Inspiration from Michele Obama's "Becoming"

“Becoming” by Michelle Obama

 

One of the finest memoirs I have ever read.  And already reputed to be the #1 bestseller of all memoirs ever.

 

I relished it for its candor, intimacy and plain-spokenness.

 

In its own way, it is the kind of memoir my wife, Francie could write.

 

Here are a few of the insights Michelle offered which I found memorable.

 

Referring to her mother she writes “she loved us consistently but we were not over-managed.  Her goal was to push us into the world.  ‘I’m not raising babies, I’m raising adults.’  She and my dad offered guidelines rather than rules.  It meant that as teenagers we would never have a curfew.”  Just like Francie with our children.

 

There is this luminous description of the challenges minority students face.  “Minority and under-privileged students rise to the challenge all the time but it takes energy.  It takes energy to be the only black person in a lecture hall or one of the few non-white people trying out for a play or joining an intramural team.  It requires effort, an extra level of confidence, to speak in those settings and own your presence in the room.”  This is why, Michelle writes, that she and other black young people relish the opportunity to be with other black people.  They felt comfortable, safe.

 

I admire the openness with which Michelle reveals her relationship and marriage to Barack.

 

At one point she wrote in her journal “I am so angry at Barack.  I don’t think we have anything in common.” 

 

She writes that they had to pursue marriage counseling, and it helped!  “Like any newish couple, we were learning how to fight.  We didn’t fight often, and when we did, it was typically over petty things..but we did fight.  And for better or worse, I tend to yell when I’m angry.”

 

Like Francie, Michelle was very confident, conscious of the stereotyped role of being a “wife.”  She writes, “wife” can feel like a loaded word.  It carries a history.  If you grew up in the 60s and the 70s, as I did, wives seemed to be a genus of white women who lived inside television sitcoms—cheery, coiffed, corseted.  They stayed at home, fussed over the children, and had dinner ready on the stove.”

 

Michelle pushed back against that.

 

Michelle is honest in saying how as a Senator’s wife she began to feel sublimated “at the heart of my confusion (in Washington) was a kind of fear, because as much as I hadn’t chosen to be involved, I was getting sucked in.  I had been Mrs. Obama for the last 12 years, but it was starting to mean something different.  At least in some spheres, I was now Mrs. Obama in a way that could feel diminishing, a Mrs. defined by her Mr.”

 

Michelle had a revealing and in many ways chilling experience during the campaign when she was asked to look at the talks she was giving without any sound, just the visual.  What she saw was that she was “too serious, too severe.”  She needed to lighten up.  Examining how we look without the sound can be very instructive.

 

As First Lady, Michelle knew she would be measured by a different yardstick.  She found herself, as she had before, “suddenly tripped by doubt.  Confidence, I learned then, sometimes needs to be called from within.  I have said the same words to myself many times now, through many climbs.  Am I good enough?  Yes I am.”

 

Toward the end of her memoir, Michelle writes in a way that articulates my own experience:  “The important parts of my story lay less in the surface value of my accomplishments and more in what undergirded them—the many small ways I had been buttressed over the years, and the people who helped build my confidence over time.  I remembered them all, every person who had ever waved me forward.” 

 

For me, there have been so many.  I recorded many of them in my paper, “If It Weren’t For Them,” and there are many more I have met since writing that paper.

 

Michelle goes on:  “My early successes in life were, I knew, a product of the consistent love and high expectations with which I was surrounded as a child, both at home and at school.  I had been lucky to have parents, teachers and mentors, who had fed me with a consistent simple message:  you matter.”

Yes, that message—"you matter"—changes lives for a lifetime. 

"Grapes of Wrath" byJohn Steinbeck—Personal Reflections on Its Meaning for Today

This novel takes its place among the five finest novels I have ever read: the others being Crossing to Safety by Wallace Stegner, Tolstoy's War and Peace, Gilead by Marilynne Robinson and Towles’ A Gentleman in Moscow.  

Of all these novels, however, "Grapes of Wrath"  has most deeply penetrated my life. For many reasons,  above all because I came to know and feel the characters more intimately and viscerally and emotionally than in any other book I have ever read.

 

 I understand what Norman Mailer meant in writing of "Steinbeck's marvelous and ironic sense of compassion…daring all the time to go up to the very abyss of offering more feeling than the reader can accept."

