One Can Make a Difference (15 page)

Then, in Cleveland, in the mid-fifties, African Americans started moving into “white neighborhoods.” People in those neighborhoods came out and protested. It was so unfair. I think people should be able to live where they want to live. I saw this personally and was very upset by it. After that, I paid greater attention to such discrimination. These were the early days of civil rights, and it never seemed fair that people should have to struggle this hard for equality. Seeing this, knowing people who were caught up in the struggle, made me realize that I needed to defend the principle of equality, that I could use the advantages I was lucky enough to have to stand up against bigotry, not only when it was directed against my friends like Dwight, but on a far larger scale. I realized that in public office I could actually make policy and set an example of fairness to all. Since I have been a congressman, I have had the opportunity to cosponsor numerous bills that would help protect or enhance the well-being and livelihood of people who sometimes get the short end of the stick. I've seized those opportunities with great joy by supporting, for example, school-based music education, Medicaid, a tax-cut repeal for the wealthy, assistance to those living in poverty, further research into an HIV vaccine, and religious tolerance. I've supported bills that focus directly on the needs and rights of minorities, such as condemning the existence of racially restrictive covenants in housing documents and recognizing the low presence of minorities in the financial services industry and in upper-level positions of management, and working to change that. And I've supported the goals and ideals of National Black HIV/AIDS Awareness Day and Anti-Slavery Day. I've also supported legislation that would honor several minority figures properly such as a posthumous pardon to Jack Johnson who went to jail, basically, for having a white girlfriend, Lena Horne for her outspoken opposition to racial and social injustice, Judge Constance Baker Motley for her courage, as both a woman and an African American in arguing key cases in front of the Supreme Court, and for Wangari Maathai for winning the Nobel Peace Prize for her tireless work promoting sustainable development, democracy, peace, and women's rights in Africa. Weighing in on these matters has meant the world to me.

If I have any advice for someone feeling unsure about what they can do in life, I would offer this: Each person who has the courage to follow his or her own dream and do it with joy, without compromise, will soon come in touch with great creative powers that may seem divinely inspired and that are in fact profoundly human.

HEIDI KUHN

From Mines to Vines

Heidi Kuhn founded Roots of Peace in 1997. The organization not only carries
on, but expands upon, the work of the late Princess Diana, removing landmines
from fields in places as far flung as Afghanistan and Croatia, helping
plant crops like grapes and pineapples where once the fields were too dangerous
to plow, and advocating a ban on landmines. Her work with the soil, her own
roots (she was born in California just in time to absorb the peace and love message
of the sixties), the fact that she has four children of her own and likes to
be barefoot, in her kitchen, make Heidi Kuhn a true “Earth Mother.” But the
photographs of her show a different side: a professional with a purpose, standing
with farmers at the grape harvest, discussing war and peace with Kofi Annan at
the United Nations, and presenting a pomegranate to President Hamid Karzai.
She fascinates me! Heidi didn't plan this path, but, as a young mother, Heidi
acted on her “women's intuition” and started filing news reports. She started in
Juneau and ended up in Moscow, where she captured some of the world's most
interesting and important news stories coming out of the Soviet Union. As she
tells the story, it was a matter of one thing simply leading to another.

I
am a fifth-generation Marin County resident, born in San Raphael. I am also a Roman Catholic, although I think religious ideals cross denominational barriers. Raphael is the patron saint of healing. San Francisco, which is where I got the idea to start the foundation, is named after St. Francis, whose words

“Dear God, make me an instrument of your peace” mean a great deal to me. I found myself saying similar words in 1988, when I was diagnosed with cervical cancer. There I was, in the incredible cold of the Alaskan tundra. I felt very alone. My husband was away on an extended business trip; I had babes-in-arms to care for, no friends in this out-of-the-way place, and my life was at risk from this insidious disease. I looked out at a fourth-of-July celebration and wondered if I would ever see another. Just before I went under anesthesia for the surgery, I prayed quietly, “Dear God, please grant me the gift of life. If you do, I promise I will do something special with it.” I never forgot that pledge, and I still see every day as a gift, a chance to do something that represents the values I grew up with: love, peace, caring.

When the
Exxon Valdez
ran aground, I used contacts I had made with mainland news bureaus to file reports from the scene. Reporting seemed to suit me, and I enjoyed knowing that I was helping people in, say, New York, connect to people thousands of miles away. Soon I had an idea: why not go to the Soviet Union and try to cover the melting of the “ice curtain” between the U.S. and the Soviet government? At that time, no U.S. reporters were permitted access, and it was a bit of a scary prospect, entering the belly of the beast, knowing this was the superpower that had us all hiding under our desks in school, practicing how to survive a nuclear attack.

Everyone around me said, “No, don't go” and “It's impossible.” Just getting a visa took six months. But you have to be partially deaf to work for social change, so I didn't listen. I wanted to tell the human story behind the thaw, and I was going to do my best to get in and get it. And things started to fall into place. My husband decided to take a leave to act as my cameraman, and a wonderful pediatric nurse we knew volunteered to look after the kids. Suddenly everyone was empowering me! In December 1989, I found myself looking out of the plane window at the full moon, headed for Moscow, wondering what I was doing. I didn't even have a contract with a news agency; I just had an idea.

My grandmother used to say, “Coincidence is a miracle in which God prefers to remain anonymous.” As it turned out, the Soviets denied U.S. reporters any access but had a special relationship with Alaska. Because of that, I was the very first reporter given the story of Andrei Sakharov's death, a worldwide exclusive that I raced across town to satellite feed to ABC studios in New York. I proved that I could get the story and that I could deliver it! One thing led to another. I found myself not only able to report on peace, the warm and fuzzy “Yalta to Malta” stories, but leading the first news crew into Vladivostok and meeting every dignitary in the land. That stood me in good stead for the charity work ahead of me when my life changed again in 1997.

