Moral Numbness Leads to the Abandonment of Moral Principle

“WE ALREADY KNEW THAT!”

Moral numbness leads to the abandonment of moral principle

In reading Brett Stephens’ review of John Bolton’s new book, The Room Where It Happened, I was reminded of one of the most gut-wrenching experiences in my youth.  I was 7 or 8.  I had a pet turtle.  I placed it in a bowl with a rock it could rest on surrounded by water.  The room that day was cold, so I decided to put the bowl on a radiator to give the turtle some needed warmth. The next morning, the turtle was dead.  The temperature had gradually risen.  It killed him.

This well-worn analogy, unforgettable in my mind seventy-five years after it happened, applies to the Trump presidency and to Stephens’ review of Bolton’s book. 

John Bolton writes that Trump’s Ukraine quid pro quo discussions with the President was “bad policy, questionable legally, and unacceptable as presidential behavior.”  Stephens' response: "We knew that."

Bolton writes that Vladimir Putin “had to be laughing uproariously at what he had gotten away with in Helsinki.”  But we knew that, too.  

He writes that for Trump, “Obstruction of justice (is) a way of life.”  We knew that, too. And, so, on it goes. One "head-shaking" divisive and denigrating tweet or action after another. 

I asked one of my Trump-supporting friends, “Do you believe what John Bolton is telling in this book will change people’s minds about whether to vote for Trump?”  His answer was, “Probably not. Everyone already knew all of that.” 

Think back to the history of our country.  Would the by now well-supported allegations being made about President Trump, not just by Bolton but by many others, be accepted with a shrug of the shoulders and a “we knew that?”  Of course not. 

We’ve long known that moral standards of behavior cannot be taken for granted.  It’s a slippery slope.  A company can pledge itself to never giving a bribe, but then can be tempted to give a small facilitation gift to get something done and, sure enough, that small “facilitation gift” can  become bigger, and bigger.  You've crossed the line.  And as others in the organization see it happening, they start to believe that the controlling mandate is to make the end goal happen, no matter what the means.  

This is a dangerous, frightening and treacherous development in our Nation.   We are on the way to moral numbness through the repeated violation, at first perhaps seemingly small, of moral standards of truth and of common decency.  What does this lead to? It leads to the abandonment of moral principle and the commitment to truth. It leads to cynicism and to the corruption which inevitably follows. 

That’s what’s been happening in this country under the Presidency of Donald J. Trump. 

This risk of moral corruption didn’t begin four years ago.  It will always be a risk in human nature.  However, Donald Trump has brought it to an unprecedented level. This represents a grave danger for our Nation.

Bret Stephens cites an essay in The Atlantic by Ann Applebaum which draws on the inspiration of Czeslaw Milosz’s The Captive Mind, to shed light on the roots of this human tendency.  There is the relief and pleasure of political conformity, there is the allure of power or proximity to it and there can be a profit motive.  

I believe one or more of these attitudes explain how almost every Republican senator is justifying not speaking out against Trump:  “I am doing everything I can privately to alter his behavior where it needs to be altered,” they explain.  “Coming out publicly would not lead to a good outcome.  And while here, in the Senate, I will be pushing for legislation which is good for the American people.”

Understandable responses?  "Yes."  Responses which are helping to enable  President Trump's immoral behavior to continue unchallenged and thereby grow stronger?  Absolutely, "yes." This represents a frightening threat to our Nation's future. 

In the first week of November, every voter will face a stark question,  “Am I willing to continue to condone the moral behavior of Donald J. Trump through my vote?   Or is his behavior and the character which it portrays so out of line, so against what I believe is right personally and what is right for my family and for our Nation that I will vote to remove him from office?”

I pray and trust that a great majority of Americans will vote to remove Donald Trump from office.

Doing so will validate and affirm for time immemorial that there are certain moral principles which dare not be transgressed and which cannot be taken for granted and which cannot be tolerated in the leader of any organization, let alone the Presidency of the United States. It will affirm that the values of integrity and common decency reign supreme and that personal character is non-negotiable. 

The Pharmaceutical Industry

PHARMA:  GREED, LIES AND THE POISONING OF AMERICA BY GERALD POSNER
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This is a blistering indictment of the pharmaceutical industry focused especially on the deadly scandal of OxyContin and the Sackler family which pulled it off.

There aren’t many heroes in this book and villains abound.  The Sackler’s, of course; weak-kneed administrators in the FDA; and Rudy Giuliani, who ended up being the Sackler’s lawyer after he had the mayor position in New York.

It’s amazing to me how I failed to penetrate the severity of the opioid OxyContin crisis.  By 2015, opioid prescription rates were triple the number dispensed in 1999.  Enough OxyContin was prescribed that year to medicate every American for nearly a month, and it killed more people than had fatal car crashes and guns combined; 52,000.

