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. 

 

Let's Turn the Table on the Demise of Vision, Purpose and Hope

We are a sick nation in many ways, and I am not just referring to COVID-19.  There is a cloud over America.  It has gotten darker during the four years of the Trump administration, but it was there before.

 

It is a cloud growing from a decline in trust, in civility, and in a sense of vision of what our nation can be, what we can be.  A decline in a sense of purpose and hope.  To be sure, there are bright and inspiring sources of light:  healthcare workers risking their lives in hospitals, men and women in food banks and food stores, teachers coping with challenging and risky circumstances, millions seeking jobs, valiantly, while taking care of their needy families.  

 

“Make America Great Again” has become a hollow slogan.  Yes, there have been a few statistically valid accomplishments over the past four years which the Trump administration can claim.  Low unemployment numbers, though we have to acknowledge that hundreds of thousands of people are dropping out of work, and many new jobs come with compensation levels well below what people had before.  

 

However, for many if not most, the quality of life is far from what they would choose.  And, their hope for the future is low.  

 

Our nation has always thrived on an uplifting vision, a big dose of ambition and a sense of purpose.  We haven’t always fulfilled it, not by a long shot, but we have had a star to which we strove and our leaders have called us to reach for it together.

 

This erosion of vision, of ambition and of purpose has reached a peak level today with the simultaneous challenges presented by the pandemic, the resulting severe economic downturn and the moral turpitude and erosion of the very concept of truth embodied by the current President of the United States.  

 

We should recognize that this cloud of pessimism and of doubt, represents an enormous change over the last 60 years.  In 1958, the renowned historian C. Vann Woodward recalled Professor Arthur Schlesinger’s then-recent attempt to define the American character as being “bottomed upon the profound conviction that nothing in the world is beyond its power to accomplish.”  In this, Woodward writes, Schlesinger “gave expression to one of the great American legends, the legend of success and invincibility.  Almost every major collective effort, even those thwarted temporarily, succeeded in the end.  American history is a success story.  Why should such a nation not have a profound conviction that nothing in the world is beyond its power to accomplish?  The American people have never known the chastening experience of being on the losing side of a war.  Success and victory are national habits of mind.”  

 

In 1960, Vann Woodward called on historians to “penetrate the legend without destroying the ideal, who can dispel the illusion of pretended virtue without denying the genuine virtues.  Such historians must have learned that virtue has never been defined by national or regional boundaries, and that morality and rectitude are not the monopolies of factions or parties.  Their studies would show the futility of erecting intellectual barricades against unpopular ideas, of employing censorship and repression against social criticism, and of imposing the ideas of the conqueror upon defeated people by force of arms.  The history they write would also constitute a warning that an overwhelming conviction in the righteousness of a cause is no guarantee of its ultimate triumph, and that the policy which takes into account the possibility of defeat is more realistic than one that assumes the inevitability of victory.”  

 

Yes, this erosion of trust and confidence and hope has been a long time coming.   It has developed over the course of more than 50 years. Over this half-century, our nation has witnessed a profound loss of innocence as we have discovered that all wars are not winnable (witness Vietnam), others are misbegotten (witness Iraq) and some never end (witness Afghanistan). 

 

We’ve lost a sense of invulnerability as we’ve felt the devastating impact of the pandemic and seen terrorists attack our own country and others.  Vulnerable, too, as we watch China grow to become the largest economy in the world, with strong autocratic leadership, and we face a greater number of what we are defining as “enemies” than ever before. 

 

The period has been marked by a sharp erosion of trust in our institutions, including religion, business and government, starting with Nixon’s Watergate, Clinton’s lying and exploitation of a young intern, and now Donald Trump. 

 

It has been abetted by the increasing polarization of politics, even impacting people’s families, enabled by gerrymandering and the far greater impact of big money in influencing the leadership of the country.  

 

It has been fueled by increasing income inequality and by a sense that the world is not as fair as it used to be and that the opportunity for the next generation to do better than the current one has become small.  Media has become increasingly fractionated, enabling all of us to hear what we want to hear, almost always in stark opposition to, often demonizing, the other side.

 

To be sure, there have been events and leaders that have provided hope and evidence that, halting as it is, progress is possible.  The fall of the Berlin Wall and the peaceful dissolution of the Soviet Union (even though it led to what proved to be a far too self-congratulatory conclusion that the West had won and that democracy and capitalism would prevail across the world).  

 

We’ve been lifted by the greatly increased and long overdue acceptance of the LGBTQ community, offering legitimate hope that positive change can happen.   Many of us were lifted by Obama’s being elected President, feeling this was an indication that opportunity was available to people regardless of their race.  

 

At this moment, there is a greater sense of realism and more honest confrontation of the facts than I have ever before experienced. This is a good thing for facing the reality of where we stand is the starting point to make things better. 

 

We know we continue to face the challenge of racism which we thought had been largely disposed of.  We know we’re vulnerable to disease which, before now, we’ve talked about only as historical incidents (e.g., the Spanish Flu of 1918) as if they were just things of the past.  We—at least most of us—recognize the threat of climate change which has contributed to this year’s wildfires in the western United States, hurricanes in the Gulf and flooding in Iowa. We know, at least we should know, that we face an overhanging threat of nuclear annihilation.  We must work imaginatively and with determination to reach agreement among all nations to control this means of wiping out life on earth as we know it.  

