CD: And how would you like to see it addressed?

MELADY: Well, I wrote a book on it. Now, the book’s about fifty years out of date, but some of the things haven’t changed. My first job when I got out of Catholic University was in Ethiopia, and we had to learn some lessons. We had a lot of ideas, but what we didn’t do was talk to the people — it was our idea, it sounded good for us. Unfortunately that was characteristic of a lot of the foreign aid, however well-intentioned. As I say in the book, the final lesson was that we have to work with [the local people]; they would have the determination, and we would help them with their ideas. Right now no one has spoken much on developing societies.

CD: What about our own country? What do you see as some of the biggest challenges facing America today?

MELADY: Well right now we have to recognize that there are some difficult challenges facing us: the Iraq war, the growing tightness of our economic system. We’ve got unemployment that’s about the five percent level, which technically isn’t bad, but it’s the wages and so forth that we have to look at. And so we have a whole number of things to look at and to restore confidence that we can do things. And a four letter word, which is spelled h-o-p-e, there’s something to that. Hope that we can turn things around, that we’re going to resolve the situation in Iraq. We have to do it in terms of our long-term interests and the long-term interest of the people there. With regard to the economy, we have to adjust to the realities. The good thing is that unemployment is down to less than 5 percent. On the other hand we’ve seen all the studies about the salaries. You see the rise in the cost of higher education; you see some people graduating with loans of 60 to 90 thousand dollars, and even higher than that. It’s alright for the young person coming out of college and going to a well-paying law firm, but what about the young person who wants to become a high school teacher? We need to figure out some other ways. I look at the campaign in a very positive way. Let’s get a lot of these ideas out there for public discussion.

CD: Sure, that’s an important part of the election process. You mentioned the Iraq war. Governor Romney has been in favor of the troop surge, and he’s also expressed the opinion that it’d be beneficial to double the size of Guantanamo, and for Americans to employ “enhanced interrogation techniques.” Is this something that you also support?

MELADY: I’d like to see us solve the problem in Iraq. It’s gone on longer than we ever thought it would. Things seem to be improving. In regard to the treatment of prisoners, I just became aware of that statement; I haven’t had a chance to focus on it. I’d look at the whole thing happily. The thing is, things have changed. I teach history, and to get back to World War I where the German soldiers and the French soldiers took off Christmas Eve night and got together and sang Christmas carols, that kind of atmosphere is totally past. We have terrorists. And we had rules of war by Judeo Christian teachings, and now we have another kind of enemy attacking us, so it requires an adjustment, but I don’t think we want to lose sight of our ideals.

CD: So do you think the answer lies in something like increasing the size of Guantanamo or in a troop surge?

MELADY: Well [Romney] must have thought about it carefully, and I haven’t. A troop surge — this is not my field — but there’s some evidence in the past month that there’s been some success to it. The number of deaths in the past few weeks has significantly gone down, and that may be attributed to the troop surge.

CD: There are so many factors that play into these issues.

MELADY:It’s a complicated thing and it doesn’t lend itself to one-word answers. CD

Kerry Weber is associate editor for Catholic Digest.