The Centrality of LOVE

 We hear its all importance celebrated simply and singularly from two different eras:

"Love, and do as you will"--Saint Augustine.

"All you need is love"--John Lennon and Paul McCartney

War Is Hell--Let Us Never Forget. It

 This from Tolstoy's "War and Peace"

“War isn’t courtesy, it’s the vilest thing in the world, and we must understand that and not play at war.  We must take this terrible necessity sternly and seriously.  That’s the whole point:  to cast off the lie, and if it’s war, it’s war, not a game.”

We are being reminded of this yet again, in the carnage suffered by people in the Holy Land and Ukraine. Both conflicts must be stopped and a basis for lasting peace put in place. That's what the people want. Leaders must step up and face reality and do what is right to achieve peace. 

Don't Throw the Baby Out With the Bathwater

 That proverbial cliche comes to mind as I read the deluge of over-the top criticism of so called "elite universities" following the misbegotten testimony before congress by three presidents of Ivy League schools. 

Yes, it is true that the faculty of most of these schools follows a liberal political bent. 

Yes, it is true, that many students and faculty members holding "conservative" views may feel uncomfortable in expressing them. 

Yes, it is true that group identify has taken on a greater significance than individual identity in recent years, in some cases excessively so in my opinion. 

Yes, there are always reasons to ask if we have the balance right between seeking truth and respecting our most important personal convictions born of learning and one's life experiences.

But lets please keep this in perspective. 

Peggy Noonan in her WSJ column of 12/16-17 captures the shrieking exaggeration we are seeing all too broadly. Universities "have gone from being centers of excellence to institutions pushing political agendas". 

Noonan writes that the idea of a historian attempting to "find the honest truth seems inapplicable to the current moment". She asserts, with absolutely no evidence, that "the good faith of the scholar is sacrificed to political fashion". 

Tell that to the Professor of History I have known at Yale for decades. Neither he nor I will know what you are talking about. He is seeking truth with all its complexity. So will the many other historian I have known. 

The same drive to find the truth, mine new knowledge, motivates every professor I have known no matter what their field.  I have agreed with some of them; I have disagreed with others. But I do not see their orientation to continue to learn in the search for truth to have changed.

Let's calm down. Improve where we should, keep an open mind, listen to and respect different points of view. But don't throw out the baby with the bathwater. 

We Are at a Moment of Crisis: President Biden Needs to Address the Reality of the Moment

 

For a couple of months now, it has become clear to me that unless President Biden is willing and able to change the way he is communicating with the American public and what he is actually proposing and accomplishing, he’s going to lose big-time to Donald Trump or to whomever takes his place in the unlikely event that the criminal cases become so appropriately overpowering someone else does take his place.

 

The latest poll numbers this morning shout even louder that this is the truth.  He’s down in all the key states versus Trump; and if Haley would displace Trump (and she is the most likely candidate to do so) the gaps would be even higher.

 

It is clear that the 91 indictments against Trump and his outrageous self-revealing assertion that he’ll be a “dictator on Day One” aren’t moving the needle.  They will to some degree when voters are confronted with this reality in the voting booth, but not enough.

 

Biden’s challenges are two-fold as I see it:  1) Personal.  He is not seen as sharp enough; he is “too old for the job.”  2)  There are the policy issues, above all immigration; he and the administration have to take a decisive stand on this now.  The feeling that the economy is not going well is out there, too.  Time is going to have to take care of that.  I think the message that the economy is better will come through over the next year. 

 

However, the age and policy issues, particularly around immigration, won’t go away unless Biden does something differently.

 

I don’t know if he’s up to it, but he has to change the way he presents himself to and communicates with the American public.  I believe he needs to adopt informal fireside chats.  Perhaps with an interviewer; perhaps with a small group.  I’m not talking about town halls.

 

He needs to address head-on the issues that are on voters’ minds:  his age, his quickness, why he feels he is uniquely able to carry out the role of the presidency at this point in time.

 

I for one believe he is, above all because of the global challenges we face in Israel and Palestine, in Ukraine and Russia and in many other places, too.  We must hold NATO together.  We must have good relationships with our allies.  We must seek a relationship with China that doesn’t blink at the reality of competition but sees the opportunity and the need for collaboration.

 

Joe Biden is far more equipped by experience and temperament to carry out this critical function at this moment in history than any other candidate, Democrat or Republican.

 

He needs to make that clear.  Concretely. 

 

I wish I knew how to share this message with someone who might be able to make a difference in how Biden approaches this.  In fact, I don’t think what I’m saying here would be new to the inner circles of the White House or the Democratic Party.  What I don’t understand is why it’s not getting through. Or, perhaps if it is, why Biden isn’t acting on it.  I just hope he is up to it.  I truly believe the country’s future depends on it.  We are at a perilous moment.  Liz Cheney understands this.  Not enough other leaders do. The time to act differently is now. We can't just pretend that it will all work out. Life does not work that way. 

