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Voices of Experience

Poet, World Affairs director deliver post-Sept. 11 lessons

Tuesday, October 8, 2002
By Jane Rider
The Missoulian



Reporter Jane Rider can be reached at 523-5298 or at jrider@missoulian.com

Missoula poet Philip Burgess, right, and Mark Johnson with the World Affairs Council of Montana spoke to Sentinel High School students Monday as part of the Montana Committee for the Humanities lecture series.
Image Credit: Michael Gallacher -- The Missoulian.

Sept. 11, 2001, is a product of the awful marriage between radicalism and high technology, he
said. It is globalization's worst nightmare. "The real issue is the poverty and oppression in the Middle East," Johnson, a former U.S. ambassador to Senegal, said. "They resent our lifestyle because they are so politically repressed and economically disadvantaged." When a student asked if he ever encountered hatred against America while working in a foreign country, Johnson recalled an experience in the Gaza Strip. "When I drove into that town - a town ankle-deep in trash, without clean water, they didn't have eyes, they had burning embers of hatred for me ... and the U.S.," he said.

In the summer of 1968, two young men from Montana arrived in Washington, D.C., on separate paths, heading in different directions.

The Vietnam War was escalating and Americans were still reeling from the recent assassinations of Robert F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr.

Mark Johnson, a Great Falls native who is now executive director of the World Affairs Council of Montana at the University of Montana, had just begun a detail at the Pentagon - the start of a remarkable career as a U.S. diplomat that spanned 30 years.

Philip Burgess, a Fairview-area native and now a nationally recognized poet, had just returned from the U.S. Army's jungle warfare training in Panama and was preparing to leave for Vietnam.

The two men never met while in our nation's capital. But their paths eventually crossed last month, when they agreed to team up to spearhead a discussion in St. Ignatius on how the events of Sept. 11 had changed the world.

Cheryl Hughes, a Sentinel High School English teacher, attended that talk with her three children. She was so impressed by the discussion that she invited the poet and diplomat to her school to talk to students.
(More: Missoulian.com News Source)
2002 © The Missoulian.

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