Interview with Jimmy Carter
This week, Bill Johnson reviewed and summarized an article in the Rotarian, February, 2018. The specific article he presented was an interview with President Jimmy Carter. It starts with a group of students touring the Jimmy Carter Presidential Library in Atlanta. At the end of the exhibit is Carter`s Nobel Peace Prize, which he received in 2002 in recognition of his decades of work advancing peace and human rights. “This is the biggest award in the world, ” one of the field trip leaders explains to the elementary school students. Then she puts it into terms they will understand: “This is bigger than the Super Bowl MVP, believe it or not.”
Carter has spent his life fighting for peace: brokering the 1978 peace talks between Egypt and Israel that led to the Camp David Accords, paving the way for a nuclear pact between the United States and North Korea in 1994, and monitoring elections in Panama, Nicaragua, Venezuela, and other places where the ballot box became an alternative to civil war. During his time in office, from 1977 to 1981, the United States was not involved in any wars.
For the past 37 years, Carter has been redefining what it means to be a retired president – and the country`s longest-lived one at that, having surpassed Herbert Hoover (who lived 31 years after leaving the White House). During his presidency, Carter made a commitment to human rights the cornerstone of his foreign policy; he and his wife, Rosalynn, continued that emphasis when they founded the Carter Center in 1982. The center`s programs revolve around two main themes: peace and health.
“We feel that there`s a human right of people to live in peace, ” he told The Rotarian.“We feel it`s a human right to have a modicum of health care, to have a decent place in which to live, to have a chance to have an education, to have freedom of speech and freedom of religion and the right to elect your own leaders. ”
The center has observed 105 elections, including recent contests in Liberia, Kenya, the Philippines, Zambia, and Guyana, and it has worked with the United Nations and other groups to develop standards for democratic elections. When democratic avenues fail, the center mediates armed conflicts. It is currently involved in efforts to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, as well as conflicts in Sudan and South Sudan, Syria, and Liberia; it`s also working to combat the rise in violent religious extremism and Islamophobia in Europe, the Middle East, and the United States.
On other fronts, the Carter Center has formed a task force on disease eradication. The only one of its kind in the world, it analyzes data to ascertain which diseases could be eradicated from the entire world.