 

My Meeting with Prime Minister Netanyahu Fourteen Years Ago--A Sobering Look Into His Uncompromising Mind

 

• 
  I recently returned to notes I made about my first and only trip to Israel in 2009. As part of the trip, we had a private session with Netanyahu. It was a chilling meeting. Netanyahu displayed not an iota of appreciation for the Palestinian predicament. Fourteen years later, the tragedy continues. While condemning without qualification Hamas' horrific murder of over a thousand Israelis and capturing hundreds of innocent hostages, Netanyahu has continued now for decades to work thwart a two-state or other solution that would respect the rights of Palestinians. Doing so, he has thwarted peace and incited violence and death to this very day.

  
  

  
  

  Israel was the last stop on my trip to the Middle East (Lebanon, Syria, Jordan and Israel) in October, 2009.  I wrote about it in my journal at the time,  “How sad that these religions (Jewish, Christian and Muslim), all committed to one God, all beholden to the same basic values—whether those expressed by Jesus in the Beatitudes and Sermon on the Mount, or the Jews in the six points of its star, or the precepts of the Koran, have spent so much blood and lives in fighting against one another.  What horrible evidence of man’s propensity to defile the ‘other’ in order to justify one’s self worth.  And it continues today,” I wrote in 2009 and as I write now in 2023. 

  
  

   

  On October 15, thanks to Eason Jordan, who had been leading CNN International News, we had a private meeting with Prime Minister Netanyahu.  I wrote this after the meeting:  “This was more than a little interesting because, at this moment, there is a huge debate about the so-called Gladstone Report which accuses Israeli soldiers of human rights violations in the attack on the Gaza Strip a year ago.  Also, fierce debate about his policy urging the expansion of more Jewish settlements in the Palestinian-held West Bank, an action that makes peace talk discussions a non-starter.” 

  
  

  And so in 2023, it continues.

   

  I asked Netanyahu about this being a roadblock to negotiations.  He responded immediately (almost angrily) saying he did not feel they were the real issue—that he said was the Palestinians’ unwillingness to agree to a sovereign Jewish nation on agreed borders.  He went on to make the case that the land had really belonged to both religions over time (conveniently ignoring the reality that this area had been consigned to the Palestinians by the United Nations). He asserted that the Jewish settlements occupied only about 3% of the land area, conveniently side-stepping the fact that these are choice areas and non-contiguous sections of the West Bank, making a unified Palestinian state virtually “impossible.”

   

  The steely, unyielding character of Netanyahu was revealed to me in striking and stunning fashion in this meeting.  Little idea did I have at the time of the human trauma and death it was causing and would be causing today as I write this in December 2023.

A Memoir That Speaks to Me on Many Levels--"Free" by Lea Ypi

    

Free is a great memoir.  It takes its place for me next to those of my other two favorites: James Reston's "Deadline" and Katherine Graham's "Personal History". Each of these memoirs tells a unique  human story in unforgettable, candid prose. But each does something else: they cause me to reflect on aspects of my own life.

Lea Ypi's horrific portrayal of the civil war going on in Albania in 1997 feeds in a macabre horrific all -too human  way to the humanitarian disaster going on now in Ukraine,  the cataclysmic turn to the past in Russia, and the infernal continuing deadly repression of the Palestinians quest for independence by Israel.

 

The author writes:  “Nobody understands anything.  It’s like a whole country committing suicide.  Just when it looked like things were getting better, it all went downhill.  Now that we are all falling from a precipice, there is no way back.  It’s so much worse than 1990.  At least there was hope and democracy then.  Now there is nothing, just a curse.”

 

Yet Ypi does not leave us off the hook. She goes on to recall  what she tells her students teaching Marxism at the London School of Economics.  It is, she describes, “a theory of human freedom, of how to think about progress and history, of how we adapt to circumstances but also try to rise above them.  Freedom is not sacrificed only when others tell us what to say, where to go, how to behave.  A society that claims to enable people to realize their potential but fails to change the structures that prevent everyone from flourishing is also oppressive.  And yet, despite all the constraints, we never lose our inner freedom:  the freedom to do what is right.”

A call to the ultimate duty: trying to do what is right. Giving all people the opportunity to succeed as best we can.

