Maintain Focus—Keep the Faith—Act

The last few days have dashed any hope I had that having seen what Trump incited on January 6—on top of all of the other insults to character and civility he has exhibited over the past four years—that this would persuade large segments of the Republican Party to finally abandon what he stands for. 

 

Only six Senate Republicans joined the Democrats in indicating that an impeachment trial was justified.  The final vote won’t be much different from that.  

 

It is disheartening to see this, to put it mildly.  But it should not stop us from focusing on what has been clear from the beginning as the only path forward to gain a semblance of unity in the country.  

 

We have taken the first step in electing Joe Biden.  His tone from the start has been the best one possible to lay the foundation for beginning to unify the country.  However, it is clear that tone alone won’t do it, especially because he is and should be taking actions that will be quickly labeled by the Republicans as partisan.  I refer to the number of Executive Orders he has issued, most of them turning back Orders which Trump had taken to turn back what President Obama had done.   

 

What will be needed now beyond tone are actions.  Actions that are seen by the great majority of the country as being right for them.  Actions that will get COVID-19 under control.  Actions that will bring the economy back.  Actions which will create jobs, hopefully through an infrastructure bill that can be passed soon.

 

It will only be actions seen to benefit the majority of the country, including millions who voted for Trump, including in rural areas and small towns where special help is needed.  Only actions like this will change the tide.  This is what had to happen after the Great Depression.  Large segments of the population hated (and that is the only word that applies) President Roosevelt’s plan.  But the tide was turned as the majority of Americans saw a decisive and capable president and an administration that was attacking the problems at hand and making life somewhat better for them.

 

That is what we need to focus on now.  Passing legislation that does those things. And insofar as possible, make it bi-partisan. 

 

Let’s stop the gnashing of teeth about how the Republican Party hasn’t reformed itself, as disappointing as that is.  Let’s dial down the rhetoric.  Let’s stay focused on what needs to happen for the improvement of people’s lives.

A Poem Written by My Eleven Year Old Granddaughter and One of Her Classmates Two Days After the January 6th Attack on Our Capital

 Rock Bottom

Storming the capitol

A landmark in D.C

All at the hands

Of an ex-president to be

Rioters holding a flag of red white and blue

But it’s not the one we love

Did you get the clue?

The confederate flag

Being carried throughout

They carry it with love

Fly it with no doubt.

Windows broken

And lives taken

The president then speaks

He’s finally awakened

Senators scared

They run for their lives

If they had got too close

They could’ve died

Did the police do their best?

Was it really enough?

At the end of the day

People were in handcuffs

Tear gas spread

Guns got fired

All because they obeyed

Who they most admired.

Our country has a label now

That no one truly wanted

Our own people turned on us

Is the U.S haunted?

This really wasn’t a great way

To kick off a new year

It’s truly sad to be in a world

Where you sometimes live in fear

Although we’ve hit rock bottom

We know we will rebound

Because before you fly up

You have to touch the ground

This’ll go down in history

We won’t forget this day

We will finally pull through

‘Cause we’re the USA!

The Contingency of History—We Missed a Bullet—So Today, January 20th—We Celebrate with Relief and Hope Joe Biden's Inauguration

 

I am more mindful than ever of the contingency of history.  There are so many ways we could be beset with another four years of Trump. 

 

Imagine if the Republican had impeached Trump the first time around, not that it was a close call for them.  But he would have been out and Pence would be in, and I think it is entirely possible that he would have been elected as President.

 

Much more likely, if Trump had had a modicum of common sense about him, he would have taken the lead in attacking COVID-19.  He would have worn a mask, been supportive of science.  And if he had done those things, not only would lives have been saved (most importantly), but I am convinced he would have won the election.

Or imagine if Covid has not happened in the first place. I believe Trump would have been reelected. 

 

Or imagine, if Jim Clyburne hadn’t advanced Biden in the South Carolina primary, Biden probably wouldn’t have won and probably wouldn’t have become the Democratic nominee.  And I don’t believe there was any other Democratic nominee who would have beaten Trump, even with all of the things he did wrong, and COVID.

 

All of which is to say we are not only damn lucky but thank heavens for those people who got out the vote and worked so hard. And thank heavens that Biden stepped forward in the way he did and that we now have him about to enter the White House.

 

We have always known how contingent  history is; how contingent it was, for example, that Lincoln was our President.  But I don’t think there has ever been a time where being on the right side of history mattered more than it does at this moment in history. 

January 20th; the day we can celebrate the inauguration of a President, Joe Biden, who despite the monumental challenges, can with all our help begin to heal the distrust and confront the inequities which assault our Nation. 

 

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2021—A Year of Hope and Opportunity. A Test of Our Resolve

 

The year 2020 revealed stark realities like no other year in my 80+ year lifetime.  It has taught us a lot.  It has left us aware of the need for change and it has left us, to larger and lesser degrees, committed to make change.  The proverbial $64,000 question is, will we have the wisdom, the resolve, the courage and the perseverance to make and sustain these changes.