The claims made on label and in detailing OxyContin were plain lies and the executives knew it.  Seventy-five percent of the $400 million spent on marketing OxyContin came after the year 2000, when executives first acknowledged knowing about the abuse.  

The premise of OxyContin’s differentiated position was that it would last for 12 hours and did not require repeat dosage as other similarly effective pain relievers did.  It counted on its slow-release coating to achieve that.  They also claimed that the slow-release coating meant that it would not produce the “highs” that could lead to addiction.  This claim was made despite the fact that a third of the subjects in their trials needed another dose to offset pain before 12 hours expired.  Not only that, addicted people learned to scrape the delayed coating off the tablet to get a quicker release and a high.

The Sackler’s made billions off OxyContin.  Particularly staggering to me was the fact they continued to promote the drug illegally after they had made a full-throated confession of guilt and had signed a consent order with the FDA in 2007.

The case that will determine how much money they will end up paying is still in the courts.  Nobody has gone to jail, despite all these deaths.

Stepping back, "Pharma" is not a well-balanced history of the pharmaceutical industry.  While it does, in the early pages, give credit to the breakthroughs that occurred in penicillin and other antibiotics, it does not step back and appraise the life-extending benefits and life-improving relief which pharmaceuticals have enabled.  

It does leave no doubt that a large part of the higher cost of pharmaceuticals in the U.S. is due to pharmaceutical benefit firms.  These middlemen are soaking up significant amounts of money.  This doesn’t happen in other universal healthcare plans in other countries.  It also illuminates the challenge posed by “orphan drugs,” often ones with very small differentiated claims, that enable an extension of patents for years.  Seven of the top ten selling pharmaceuticals as this book was written were orphan drugs.  

Posner also does a good job of pointing out the risk that we have of antibacterial resistant strains developing because antibiotics are being prescribed far too often for conditions that don’t warrant it.

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Posner may have ended his play one scene too soon: before the covid-19 crisis. He salutes the pharmaceutical industry for pooling their research on penicillin in the 1940s leading to the mass availability of the drug by the latter part of WWII, thereby saving tens of thousands of lives. The same opportunity for pharmaceutical companies to pool their research findings and supply chain capability exists today.. Doing so is vital to achieve the equitable distribution of the vaccine once it is proved. 

Reflections on Jon Meacham's Biography of Thomas Jefferson

May 21, 2020

JON MEACHAM’S THOMAS JEFFERSON:  THE ART OF POWER

 This magnificent biography ranks among the three or four finest I’ve ever read.  Alongside it I would put Robert Caro’s multi-volume biography of Lyndon Johnson, David McCullough’s biography of Truman and David Blight’s biography of Frederick Douglass.  

I’m going to break my reflections and excerpts from the book into two groups, the first being new insights and the second being personal beliefs strongly reinforced.  

New Insights

1. Jefferson and many of his peers saw a constant threat to the United States still newly acquired freedom from Britain and, to a lesser extent, from France.  This is the context in which we have to view his life starting in 1765 all the way through to 1815 and the Treaty of Ghent, which concluded the War of 1812.  

The controversies with Britain were many:  impressment of U.S. ships seeking British sailors, alliances which Britain made (or was felt to make) with Native Americans, possible encroachment from British-held Canada and more.  

For most of his political career, Jefferson was tightly aligned to France.  He was there as the country’s emissary in the 1880s.  He loved it.  

2. There was unending enmity between the two parties, the Federalists and Republicans, and their leaders, particularly Adams and Hamilton for the Federalists.  

Jefferson greatly feared the tendencies he saw in Adams to want to re-establish the vestiges of monarchy.  He felt Hamilton, quite correctly, was intent on forming a much stronger central government.  Witness the U.S National Bank.  Jefferson was strongly in favor of popular democracy and while at times pragmatically flexible on the point (e.g., his bold decision to carry out the Louisiana Purchase), he favored states’ rights.  His acquisition of the Louisiana Purchase was carried out through executive order, though it was eventually approved by the Senate.  He had considered calling for a constitutional amendment but correctly saw that this could delay the purchase and that Francie might have second thoughts. 

To amplify on the party and personal divisions.  When they were both members of the cabinet, Jefferson wrote that he and Hamilton were now “daily pitted in the Cabinet like two cocks.”  President Washington lamented this:  “How unfortunate and how much it is to be regretted that, whilst we are encompassed on all sides with avowed enemies and insidious friends that internal dissentions should be harrowing and tearing our vitals.”  