 

Again and again, that is how I felt, hanging on every word and phrase, wondering, worrying about what comes next. 

 

It did not happen by accident. Steinbeck records this in the midst of writing the book: "Yesterday it seemed to me that the people were coming to life. I hope so. These people must be intensely alive the whole time".

 

The whole time. Exactly. No false notes.  Through detailed depiction of the environment, layer upon layer, in cinema-like detail, through the development of the looks, gestures and clothes of every character and through dialogue, authentic and colloquial, matched to the individual, I am PRESENT. I am THERE.

 

Steinbeck greatly respects his theme, the magnitude of the undertaking: "I went over the whole of the book in my head—fixed on the last scene, huge and symbolic (and I would add brave and unexpected), toward which the whole story moves. And that was a good thing, for it was a re-understanding of the dignity of the effort and mightiness of the theme. I feel very small and inadequate and incapable but I grew again to love the story which is so much greater than I am. To love and admire the people who are so much stronger and purer and braver than I am." 

 

Such humility combined with reverence and ambition and incredibly hard work—the sources of greatness. 

 

Like many, I resonate to this story today because it presents vividly what immigrants fleeing violence and life-threatening poverty face today. And the homeless too. It dramatizes how many will take advantage of them, some will castigate them as being dirty and threatening and dangerous, and a few generous souls will step forward as Good Saviors to try to help them on their journey.

 

For me, this story cries out for individual and collective action today.

We need the equivalent of "Grapes of Wrath" today to reveal viscerally and authentically the challenge that hundreds of thousands of threatened women, men and children face today as they seek safety and freedom for their families. 

 

 In the broadest sense, this novel presents the urgent need for social justice, understanding and compassion so needed in our world today. As one commentator observed, it is also at once an elegy and a challenge to live in harmony with the earth. 

 

Hope and valor present themselves repeatedly in this magnificent novel, but never, ever at the expense of recognizing the raw often brutal challenge of life. The ex-preacher Casy captures this combination of challenge and hope as he describes how a friend looks back on being violently jailed by vigilantes because he had tried to setup a union among exploited workers.  

 

"Anyways, you do what you can. The only thing you got to look at is that every time there is a little step forward, she may slip back a little, but she never slips clear back. You can prove that and that makes the whole thing right. And that means there wasn't no waste even it seemed like there was."

 

No matter what, we must continue on. Recalling one of my favorite texts the Talmud: "You are not required to complete the work, but neither are you free to desist from it."

 

Steinbeck honors the uniqueness and complexity of every individual's life but also the strength to be drawn in being part of something bigger than oneself, ones family above all and the whole of humanity beyond. It is a noble calling. One worthy of our best effort. 

James Baldwin's Mind-Opening, Mind-Challenging "The Fire Next Time"

 I recently finished reading the mind-opening, mind-challenging book, James Baldwin’s "The Fire Next Time"

As The Atlantic wrote in its review:  “So eloquent in his passion, so scorching in his candor, it is bound to unsettle any reader.  As a novelist and writer of uncommon talent, James Baldwin plunges to the human heart of the matter.”  And the Christian Science Monitor:  “Anguished, stabbing, a final plea and warning to end racial nightmare.”

 

I can’t imagine a book more prescient in illuminating the moment we find ourselves in, over 50 years after the book was published.  

 

The challenge Baldwin offers cut deep:  “Today, 100 years after his technical emancipation, he (the Negro) remains, with the possible exception of the American Indian, the most despised creature in his country.  Now, there is simply no possibility of a real change in the Negro’s situation without the most radical and far-reaching changes in the American political and social structure.  And it is clear that White Americans are not simply unwilling to affect these changes; they are, in the main, so slothful that they have become unable even to envisage them.”

 

Today, to a degree I don’t believe even Baldwin could have envisaged, eyes are open.  The question is, will they lead to radical action?

 

Baldwin comments:  “The sloppy, infatuous nature of American good will can never be relied upon to deal with hard problems.  These have been dealt with, when they have been dealt with at all, out of necessity—and in political terms anyway, necessity means concessions made in order to stay on top.  I think this is a fact, which it gives no purpose to deny, but whether it is a fact or not, this what the Black population of the world, including Black Americans, really believes.”