 

Personally, I enter 2021 with hope but no sense of complacency.  There is above all hope in that we will be led by a president, Joe Biden, experienced and genuinely committed to healing the partisanship of our country and the prevailing distrust among the nations of the world.  Like the majority of the population, I believe he is committed to take action to confront issues that are staring us in the face:  a still raging epidemic, the challenge of distributing a vaccine and contending with perhaps another variant of the virus; an economy still at a delicate stage of recovery, with as much as a third of our population in dire economic straits and, overarching all of this, a deeply divided electorate and undeniable evidence of social and racial injustice.

 

We have been put in touch in with these realities during the past year as never before in over 100 years.

 

Positively, I am convinced we have the right leader in Biden.  I believe he has the mind, the experience and the spirit to confront these realities and challenges. But this president—no president—can come close to doing this singlehandedly.

 

Here is the question that we face in 2021.

 

Are we up to the task of acting decisively and collaboratively on what we have learned, even knowing that the work will occupy many years.

 

I am talking about acting at every level.

 

Federal, state and local governments, working in tandem.

 

Every corporation.

Every one of us as individuals.

 

At the government level, will Congress get together to design and pass legislation, including:

--dramatically improving the nation’s infrastructure in a way that adds jobs

--providing sensible immigration reforms

--expanding lower cost healthcare that everyone can benefit from

--reforming criminal police practices, without throwing out the baby with the bath water?

 

Will companies take action to:

--increase representation in executive leadership of minorities.  

--contribute  to the welfare of the community at the same time they reward their shareholders and provide an environment where all employees can grow to achieve their full potential?

 

Will non-profit and other organizations pool their resources and capabilities against common goals to better enable everyone to fulfill their full potential?  Through better education, development of minority businesses, improved housing and much more.

 

Will we as individuals be more open to know and listen to one another, to walk in each other’s shoes, to set aside implicit biases and to simply be kinder to one another?

 

If you look forward 10 years, I dream that we will look back on the years 2020 and 2021 as two sides of the same coin.

 

2020 provided a nerve-wracking, life-changing, often life-taking demonstration of how vulnerable we are, particularly how vulnerable certain portions of our population are.

 

A year when we confronted realities that we have been aware of, some more than others.  In 2020 they stared us in the face as systemic problems like never before. 

 

These realities have led to a growing stronger and unified commitment to address the challenges revealed by these realities than I have ever seen before. 

 

What 2021 can be and must be is a demonstration that we will continue to address these issue with wisdom and persistence.  This will not be a one-year undertaking; it won’t even be a decade-long undertaking.  But if we don’t get started now, I don’t know when we will.  It would be impossible for me to imagine, let alone want, a more vivid demonstration of where we need to improve.

 

The year 2020 has revealed human characteristics that we will depend on in 2021 and in fact have always depended on to make progress.  I am talking about people like the frontline healthcare workers who risk their lives to help others.  It has happened again and again.  That human spirit is present.   The question is, can we marshal it broadly. Can we cooperate and not compete, can we see each other as fellow travelers on this journey of life, trying to help one another along that path, pursuing justice for all? 

I refuse to believe we cannot do better.  We can make important progress.  We have done so before. The time to do so is now. 

  

 

Porcupines: An Intriguing Metaphor for How We Pursue the Common Good While Retaining Our Individual Interests

 

The One and the Many:  America’s Struggle for the Common Good by Martin E. Marty

 

This book, written by Martin Marty, was published 23 years ago but it could have been published today with equal if not greater relevance to the moment we’re living in.  It is a short book of about 240 pages. Its essence could be boiled down to an even shorter book. Whatever the length, it is powerful and relevant. 

 

I took away three related thoughts:

 

1. The importance of telling and understanding each other’s stories, personally and as special interests, alongside the importance of recognizing the importance of pursing a unifying common good.

 

2. The concept of affection.  The value of “having affection” for one another and how that is different than love; it is not as strong as love but terribly important.

 

3. The concept of kinship or kin.  

 

Marty explores the different pulls of “pluralism” and allegiance to the common good.  He contrasts the unum and the plures.

 

There has constantly been in our country tension between the two.  Alexander Hamilton in 1802 expressed his fear of the influx of foreigners who must “tend to produce a heterogeneous compound; and to change and corrupt the national spirit; to complicate and confound public opinion; to introduce foreign propensities.  In the composition of society, the harmony of the ingredients is all-important.  And whatever tends to discordant intermixture must have an injurious tendency.”  

 

Our other founders, Franklin and Jefferson, offered similar testimony in defense of the unum, of sameness.  

 

We face the question:  How do individual special interest groups themselves co-exist and how do they make contributions to the common good?  What we’ve seen in Lebanon and Bosnia to this very day alerts us to the dangers of tribalism, unchecked by republicanism—that is a commitment to see how we do achieve the common good.