 

Yes, events over the past 60 years have, for almost all of us, removed any aura of innocence.  Indeed, I would say our task now is to recognize the rightness of our founding ideals without indulging in hubris or allowing it to manifest itself in trying to impose our way of life on other nations.  We’ve seen the price to be paid of pursuing a moral crusade on a worldwide scale.  We must have the wisdom to chart a course of foreign policy between the perilous extremes of isolationism and world crusade.  Both extreme courses will always have powerful advocates; neither can be regarded as a dead issue.  

 

Yes, a cloud covers our nation today and indeed the world; a cloud of uncertainty, cynicism and hopelessness.  We need not, we must not, allow ourselves to wallow in this.  We need a new realistic vision, a new ambition to achieve our noblest ideals.  We need leaders who will carry this mission forward with conviction, with courage and with belief in their fellow citizens—all of them.

 

We have had this sense of vision and purpose in our nation before, a vision brought to life by concrete decisions, actions and achievement.  We need such a vision and sense of purpose and actions to realize it in the next administration.  Actions such as infrastructure improvements providing millions of new jobs, quality health care and educational opportunity available to all, regardless of income working together with other nations to attack climate change, seeking resolution of disagreements with adversaries and working with them where we need to—for example, on nuclear proliferation. We must mend our relationships with allies to achieve common purposes. Perhaps above all, in our relationships and dialogue with one another, we must be civil and display common decency. That's the only way we can come together to accomplish what we need to. 

 

We need to look at one another as fellow travelers in the pursuit of a better country devoted to fulfilling the ideals embedded in the founding of our nation.

 

We can do better, much better.  I for one am optimistic that we can and will begin to turn the table on the erosion of Vision, Purpose and Hope under a new Biden administration. It will not be easy and it will not happen overnight but we must and can begin and I think we will. 

 

 

Diverging Perspectives on Racism as It Exists Today—Continuing to Learn, Personally

 It would be hard to imagine two books, sharing similar titles, that differ more in their thesis than two I’ve recently read—White Fragility:  Why It’s so Hard for White People to Talk About Racism by Robin Diangelo; White Guilt:  How Blacks and Whites Together Destroyed the Promise of the Civil Rights Era by Shelby Steele.

 

There is one belief that the books share in common which is a rightly cautionary one.  This is the risk of how a feeling of moral superiority, drawn from one’s opposition to racism, can become a badge of honor.  

In the case of Whites, it can dilute the need for one to take concrete actions to attack systemic racism.

 

For Blacks, per Shelby Steele, being conscious of racism, leads to “White Guilt,” which he asserts reduces their sense of individual responsibility. 

 

I am personally very conscious of the risk that my concern about racism, sharper today than it has ever been, can elevate itself to a feeling of moral righteousness.  My being conscious of racism can lead me to feel I’m doing something good and meaningful simply by recognizing racism. Just as invidiously, I can come to view Blacks as a class rather than penetrating to understand each individual’s circumstances through genuine conversations and by understanding each other stories.  

 

Shelby Steele’s book suffers from several errors in fact, as I see the situation.  Specifically:

 

• His belief that African-Americans are motivated much more by White Guilt than by key principles founded on personal responsibility;
• His view that racism and White Supremacy are now recognized as real and seen by almost all people as morally wrong. If only that were true; 
• His failure to recognize that there are indeed systemic racial barriers that still exist in educational preparedness, job interviews, criminal justice and  healthcare;
• His belief that the pursuit of diversity is simply an expression of a way to suppress the feeling of White Guilt rather than a recognition of the benefits which diversity offers;
• His belief that the pursuit of diversity requires a diminution of quality and excellence.  I say this, knowing that this is indeed possible but in no way inevitable or necessary;
• His assertion that White Guilt, following what Steele feels was closing the curtain on racism in the mid-60s, has created a moral vacuum which has played a major responsibility in the reduction of moral standards in general.  He asserts that White Guilt has been the principal, if not only, factor reducing moral authority in our world today.  He goes so far as to express the belief that it was responsible for the broad acceptance of Clinton’s taking advantage of Monica Lewinsky.  There has indeed been a general deterioration of moral standards in many areas.  The causes of this have been multiple.  While White Guilt is a reality, Steele badly overstates its influence.  

 

Robin Diangelo in White Fragility includes many thoughts which strike home for me:

 

• Viewing privilege as something that White people are just handed obscures the systematic dimensions of racism that are actively and passively, consciously and unconsciously, maintained by all White people;
• There is a network of systematically related racial barriers. Taken individually, none of these barriers might be that difficult for an individual to get around but, because they interlock with each other, they have a very telling effect.  These barriers relate to housing, neighborhood, education, employment, health and wealth and income;
• “We Whites who position ourselves as liberal often opt to protect what we perceive as our moral reputations, rather than recognize, challenge and seek to change our participation in systems of inequity and domination.  What is particularly problematic is that White people’s moral objection to racism increases their resistance to acknowledging their complicity with it.” 

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.