 

Baldwin offers this stunning insight:  “There are too many things we do not wish to know about ourselves.  People are not, for example, terribly anxious to be equal (equal, after all, to what and to whom?) but they love the idea of being superior and this human truth has an especially grinding force here, where identity is almost impossible to achieve.  And people are perpetually attempting to find their feet on the shifting sands of status.”

 

And then, with this sequence of convictions and hopes, Baldwin concludes:  “Perhaps people being the conundrums that they are, and having so little desire to show the burden of their lives, this is what will always happen.  But, at the bottom of my heart, I do not believe this.  I think people can be better than that, and I know that people can be better than they are.  We are capable of bearing a great burden, once we discover that the burden is reality and arrive where reality is.”  

 

This eloquent thought captures what I have seen be the best of life.  I’ve seen it happen many times in P&G’s history as we have overcome challenges by facing reality and living our Purpose and Values.  It has happened for a time, not as long as I would wish, in the history of our country.  However, such moments of progress can never be taken as the new norm or something that will proceed on automatic pilot.  They are subject to all of the “push and pull” of history and leadership.

 

At the conclusion of his book, Baldwin writes:  “A bill is coming in that I fear America is not prepared to pay.”  He is referring to the problem and vestiges of slavery:  “A fearful and delicate problem which compromises when it does not corrupt all the American efforts to build a better world—here, there or anywhere.  It is for this reason that everything White Americans think they believe in must now be re-examined.  What one would not like to see again is the consolidation of peoples on the basis of their color but, as long as we in the West place on color the value that we do, we make it impossible for the great unwashed to consolidate themselves according to any other principle.  Color is not a human or a personal reality; it is a political reality.”

 

“If we—and now I mean the relatively conscious Whites and the relatively conscious Blacks, who must, like lovers, insist on, or create, the consciousness of the others—do not falter in our duty now, we may be able, handful that we are, to end the racial nightmare and achieve our country and change the history of the world.  If we do not now dare everything, the fulfillment of the prophecy, recreated from the Bible and sold by a slave, is upon us:  ‘God gave Noah the rainbow sign, No more water.  The fire next time!’”

 

The Fragility of Racial Equality: What It Demands at This Moment

 

THE FRAGILITY  OF RACIAL EQUALITY:  WHAT IT ENTAILS AND WHAT IT DEMANDS OF US AND ME AT THIS MOMENT.

 

 

I’ve often remarked that the pursuit of racial diversity, inclusion and equity cannot be put on automatic pilot.  There are too many other pressures that can thwart making racial diversity and inclusion a reality which is sustained.  In a business, it’s the pressure to deliver sales and profit targets.  In government, it can be the pressure imposed by a financial crisis or, as is the case at this moment, a health epidemic.  It can also be thwarted by changes in leadership, some leaders believing in its importance more than others. 

 

This is not an academic concern. I have seen us lose momentum in realizing our commitment to sustain progress in  diversity and inclusion in companies, on university campuses,  and I’ve seen it in our Nation.  

 

A fresh light was shed on this challenge for me by a series of lectures which I recently listened to by Professor David Blight of Yale.  The lectures actually occurred in a course on Reconstruction he was teaching in 2009, eleven years ago. 

 

Professor Blight noted that the concept of racial equality has rested on three foundations: 

 

The first foundation grows from the belief that we are all creatures made in God’s image and that everyone deserves the respect which that belief imposes.  

 

The second foundation is rooted in law.  It didn’t really come until the end of the Civil War, with the passage of the 13^th Amendment, outlawing slavery, the 14^th Amendment, confirming the right to due process on all people regardless of race, and the 15^thAmendment, conferring the right to vote on all citizens without regard to race.

 

It was felt at that time, even by the Radical Republicans  that this pretty much did it.  Racial equality had now been embedded in law, it was acclaimed.  

 

The third foundation of racial equality didn’t fully come alive until the Civil Rights movement in the 1950s and ‘60s.  This was the dimension of equal opportunity.  This has led over time to many things, including affirmative action, hotly (and I believe wrongly) contested, at this very moment. 

 

Professor Blight makes the point that the strong commitment to racial equality which, at least in the legal sense, existed following the Civil War in the three Civil Rights amendments faded quickly.  By the middle of the 1870s and for the next 70 or 80 years, it fell fallow.   