Jefferson’s view of the Federalists makes the point:  “their leaders are a hospital of incurables and, as such, entitled to be protected and taken care of as other insane persons are.”

Still, before becoming president, he expressed contemptuousness for politicians who held themselves above party.  “A few individuals of no fixed system at all, governed by the pack or the prowess of the moment, flap as the breeze blows against the Republican or the aristocratic bodies and give to the one or the other a preponderance entirely accidental.”   That changed when he entered the presidency.   He hoped he could achieve political unity.  “Nothing shall be spared on my part to obliterate the traces of party and consolidate the nation, if it can be done without abandonment of principle.”

But a few years later, he had to write:  “The attempted reconciliation was honorably pursued for us for a year or two and spurned by them.”  As Meacham writes, “As Jefferson well knew, in practice the best he could (hope for was a) truce between himself and his opponents, not a permanent peace.  Political divisions were intrinsic; what mattered most was how a president managed these divisions.”

3. The conflict between Jefferson’s notions and ideals of freedom and his continued willingness to live alongside slavery, in his own family and with his own bedmate, are vividly portrayed.  He firmly believed that whites could not live with blacks, not at least as far out as he could see.  He was willing to “kick the can down the road,” so to speak in finding a way, if there was to be found one, where blacks would be free and actually integrate with white society. Prior to his presidency, Jefferson would write:  “Nothing is more certainly written in the book of fate than that these people are to be free nor is it less certain that the two races, equally free, cannot live in the same government.  Nature, habit, opinion have drawn indelible lines of distinction between them.”

Jefferson’s cohabitating with Sally Hemmings was well known.  He coolly recorded the birth of Hemmings’ children in his farm book along with other details of the lives of his slaves and of the fates of his crops.  “A multi-racial society was beyond Jefferson’s imagination,” Meacham writes, “except it was not beyond his experience, since he had created just such a society at Monticello.  Mixed-race children such as those he had with Sally Hemmings suffered, in his general view, from an intrinsic “degradation” produced by the “amalgamation of white and black.”  How is it possible to explain the disorienting contradiction between his harsh view of “amalgamation” and his own paternity of such children Meacham asks.  He speculates that the human products of “amalgamation,” to use his term, were thought to be sources of chaos in the road behind his own mountain.  

Meacham correctly points out that rendering moral judgments in retrospect can be hazardous.  Yet also correctly he points out that it’s possible to assess a man’s view on a moral issue like slavery by what others in the same age and facing the same realities thought and did.  And there were at this time in the 1790s  some Virginians of Jefferson’s class who recognized that the blight of slavery had to go and they did what was within their power by emancipating their slaves.

4. Somewhat surprising to me was Jefferson’s desire to “avoid conflict at any cost.”  I can identify with this personally.  It has gotten me into trouble at times. 

It showed up in Jefferson’s case on a personal level by his unwillingness to intervene in a conflict between his two sons-in-law.  Meacham’s traces this tendency on Jefferson’s part back to his childhood.  So it is with mine as well.

5. As with so many historical figures, I was struck by how much death occurred in Jefferson’s family.  His wife, Martha, at an early age; four of his six children, three of them in early childhood.  I’m also struck by that Jefferson had that were either improper (for example, with the wife, Betsy Walker, of one of his best friends) or other loves which were not returned. 

6. Perhaps I shouldn’t have been, because it’s so human, but I was surprised at how often and how deeply Jefferson felt sorry for himself.  

Early on as president, he wrote:  “I long to be in the midst of the children, and have more pleasure in their little follies than in the wisdom of the wise.”  (I can understand that.)  Here, too, he wrote his wife:  “There is such a mixture of the bad passions of the heart that one feels themselves in enemies’ territory.”  

Maybe that’s less “feeling sorry for yourself” than simple good introspection.  

In a latter part of his second term, he wrote a friend:  “I am tired of an office where I can do no more good than many others who would be glad to be employed in it.  To myself personally, it brings nothing but unceasing drudgery and daily loss of friends.”  (Well, we can have our down moments.  He’s just human.  That’s one of the things that makes this biography and his life so special.)  

Later, now retired from the presidency, but still only 68, he writes:  “I am already sensible of decay and the power of walking, and find my memory not so faithful as it used to be.  This may be partly owing to the incessant current of new matter flowing constantly through it”  (I sure can identify with that today at the age of 81).

7. Another element driving Jefferson’s fear of a return of monarchy was his deep knowledge of the history of the English civil war when a short-lived move to popular rule was turned back and the monarchy returned.

8. Striking and concerning to me was Jefferson’s abandoning his rule as Governor of Virginia in the midst of the British attack in 1881.  Jefferson later defended himself against charges of walking away but they were not persuasive to me.   

