History and human life
he same day the card was issued, the Northwest Arkansas Times ran a front-page story with a huge headline: “President’s Palace Bombed in Vietnam.”
A few years ago, I was paying for dinner at a restaurant. The tab came to $18.64. I asked the person at the cash register, soon to graduate from college, who the U.S. president was in 1864. She said she didn’t know because she wasn’t “good” at history. I offered an assist: “In 1864 the Civil War was going.” She countered again that, not being “good” at history, she didn’t know. In other words, a person who had been through nearly 16 years of formal schooling didn’t know that Abraham Lincoln was president during the American Civil War.
Possession of such basic knowledge doesn’t require being “good” at anything. It only requires small effort from someone along the schooling way.
Since that interaction, my sense has been that perhaps half of the young people who will “graduate” from high school next year won’t know that Abraham Lincoln was president during the American Civil War, or even that there was a Civil War.
An ideal is for a high school graduate to be able to express modest insight into the message of, say, Lincoln’s “Gettysburg Address.” We’re obviously far from the ideal. So, it would be good if students at least knew that there was an event called the American Civil War, that there was a person named Abraham Lincoln and that these two facts are connected. But even this, it appears, is in doubt.
The peculiar thing is that the young person at the register was graduating with a degree in psychology. Yet history was irrelevant to her, as if history wasn’t just psychology in motion — the jumble of decisions, personalities, complexes, ideals, deceptions, foibles, acts of courage and everything else human flesh is heir to.
This thought came to me as I considered the ID card in the photograph nearby. The man in the photo was an employee of South Vietnam’s Ministry of Culture, Education and Youth. The card is dated April 8, 1975. Twenty-two days later, the nation of South Vietnam ceased to exist.
The same day the card was issued, the Northwest Arkansas Times ran a front-page story with a huge headline: “President’s Palace Bombed in Vietnam.” The palace was in Saigon, where the ID card was made. South Vietnam was lost but the government continued to issue ID cards. Why?
In a classroom, the card could be used as a starting point to discuss the end of a conflict in Vietnam that had begun 30 years before. Just a few weeks ago I spoke with a South Vietnamese soldier who was in Saigon the day the city fell.
The card could also help us get at broader human themes. Why would someone seek an ID card from the government of a nation on the point of collapse?
One thing it might symbolize is the human capacity for denial and wishful thinking, both common and often not more distant from observation than the closest mirror.
For instance: Despite the grim assessments of one international and national report card after another, and despite observations like the one above, Americans are certain that their own kids are getting a good education. But they don’t really want to check, because if they checked and learned otherwise, they’d have to do something. But they don’t want to do anything and they don’t want to face the realization that they don’t want to do anything, so it’s easier to proceed as if everything’s fine — like an official in Saigon issuing an ID card when the city’s outskirts are on fire.
More positively, the card might symbolize a commitment to doing one’s duty regardless of what’s happening in the wider world. When I was a kid I heard a gardener say, “If I knew the world was ending tomorrow, I’d plant a tree today.” His point was that his personal mission was to be gardener. If the world was going to end, there wasn’t anything he could do about it. But he could act on his personal vocation.
Perhaps this is what the official in Saigon was up to. He issued the ID card, not because he thought South Vietnam had any chance of survival but because it was his duty, and there’s something honorable about doing one’s duty regardless of whatever else is going on.
We can’t know what the individuals behind this card had in mind. We can have a pretty good idea of what happened to them if they weren’t among the South Vietnamese who fled their vanished country, some of them soon to arrive at Fort Chaffee near Fort Smith, and many of them still among us.
These refugees know what it’s like to lose a nation, problematic as it was, to advocates of a political ideology equally gifted at voicing lofty slogans and dispensing atrocities and rigid conformity—all (of course) in the name of “justice.”
They also know what it’s like to be welcomed by a generous country that is increasingly indifferent to itself. But perhaps the country still has the capacity, in Lincoln’s words, to deploy “the better angels of our nature” to recover that cultural health that made it a beacon to those whose own world was lost.
The man in the picture could teach us a lot.