 

What changed in the 1870s which caused even the radical Republicans who had led the drive for equality to let up; to feel that their goal had been achieved?  

 

One element was the passage of the Amendments and the Enforcement Acts passed in 1870-71 which among other provisions gave the federal government the right to deploy federal troops to enforce the right to vote.  Treacherously,  the Supreme Court, in decisions occurring in 1875 and later, took the teeth out of the ability of the federal government to intervene.  It left the authority to enforce the rights conferred by the Amendments up to the states. And, of course, particularly in the South, states  were moving into Democratic hands. They were led by legislators, including many Klansmen, totally opposed to the equality which the amendments had called for.

 

But there was more than that which stalled momentum.  The severe financial panic of 1873 led people to worry about things they found to be of greater importance than pursuing racial equality.  The leaders of the Radical Republicans, who had led the drive for racial equality were dying:  Sumner, Wade, Phillips, among others.  And people were just getting tired.  They wanted to move on, and they had enough of a rationale to convince themselves, at least most of them, that it was time, it was okay to move on. 

 

Here is a classic example of the fragility of racial equality.

 

I would argue that we saw much the same thing following the Civil Rights movement of the ‘50s and ‘60s.  People got tired in the late ‘70s and ‘80s; we are just now waking up.  Ronald Reagan preached a convincing (for many) doctrine of a unified, happy, better America; the proverbial village on the hill.  

 

And something else was happening that gave credence for many to the belief that, surely, the issues Black men and women had faced were behind them.  There was the  progress of individual Black men and women.  The election of President Obama, Oprah Winfrey, celebrated sports figures, and many more.

 

And it went beyond the anecdotal.  There was a growing African American middle class.  The percentage of African Americans with college degrees doubled between 1995 and 2017, from 11% to 24%. And the percentage of Blacks living below the poverty line was cut in half from about 40% in 1966 to 20% in 2018. 

 

What more could Blacks be seeking, some asked—though it was more a declaration than a question. .

 

All of this brings us to today.  The murder of George Floyd and Covid-19's  revealing of immense racial disparities  have sensitized America, including countless White Americans-- like me-- to the continued burning reality of  of racial inequity and injustice  in our Nation. These inequities in education, wealth, health, the application of criminal justice and more are staring us right in the face. The facts are inescapable.  We have not seen anything like this in my lifetime.   

 

Still, the haunting question remains:  Will the fragility of racial equity which we’ve experienced many times come back to haunt us again?  Will our energy flag? Will this become another lost moment in time? Or can we turn this "moment" into a "movement"-- for it is a movement we need.

 

There are reasons to be concerned.  We live in the midst of a horrific health epidemic; millions of people face enormous financial challenges.  And for the moment, we have a president and any number of other politicians that seek to leverage the racial divide for their re-election.

 

To be clear, I am not despondent about what’s possible. I am lifted, for example,  by the relatively rapid if still incomplete change in attitude, policy and law with respect to members of the LGBTQ community. .

 

But I warn myself  and everyone who reads this paper that we’re going to have to be very intentional.  We’re going to have to mount enormous commitment—personal commitment—to put in place the systemic changes needed to overcome racial disparities. As my son, John, says, we need to keep showing up. Especially when it is inconvenient. Even when it's not clear that a "return on investment' will be realized. 

We need more than incremental improvement.  We need radical systemic changes in policy and practice--  in housing, criminal justice, healthcare and education. We need to confront the widening wealth and income gaps.  

 

Personally, and I am speaking to myself, we need  to  bring far greater empathy to our relationships with people who are different than we are. We need to let them know they count, that they matter.  We need to listen to them with an open mind and heart. That's how we will come to know and appreciate their stories as they learn ours. From this can come what I have discovered to be that most precious of gifts: a "positive transformational" relationship.

 

Transformational relationships build our expectation of what we can accomplish; they make us feel we matter; that we "belong", that we are '"in the house". They allow us to be freer to be our authentic selves  and to take risks. In my experience, it is generally harder to form such a relationship with someone different from you. That doesn't make them less important; it make them more important. 