9. On religion, Jefferson believed in the existence of a creator God and an afterlife.  On the death of Abigail Adams, a good friend, he wrote to her husband, John Adams:  “Mingling sincerely my tears with yours.  Looking forward to ‘the time not very distant’ when we will ‘ascend in essence to an ecstatic meeting with the friends we have loved and lost and whom we shall still love and never lose again.”  Jefferson expressed far more certainty in the prospect of an afterlife than I hold, but I won’t be particularly surprised if that’s what I find and I will be delighted to find it for the same reasons Jefferson enunciates.  Jefferson had no time for what he described as the “dogmas” of most established religion, including the divinity of Christ and his birth by the Virgin Mary.  But like me, above all, he defended the moral essence of the life and teachings of Jesus.  In fact, he wrote a 46-page worked entitled, The Philosophy of Jesus of Nazareth Extracted from the Account of His Life and Doctrines as given by Matthew, Mark, Luke and John.

He carried a well-worn Book of Common Prayer, served as a vestryman and invoked the divine in his public statements.  He fought against the establishment of a religion but understood and appreciated the cultural role faith played in the United States.

10. Telling testimony from Jefferson writing to Edward Rutledge as he entered George Washington’s presidency as vice-president:  “You and I have formally seen warm debaters and high political passions.  But gentlemen of different politics used to speak to each other…it is not so now.  Men who have been intimate all their lives cross the streets to avoid meeting, and turn their heads another way lest they should be obliged to touch their hat.”  (What we are experiencing today is not as novel as we sometimes aver, but it is still very undesirable). 

Personal Beliefs Strongly Reinforced

1. Jefferson shares a commitment to service, to good values, to importance of good relations and treating all equally.  To wit:  “There is a debt of service due from every man to his country, a proportion (according to the) bounty which nature and fortune have measured to him.”

Writing to his grandson, Jefferson articulated this understanding of politics and the management of conflicting interests:  “A determination never to do what is wrong, prudence and good honor will go far towards securing  the estimation of the world.”  

And then going on in that letter:  “I never yet saw an instance of one of two disputants convincing the other by argument.  I have seen many…getting warm, becoming rude, and shooting one another.”

Jefferson believed, Meacham writes, that “socialability was essential to Republicanism.  Men who like and respected and enjoyed one another were more likely to cultivate the virtuous habits that would enable the country’s citizens to engage in ‘the pursuit of happiness.’”

On treating all equally, Meacham writes:  “To Jefferson, each guest who came into his orbit was significant and he had little patience—no patience in fact—with the trappings of rank.”

2. On optimism.  “I’ve often been ‘accused’ of being too optimistic.  I plead guilty.  I have sometimes been too optimistic, not sufficiently attached to a sense of reality.  But far better that than a pessimistic view.”  Jefferson held an optimistic view of life’s possibilities, even as he recognized its imperfections and tragedies.  How could he not, with all the death in his family which surrounded him.  As Meacham writes: “To Jefferson, the imperfections of life and the limits of politics were realities.  So were the wonders and the possibilities of the human mind.”  “I am among those who think well of the human character generally,” Jefferson wrote 21 months before becoming president.  “It is impossible for a man who takes a survey in what is already known, not to see what an immensity in every branch of science yet remains to be discovered.”

I think of this as we contemplate how we will create a lifesaving vaccine for Covid-19.  And how we will create the method and science to be able to predict the next epidemic before it takes its onslaught on people.  

Later in his life, Jefferson struggled to be optimistic.  “I think, with you, that it is a good world on the whole; that it has been framed on a principled benevolence and more pleasure than pain dealt out to us,” Jefferson wrote Adams in 1816.  He took the broadest of views:  “I skewer my bark with hope in the head, leaving fear astern.  My hopes indeed sometimes fail; but not oftener than the forebodings of the gloomy.”

Future presidents often drew on Jefferson’s thinking.  Here is Truman invoking Jefferson:  “I have a profound faith in the people of this country.  I believe in their common sense.  They love freedom and that love for freedom and justice is not dead.  How our people believe today, as Jefferson did, that men were not born with saddles on their backs to be ridden by the privileged few.  We believe, as Jefferson did, that (the) ‘God who gave us life gave us liberty.’  We will not give up our democratic way to a dictatorship of the left; neither will we give it up to a despotism of special privilege.”

3. Like me, Jefferson saw civility as an important political virtue.  In the main, he practiced what he preached.  He understood, as Meacham writes, that “politics is a kaleidoscope, constantly shifting, and the morning’s flow may well be the afternoon’s friend.”  

