Czar Nicholas II hanging on the walls of their homes.

The stubborn attempt to cling onto the past is like keeping a hope alive. By slowing time the residents of Flores believe that they can protect and cherish those ideals that their migrant relatives brought from faraway European lands.

An uncle called Horacio who lived in Flores would scold me if I brought a modern object like a pocket calculator to his home. “Are you mad!” he’d jump up and say. “Get that contemporary thing out of here – We don’t want to speed the pace of time, now do we?”

Horacio’s home was like a museum. The only modern appliances he had — a television set and fridge — were at least 20 to 30 years old. He’d often talk to me as a child about traveling to Africa on an adventure safari, even if in his lifetime he never traveled outside radius of 100 miles from Buenos Aires.

One day Horacio told me why he had ripped the hands of time off all the time contraptions he owned.

“Time is a migrants worst enemy because it distances us from who we were and shapes us by force into nationals of new countries and circumstances,” he said. “I’m still hopeful that if time is slowed and the past and present are perfectly balanced, the answer why my migrant parents failed to find what they searched for in these parts will drop on my lap like a golden leaf inscribed with wisdom.”

I never knew if Horacio found the great secret that would help him find happiness. The last time I spoke to him was about thirty years ago. I saw an old man who was getting ready to embrace death.

The bitterness brought on by hyperinflation, political and economic turmoil were his death blows.

Here’s to expand on the article in The New York Review of Books, Jonathan Freedland. He quotes Charlmers Johnson’s Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic:

Necessarily, it is Johnson, who has diagnosed a more radical problem, who has to come up with a more radical solution. He cannot merely call for greater powers for Congress, because by his own lights, “the legislative branch of our government is broken,” reduced to the supine creature of large corporations, the defense contractors first among them. Instead, he urges a surge in direct democracy, “a grassroots movement to abolish the CIA, break the hold of the military-industrial com-plex, and establish public financing of elections”—but he has the grace to recognize how unlikely such a development is.

So he is left offering not an eleven- or twelve-step program, but rather a historical choice. Either the United States can follow the lead of the Romans, who chose to keep their empire and so lost their republic. Or “we could, like the British Empire after World War II, keep our democracy by giving up our empire.” That choice was neither smooth nor executed heroically, but it was the right one. Now much of the world watches the offspring of that empire, nearly two and a half centuries later—hoping it makes the same choice, and trembling at the prospect that it might not.

Zbigniew Brzezinski, the former security adviser to Jimmy Carter, gives a report card to George W Bush, Bill Clinton and George H. W. Bush. In an interesting article in The New York Review of Books, Jonhathan Freedland writes a review about three books written about the Bush administration. One of these is by Brzezinski, Second Chance: Three Presidents and the Crisis of American Superpower.

The conservative Democrat and cold war hawk, gives Bush Sr. a B, while Clinton gets a C. Bush Jr. gets slammed with an F.

Quoting Brzezinski, the article in The New York Review of Books gives a very critical picture of the Bush administration:

It is hard to exaggerate the Bush administration’s fundamental miscalculations on Iraq… Small wonder that after nearly four years of warfare, Iraq has been a disaster, costing thousands of lives, requiring the expenditure of hundreds of billions of dollars, stretching our forces and reserve system to the breaking point, and becoming a magnet for terrorists and hostility towards the Untied States throughout the Muslim world.

He continues:

Because of Bush’s self-righteously unilateral conduct of US foreign policy after 9/11, the evocative symbol of America in the eyes of much of the world ceased to be the Statue of Liberty and instead became the Guantánamo prison camp.

It’s pretty evident that the Bush administration has fallen into a trap that has meant the demise of some autocratic regimes. Whenever the leader of such a government believes that he’s on a crusade to save the country or world from some murky enemy like terrorists, that’s the first sign that the government is in self-destruct mode. Wars that such despots declare turn into obsessions that blind them into believing they are indestructible.

It’s unfortunate that countries like Germany with Adolf Hitler and the former Soviet Union with Joseph Stalin had their tragic rendezvous with autocracy. The US is now suffering from the same problem under Bush, even if the president hasn’t been able to destroy all of the US’ democratic institutions.

There’s still hope to salvage US but the main priority must be to get Bush out of the White House.

I was shocked to read that all except one of the Republican candidates vying for the White House in 2008 wouldn’t rule out nuking Iran. The only brave one to oppose such an attack was Rep. Ron Paul of Texas.

If one looks at the damage that this administration has caused on US institutions and the country’s reputation abroad, we should be extremely worried if one of these Republican candidates makes it to the White House next year. Their prickly statements show that we can expect worse than George W Bush if one of these men – except possibly for Rep. Paul – wins the 2008 presidential elections.

