The Education of an Idealist: A Memoir

by Samantha Power

To this day, when I hear people judge students on the basis of their test scores, I think of my sleep-deprived African-American classmates as we geared up to take English or math tests together. We may have been equal before God, but I had three more hours of sleep, vastly more time to prepare, and many more resources at my disposal than those who were part of the busing program.

A friend of mine overheard a group of teachers crudely joking that the English department should begin teaching Ebonics, “so that we can properly communicate in their language.”

Despite coming at a heavy cost, Mum’s decision to move to America had opened up a whole new world for me. I knew that attending Yale would do the same.

When I returned to Yale that fall, I became a history major, throwing myself into schoolwork and studying with far greater intensity than during my freshman year.

CG

I learned a lesson that stayed with me: concrete, lived experiences engraved themselves in my psyche far more than abstract historical events.

governments can either do harm or do good. “What we do,” he would say, “depends on one thing: the people.” Institutions, big and small, were made up of people. People had values, and people made choices.

Mark Twain’s line: “A cat who sits on a hot stove will never sit on a hot stove again. But he won’t sit on a cold stove either.”

The Bosnian Serb paramilitaries had first introduced the chilling term “ethnic cleansing” in places like Banja Luka to describe how they sought to “purify” the land they controlled of its Muslim and Croat residents.

Had no idea stuff like this was happening after fall of Soviet Union

I just couldn’t make myself care about the topics we were studying. In 1L, Scott Turow’s memoir of his first year at Harvard Law School, he compares studying case law to stirring concrete with his eyelashes;

Lol

with funding from American tech entrepreneur Greg Carr, we built the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy,

I think i follow thus guy on Twitter ???

He predicted that we were entering a period in which Americans—especially young people on college campuses—would rise up to demand a different kind of foreign policy from Washington. “It’s all about pressure,” he said. “Governments will do the right thing, or less of the wrong thing, if people make clear that they care.”

-John Prendergast

Obama spoke with unusual precision about his strengths and weaknesses. “I’m not some big original thinker,” he said. “But I listen well, I synthesize ideas, and I can generally figure out how to communicate what we need to do.”

“Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people.”

-Eleanor Roosevelt

In the Book of Proverbs, Chapter 24, Verses 11 and 12, it reads as follows: Rescue those being led away to death, Hold back those staggering toward slaughter! If you say, “But we knew nothing of this!” Does not he who weighs the heart perceive it? Does not he who guards your life know it? Will he not repay each person according to what he has done?

People feel the pain regardless of if it is acknowledged

Although I had never considered myself a particularly partisan person, I came away immensely frustrated with the way Republicans often forced debates over US policy into a false dichotomy between an overreliance on military force on the one hand, and what they called “appeasement” on the other. I was also struck by how unprepared our national security institutions were for responding to unconventional threats like climate change.

I asked him about his recent trip to Kenya, his first since becoming an internationally known figure. He told me about the intensity of the crowds who lined the streets wherever he went. “Goodness,” I said. “How did that feel?” “Pardon?” he replied. “How did it feel?” I repeated. “What do you mean?” he asked. “Barack!” I exclaimed. “Feelings! Remember those?” “I don’t know,” he said. “I guess I felt the way I feel about all of this. People are hungering for something, and they see that something in me. I can’t take it too seriously.”

I was suffering, he insisted, from what behavioral scientists called the “Spotlight Effect”—the overwhelming human tendency to believe that others are noticing one’s actions far more than they are. This seemed a fancy way of stating what was true: becoming a headline news story was causing me to exaggerate my own importance.

Definition

Cass was content anywhere. Whether hanging out in an airport lounge or waiting at the dentist, he needed only his laptop to feel at home. I came to understand why he was one of the most prolific scholars in the world—he used every nook and cranny of the day, no matter where he was, to write. As soon as he had turned on his MacBook Air and pulled up a document on the screen before him, he simply picked up where he had left off ten minutes, an hour, or the day before.

Lets try to be moore content everywhere

My regular “X test” formulation now had a new twist: if all I achieved in becoming an overnight media scandal was marrying Cass, it was perhaps the best deal of my life.

the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA) was known around Washington as “the most powerful job nobody has ever heard of.”