On a key issue in dispute, Jefferson confided his faith in a middle course of Madison:  “I think we should leave the matter in such a (position) that we may not be committed absolutely to push the matter to extremities, and yet may be free to push as far as events will render prudent.  A little patience and we shall see their spills dissolved and the people recovering their true sight.”

4. On the importance of taking decisive action, including reversing a prior point of view and taking a bold risk.  This was at play for me and others at P&G when we decided to introduce multiple categories in multiple countries at a time of economic and political uncertainty when Eastern and Central Europe opening up after the fall of the Berlin Wall.  Probably the most luminous example for Jefferson was the acquisition of Louisiana in 1803.  He exercised executive power here, foregoing involvement of the states in a way that, under normal circumstances, he would not have countenanced.

As Meacham writes, “The vibrant, breathing, prevailing politics of the hour reflected the complicated character of the triumphant president.  The America of Jefferson was neither only Federal nor wholly Republican.  It was rather a marbled blend of the two, confected by a practical man of affairs.  The significance of the case of Louisiana in shaping the destinies of the country and in illuminating Jefferson’s political leadership cannot be overstated.  He believed, for instance, in a limited government, except when he thought the nation was best served by a more expansive one.”

This is what has characterized the most momentous decisions of any time, including right now, as Congress and every level of business of government has had to take unorthodox, even draconian, steps to minimize the impact of Covid-19.

At a time in 1805 when the Nation was under threat of war from either France or Spain, some advocated forming a provisional treaty with Britain.  Jefferson said “no.”  He insisted  that neutrality was still the country’s best course.  

A similar decisive action, though in history not highly regarded, was Jefferson’s decision to impose an embargo on all imports and exports in 1807.  “It was a breakthrough bill,” Meacham writes.  “A projection of governmental power that surpassed even the hated Alien and Sedition Acts.”

5. Jefferson’s life affirms what I’ve all believed of all of us, even the most famous, “No man is perfect.  We must judge a person by his whole life:  what he did, what he said, what he stood for, his values.”  As Jefferson wrote to his daughter, Patsy:  “Every human being, my dear, must be viewed according to what it is good for, for none of us, no one, is perfect; and were we to love none who had imperfections, this world would be a desert for our love.”

As Jefferson wrote later:  “All we can do is to make the best of our friends:  love and cherish what is good in them, and keep out of the way of what is bad; but no more think of rejecting them for it than in throwing away a piece of music for a flat passage or two.”

Meacham writes with wisdom as he moves to sum up Jefferson’s life.  “We sense his greatness because we know that perfection in politics is not possible but that Jefferson passed the fundamental test of leadership.  Despite all his shortcomings and all of the inevitable disappointments and mistakes and dreams deferred (surely referring to the abolition of slavery and the treatment accorded to the Native Americans), he left America, and the world, in a better place than it had been when he first entered the arena of public life.”

No one could ask anything more of a human being than that.  

Meacham continues:  “The real Jefferson was like so many of us:  a bundle of contradictions, competing passions, flaws, sins and virtues that can never be neatly smoothed out into a tidy whole.”

With due respect, I think Meacham oversimplifies what anchored the values and purpose of Jefferson’s life.  He writes that, “The closest thing to a constant in his life was his need for power and for control.  He tended to mask these drives effectively.  Henry Adams wrote:  “The leadership he sought was one of sympathy and love, not of command.”

But that was not quite the case, Meacham writes.  “For him, sympathy and love among the members of his political circle were means to an end—and the end was command.”

Yes, I agree.  Command was part of it.  But I think he had a nobler purpose, to make the nation a better place, a safer place, a larger and more vibrant space.  In other words, I believe comand was a means to a nobler end.

What has been the “constant” in my life?  I return to service.  Being all I can be and helping others do the same.  Succeeding.  Leaving people, above all my family, in a better place.  

In a way, Jefferson expressed what he viewed as the constant in his life in his later years, as he reflected on drafting the Declaration of Independence:  “Neither aiming in originality of principle or sentiment, nor yet copied from any particular and previous writing, it was intended to be an expression of the American mind, and to give to that occasion the proper tone and spirit called for by the occasion.”

In less grandiose terms, that thought was in my mind, in all of our minds, as we wrote the Purpose, Values and Principles of P&G in 1987, as we celebrated the 150^th anniversary of the company’s founding.

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"I Want More Than To Return to 'Life as Normal'"—by Susan Pepper

(This essay by my daughter, Susan, is so meaningful I decided to share it on my blog. It ran on-line in today's Cincinnati's Enquirer)

Two important lessons for me through COVID-19: life is indeed fragile AND we are not powerless to make big sweeping change as a culture – one person and one household at a time. These lessons are changing the way I think about the enormous challenges we face with climate change.