It’s tragic that such politicians who should know better haven’t learned from the perilous mistakes made in Iraq. Some of them were kids when the US made history and became the first country to use an atom bomb against another nation. The first atom bomb was dropped August 6, 1945 over Hiroshima and three days later over the city of Nagasaki.

The most incredulous matter about these Republican contenders is how freely they talk about upholding Christian values while on the other hand they wouldn’t hesitate to kill tens/hundreds of thousands of people with nuclear weapons.

They appear more like the Christians of the Dark Ages, who did nothing more “Christian” than murder, pillage, imprison and instill mayhem.

Nature has imagination. It houses
many exotic plants and creatures.

When I lived in California, the matter I missed most about Finland was summer. For a country with a strong migrant past, summer is a ritual where relatives get together from distant lands after many months, possibly years, of separation.

Like many children, I also got acquainted with Finnish culture thanks to those unforgettable summers I spent with my grandparents in Finland’s countryside.

Summer has now arrived in these Nordic latitudes. Even if one of the most awaited seasons by some Finns has made its debut for millions of years, it appears to still hesitate slightly before orchestrating nature into its wonderful balancing act, when time screeches to a near halt in these parts.

The hesitancy by nature is understandable. When seasons change in such far-flung regions of the globe it isn’t a light matter – it’s a revolution. There is, however, a lull, or no-man’s-land of spring and summer, where everything is quiet for a moment. Nature catches its breath and then with fury changes everything.

It’s all a spectacular feat: leaves budding, lilies rising to the lake’s surface, airborne dragonflies and butterflies painting the air with pesky mosquitoes. There are also the spruces, firs and disorganized islands of birches peppered with a few mountain ashes and alders, which are very talkative in summer.

Amid such overflowing and radiant beauty it’s not a coincidence to find one’s soul basking in the lush undergrowth.

Summer is such a magical and sacred period in that only good things are supposed to happen. The personality of the Finns change during this short season: Some say that in summer we are more pleasant, while in winter more reserved.

Although it’s always dangerous to make national-character generalities, Finns have learned the painful way that wars should never be waged in summer. We can debate the myriad of reasons why Finland went to war against the former Soviet Union in June 1941.

Some agree, however, that going to battle in the summer of 1941 was a bad omen. Despite the initial success of the Finnish army at the onset of the conflict, the impact of what Finnish historians call the Continuation War (1941-44) was far-reaching and affected generations of Finns.

Who knows, matters in post-war Finland could have been different if the war would have started in autumn or winter. We learned a valuable lesson, though: war should never upset summer.

This is — in my opinion — why most Finns loathe wars.

Keeping in touch

When I was a child and spent summers in the woods of eastern Finland, I would regularly pay visits to people who lived near our summerhouse.

On one of these journeys I met Eeva Kilpi, a well-known Finnish writer. It was friendship at first sight. I believe one reason why we have always been so close is because we are displaced people.

Kilpi was a child when she was forced to abandon her home in Hiitola on the Karelian Isthmus, a strip of land ceded to the after the end of the war.

Even if we spoke about trivial matters on that first meeting, our hearts were busily in conversation about the pain of losing a home because of war or migration.

There were other interesting people I met in the woods of eastern Finland as well. Such people were always kind and never made me feel like an outsider, even if I was from a faraway place called Hollywood, California.

I felt these people were content and even envied them a little because they lived amid such beautiful landscapes.

During nine months of the year, most of the trees I saw in Los Angeles were well behaved and stood at attention in straight lines next to stoic buildings; the only bodies of water I saw then were man-made reservoirs and swimming pools.

Part of this beautiful scenery I am enjoying now will soon give way like a lover to autumn and then it’ll be winter all over again, another magic season when darkness and silence are so thick that you can almost lean against them.

As you know, winter is cold in these parts and the snow may want to tuck you into bed. When this happens, you normally awake in spring by singing birds atop of budding trees.

It is that time of the year like now when we rejoice the coming of summer.

By Enrique Tessieri

There is nothing more devastating than a farewell that implies a long and painful separation. For a people like the Finns, who were once a nomadic tribe that ended up settling this lonely yet magical corner of Europe, the ritual of saying goodbye still forms an important part of our cultural heritage.

Farewells are peppered everywhere in our folklore. Even Väinämöinen, the mythical white-bearded hero of the Kalevala, leaves on a boat to never return again. Even Jean Sibelius composed a concerto called, “Goodnight – Farewell.”

