Ehlers on Everything

Caught in the Middle: On Women's Rights and Coming of Age in the Seventies

2012-01-24T23:28:00.001-05:00

Men weren’t really the enemy, they were fellow victims suffering from an outmoded masculine mystique that made them feel unnecessarily inadequate when there were no bears to kill. – Betty Friedan.

I was born in 1959, when Eisenhower was President and men wore business suits to baseball games. The civil rights movement was still in its infancy, Americans had yet to conquer the moon and Vietnam was a distant, far-off country that few people had heard of. The Cold War was in full bloom, the threat of nuclear annihilation hovered like a dark cloud above, and men ruled the world.

John Kennedy was elected President in 1960, in the Age of Camelot. With a young, handsome President and his glamorous wife on the cover of Life magazine, America was filled with optimism and youthful energy. Sophisticated and regal, Kennedy was, like his predecessors, surrounded almost entirely by men, the Best and the Brightest they would later be called, men who had been educated at Harvard and Yale, Andover and Choate, who promised to “pay any price [and] bear any burden . . . to assure the survival and the success of liberty.” They possessed an upbeat, optimistic view of the world and of America’s place in it. Although it all ended a few years later at the hands of a lone assassin, it remained a man’s world.

Kennedy’s men, and later Johnson’s and Nixon’s men, would embroil us in a difficult, messy, unjust war and struggle to make sense of changing times, but as a young boy growing up in suburban New Jersey, it seemed perfectly natural that men made the decisions and held positions of power and influence. Virtually all of my role models, the persons I wished to emulate, whether politicians, ballplayers, musicians, or actors, were men.

For the first decade or so of my life, American society had clearly defined roles for the sexes, or so it seemed. Boys were expected to pursue careers in law and medicine, run our companies, make our laws and, when necessary, fight our wars. Girls were expected to get married, have children, and provide emotional support for their families. It was almost that simple. Men were CEOs, Senators and Presidents, doctors, scientists and lawyers. We ran the corporations, the banks, the universities, and the government. Women labored in service-oriented and subservient positions, as nurses, teachers, librarians, and secretaries. The status of women, as explained in Woman in Sexist Society: Studies in Power and Powerlessness (New York: Basic Books, 1971), was “the result of a slowly formed, deeply entrenched, extraordinarily pervasive cultural (and therefore political) decision that . . . woman shall remain a person defined not by the struggling development of her brain or her will or her spirit, but rather by her childbearing properties and her status as companion to men who make, and do, and rule the earth.”

By the time I entered high school in 1974, the Supreme Court had ruled for 100 years that the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment did not apply to women, who only a half century before had earned the right to vote. Indeed, women were confined to second-class citizenship in most aspects of law and economic life. And while a growing percentage of young women attended college, it was a common refrain even in the mid-1970’s said only partially in jest, that most girls went to college for their “MRS” degrees.

I grew up when Leave It to Beaver and Father Knows Best filled the screens of American televisions, part of a powerful socialization process reinforced by churches and schools, textbooks and the mass media. Before the advent of Title IX, society encouraged boys to play sports and girls to be spectators and cheerleaders. We were bombarded from infancy with portrayals of stereotypical sex roles, with advertising images of women as housekeepers and mothers, happily folding the laundry and cooking dinner in service to husbands attending to more pressing matters.

And then everything changed.

In 1963, Betty Friedan, a suburban housewife who supplemented her husband’s income by writing freelance articles for women’s magazines, published The Feminine Mystique. Several years earlier, Friedan had surveyed her Smith College classmates at their 15-year reunion and found that this highly educated and talented group of women, mostly housewives in their mid-30’s, were deeply dissatisfied with the state of their lives. From these and other interviews, and drawing on history, psychology, sociology and economics, Friedan wrote what would become one of the most influential books of the 20th Century. The Feminine Mystique described Friedan’s insights into the soul-draining frustrations of educated, stay-at-home women in the 1950’s. She called it “the problem that has no name”:

The problem lay buried, unspoken, for many years in the minds of American women. It was a strange stirring, a sense of dissatisfaction, a yearning that women suffered in the middle of the twentieth century in the United States. Each suburban wife struggled with it alone. As she made the beds, shopped for groceries, matched slipcover material, ate peanut butter sandwiches with her children, chauffeured Cub Scouts and Brownies, lay beside her husband at night – she was afraid to ask even of herself the silent question – “Is this all?”

