Allan J. "Alonzo" Wind's Blog, page 2
July 8, 2024
A Moving and Potent Speech at Temple Micah – Washington DC
Senior Rabbi Daniel G. Zemel thanked Alonzo Wind for his recent talk several weeks ago, touching on difficult but critically important themes regarding Israel, the occupied Palestinian territories and the war in Gaza. About 50 people joined in person and an additional 50 people were online for the Zoomcast.
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1qZk09D2unF8neEPCUrG3qRlJ2joot33U/view
The post A Moving and Potent Speech at Temple Micah – Washington DC appeared first on Enable & Ennoble.
Special Public Talk at Temple Adas Israel – Washington DC
DC supporters of Standing Together invite you to join us for an event discussing the humanitarian situation in Gaza. We will begin with a panel of humanitarian experts: Noah Gottschalk (HIAS and Adas Israel member), Kate Phillips-Barrasso (Mercy Corps), and Alonzo Wind (recent West Bank/Gaza director at International Medical Corps). The panel will be followed with an opportunity for small group discussions led by experienced facilitators, to offer space to process thoughts and feelings. Sharing the link for the upcoming panel at Temple Adas Israel for July 21: Sign up link below. https://www.adasisrael.org/event/humanitarian-obligations.html
The post Special Public Talk at Temple Adas Israel – Washington DC appeared first on Enable & Ennoble.
October 6, 2021
HARDCOVER EDITION NOW LIVE
The hardcover version of ANDEAN ADVENTURES is now live and for sale on Amazon, for those who might prefer that edition. Enjoy!
The post HARDCOVER EDITION NOW LIVE appeared first on Enable & Ennoble.
NEW PODCASTS AND YOUTUBE VIDEOS ARE LIVE
Before the summer and then in the past weeks, I have been invited to record multiple podcast radio shows on different topics. I have been invited to talk about international development cooperation, about issues in Africa and Latin America, about leadership and about overcoming life adversities. Some podcasts recorded previously also went live since my last newsletter. Have you caught any of them?
Here are a few of the most recent ones, which we’ve publicized on social media and YouTube. More are dropping soon:
JULY 30th: FROM EMBERS TO EXCELLENCE – DAVE HOLLENBACH
Youtube video
Interview with Allan J. “Alonzo” Wind, UAID Senior Foreign Service Officer, Retired – YouTube
FROM THE DRIVE TO SUCCEED – DANIELLE FRANCISCO
September 14 Release:
The Drive To Succeed Podcast on Apple Podcasts
Video Trailer here:
https://tinyurl.com/AJWpodcastDrive2Succeed
September 27 Release:
FROM THE INTERNATIONAL RISK PODCAST
FROM DR CHRIS STOUT – LIVING A LIFE IN FULL PODCAST DROPPING OCTOBER 1 and ACCOMPANYING YOUTUBE VIDEO – THE CENTER FOR GLOBAL INITIATIVES
Living A Life In Full on Apple Podcasts
The post NEW PODCASTS AND YOUTUBE VIDEOS ARE LIVE appeared first on Enable & Ennoble.
ANTIVAXXERS
COVID travelling across Europe was not that much of a hassle. In almost all cases showing our CDC cards as proof of full vaccination was sufficient. In a few places we had to turn to rapid tests as well to be able to enter and dine indoors.
In Portugal and then again in Germany we heard anecdotal stories of a certain mistrust in the CDC paper cards because allegedly a number of Americans traveling in Europe had been found to be carrying forged or falsified vaccine cards. We could not understand the thinking and rationalization that went behind anyone doing that. How could someone go to all the effort to do that, and not think about actually getting vaccinated?
Have you ever interacted with anti vaxxers? I know someone from high school who is an anti vaxxer leader, and in their case it seemed that their sincere beliefs were all tied up with the bad science and falsified claims of this British doctor who was ultimately disbarred or whatever the equivalent is for British medicine.
Of course, those who are vaccine hesitant today are a mixed lot. There are of course some political extremists who are caught up with the conspiracy theorists and hypocritical lies of the American political right and “Fox News,” who love to use malicious lies about the COVID vaccines despite themselves having surreptitiously been vaccinated. There are others who have chosen to ignore the lengthy history of vaccinations and vaccine requirements for decades and been caught up in the polemics around this particular vaccine. There are others who perhaps have been unnerved by the speed and process of the development of the vaccines during 2020 and have worried if adequate safety testing had really been done. Some people of color have no doubt hesitated because of past racist abuses which have been unearthed and voiced to raise red flags.