Various types of parting mar Finland’s history. There is the farewell of the migrant who sailed to America in the late-19th and early-20th century, and that of a final goodbye kiss of a young wife and husband — or that of a mother to her beloved son, who will soon die on the battlefront.

Some of these farewells are so powerful that they are remembered and passed on from generation to generation. My mother once told me how my grandmother found out about the death of her son in World War II serving in the US army on the Italian front. Even if it happened over a half a century ago, I was surprised by how clearly I could see the tragic event in my mind.

“Aino was baking in the kitchen,” she said. “It was in the afternoon when she received a telegram from the (US) State Department. She collapsed upon hearing the news of Leo’s death.”

Death, which is nothing more than a final goodbye, is a recurring image found in the farewells of the Finns. French poet Edmond Haraucourt (1856-1941) believed that the image of death normally appears whenever two humans part. He wrote: Partir c’est mourir un peu. C’est mourir a ce qu’on aime (To part is do die a little, to die to what one loves).

The conclusion of World War II did not bring an end to the tradition of painful farewells. On the contrary, hundreds of thousands of Finns began to move to the cities leaving behind their homes in the countryside. In such cities a great sense of emptiness struck. We were filled with nostalgia because we were constantly remembering our homes in the countryside and the farewells that accompanied the final images.

Even today, amid modern and relatively cheap air travel and the internet, we Finns continue to be molded by a sense of constant movement and by past, present and future farewells.

I hope that the technological leaps and strides that humankind will make in this millennium will also include rendering farewells obsolete. Possibly a new form of travel, through a dimension like cyberspace, would enable us to be in many places simultaneously thousands of kilometers away without moving from our room. Under such circumstances, it would not be necessary to say goodbye because we could be with as many loved ones and friends as we’d wish.

Light farewells

For many years, and almost subconsciously, I have stayed clear of farewells that are profound, long and almost final. That is why I do not enjoy going to funerals never mind wishing a person farewell before a long journey.

German poet Rainer Maria Rilke once wrote: “Be ahead of all farewells, as if they were behind you, like the winter that is just departing.”

By far the most difficult farewells I had experienced was bidding goodbye to the summer eastern Finnish woods of Savo, where I spent childhood and adolescence with my maternal grandparents. I heard lachrymose tunes of good byes coming at me from the woods as it came time to return back to the concrete, hot asphalt streets of Los Angeles, California.

It is wishful thinking to believe that a farewell to a home is a one-way affair. Such landscapes can easily possess a person without you even knowing it. Because Sub-Arctic forests teem and overflow with magic, the birches, spruces, lichen, lakes and wild grass do everything possible to claim and keep you near them.

Parting in the beginning of the century must have been a much more traumatic experience than today. People, who would never see each other again because of fate and geography, had to disguise farewells with strong doses of hope. They would try to convince themselves that they’d soon meet again, even if they never did.

How many millions of migrants would have left their loved ones if they knew that they’d never see them again? Possibly the history of humankind would have been written differently if we had the ability to know if our farewells were final.

Note: This story appeared on Suomen Kuvalehti’s website. It was published shortly after the US-led coalition invaded Iraq in March 2003. All you needed back then was common sense to understand that the invasion of Iraq was a huge and costly lie.

As U.S.-led coalition military forces continue to pound Iraqi army positions and the war claims its share of mounting civilian casualties, one matter appears certain: U.S. and U.K. forces are not being greeted by the population as liberators.

Whatever the reasons may be for stiffer Iraqi resistance, it is incredible that Washington has overlooked one very elementary fact: People are nationalistic and don’t like to be invaded by foreign armies.

Loyalty and love of one’s country are the first facts children learn at school no matter how poor or rich their country is. The United States is no exception.

When I was thirteen years old and studying at a Catholic school in California, the history teacher spoke often about how “evil” the former Soviet Union was and how “right” our system of government is.

“People in the (former) Soviet Union live in a prison,” the U.S. history teacher said. “If you open the doors of Russia, millions of people will flee to freedom.”

Having lived in a number of countries, I openly disagreed with the teacher. I tried to use logic: “If the Russians have never traveled anywhere in their lives, surely they consider their country the best in the world,” I said.

A silence descended over the classroom and I felt naively that I had made my point. The teacher looked at me, and then snapped: “What are you – a communist! If you don’t like America go live in Russia!”

Coup vs. régime change

As time moves on so do geopolitical perceptions. One of these is the George W. Bush doctrine’s view of how governments are changed. The new term is “régime change,” which has sidelined a fancier French word used before known as coup d’etat.