 

As I chart my own small  part in converting this critical moment into a sustained movement, I intend to work on two objectives: 

 

1. Intentionally developing empowering transformational relationships with 4 new people. Covid-19 may make this more difficult but it won't stop me.

 

2. Working on systemic change in a) the support systems supporting the development of children, 0-5, and their families and b) the contribution to building racial equity through programs offered by the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center. 

 

I will pursue these objectives to the best of my ability.

 

 

John Pepper

 

Words Which Describe Why Donald Trump Must Be Replaced as President

 Over a half century ago, Walter Lipmann, then arguably the most famous columnist in the country, wrote, “Those in high places are more than the administrators of government bureaus.  They are more than the writers of laws.  They are the custodians of the nation’s ideals, of its permanent hopes, of the faith that makes a nation out of the mere aggregation of individuals.”  

 

It is this perspective that makes Donald Trump's presidency so dangerous.

 

So does this which Lipmann wrote eighty years ago, in 1940:  “Our civilization can be maintained and restored only by remembering and rediscovering the truths, and by reestablishing the virtuous habits on which it was founded.  There is no use looking into the blank future for some new and fancy revelation of what man needs in order to live.”

 

“The revelation has been made.  By it man conquered the jungle about him and the barbarian within him.  The elemental principles of work and sacrifice and duty—and the transcendent criteria of truth, justice, and righteousness—and the grace of love and charity are the things which have made men free…only in this profound, this stern, in this tested wisdom shall we find once more the light and the courage we need.”  

 

That is about as well as it can be said.

 

As is this quotation from novelist, Joseph Conrad:  “What one lives for may be uncertain; how one lives is not.  Man should live nobly, though he does not see any practical reason for it, simply because in the mysterious, inexplicable mixture of beauty and ugliness…in which he finds himself, he must be on the side of the virtuous and the beautiful.”

 

 

Trust—The Magic Potion of Every Great Team Effort

 “I think trust is the single most important thing in rowing.  You really do become part of something larger than yourself.  Every time you take a stroke you are counting on everybody else in the boat to be putting his whole weight, full strength into that stroke.  That is only going to happen if every man in that boat trusts the others at a very fundamental level.”

 

That monologue comes from the narrator in the documentary The Boys in the Boat, which tells the story of the University of Washington crew as they were preparing for their nail-biting win in the Olympics in Berlin in 1936.  

 

This description of the importance of trust, unbounded trust, shared trust describes the magic potion of every great team effort I have ever experienced.

 

 

A Man Forgotten Joseph Davies—Lessons for Us All

 

Joseph Davies was the second ambassador to the Soviet Union, serving from 1936-38.  He was 49 at the time; a practicing lawyer, defending companies against the government, quite successfully, most prominently the Ford Motor Company, which had been charged by the government with the requirement to pay back multi-millions.  The government lost that case and ended up paying Ford several millions, resulting in the largest fee to a lawyer in history at that time.

I just finished reading his book, Mission to Moscow, published in 1941.  It was very popular, selling 700,000 copies.  

His description of the Soviet Union was deep, based on extensive travel orchestrated by the Soviet government.  There is no doubt that he, like many other people, was taken by being “close to power.”  He and his wife, Marjorie, were treated with careful and, from all appearances, sincere hospitality by President Litvinov and other officials.

He offered accolades to the Soviet government on the progress it had made during Stalin’s first five-year plan.  Indeed, it was impressive, whether measured in infrastructure (e.g., railroads), building K-12 schools or universities, etc.  

Davies’ attempted to bring “objectivity” to his task but I believe  he far too kind in looking past the atrocities which were going on in his sight, including the “Trial of 20,” in which the defendants pled guilty (David felt genuinely; others weren’t so sure).

Davies was convinced, and in this I believe he was right, that there was a genuine affinity between Russian leadership, Russian people and the U.S.

He was convinced that “there were no conflicts of physical interest between the United States and the U.S.S.R….nothing that either has which is desired by or could be taken by the other.”  

The U.S.S.R.’s fear of Germany was high; no less was its fear of Japan.  As has been the case throughout its history, including in recent years, the U.S.S.R. felt under attack.  It felt betrayed by Britain and other Western European countries as they “gave in” to Hitler’s demands, step by step.  Both Stalin and Davies could see the ultimate outcome.  Davies, presciently, warned President Roosevelt and the U.S. State Department that, unless they provided strong support for the U.S.S.R., there was every likelihood it would get into bed with Germany to protect itself.  It was also clear to Davies before Germany’s attack on Poland that it would try to find a way to take the threat of a two-front war off the table by establishing a treaty with Russia, which, of course, is exactly what happened.  