The Feminine Mystique shocked middle class America and became an instant bestseller. It exposed the myth of the happy housewife, an ideal promoted by television, Hollywood, and mass advertising, and helped transform the expectations and roles of American women virtually overnight. With Friedan, Gloria Steinem, Bella Abzug and others leading the way, the women’s rights movement pushed for equal pay for equal work, gender-neutral help-wanted ads, maternity leave, child-care centers for working parents, legalized abortion, safe and accessible birth control, laws prohibiting sex discrimination in the workplace, and other issues often deemed radical by the standards of the early 1960’s.

I witnessed first-hand the growing consciousness and political empowerment of women in the late 1960’s and 1970’s. However little I may have paid attention to these issues in my younger years, intellectually and rationally, I understood exactly what women were demanding and why, for I wanted the same opportunities for myself. Black Americans and other minorities were properly demanding equal rights in all spheres of American life, so it was only appropriate that women would want these same things. The women I went to school with were just as bright and hardworking as me, so why should they not also be entitled to the same opportunities?

There were times, of course, when I reverted back to socialized sexism, when my competitive instincts and male role models did not easily reconcile to an imagined society in which the sexes were completely equal. I wanted to be respected and admired as a man of importance. I wanted to accomplish big things and be looked upon as someone special. Like any red-blooded American male, I wanted to slay the dragons and be greeted by admiring females. I wanted the women in my life to look at me with pride and affection as I battled the forces of evil and saved the world from destruction. I wanted to be Superman carrying Lois Lane to safety.

But then the rules changed. All of a sudden, women my own age and education level wanted a chance to slay their own dragons and hunt their own prey. They wanted to be Superwoman and didn’t need no stinking Superman. Men were no longer entitled to instant respect. We now had to compete not only with each other, but with women as well.

Had you asked me in high school if I was a feminist, I may have answered, “Sure, I dig chicks.” But I’m a fast learner. By the time I graduated college and entered law school, where I studied alongside lots of really smart, ambitious women who made up nearly half of my law school class, I genuinely embraced and acknowledged the merits of true women’s equality. My female classmates wanted the same opportunities as my male classmates – an interesting and satisfying career. And just like the men, the women saw no reason why they couldn’t or shouldn’t be able to combine a good career with a family.

Of course, American society was divided on the merits of a woman trying to do too much. “What about the children?” was a common refrain. Some contended it selfish and foolhardy for a woman to think she could do what needed to be done to advance in a pressure-filled, demanding legal career and still have time to raise a family. Men were not, were never, in my experience, asked these same questions. And yet, since the industrial revolution, a large percentage of men had failed miserably in mixing ambition with fatherhood. My female classmates understood this, which is why they wanted husbands who bore a greater share of responsibility for child rearing and house chores, who understood instinctively that an even distribution of responsibilities was only fair and just.

In all of my professional life since, I have worked for and beside many bright, talented women. It has always seemed quite natural, as if a continuation of college and law school, when women coexisted as equal partners in education. I have watched many of my female colleagues negotiate the constant struggle of balancing the demands of children with the desire to excel in their careers. When I first joined a large law firm in Washington, D.C., in 1986, a strong push was then being made for fair-minded and liberal family leave policies. It was debated regularly in offices and conference rooms of law firms and corporations, as employers sought to find ways to attract and retain highly qualified women professionals, and to provide the appearance of a family-friendly work environment. But inevitably, stories rolled-in about those who actually took advantage of these policies, who took time off to spend with their newborn infants and paid a price in stifled advancement and delayed career gratification. It could be no other way, really, the economic realities what they are in corporate America. There was still a long way to go.