But it seems to require a particular type of mentality and cynicism to be fabricating and seeking phony vaccine cards. I haven’t seen the numbers and whether this has really been extensive or not among American travelers to Europe. But it has been enough anecdotally to cause some alarm among a few European AirBnb hosts and restaurant managers, within an EU milieu which has been carefully increasing the use of online digital certifications and QR codes on peoples’ phones.
From our point of view, it has been convenient and helpful that almost all European venues have ultimately accepted our CDC cards, but it has also been amazing how tied up in knots of incompetence and policy misdirection the reverse has been true: that even fully vaccinated Europeans have largely not been able to travel to the USA just yet. This despite the unjustifiable reality that a higher percentage of many European countries are fully vaccinated compared to the struggling levels in the United States, which seems to have been stuck at just below 60% for the longest time.
And even more touching for us in the wider context is the continuing reality of vaccine inequity – the surfeit of vaccine availability in the wealthiest countries where so many countries have struggled to be able to purchase or obtain enough vaccine for their populations. This vaccine inequity is of course just one additional characteristic of an economic self-defeating inequity. As Lawrence O’Donnell and others have cogently repeated: energetically vaccinating the rest of the world in this pandemic spread of variants is not charity but self-defense. What goes around comes around. The increased impoverishment, marginalization and hunger in many nations in my mind should be turning on warning lights and alarms all over – how can this not end up feeding increased polarization, extremism and radicalization around the world? And how can we, as the poster child for wasted and ill utilized excess abundance, not be a primary target for that radicalization some day?
The post ANTIVAXXERS appeared first on Enable & Ennoble.
EUROPEAN VACATION
I put the newsletter on a summer hiatus as we recently returned from almost six weeks away, travelling across Iceland, and then on to Germany, the Czech Republic, Vienna Austria, and finally Portugal. Not sure why, particularly in the case of Portugal. We’d been to Spain before in the past and had gone through the Lisbon airport en route to Angola, a former Portuguese colony where we lived from 2005-2007. My family and I had a fantastic time in each country we visited.
I’ll share some photos here — sadly while the land of the midnight sun was surely felt it was not the time for the best viewing of the northern lights, the aurora borealis. We were certainly left with the hankering to go back again sometime. On the return flight back to North America we overflew the forbidding glacial wilderness of Greenland, which once again captured our imaginations as we looked for any sign of human presence. The climate change deepened effects of glacial melt seemed all too visible.
Lisbon and Sintra were full of lovely surprises and treats as was Prague. Such an amazing, clean and proud medieval city. Remarkable buildings from almost one thousand years 
ago. And very hospitable people.
The Algarve sun in the south of Portugal also offered us a comfortable way for a summer beach return in the pandemic. We went to Lagos primarily, near the Sagres fortress. Lagos had been the jumping off point for exploration 500 years ago for Prince Henry the Navigator. It also has the remains of the market for African enslaved peoples.
Iceland notably captured our imagination going. We did a self-drive tour along the south coast and up along part of the eastern side of the island. It was rainy, foggy and chilly for much of it, and indeed that time of the summer is their rainiest time of year. We saw endless waterfalls and volcanic fumaroles and geysers, completed a snowmobile circuit across part of the largest glacier, entered and explored an extinguished lava tube cave underground, and did a boat tour around one of the larger glacial lagoons with calving icebergs. Much of the volcanic ground was covered by a thick pelt of green moss, and that part not green was often a black alien landscape of rock and volcanic ash which made clear why Iceland is a preferred locale for cinemaphotographers and other worldly film adventures.
The post EUROPEAN VACATION appeared first on Enable & Ennoble.
July 14, 2021
So Conflicted About the News from Afghanistan
Today the news reported the criticisms of former president George W. Bush about the withdrawal from the Forever War of Afghanistan. While I take that sort of chatter and much of the rest that has rebounded from different Republican circles with grains of salt, at best, I do remain conflicted. On the one hand, there is no question that there has been a failure of American governance and accountability to allow us to remain in a country like Afghanistan with military forces, even in a training role for the ANA and a garrison role for the U.S. Embassy for over a generation. President Biden rightly questioned how we could possible defend the presence of troops who in some cases had parents previously stationed in Afghanistan. If we have failed to accomplish a lasting mission so far, how could one more year make a difference? Or five?
