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View From the Stars: A Rotarian’s Parallax
Vision
(Submitted for publication to The
Rotarian Magazine)
Joe Kagle, Rotary eClub of the Southwest, USA
As a Rotarian for over 35 years (the last 19
with perfect attendance), a little less than half my age,
you would think after years of travel on World Campus
Afloat, Fulbright grants to Taiwan, Republic of Georgia (2)
and Mongolia, your point of view of the world would have
been fixed long ago. Not true! Recently I joined Rotary
eClub of the Southwest, USA (with members all over the
world) (I am the first Texan but we also have one member
from Japan, India and the Marshall Islands) and Rotary Global History. My view has expanded and
contracted all in the same instance. It has expanded to a
flat world point of view (information, thoughts of freedom,
communications, images and stories) where borders now hold
no barrier to ideas and visions. Also it has contracted to
the place where I see the world from a satellite point of
view, one place, one globe, one people.
 My creative work shows this change in
viewpoint. I will not call it “perspective” because that has
meaning that links it to the Renaissance- on the ground and
one-on-one to an horizon. A Rotarian thinks immediately of
Paul Harris’ and Bill Boyd’s words that we must “Lead The
Way.” I spent the good part of twenty years as Director of
the Art Center in Waco, Texas and belonged to the Rotary
Club of Waco (one of the oldest in America). There I gave
talks on my travels to other countries and reports on the
projects that were accomplished during those visits: such
as, creating the first prototype playground in Tbilisi,
Georgia in a housing development where the average wage for
a worker was less than $10 per week and if you retired after
25 years of service to a company you would get all of $7 a
month in retirement benefits. This was a joint effort of the
Rotary Clubs in the Republic of Georgia and America (me as a
Rotarian and Fulbright Scholar), and the Bernard and Audre
Rapoport Foundation (a family foundation in Waco, Texas).
This playground, named for Rapoport’s mother, now serves
thousand of children who would not have this kind of
surroundings for creative play. As most educators know, play
is how we all learn when the environment is foreign (which
it always is outside us).
It was certainly vocational volunteerism
(although my Rotary or I got no credit for it). In the last
few years, I worked over the internet with friends as a
follow up to my Fulbright trip to the Republic of Georgia in
2001-2002 and again in 2003 on a $1 million dollar grant
that brought together the national museums, symphony, opera
and dance companies (also not mentioned as my Rotary
international volunteerism). Those organizations did not get
the grant but now have a working relationship that writes
collective grants each year. Now since joining the Rotary
eClub of the Southwest, USA, my efforts to work with those
same people in that Tbilisi housing development (to build
additional educational, play places for children) and build
a network for the arts organizations is part of my volunteer
hours over the internet. Starting in August 2006, I will be
working with Engineers Without Borders as a grant writer who
will take thirteen individual projects in El Salvador and
wed them into one grant package for $3.6 million dollars to
be spent over the next five years. The engineer who is
coordinating all these infrastructure projects lives in
Portland, Oregon: the Rotary man who is researching all the
possible granting agencies is from Colorado; and my contact
here in Texas works as a space engineer from NASA. This is
how projects gets done today; it is from a collage (putting
divergent pieces together) and parallax method (view from
the sky) of working without borders by getting people
together with passions to serve a larger community in the
world. The water and purification projects will save lives,
improve life styles, create better, healthier communities
and make friends for the process of freedom. All this work
on a global scale can now be part of my Rotary volunteer
service to the community of this globe. What does this all
mean for Rotary? It means that instead of giving the minimum
of 30 hours a year for my home, land-based Rotary in Waco or
Humble, Texas, I have already given in the six weeks since
my acceptance in June over 300 hours of service and with the
Engineers Without Borders and Rotary Global History, RGHF, that will probably come closer to 1200
hours for the year for the virtual eClub Rotary. Giving
Rotarians the freedom to use all their talents and skills is
good for Rotary. Paul Harris would be an eClub Rotarian, I
believe.
The change for this Rotary member from
land-based Rotary membership to internet-based eClub
membership on June 12, 2006 has also meant a total use of my
talents for writing grants, articles and opinions,
organizational skills, marketing and visualizing ideas for
the future. One of the members of Rotary eClub of the
Southwest, USA recruited me into RGHF and they made me a
Peace Historian. My first act was to suggest a new approach
to exploring peace, an eight-part Peace Journey (using a
beloved Ming Dynasty hand scroll for an imaginary, peaceful
voyage across a Southern Sung lake to the Northern Sung
mountains to the mists and waterfalls of the UNKNOWN) (http://www.rotaryfirst100.org/peace/,
then add two, three, four, five, six, seven and eight to see
it all). It uses all my skills as a Chinese art historian
and Western artist, my talents in writing, and my
observations that have been honed by writing opinion
articles for the Waco Tribune Herald as one of its 32 Board
of Contributors from 1988 to 2005, reaching over 150,000
readers in Central Texas. Now RGHF plans to reach close to
one million readers and visitors for this Peace project.
 I have traveled all around this globe (we
call a “world” although it is only the one that we see from
space, not through a microscope or our imagination). When I
am now asked by one of my students about how I see the
“world” with this question: “Is the world flat or round? Are
there borders that cannot be crossed or do borders even
exist anymore?” I give a Japanese answer, “Yes.” What that
means is: “Yes, you have asked the correct question for our
time, but I do not know the answer.” The second part of the
answer I never give but leave that part of the answer in the
sky for the student to ponder in time. That question is like
Joseph Campbell’s “hero with a thousand faces”. My answer
depends on the culture, the myths and stories, the
technology or lack of it, my own point of view at that exact
moment and the intention of the questioner. Truth is
multicultural. Rotarians in a eClub are like explorers in
the “undiscovered country” of virtual space and time. They
know that this pursuit is the wave of the future but they do
not know the correct board to ride on it- YET!
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