Many of my friends and spouses, often two career couples, found the demands of toddlers and child care to be equally draining. The frustrations expressed by 1950’s housewives and Betty Friedan’s Smith College classmates were replaced by the frustrations of women (and some men) who, wishing to have it all, found that it was not so easy, that choices and sacrifices inevitably had to be made. Although the opportunities available to women have greatly expanded since The Feminine Mystique was first published, many women discovered that happiness can be elusive, whether pursuing a rewarding career or choosing the undervalued and underappreciated role of housewife and mother, or something in between.

Twenty-six years later, I wonder how many of my classmates have been disappointed with their careers and choices. How many underestimated the deep-seated socialization process that embedded traditional notions of home life in men, even those who seemed to be more progressive minded than most? How many had hoped that corporate America would more quickly adapt family friendly work environments?

The world is today more complex, if not necessarily more advanced. Advertisers and women’s magazines continue to portray the ideal Superwoman as super-thin and sexy, as someone who can wear a size 4 dress and flaunt a Barbie-doll figure while negotiating a merger and spying on the Russians. Pick up any issue of Cosmopolitan magazine and you will see nothing but photographs and articles on fashion, sex, make-up, weight loss, and tips on how to please a man. Meanwhile, American women and girls continue to face a body image crisis, with constant attacks on women’s self-esteem and self-worth. Women today are supposed to want it all, and when life comes up a bit short, when their careers or family lives, or both, do not match the glamorous images of the mainstream media, a crisis of confidence creeps into the mindset of many professional women. Women are now expected to have a career, many by necessity require financial independence, and yet they continue to bear the lion’s share of child rearing and housekeeping responsibilities.

In many ways, the advances made by women in the professions have been both a curse and a blessing to them. Despite the ever present glass ceiling, some women have successfully competed with men for the highest positions in business, law, medicine, and government. Those willing to sacrifice a rich family life, or cherished time with children – the same sacrifices ambitious men have been making for a century – can advance to positions of power and influence. And yet, for many women, a lingering dissatisfaction remains, the reality that merely emulating the life of a high-charging, career-driven man comes with many spiritual and emotional sacrifices, which even for a growing proportion of men, is not worth the cost of lost time with children and families.

Although I have occasionally looked with envy on the societal privileges (white) men enjoyed prior to the sexual revolution and The Feminine Mystique, I am today a better person, a better father, and a better co-worker because of the women’s rights movement. American society has made strides in the right direction. The big law firms, prestigious universities, and some major corporations today offer extended family leave plans, in-house child care options, and flexible work schedules. For my two daughters, I very much desire a world that provides women with the same opportunities and career options as men, that treats men and women with an equal degree of respect, and which allows everyone to pursue their dreams in ways that best fit their talents and skills. But I also hope that my daughters, and all young men and women, recognize that ambition has consequences, and that the dreamed-of career may not alone provide a fulfilling life; that it is important to explore what it means to live fully and passionately, with a sense of purpose and humility, authenticity and simplicity, and to drop preconceived ideas of who and what we are. "Our lives are a mixture of different roles,” said Hillary Rodham Clinton. “Most of us are doing the best we can to find whatever the right balance is . . . For me, that balance is family, work, and service."

The women’s movement will have succeeded if, as a society, we steadily seek a more compassionate and humane world that permits women and men to balance their lives in ways that are good for everyone; that allows us to enrich our spiritual and creative lives, to see the potential in ourselves and in others. For as Greta Crosby advised, “If I could give you one key, and one key only, to a more abundant life, I would give you a sense of your own worth, an unshakeable sense of your own dignity as one grounded in the source of the cosmic dance, as one who plays a unique part in the unfolding of the story of the world.”