The world has “shut down” in a way many of us have never before experienced. Of course, front-line medical workers and others performing essential jobs have probably never felt so stretched or overworked. And while we have just completed about six weeks of staying at home (I’ve lost track), my mind returns to a problem I’ve thought about, worried about and grieved for over half of my life – the incompatibility of our culture and way of life here in America with the viability of the ecosystem and the natural world that is the root of our very existence.

While the government is trying to prepare to get our economy back up and running, I realize that I don’t want to go back to life as usual. I want something more – something better for humanity and something better for our ecosystem.

I’ve harbored a vision for a long time, and that vision is pretty – to stay grounded in my home and community and develop bonds with the people and spaces around me. I see our current economy as being akin to a bulldozer clear-cutting a forest. When we should be devising new modes of public transportation, highways for cars are widened. When we should be finding new ways to harness the sun’s power and other sustainable innovations, we’ve seen pipelines being dug – and more pollution in the air and groundwater.

I’ve often dismissed the concerns that I felt before I ever heard the words “climate change.” I couldn’t explain the nagging worry I felt around sustainability because it seemed so foreign to the drive for prosperity and seeming invincibility in the culture around me. After all, our leaders constantly remind us that we are America, second to none. And now, this pandemic has reminded me that life is fragile and that we are not invincible. Mostly, I have honestly been afraid to really examine the predictions of scientists around climate change.

As science offers real resources during this crisis, I am asking myself what lessons there might be here for climate change. When scientists in the CDC quietly but visibly communicated on their website in February that the spread of this disease was inevitable, I acted. I began to prepare my mind. I began to prepare our home and stock up our pantry with some essentials to help us get by some weeks without going to the store.

Maybe it’s finally time I have the courage to listen to, understand and act on the alarm bells scientists have been sounding for my entire 42 years of life.

I want to stay home, not for COVID-19 but for other reasons. I want to keep getting to know my neighbors. Getting to know the land and this place where I live – for my sake and for my children’s. I’m so scared to admit it, but that’s exactly what I want us all to do, all the while building a healthier economy, a healthier environment and healthier ways of life than previously known. This will take some doing, of course, but we know “business as usual” will likely result in the undoing of us all, so the first option seems like the more sensible of the two.

I’ve often dismissed my vision – my dream – not thinking it possible. But, now I’ve seen how fast sweeping change can happen (and I’m at home) – so I see that possibilities for collective action for the good (and the bad) are possible.

We have learned through COVID-19 that we are more interconnected than we knew. A breath of air with a lethal pathogen has managed to be shared and passed person-to-person in a matter of months across the globe. If we are so connected with each other, then we must, too, be interconnected to the spaces between us. Our water, our air, our land – it is not “the environment.” It is who I am; it is who we all are.

I pray we find a way to collectively harness our wisdom, creativity and intelligence to do this together in a humane and sustainable way.

Susan Pepper lives near Sylva, North Carolina, with her husband and two children and is a singer/songwriter in the old traditions of the mountains and movie producer. 

"The Blame Game"—Stop It

The Trump Administration blames China  for the spread of the virus, implying it may have even been intentional, and threatens higher tariffs or other actions for compensation. Our National Intelligence Agency has been dispatched to carry out the investigation of China.

The Democrats and some Republicans blame Trump for having dismissed the virus a threat for far to long, causing needless deaths as a result.

Republican blame Democrats for politicizing the epidemic to get Trump out of office.

Trump blames Obama for not having stockpiled supplies, even tough he (Trump) had been in office for three years.

Stop it. This is madness.

There will be a time and the need for throughly examining the causes of this epidemic: what could and should have been done differently to lessen its impact and the learning for the future. But now the focus needs to be like  a laser  on everyone's working cooly and as wisely as possible, protecting lives while getting people and the Nation back to work.

Political leaders and the media need to stop the blame game now and focus on what matters now.

The Future Global Order—A Fork in the Road

Richard Haas, President of the Council on Foreign Relations, has written an important article in the April 7th issue of Foreign Affairs.  The headline of the article summarizes Haas's conclusion: "The Pandemic Will Accelerate History Rather Than  Reshape It". 

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Haas  is a realist. He is deeply informed. I respect him. But in this judgement, I hope he is wrong. 

No doubt, , the future following Covid-19 which he predicts— an acceleration of  the populist, nationally-centric policies which we are increasingly  seeing today-- would rightly be deemed the "most likely"one  based on the evidence in hand. 

It is, however, for me, a very dangerous one. It would certainly spell a lost major opportunity--for if there is one thing Covid-19 is doing more than any other in my adult life time is giving teeth to the well-worn mantra that we really are all in this together and that we will not resolve the major challenges we face in the world successfully without strong International  coordination. 