 

One writer came upon an interesting metaphor—the porcupine—to depict civil association. This is a model that allows for both the need to “hover together” and the need to “draw apart.”  This metaphor describes citizens in their national and sub-national groupings and as individuals.  

 

James Madison in Federalist No. 51 speaks clearly to the rights of factions and common interest.  He recognized the importance of individual factions but he did not want those members to lose the sight of a theme that brings together everyone against the goal of “justice as the end of government.”  Justice is a unifying theme for a cohesive sentiment. 

 

Marty wisely writes that “intimate communities, because of the closeness and commitment that they express, depend upon love.  Citizens, however, cannot express sentimental attachment or personal affection for all fellow citizens and societies conceived as civil association.  They certainly will not credibly display love, because of the impersonality of the bonds of association and the heterogeneity of those who are encompassed by them.”

 

Here is where the concepts of association, affection and kinship come in.  I turn to Procter & Gamble.  I’ve often described it as a community, and I still do.  Having read this book, I believe that the concept of affection is a very good description of how P&Gers feel about one another.  So is kinship.  Fellow P&Gers are kin.  

 

This is also how I feel about fellow Yalies, although not to the degree I do with fellow P&Gers.  My contact has not been that close, not nearly.

 

Family reunions, just like P&G reunions, bring together kin and affection.  They draw on the notion of the “binding tie of cohesive sentiment,” which Felix Frankfurter enunciated.  

 

As I wrote at the beginning, this book was written 23 years ago.  It was meant to address the need to resolve the tension between particular interests and factions with the need to pursue the common good.  At this moment, in the just-completed election, we have in Joe Biden a President-elect who instinctively is primed to unify the interests of individual factions, many of whom have been deprived of justice, with the pursuit of a common good, of a binding sentiment--justice and opportunity for all—which I believe can unify us. 

 

Marty’s book serves to illustrate that the search for this unifying end point has been a perpetual one in this country and, indeed, in the history of the world. Despite the challenge, it should not stop us from continuing to pursue it. I feel confident it will be pursued under the new administration.

 

 

 

Wisdom from 80 Years Ago—Wisdom for Our Moment

 Walter Lipmann, the nation's most esteemed columnist at the time,  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 pointed perspective that has made the Trump presidency so invidious. It is what makes me so grateful and hopeful for the Biden administration which lies ahead.

 

In a separate passage, Lipmann wrote::  “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 as well as it could be said.

 

I believe this timeless  quotation from Joseph Conrad captures the essence of our ambitions:  “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.”

"A Decent America Will Be a Force to Celebrate"

 “When World War II Ended, Nearly Everyone on Earth, Including Americans Themselves, Admired America; So Did the Japanese”

 

So writes the Japanese contemporary novelist, Minae Mizumura, in the recent issue of The New York Review of Books.  

 

Mizumura goes on to write that, in hindsight, we know that the allied occupation forces meticulously controlled the media so that no Japanese criticism saw the light of day.  The nation was to repent and welcome its defeat.  “Cynics say the population was brainwashed, and I find myself often agreeing with that assessment.  After all, America dropped the A bomb…ultimately, however, I have always concluded—if somewhat grudgingly—that the nation’s admiration was justified.  America showed generosity toward the defeated; its people wanted a better world for everyone.”

 

Mizumura went to live in the United States when she was 12 and ended up staying in the U.S. for 20 years, from 1963 to 1983.  She acknowledged that she refused to adapt to her new environment and “turned into an antisocial little Japanese patriot.”  But even during those years of rebellion, at a time when American soldiers were fighting a war in a far-away land, Vietnam, and society was in turmoil, “I never doubted that the U.S. as a whole was fundamentally a moral nation.”  

 

Moving on, Mizumura reflects on how she reacted to the news of Trump’s election.  As she held the newspaper reporting this in her hand, "My mind went numb.  Noises around me ceased to exist.  For the next four years, I felt I was on a rollercoaster, a rollercoaster that just kept plunging lower and lower.  Trump seemed to revel in his amorality.  The more he assaulted the human decency that had created America’s praiseworthy institutions and ideals, the more his orange face glowed.”  The MAGA rallies she observed on the streets and the “idiotic, hateful obsequious” support for Trump in Congress has “betrayed the image long ingrained in me of America as a nation of big-hearted, fair-minded people.”  

 

Mizumura concludes, “The world has become so intertwined that we simply cannot afford another four years of Trump wrecking our future, especially now when that future is imperiled by the threat of a renewed arms race and the ever-accelerating warming of our planet—our only planet.  I will gladly adore America once again if the country makes a decisive turnabout in November.  America doesn’t have to be ‘great again.’  A decent America will be a force to celebrate.”  

 

My friends from around the world, many of them retired from Procter& Gamble, echo the same sentiment that Mizumura expresses poignantly, almost word for word. 

 

And so do I.

 

PLEASE VOTE AND TELL ALL YOUR FRIENDS TO DO THE SAME.