Admittedly, what gets partially missed in much of the chatter in the different media bubbles is the reality that our presence is far different from what it was five or ten years ago. U.S. forces no longer have a “combat” role and haven’t for some time. Still, even with the reduced presence of 2-4000 troops for the last six years, what sort of “training” of the Afghan National Army are we accomplishing? How is it that forces of the ANA, trained and equipped to the degree they have been, have allowed themselves to be consistently pushed out by the Taliban forces, supposedly a quarter of their size, and how is it that many have fled across the border to neighboring countries? How is it that there has been no degree of commitment and organization under a functioning Afghani government all this time? After so many billions have been spent and largely wasted on them?
I am even more conflicted by the appearances in the past couple weeks of the way it seems U.S. forces essentially snuck out like thieves in the night from Bagram Air Base, cutting off the power, rendering the base as a final potential resource for the Afghani government largely useless. And this is a base which itself hosts to this day hundreds if not more Taliban prisoners. How long will they possibly be held in the face of such absurd abandonment? How did the Pentagon allow for this type of withdrawal months ahead of the planned deadline of departure by September? Is it their excuse that this somehow saved American lives in a potential Saigon-like withdrawal that might have happened? What honor exists then?
Perhaps the narrative as presented by the Afghanis, and international journalists like Richard Engle from NBC, is somehow wrong or false or misleading. But I grieve nevertheless for Afghanistan, I grieve for the losses that have been endured there by all sides, for what unidentifiable purpose. I grieve for what seems to be a real loss and stain for the early Biden administration, for not ensuring that we not do the sort of incompetent and messy screwup as the situation you’d have expected for the brutally thoughtless and blundering previous administration of Agent Orange. I don’t know why, if this narrative is a false one, there has not been a clear message or explanation otherwise. So far it seems there simply can’t be one, since Afghanistan is being written off and we are allowing vain and blind bureaucrats delay and block what should have been a robust effort to evacuate the many thousands of translators and collaborators we have had in that country to save than from the cataclysm yet to come.
With LTC Cliff Faulkner
me and Marion, Acting PRT Director
The post So Conflicted About the News from Afghanistan appeared first on Enable & Ennoble.
July 4, 2021
Social Psychic Podcast Show Episode Released
https://www.dsocialpsychicradio.com/An unusual but delightful and engaging show. I was happy to join Jason Zuk on it. Jason is a remarkable guy – he has a wonderful temperament and enthusiasm as an internet radio show host. We covered a wide range of topics during the hour or so we recorded, including race relations and the BLM movement, the unaddressed challenges of re-segregation and social injustice, my own experiences internationally and what led me to pursue a vocation overseas, and spirituality at the tale end of the conversation. Jason is very much an enlightened and informed globalist, and we had fun with storytelling along the way. I hope you will check out this just released podcast from the_socialpsychichttps://www.dsocialpsychicradio.com/episodesAndean AdventuresThe post Social Psychic Podcast Show Episode Released appeared first on Enable & Ennoble.
June 30, 2021
New podcast with the Center for Strategic and International Studies
I am proud to share this podcast episode that just went live between Dan Runde, a distinguished thought leader in international affairs and myself. Please listen and feel free to share and comment. Tell me what you think – you might find other episodes that Dan puts out also of interest.
The post New podcast with the Center for Strategic and International Studies appeared first on Enable & Ennoble.
June 22, 2021
BOOK SUGGESTIONS
I have added to my reading list some additional powerful new books.
I am starting to read THIS IS HOW THEY TELL ME THE WORLD ENDS by Nicole Perlroth. It is part detective story and part chilling projection of the cyberwar environment and how it is worsening year by year. She talks about how she began to cover it as a journalist and she shows the sleuth skills she has had in getting to the bottom of something only now becoming more familiar to millions of Americans. I’m about ¼ of the way through and I am enjoying it, although I find myself stopping often for different reasons. I’ve seen the writer a few times on MSNBC in the past, and she was always very coherent. So it has been interesting to read her writing here, outside of the newspaper format.
I have also begun AFTER THE FALL by Ben Rhodes. I’ve respected his work in the Obama Administration, and I think he has written a sobering volume with a difficult perspective on where the previous administration of THE PREVIOUS GUY left us all. This book stands out for me among many out there. I think Rhodes raises a host of important questions which boil down to: How do we recover from the horrendous damage of recent years? If we can’t go backwards and pretend it never happened – and we certainly can’t – then how do we chart a meaningful way forward that builds on and draws strength from the sorts of value we do want to stand for in the world? There are no easy answers of course, but more and more of us need to be asking these questions and keeping them in mind.
The post BOOK SUGGESTIONS appeared first on Enable & Ennoble.
