Aid is more than an organized effort to transfer resources from the affluent to the poor. It is also a message to the world and a medium of communication. Who we are as a people and what we stand for as a nation are implicit in the choices we make in our aid programs and are revealed by the manner in which we pursue them.

I am going to touch on three topics that bear heavily on the fortunes of Pacific countries: the so-called energy crisis, the economic prospects of the Association of South East Asian Nations (ASEAN) and neighboring countries, and the implications of Chairman Hua's presumed pragmatism. I find myself holding unusual views on all of them.

Until 1973 I thought there might be a shortage of energy in the 1980's because energy was so obviously being temporarily underpriced. Since 1973 I have believed there is more likely to be a glut of energy in the 1980's because energy is being temporarily overpriced.

The possibility that OPEC might be able to maintain its cartel has, admittedly and unhappily, been increased by President Carter's and Congress's energy policies. These policies seem to me (although I know many who disagree) to be a glum example of the way in which politicians’ misunderstandings now override economic logic and history's lessons.

Beatrice Waters lives in the corner flat on the top floor of a council house in the Islington district of London. She spent four years of her life making the arrangements to rent a flat in this particular block of council houses. Four long years of speaking with this or that authority and arguing with her husband over whether they had made the right decision. At fifty, Henry Waters doubted he could survive still another move. He couldn't even remember all the places in which he had lived, as if immigrating from the West Indies to England wasn't significant enough. “Don't you think,” he would ask Beatrice, “there comes a time that people just settle down, no matter how good or bad a deal they've made for themselves? How long do you keep changing homes just to prove you're really getting somewhere in the world?’

In the midst of the Democratic national convention in July, 1976, Roman Catholic Archbishop Joseph L.Bernardin of Cincinnati spoke out publicly against the party's recently adopted platform plank favoring legal abortions. The plank, he said, was offensive to many Catholics.

Stuart Eizenstat, a key aide to Governor Jimmy Carter, who was about to become the party's presidential nominee, told the press that the archbishop's statement “was not from the hierarchy.” “My understanding is that many in the hierarchy were extremely upset and in effect told him to cool it. No one has come to his support. I think that fellow went out on a limb.“

Archbishop Bernardin was in fact the elected president of the American bishops and was speaking in their name. After numerous telegrams from bishops protesting Eizenstat's remark, he apologized, explaining that he had not known who Archbishop Bernardin was.

Militarism. The word has a faintly anachronistic ring. It conjures up images of Prussia in Bismarck's day, or perhaps Hitler's Third Reich. It suggests a static, rigid society in which a traditional officer caste dominates an authoritarian and hierarchical state system. But while this image is still valid for many societies today, it fails to convey the particular virulence and dynamism of modern militarism—a scourge that threatens to obliterate all the gains made in the areas of human rights, democratic government, and economic progress throughout the world since the end of World War II. If not checked soon, this scourge will almost certainly trigger a global conflagration that could destroy the human species.

Consider: World military spending in 1977 reached the record level of $400 billion—more than the combined gross national product of the world's hundred poorest nations. Most of these funds, of course, were expended by the two superpowers, which now have sufficient nuclear weapons to destroy each other several times over.

Christians have been trying to convert Jews for two thousand years. And for two thousand years Jews have been resisting with notable resiliency. Judaism has lost more Jews to apathy or assimilation than it ever has—or probably ever will—to the blandishments of Christian missionaries. Jews unwilling to affirm the beliefs or practice the rites of Judaism are rarely ripe candidates for the ardent Christian proselytizer. As a matter of fact, these approaches have most often revolted even the most cynical Jew. In modern times proselytism has become a kind of chronic nuisance, having two main effects, both of them negative. It produced a deep-seated anti-Christian attitude within the bosom of the Jewish body, and it facilitated a defensive withdrawal by Jews from the larger “gentile world.” Jews sometimes justify this inwardness with words like “peoplehood.” Non-Jews have as often labeled it “clannishness.”

Because it is there!” the rabbi coins a phrase when asked by baffled congregants why, of all places, he chose to go to the Indian subcontinent for his summer vacation. The truth, nothing but the truth…but not the whole truth. He also went to sniff exotic art, architecture, landscape, music, and theologies. Shocking to admit, he decided on India because that's just about as far away as you can get from the normal daily realities of his life: Jews, that is. A guy needs a change.

Easier said than done. Remember Jonah and Nineveh and the big fish. Evasion of responsibilities does not seem to work. You buzz off to forget (temporarily, therapeutically only, you chirp) your fellow Jews. So they come traipsing after you (physically, figuratively; who's counting anyway?). I was positively haunted. A small mercy though: at least I did not bump into the standard, Hilton-circuit, American Jew in his flowered bermudas and her sequinned sunglasses. If they were around, they must have been safely tucked away in their airconditioned buses or in their gaggles of guided gawkers at mandatory sites. No, it was a very different presence of Jews that kept stepping on my heels.