OIRA oversees regulation on issues as diverse as civil rights, health care, the environment, worker safety, transportation, food safety, and veterans affairs.

quoting Nobel Prize–winning psychologist Daniel Kahneman, who wisely wrote, “Nothing in life is as important as you think it is when you are thinking about it.”

“Will people think I’m just a reporter masquerading as a bureaucrat?” I asked Cass. He answered with typically astute behavioral wisdom. “People tend to think about themselves,” he told me. “It is highly unlikely your colleagues are thinking about you at all.”

“Feel the fear and do it anyway,”

Jon Favreau and Ben Rhodes, Obama’s two gifted speechwriters,

Krauss would love that Favreau wrote Obama speeches

In Ivory Coast, the tools we employed were different, but also had important effects. There, the crisis emerged when the incumbent president, Laurent Gbagbo, lost his bid for reelection and tried to remain in power while holed up in the presidential compound.

Hmm... 2021 vibes

When the US government takes a leadership role in preventing mass atrocities, the blame is sometimes laid at our feet for not being able to prevent future human rights abuses. And unfortunately, violence frequently recurs. In South Sudan in late 2013, for example, some of the very same politicians and generals who brought the country into existence would lead their people into a savage civil war.

Ishmael: our creation of a better world does sometimes manifest more problems

But just because we couldn’t right every wrong did not mean we couldn’t—or shouldn’t—try to improve lives and mitigate violence where we could do so at reasonable risk.

Explaining the logistics of baby care to Eddie by phone was like trying to explain the complexities of a new tech gadget: what seemed straightforward to me just wasn’t obvious to a man in his seventies.

Godwin

What does the Ambassador like to eat?” Cass’s mind, unusually, drew a complete blank. He viewed food as fuel—tuna sashimi from Nobu was indistinguishable from a tuna sandwich from a vending machine.

Hahaha

I was struck on many of my visits by the extent to which the UN-based ambassadors and their citizens back home were intertwined with the United States. The ambassador from Eritrea, then the most isolated country in the world aside from North Korea, had been educated at Bowdoin College in Maine and American University in Washington, DC. The Somali and Bruneian ambassadors had attended the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University in Massachusetts. I heard constantly about connections like these. A half dozen of my fellow ambassadors began our meetings expressing “personal thanks” to the United States for educational support they had received through various State Department programs, which they said had made it possible for them to become diplomats.

“If America sneezes, people in my country catch a cold.”

Phrasing

I tried to focus on the Ukrainian people whom Russia sought to airbrush from history.

Phrasing

He reminded us that not so long ago, being gay and serving in the State Department had been a terrifying experience. In the 1950s and 1960s, homosexuality was classified as a national security risk, and more than 1,000 people were fired or forced out due to suspicions of being gay. It was not until President Clinton’s first term that Secretary of State Christopher finally put an end to the practice of vetting employees as potential threats solely on the basis of their sexual orientation.

Crazy

“We won,” I told the team, “because we cared more and we worked harder. Never forget how much that can matter.”

I understood why, and quoted my favorite line from the late psychologist Amos Tversky, who had said he preferred optimism because “as a pessimist, you suffer twice.”

Quote i like

“Officials are importing Ebola into the U.S.,” warned the popular far-right website InfoWars.

Come on Alex Jones...

I had told the ambassadors from other countries not to take the floor if they planned only to lament the seriousness of the epidemic. “Please don’t admire the problem,”

Phrasing

The other UN ambassadors were similarly generous toward my family. Halfway through my tenure, Boubacar Boureima, Niger’s Ambassador to the UN, told me that the African ambassadors were “all talking” about how much they enjoyed getting to know Mum and Eddie and seeing Declan and Rían race around the apartment.

NGA for the win

OVER THE NEXT WEEK, I met with the presidents of the three countries we were visiting: Paul Biya of Cameroon, Idriss Déby of Chad, and Muhammadu Buhari of Nigeria.

pretended to be a bulwark against terrorism

Phrasing

THE #FREETHE20 CAMPAIGN AFFIRMED what I had seen during my years in journalism: people were more likely to respond when they could focus on a specific individual—like David Rohde when he disappeared in Bosnia. Government officials were no different. During the Ebola crisis, Jackson Niamah, the Liberian health worker, had reached typically stoic diplomats with his chilling prophecy that “if the international community does not stand up, we will all be wiped out.”

People who care, act, and refuse to give up may not change the world, but they can change many individual worlds.