We are seeing that the response to Covid-19 is requiring complete unity and coordination—public, private, government at every level, nationally and globally, hospitals, healthcare workers, and every one of us no matter who we are. 

Covid-19 presents two driving dynamics: 1) those forces which underscore how connected we are in this world (e.g.witness how the disease travels) and the opportunities this offers and demands (e.g. sharing medical discoveries, learning, organized immigration policy, border control etc.); and 2) other competing forces which accelerate the drive for national separation (e.g restricting immigration; securing national not imported supplies).

It is a fact  that prior to Covid-19, leadership in much of the world, including the United States, has been moving increasingly toward a more exclusive national focus and away from multi-national agreements.. There have been many forces driving this, including increased pressure of  immigration, futile and costly involvement by the U.S. in the Middle East, weakness in European common market and U.N. leadership, adversarial U.S. relations with China and Russia ( powers which must work together if we are to achieve global effort against the existential threats of climate change and nuclear proliferation) and the U.S.'s abandonment of the Paris accord and TPP, and other multi-national agreements. 

I had hoped, and I still hope, that  the Covid-19 crisis will compel us to see the need to work together, to strengthen institutions like WHO and the U.N .and the EEC. To date, there is no sign of that happening. I see very little chance of its happening  under under a Trump administration.  As Richard Haas points out, it will also be extremely difficult for Biden, assuming his election.

Nevertheless, several things keep my hope alive.

The first is that we are and will remain a global economy for good economic reasons, quite beyond any ideological motivation.

Second, beyond the threat of a future pandemic, we face two undeniable existential threats to the very existence of  life on this planet as we know it today: 1) environmental deterioration and 2) nuclear disaster and war. Neither of these threats can be overcome without effective global organization and agreements. The question in my mind has always been: how much pain we will have to suffer (akin if you like to the devastation wrought by WWII and WWI before it) before we finally recognize and act on this need for global agreements and policies on these undeniable existential threats.   

I hope that Covid-19 will begin to tip the scales. It is presenting powerful evidence of the need to work globally on key issues including sharing knowledge and expertise and resources among the medical and scientific community. As just one example,  on a recent conference call with the Heads of the Schools of Public Health and Nursing at Yale, we learned that the Nursing Association in China is sharing protocols on their learning in combating the virus in China and having them translated into English.  Sharing like this will come naturally for the scientific community provided it is supported by the leadership of  the principal nations and a strengthened WHO. 

I believe that if Joe Biden is elected President, the United States will take practical steps in the right direction, rejoining the Paris accord and helping lead effective global action on climate control. He can also bring back the Iran treaty  on nuclear capability  I believe it should be possible even if difficult to update the START treaty and reach agreement with China and Russia on nuclear proliferation. Remember, we reached agreement with Russia on nuclear weapons controls when it was still part of the Soviet Union. 

Development of immigration polices which reflect a collective multi-national and not solely individual country perspective is critically important—and will be extremely challenging. However, we and other countries must try. Failure to do so up until now is a big reason explaining the rise of populist national leaders like Hungary's Orban and our own President and it is influencing the political dynamics in almost every country. Beyond that and most painfully,  it is resulting in the greatest refugee crisis in modern history.

Practically, at this moment,  we must  look to new Presidential  leadership in the United States to take concrete steps toward achieving collective action, both domestically (for example,  Covid-19 reveals deep racial inequities in health care)  and globally, against our key existential threats of epidemics like Covid-19, climate change and nuclear proliferation 

 It will be vital to identify Congressional leaders from both parties that see these imperatives and are prepared to guide and  support the President on these policies. We will also need media to shape public opinion to see the realty of the need to work together across the globe on specific key issues and trumpet the benefits of doing so. 

This will be very difficult. It will not be the task of a single administration. It will take many years. We stand at a crossroads, as Yaroslav Trofimov writes is an essay in the "Wall Street Journal". Will the route we take to tackle the pandemic and its economic fallout follow the route of national grievances and finger pointing  and protectionism which country after country embraced after WWI with its disastrous outcome? Or will the pandemic, with it lessons, spur a renewed commitment for cooperation and shared solutions as happened after WWII—though this time, unlike post-WWII, on a global basis?  

History offers hope. As Winston Churchill once remarked, "the future is unknowable but the past should give us hope"—the hope, as Jon Meacham brilliantly offers, that human ingenuity, reason and character can combine to save us from the abyss and keep us on a path, in another phrase of Churchill's, to a broad sunlit road.  