Latin America was a region where coups – oops! régime change — occurred on a grand scale. If experience of how the U.S. influenced Latin America in the last century is anything to go by, the people of the Middle East are in big trouble.

In the 1970s, some Latin Americans accused Washington of double standards. Why did the U.S. support despotic and brutal military régimes south of its border if it is a model of a western democracy?

The list of tyrants that ruled Latin America is a long and tragic one. Few will question the CIA’s role in regime change during the cold-war era. Its director during 1976-77 was none other than former President George Bush Sr.

We were told back then by Washington that the justification for régime change and military juntas was to defend Latin Americans from communist tyranny. Even so, any serious student of the region understands that Washington’s main goal was to defend its national security interests.

Will U.S. national security prevail in the Middle East as the driving force of President Bush’s administration as new geopolitical maps are redrawn of the troubled region? There is nothing to suggest the contrary, considering Bush’s obstinacy for a military solution for disarming Iraq and the present administration’s suspicion of the UN.

The scars left by ruthless dictators have traumatized Latin Americans for generations, like the Iraqis, who will not only be haunted by a past tyrant — but by a terrible war waged by the U.S. in the name of a questionable invasion.

 

If a person asked me to say what is one of the most important pillars of Finnish culture, I’d respond: the sauna.

The sauna is more than a room where people bathe and sweat naked in 80-100 Celsius (176-212 Fahrenheit) temperatures. It’s a way of life for some Finns – so much so, in fact, that some hope there will be a sauna in heaven or hell when they die.

It’s interesting to note that sauna is the only Finnish word that has spread and been adopted by so many foreign languages. Well… in almost all languages except for Swedish, where it is called bastu.

Writer Maila Talvio (1871-1951) once said that Finns have been unanimous for centuries about one matter – the sauna. For as long as children are born in this far-flung land, she said such unanimity will characterize the Finns.

The sauna is a good yardstick – like the automobile in the U.S. – to measure how living standards have risen in this country. Compared to about 2 million today, there were in 1990 some 1.5 million saunas versus half a million in the 1930s.

That’s a lot of saunas, considering that Finland is only a nation of 5.2 million people. If a typical Finnish family has 3-4 members, it means that everyone in this country has access to a sauna.

We have two saunas: one at home and the summerhouse. Even so, my ultimate dream is to have four: a smoke sauna to celebrate special occasions like Christmas; a wood-burning and electric sauna in the country; and an electric sauna in the city.

The sauna-bathing ritual has changed very little over time. The only matter that has changed during the past century is the technology we use to heat the stones. While most saunas are electric, few will disagree that the best steam comes from stones heated by deciduous trees like birch.

Who knows what the future may bring. If the Japanese have invented “air-conditioned” shirts, I’m certain that it’s only a matter of time when a Finn will invent a sauna that can be worn like a suit.

Who we are

If sauna is the DNA of Finnish culture, what does it reveal about who the Finns are and where they are heading as a people?

In order to answer the question, we’d have to know what Finns do inside a sauna.

For a foreigner, the sauna must appear like a very unusual ritual. Imagine inviting guests over and then undressing and bathing together. In some cultures this would be unimaginable, especially in those where nudity is a taboo.

You’d better have a good excuse if you come to Finland and turn down an invitation to bathe in a sauna. Bathing together is a sort of rites of passage that crowns or reinforces familial bonds or friendship between two people. Refusing to go to sauna is like not accepting a person’s friendship.

The sauna has played many important roles in Finnish culture. In the past it was a panacea for all cures and where shamans took care of their patients. Apart from its healing properties, the sauna was even believed to improve virility and make women more marriageable.

In the countryside, births usually took place in the sauna. Even people that were about to embark onto the land of death prepared for such a journey in the sauna.

The Finnish Sauna Society (Suomen Saunaseura), one of the ultimate authorities on the sweat bath, says that one should behave in the sauna like in church. In other words: no blasphemy, excessive drinking or having sex, even if these matters do occur.

Some agree that the best time for Finns to make love is on Saturday night after a sauna bath.

I’m convinced that there would be fewer wars if the world could bathe inside an enormous sauna.

While the Finnish sweat bath is a sacred place where a person relaxes and speaks as little as possible, many problems have been solved inside its steam-hot walls. Imagine bathing, talking over and resolving an issue with a friend as opposed to facing him in an impersonal office wearing a suit?

Bathing with others reminds us that we are social animals. So never underestimate the magic and important role the sauna plays between people.

Possibly it’s this very magic that makes us happy every time we enter a room heated by stones, allowing us to enjoy one of the greatest fringe benefits that life has to offer.