She talks to friends at school about her growing up in Albania, first a communist, then a socialist country.  They reject the socialism which she had.  It wasn’t real.  “There was only one thing to do,” they said.  “Forget it.”  She was reluctant to forget it, not out of nostalgia, not because the concepts she had grown up with were so deeply rooted that it was impossible to disentangle herself but because, “If there was one history, if there was one lesson to be taken from the history of my family, and of my country, it was that people never make history under circumstances they choose.  It is easy to say ‘what you had was not the real thing,’ applying that to both socialism and liberalism, to any complex hybrid of ideas and reality.  It releases us from the burden of responsibility.  We are no longer complicit in moral tragedies created in the name of great ideas, and we don’t have to reflect, apologize and learn.”

 

So it is with the circumstances in which I have lived we all live.  Life is not perfect; it’s never been perfect; it never will be perfect.  We just have to make the most out of it that we can.  I return as I often have to what I hope my grandchildren will be able to say about me and my wife, Francie.  “They did the best they could under the circumstances.”  To be clear, I’m not sure we always do; sometimes we’re too ready to give up, feel sorry for ourselves, retreat into gloom.  But usually we do pull back, try to see our better selves and follow our better instincts. 

 

In the book’s Epilogue, the author turns very personal.  She reveals that her mother wondered, even if silently, how she (Lea) could be teaching socialism and Marxism.  Only once did she draw attention to a cousin’s remark that my grandfather did not spend 15 years locked up in prison so that I would leave Albania to defend socialism.  “I knew this is what she thought.  I always wanted to clarify, didn’t know where to start.  I thought it would take a book to answer.  This is that book.  

 

At first, it was going to be a philosophical book about the overlapping ideas of freedom and the Liberal and Socialist traditions, but when I started writing, ideas turned into people—the people who made me who I am.  They loved and fought each other; they had different conceptions of themselves, and of their obligations.  They were, as Marx writes, the product of social relations for which they were not responsible.  Still, they tried to rise above them.  They thought they had succeeded, but when their aspirations became reality, their dreams turned into my disillusionment.”

 

“My family equated socialism with denial:  the denial of who they wanted to be, the right to make mistakes and learn from them, to explore the world on one’s own terms.  I equated liberalism with broken promises, the destruction of solidarity, the right to inherit privilege, selfish enrichment, cultivating illusions or turning a blind eye toward justice.  In some ways, I have gone full circle.  When you see a system change once, you start believing that it can change again.  Fighting cynicism and political apathy turns into what some might call a moral duty; to me it is more of a debt that I feel I owe to all people of the past who sacrificed everything because they were not apathetic, they were not cynical, they did not believe that things fall into place if you just let them take their course.  If I do nothing, their efforts will have been wasted, their lives will have been meaningless.”

 

 

Lea writes with deep feeling. “My world is as far from freedom as the one my parents tried to escape.  Both fall short of that ideal.  But their failures took distinctive forms, and without being able to understand them, we will remain divided.  I wrote my story to explain, to reconcile and to continue the struggle.”

Yes, continue the struggle. That is our responsibility. That is our opportunity.

 

I would conclude these excerpts and perspectives  with a short endorsement for this luminous memoir another writer offered and which I echo: “A lyrical memoir of deep and affecting power, the sweet smell of humanity mingled with flesh, blood and hope.”

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Geo-Political Hopes Dashed--Family Relationships Keep Hope Alive

  

Geo-Political Hopes Dashed – Family Relationships Keep Hope Alive

 

As I reflect here today, Monday, November 20, with the world aflame around me in so many places, I lament the crushing of two of my greatest geo-political hopes of the last 30+ years:  the recovery and rise of Russia integrated and at peace with the West and the continued growth and rise of China as a member of the world community with underlying positive, if sometimes competitive, relations with the U.S. and West.

 

I hardly need say that those visions have been dashed.  I’m not going to take the time to rehearse the underlying irresistible historical and cultural elements that have led to this, nor the errors of human agency on all sides which contributed to it.  All I can say is that if we have been surprised by these turn of events, we can be surprised again and probably will be as a result of changing circumstances and changed leadership, hopefully for the better, closer to my original vision, which I believe is essential for the peace and safety of China and Russia and the entire world.

 

If my hopes have been dashed on the geo-political front, they have been lifted and nurtured by the growth and wonder of my family:  my children, their spouses and ten grandchildren.  And I’ve been lifted, too, by the courage and aspiration of countless other individuals whom I’ve known, most recently nursing aides who have helped me through the night as I recovered from my knee surgery.

 

There is so much kindness in this world. My wife, Francie and I experienced it recently in the airport as people helped us trundle along in our two wheelchairs, looking after us personally, always with a caring smile.

 

There is much good in this world.  It was manifested in a beautiful sermon I heard yesterday from Christ Church’s Owen Thompson.  All any of us can do, what I can do, is make the most of every situation by trying to do  something helpful for those around us. In short, to be kind.

 

I return to what I hope my grandchildren will say of Francie and me:  they tried to do their best. They tried to make the most of what they had and do good for others.