We must hold to our vision, mindful of the current realities and challenges, but not flinching from them. Richard Haas is right in saying that Covid-19, in and of itself, is not going to lead to a dramatic shift in the recent populist direction of global and national polices. In fact, as we have seen,  it will reinforce some of them. Crises like Covid-19 expose problems, often painfully,  but they do not supply alternatives, let alone the political will to make the changes happen. 

The change we need  will require fresh ideas and strong leadership. I believe that providing these ideas and the leadership to make them happen is the overriding responsibility of our generation. May those who look back a century from now be able to say that our generation seized the lessons coming from the Covid-19 epidemic as well as they could. They chose the right path. They mustered the fresh ideas and the political will to reengage strong international coordination on the most important challenges the world faced. I hope and pray that is what they will be able to say, for the very future of our country and our planet  depends on it.  

What Is The Coronavirus Teaching Us?

As this epidemic continues to takes its grim toll around the world, I see us learning and relearning many things, above all  how interconnected we all are —for better or for wore--and how much we can achieve if we join forces and work together against common goals. 

On the positive side, I have never seen the community come together across every sector—business, government, medical, universities, faith-based, non-profits, everyone--as well as  we are at this moment. On a phone conference from my alma-mater,  Yale, I learn that a Chinese  nurse association is not only  sharing their protocols with the United States and other countries but is translating them into English. I learn that scientists are sharing their papers on open platforms so that new insights can be shared everywhere quickly, disregarding claims for proprietary privilege. 

Governors in the Northeast and on the West Coast are collaborating to forge common regulations respecting the reality of inter-state travel in the interest of all their citizens.

Here in Cincinnati, we have some 40+ food distribution organizations working together to get food to the neediest. Most of these didn't talk to each other before. The Greater Cincinnati Fountain and the United Way unite to raise over $5 million in a couple of weeks for a special Covid-19 fund supporting first line workers helping people. Major hospitals no longer act as competitors but collaborators as they jointly plan to ensure there are sufficient. beds to handle the expected surge 

Arch rivals, Apple and Google  join forces to create software that promises to allow people who test positive to register that  fact on their smart phone. This will enable other people who came into close proximity to them to know they might have had the virus transmitted to them.  

Arch rival drug companies, GlaxoSmith-Kline and Sanofi, join forces in an unprecedented partnership to develop a coronavirus vaccine. 

Companies, Procter & Gamble (P&G) prominent among them, have quickly added capability in their plants to produce facial masks, ventilators  and hand sanitizers. To take just two of many examples, P&G's Pampers brand in China has developed a contest for babies to keep busy and in Italy a link to a musical video which shows babies how to wash their hands .

Positively, we have gained a far higher respect for scientifically based data and the uses of technology for communication. Zooms daily active users jumped from 10 million to over 200 million in just 3 months. 

 And we have gained—the hard way-- much greater awareness of the need to  be prepared to respond to future disasters, including ones that impact the entire globe overnight as this one has.  One result of this will be far less willingness to rely on single sources of supply for disaster-critical materials and likely have more of them produced domestically. 

As in any crisis, the relative strength and character of leaders are being revealed. We are witnessing strong leadership in many,  many quarters—governors like Ohio's Mike DeWine and mayors like San Francisco's London  Breed, corporate leaders, medical leaders like Dr, Fauci and Dr. Birx and the heroic healthcare workers on the front line.  Sadly, dangerously,  we have not witnessed it in the President of out Nation.

On the dark side, we are seeing deaths now over 25,000 in our country, over 10,000 in New York alone. and over 120.000 world wide, over 20,000 in Italy, my wife's and my "second home"with the numbers still climbing. Over 16 million workers have already filed for unemployment in the U.S. Hundreds of business have closed, including my son's fast food business in Boston.

Beneath these numbers lies untold grief, fear and uncertainty: "will I have a job?", "will my business reopen?" And there is the loneliness of millions, many isolated in one and two room apartments.

Never have I been so conscious  of my own and my family's privilege.

We are also seeing, starkly, the horrible, deadly consequences of our systemic inequality in people's access to good health and living conditions. I hope and pray we will finally take decisive action to close this gap.  We have long known that the average black man's life expectancy is almost 10 years lower than the average white man. Now, we are seeing this realty play out in the morgues of the nation. There is no excuse not to act on this reality today by providing quality health care for ALL and upgrading livable residential opportunities for the poor. 

Returning to where I started. 

I have never seen more united and determined action by all parts of the community—State. local, private, government, academic,  health care, non-profits, everyone--to battle an existential challenge. 

It is inspiring. It is necessary. 

It is famously and rightly said, "It Takes a Village". Well, we have such a village right here in our community and in our Nation and it is thriving. You can feel its pulse. 

May this spirit of collaboration be long remembered and called on to unite our community and Nation in confronting other existential challenges and opportunities we face.