By Steve Brawner
© 2017 by Steve Brawner Communications, Inc.

How do you make a person or a country change?

One option is to use overwhelming force so they have no choice but to bend to your will and eventually maybe even embrace it. It can work but is often unavailable and comes at great cost – for example, when West Germany and Japan became free market democracies after World War II under American occupation. On the other hand, if it fails, it fails big.

A second option is using less than overwhelming force – diplomacy, nagging, the silent treatment. It often results in only partial, pacifying change.

A third option is using influence and persuasion so effectively that the other chooses to change, often while in a state of crisis or transition. It’s the most effective option, but it requires patience, confidence, and the acceptance that others may adopt only some of your suggestions.

Which brings us to Cuba.

There, overwhelming force has never been an option for American policymakers for various reasons, most notably that it could have led to World War III. So instead, for half a century the United States chose option number two – ending diplomatic relations, condemning the Cuban Castro regime, and enforcing a trade embargo.

It didn’t work. Ninety miles from the planet’s wealthiest and most powerful nation, Cuba remained a hardline communist country even as most of the rest of the world rejected Soviet-style communism, including the Soviets.

So near the end of the Obama administration, the United States finally tried the third option, the one based on influence and persuasion, by re-establishing diplomatic relations and easing travel and trade restrictions. The change cracked open the door to American products, visitors and ideas. Meanwhile, it drew enthusiastic support from Arkansas’ agricultural interests, who see Cuba as a nearby and readymade market for Arkansas rice and poultry.

It’s far too early to gauge that policy’s success, but if Cuba is to change, this could be the time. Its longtime leader, Fidel Castro, died last year, while his successor brother, Raul, is 86 years old. Gov. Asa Hutchinson, who traveled to Cuba in 2015, said last year that Castro’s death was “the moment that I believe needs to be seized.”

Last week, President Trump rolled back the Obama policy – though not completely – by announcing new restrictions on travel and by prohibiting commerce with businesses that are owned by the Cuban military. Perhaps more important than the policy changes was the adoption of a much more aggressive, Cold War-era tone.

The move drew criticism from two members of Arkansas’ all-Republican congressional delegation, Rep. Rick Crawford of the 1st District and Sen. John Boozman. Crawford’s district produces half the nation’s rice, a product Cuba currently purchases from Vietnam, a slow boat ride away from the other side of the world. In a statement from his office, Crawford called America’s decades-long policy toward Cuba “failed, outdated, and isolationist” and said returning to it could open the door to increased influence from Iran, Russia, North Korea and China. Boozman released a statement arguing that the Cold War policy didn’t work and that a more open relationship allowed for not only trading goods but also trading ideas. Days earlier, the two had jointly published an opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal that called for allowing Cubans to buy American-grown food on credit instead of requiring cash transactions, a policy Crawford has long championed and tried to pass through Congress.

The other members of Arkansas’ congressional delegation didn’t release statements. They’re generally reluctant to criticize Trump, who remains popular in Arkansas, and to varying degrees some agree with him on Cuba. Sen. Tom Cotton strongly condemned Obama’s opening with Cuba when it happened, saying it was wrong to do business with the oppressive Castro regime.

We’ll have to see how serious and long-lasting this latest American policy is, or if it’s just temporary politics that changes nothing, and never would have.

By Steve Brawner
© 2017 by Steve Brawner Communications, Inc.

Many are asking if politics made the shooter crazy. That’s an important question. Another is, what is it doing to the rest of us?

Here’s what we know, as of Thursday morning. A man had lived a relatively normal life, even serving as a foster parent. There had been a few acts of violence and minor run-ins with the law, including one scary episode where he allegedly punched a woman in the face, pointed a gun at a neighbor and then hit him with the stock, but there’s plenty of evidence that he was sane. In recent years he’d become increasingly political and agitated, angrily obsessing over the injustices of a system he could not change. He posted political rants in Facebook’s echo chamber and joined a page pushing to “terminate” the Republican Party. He’d once practiced shooting his rifle outside his home, prompting a neighbor to call the sheriff. He moved to the Washington, D.C., area a few months ago, lived in a van, and frequented a bar where he would sit and drink beer with a creepy smile on his face. Then, on Wednesday, he took his rifle to a congressional baseball practice, calmly asked a congressman which party was practicing, thanked him for his answer, and then started shooting.

I started to write that he “snapped,” until my wife corrected me. No, she said. He made choice after choice after choice to fuel his anger until he’d crossed a line and there was no going back.

Most of us are not going to cross that line, or tiptoe anywhere near it. But we are making many of the same choices the shooter did. We obsess over societal forces we can’t change, that we don’t really understand, and that we’re not objective enough to define. We let our frustrations over these things bleed over into the parts of our lives that we can control, affecting our relationships with the people who matter. We seek shelter in our tribes and then adopt language that dehumanizes the outsiders, turning them first into caricatures and then, naturally, enemies. Political opponents are to be impeached, or locked up, or terminated.

The shooter and many of the rest of us are all marinating in those juices. We differ from him in that almost none of us are going to start shooting other people. But, like him, we can stop seeing them as human.

The American experiment is now almost a quarter of a millennium old. Its founding document, the Declaration of Independence, states that government exists to secure unalienable rights that include life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

Unfortunately, American democracy has evolved to the point that it often more deters happiness than defends it. A spirit of anger hangs over the air, unleashing the monster in one man and turning many of the rest of us into angry jerks.

Solutions? I wouldn’t have space to write them even if I knew what they were. But here are two that might help.

The first comes also from my wife, who’s taking somewhat of a news break after spending too much time worrying about the election last year, like many of the rest of us. She’s trying to refocus on real life and on the things she can influence. In a recent conversation, she said Americans should judge President Trump’s individual actions one at a time, rather than declaring him completely right or dismissing him as completely wrong, and that same standard should apply to all other elected officials as well.

That’s true. There are times to judge the totality of an elected official’s performance. They’re called elections, and there will be another one soon enough next May. Until then, let’s try to regain some objectivity – for our own sakes, if nothing else.

The other comes from Proverbs 22:24, which states, “Make no friendship with an angry man; and with a furious man thou shalt not go.”

That verse has two meanings. The obvious one is to avoid angry people.

The second is less obvious but just as important: Don’t be that angry friend. It’s the first bad choice from which a lot of worse ones can follow.