It was January and I was back in San Francisco. I had decided to stop reporting, stop traveling, and be a stay-at-home mom following the miraculous birth (my cervix had been removed because of the cancer) of my son, Christian. People would often ask if I could host events at my home, and I always said yes. This time, the gathering was for a United Nations Association touring the U.S. Lots of my neighbors are vintners. I thought “why not?” so I called up Francis Ford Coppola and asked if he would supply the wine. He agreed right off the bat. Then I asked my childhood friend, Mike, who is a concert pianist, if he'd play, and he said he would.

All this was just weeks after Princess Diana's death, and her work to get landmines banned was on my mind; it was so smart, so right. On the night of the event, Jerry White, the man who had escorted Princess Diana through Bosnia, was in my living room. He is an Irishman, a Catholic like me, and very inspiring. At some point, he simply bent down and pulled off his artificial leg. He told me that he had stepped on a landmine while walking in the Golan Heights. He remembers lying there, yelling, “My leg. My leg. My god, where's my leg?!”

It was a very moving evening. There was Jerry, there was my friend Mike playing “Candle in the Wind,” and I felt as if I were part of a wonderful watercolor painting. I wondered how I could not have known about the devastation wrought by landmines, all the work that was needed to get rid of them. Listening to the speakers, talking to the guests who had come from all over the world, I felt as if generational wisdom, the calls for compassion and peace, were echoing back from my childhood in the sixties. I wanted the earth and her people to be thought of as sacred, for all hatred to be replaced with love.

It was as if I could feel the blood of all those who are unjustly hurt being washed away by the donated wine. I knew what I wanted to do. I wanted to help carry on Princess Diana's work. We lifted our glasses for the toast, and I heard myself saying, “May the world go from mines to vines.” You could have heard a pin drop.

Since then, I have walked the minefields of the world in the name of peace. I meet with the farmers, relate to their families as a mother and as a Christian who cares about tolerance, interfaith love, and diplomacy. That is something everyone I've met has seemed to respect and understand. There is nothing more important to me than knowing that the sum total of landmine production has dropped, that families who depended on farming have been able to return to the soil, and that there is more peace in the land than there was before Roots of Peace started.

We have removed over 100,000 landmines and unexploded ordnance and trained some 10,000 Afghan farmers to grow clusters of grapes instead of sidestepping clusters of bombs. We have raised funds to help in Croatia, Bosnia-Herzegovena, Angola, and Afghanistan. And perhaps the most wonderful recognition of this work is the Roots of Peace garden in New York City, donated to us by the United Nations.

On its wall is a plaque that reads:

“They shall beat their swords into ploughshares, and their spears
into pruning-hooks; nation shall not lift up sword against nation,
neither shall they learn war any more.”

To me, the mines are the swords and the vines are the ploughshares, and our work to build bridges of peace will go on until love defeats hate.

RAYMOND KURZWEIL

The Future Is Fantastic!

PBS called him one of the sixteen “revolutionaries who made America.” A list,
mind you, that encompassed inventors of the past 200 years. He has received
the National Medal of Technology, the nation's highest technical honor; has
been inducted into the National Inventor's Hall of Fame by the U.S. Patent
Office; was named MIT's Inventor of the Year; and was ranked by
Forbes
magazine as “the rightful heir to Thomas Edison.” A mere five plucked from
his endless list of accomplishments.

Ray Kurzweil is a genius in the field of artificial intelligence. He is responsible
for more “firsts” than any other living inventor, including the first text-to-speech
synthesizer, created for the blind and reading-impaired. In the 1970s,
at Stevie Wonder's urging, he developed a computer that could so realistically
recreate the musical response of the grand piano and other orchestral instruments
that musicians were unable to distinguish its sounds from that of the actual
instruments. Among Ray's many fascinating books are
The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology
, a
New York Times
bestseller,
and
The Age of Spiritual Machines: When Computers Exceed Human Intelligence
. In them, we read of how a once-futuristic vision of a machine-dominated
world is only twenty or so years away and isn't as frightening as
we might think. Ray Kurzweil's latest ventures include FATKAT, an artificial
intelligent financial analyst. He belongs in this book because while few people
can match the power of his brain, his enthusiasm for what the future holds can
be contagious.

I
was always confident that I would be an inventor. Even at five, I felt you could create almost magical effects with inventions. All around me, other kids were wondering what they “would be,” but I knew what I was going to be. When I was eight, I built a mechanical puppet theater with a control station from which I could move the sun and moon in and out, move stars and clouds, and characters on and off stage. It was my first foray into virtual reality. When I was sixteen, I appeared on a TV show called
I've Got a Secret
, hosted by Steve Allen. I walked onstage and played a piece of music on the piano, then told Steve that my secret was that I had built my own computer. Steve was puzzled and asked, “What has that got to do with the piece you just played?” I told him that the computer had composed it. Building that computer was a high school project and my first venture into teaching computers to recognize abstract patterns, the capability that dominates human thinking. That project won first prize at the International Science Fair and an audience with President Lyndon Johnson at the White House awards ceremony.

After that, I went on to study computer science and literature at MIT. I quickly realized that timing was critical to success as an inventor. Ninety percent of inventions fail not because the inventor can't get them to work, but rather because the timing is wrong; not all the factors needed are in place. Inspired by this, I became an ardent student of technology trends. I tracked where technology would be at various points in time and built mathematical models of my findings. From this I discovered that technology is growing exponentially, as opposed to the conventionally held view that its growth is linear. For instance, it took us half a century to adopt the telephone, our first virtual reality technology, but only about eight years to adopt cell phones.