If there ever existed a near-perfect republic, what would it be like?

Would its economy be one of the most competitive in the world? Would technological innovation be king within its borders? Would its education system be at the top of the world class? Would it be one of the least corrupt countries around?

Some studies that have appeared in recent years have put Finland at the top end of all these categories. But behind Finland’s successes in many fields and noteworthy international recognition, there is one area where we haven’t excelled: integrating foreigners to the Finnish way of life.

When I moved to in the in the end of 1978, the foreign community numbered a mere 10-12.000 people. A great number of these “foreigners” were nothing more than Finns who were naturalized Swedes. But in the early 1990s matters started to change, especially in 1995, when Finland became a European Union (EU) member.

Most of the country’s 132,632 foreigners last year that live here today moved to this country during the past decade. The nationality, the biggest were the Russians (26,205) followed by Estonians (19,965), Swedes (8,398) and Somalis (4,831). By mother tongue, however, a different picture emerges: 45,224 people stated that it was Russian, 19,812 Estonian, 10,589 English, 9,810 Somali, 8,119 Arabic.

Despite their growing numbers, foreigners continue to be seen as a problem by some Finns, who do not see anything positive in them such as in the United States, Canada, Australia and other countries. They believe — erroneously — that most outsiders that move to Finland want to take advantage of the generous welfare-state system.

But if Finland is to survive and rejuvenate its population in the new century, it’ll be obliged to increase the size of its foreign population. Without them, the country’s population will continue to age rapidly. Statistics Finland forecasts by 2010 that over-65-year-olds will account for 17% and by 2040 they will grow to 27% of the population.

The biggest age group today is the post-war baby boomers (55-59 years) numbering 416,888 people.

Possibly one of the most challenging tasks that this country faces in the new century will be the conversion to a more multicultural society.The Finland of tomorrow will for certain be a very different place than today.

Foreign unemployment

While there are many ways to measure integration of foreigners in a society, probably one of the best barometers is unemployment. Without a job it is virtually impossible for anyone to build a future never mind be an active member of society.

The jobless rate among foreigners in Finland is one of the highest in the European Union. In April of last year it stood at a staggering 20%, according to the Ministry of Labor. That compares with about 6% during the same month for the whole population.

Olli Sorainan, a ministry of labor senior advisor, said the foreign unemployment in the EU ranges between 10% and 20% depending on the country.

The highest jobless rate in Finland was reported among Iraqis (62%), Afghanis (54%), Somalis (53%), Vietnamese (48%), Iranians (47%), and Moroccans (44%). The national groups with the lowest unemployment were the Chinese, Germans, US citizens, Norwegians, with 9%.

Finland’s high foreign unemployment rate is attributable to many factors. Sorainen blamed the high jobless figure mainly on two matters: many foreigners that come to aren’t job-seekers but are refugees or come for humanitarian reasons; and because Finns aren’t used to hiring foreigners.

Certainly we can’t expect that foreigners that move to Finland with rudimentary language and labor skills to be instantly hired by Nokia as well-paid executives. Even so, it sounds incredulous that “attitude” continues to be one contributing factor for high unemployment.

A recent report published by Statistics Finland and the Trade Register suggests that matters may be improving since the amount of immigrant-owned enterprises has doubled from 2001 to about 5,600 companies. Another encouraging fact is that the number of entrepreneurs out of total foreign job holders is 16% compared with 10% for the Finnish population.

The report shows that the majority of foreigners that establish businesses in Finland are in the commerce and restaurant sector (pizzeria and kebab establishments), with around 11% being “information-intensive” sector.

Even if the Statistics Finland and Trade Register report are proof that the entrepreneurial spirit is alive and kicking in the foreign community, it sheds light as well on how difficult it is for some non-Finns to get a job. Establishing a business appears to be one of the most effective ways of escaping unemployment.

Some policy-makers correctly point out that more support and funding should be earmarked for encouraging foreigners to establish businesses. However, this is not a new government remedy for lowering unemployment.

Having lived in a number of countries and grown up in Los Angeles, a true “melting pot” (note the 70s term) of cultures, one matter is certain about immigrants: they don’t lack courage and aren’t afraid of starting life from scratch. The need to survive in a new country forces some to become resourceful, innovative and hard-working.

Finland must strive as a nation to defend and strengthen a society founded on social justice and opportunities for all. In the task, people from other cultures and national backgrounds should form part of this noble project called Finland.

Maintaining and accepting such high unemployment rates as present is not only shameful for a welfare state like ours, it’s squandering valuable resources at a high cost.