Davies was too sanguine—as I have been, too—in forecasting the future development of the U.S.S.R./Russia.  He writes:  “In my opinion, there is no danger from Communism, so far as the United States is concerned.  To maintain its existence, the Soviet government has to continue to apply capitalistic principles.  Otherwise, it will fail and be overthrown.  That will not be permitted by the men presently in power, if they can avoid it.”

He expected the government to move “to the right in practice, just as it has for the past eight years.  If it maintains itself, it may evolve into a type of Fabian socialism with large industry in the hands of the state, with the agricultural and smaller businesses and traders working under capitalistic, property and profit principles.”

He was right in what would happen to large industry; dead wrong in what happened to agriculture and the peasantry.

In the end, it can be argued he was proven right, with Perestroika introduced by Gorbachev and what followed, Russia has moved to a more “capitalistic” economic form.  But it did so in a robber baron fashion, with the government (Putin) maintaining strong autocratic control of the kind Russia has embraced since the time of the tzars.

Following his return from his assignment in Russia and then later Belgium and Luxembourg, writing in 1941 just after Pearl Harbor, Davies offered this, addressing the concern that, in aiding Russia we might be creating a greater danger than Nazi Germany.  “I shall mince no words,” he wrote, “certain Hitler stooges have been trying to frighten us into the belief that Communism would destroy our form of government if the Soviet Union defeats Hitler.  That is just plain bunk.  It is bad medicine.  It is as unintelligent as it is unpatriotic and un-American.”  Hitler had declaimed:  “Peace of the world depends upon the domination of the world by the German race.”  

That said it.  Davies recognized correctly that “the government, the people and the armies of the Soviet Union stand between us in this fate (of being defeated by the Nazis).”  Correct in his emphasis on priorities, Davies was far too sanguine, indeed naïve, in not recognizing the threat of Communism, distant though it was.  

Davies’ naïve optimism, which was the outgrowth, I believe, of getting very close to a people and culture he had come to love, is perhaps best summarized by this:  “It is bad Christianity, bad sportsmanship, bad sense to challenge the integrity of the Soviet government.  Premier Stalin has repeatedly told the world that the Soviet government seeks no territory in this war.  It does not seek to impose its will on other people.  It fights only to liberate its own people and to give all people now enslaved by Nazi, fascist, or Japanese dictators the right to self-determination.  The Soviet government has a record of keeping its treaty obligations equal to that of any nation on earth.”  

Davies totally discounted the “so-called menace of Russian Communism” to American institutions.  “I cannot see it,” he wrote, “our soil is not friendly to or ready for its seeds.  Conditions certainly are not ripe for it yet, nor are conditions even possible to conceive that would be so bad, so desperate, as to cause our people to turn to Communism as a relief.  We know our system of life and society is the best yet devised by man.”

In that statement he was, of course, right.  And the threat of Communism was never as great as was broadcast by folks like Joe McCarthy in the late ‘40s and early ‘50s.  But it was a threat well beyond what Davies envisaged.  

It’s easy to criticize Davies in retrospect.  Yet, others, most prominently Winston Churchill, had a more realistic view.  I think Roosevelt did, too, though not one as clear as Churchill.  This is an example of how all too easy it is for highly intelligent people of good will to underrate the hidden duplicitous ambitions and intentions of some people pretending to want good will and hold a commitment to peace far different than they harbor.  On the other hand, there is another risk, probably equally dangerous.  And that  is to attribute malicious motivations to other people which they do not hold, at least to the degree we assert or fear.  These convictions and the actions they lead to can, tragically, actually bring us or our countries on to the collision course which both want to avert.  

In large measure, this was a driving force in the start of World War I.  I fear in some measure, it characterizes our attitude and relations with China and Russia today.  Food for careful thought.

Davies is a forgotten man today.  Testimony to the humility with which we should pursue our lives-- realizing even more that the most important thing we can do is try to make a positive difference along the journey of life to people whose lives we touch.