Forgotten People: The Nameless, Ignored Victims of War

2012-01-14T19:41:00.001-05:00

Man is the only animal that deals in that atrocity of atrocities, War. He is the only one that gathers his brethren about him and goes forth in cold blood and calm purse to exterminate his kind. He is the only animal that for sordid wages will march out and help to slaughter strangers of his own species who have done him no harm and with whom he has no quarrel. --Mark Twain

As I watch the nightly news, I am struck by the lack of moral inquiry and heartfelt concern over the consequences of America’s state of permanent war. Too often we are content to divide the world into good and evil, black and white. It is less taxing that way, for complexity and nuance require thought and judgment. Perhaps we have too much on our minds, a weak economy, the Republican primary circus, the next set of contestants on Dancing with the Stars, to expect us to think deeply and sincerely about the human consequences of America’s involvements in foreign wars, past and present.

For all of our news and noise, talking heads and 24/7 updates, we rarely examine the humanity of those we kill. We call them insurgents or terrorists, enemy combatants or collateral damage. To us, they are always the "Other," for which we display a frightening lack of concern. We keep precise track of U.S. forces killed and wounded in action, but spend very little time counting, much less contemplating, who and in what numbers we kill. Perhaps it must be this way, for if we really considered the actual consequences of our killing, we might become soft and compassionate, or worse, begin to question the necessity and legitimacy of war. For when “war is looked upon as wicked,” noted Oscar Wilde, “it will always have its fascination. When it is looked upon as vulgar, it will cease to be popular.”

How many innocent civilians did we kill during the War in Iraq? How many children have American bombs, guns, and drone missiles killed or maimed in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Yemen? To merely ask such questions in the wrong company may render one rude and impertinent, even disloyal and unpatriotic, as if the sacrifices of American soldiers are devalued by a search for truth and transparency. As free and open a society as we pride ourselves of having, on some topics, genuine intellectual inquiry is subversive. At the very least, it makes those in privileged and powerful positions deeply uncomfortable.

We have become immune to killing, it seems, having delegated it to a professional military class, unmanned drones, and aerial bombing campaigns which allow us to inflict maximum damage at minimal loss, as if we are putting together a financial statement for a public corporation. The power of modern weaponry allows us to keep our hands clean as military technicians “target” our enemies with a high degree of precision. We consider ourselves ethical, because we intentionally try to minimize “collateral damage” and avoid, whenever possible, unnecessary deaths, errant bombs, and the killing of innocents. But we are told by those in power that war is a dirty business that is by nature imprecise. We must balance the dangers to our country and our troops against the risks of killing some people we have no quarrel with – innocent children, women, the elderly, and the fathers, brothers, and sons who have not taken up arms against us. We must accept that innocent people will get killed, or so we are told, in part because the enemy is adept at hiding and commingling among the civilians, who themselves are often unwitting accomplices. Collateral damage is thus unavoidable.

There are some things we rarely talk about as a nation. Our media outlets either do not care to discuss them, or are afraid to make waves. Corporate dollars are at stake, after all, and the media plays a large role in sustaining the military industrial complex and in exploiting the entertainment value of war. During the early days of the Iraq War, live television reports gave us a glimpse of the thrill of war and provided us with a sense of national purpose. But in these and other telecasts, we are protected from the bullets and shrapnel, the bombs and after-effects, the tank and artillery rounds. We are not shown the blood and ripped apart body fragments, exploding skulls, or the stench of death. As noted by journalist and former Harvard seminarian Chris Hedges in Death of the Liberal Class (Nation Books, 2010), “The wounded, the crippled, and the dead are, in this great charade, swiftly carted offstage. They are war’s refuse. We do not see them. We do not hear them. They are doomed, like wandering spirits, to float around the edges of our consciousness, ignored, even reviled. The message they tell is too painful for us to hear.”

The myth makers in Hollywood and the media have become war’s accomplices, romanticizing the true effects of war. “If we really saw war,” writes Hedges, “what war does to young minds and bodies, it would be impossible to embrace the myth of war. If we had to stand over the mangled corpses of schoolchildren killed in Afghanistan and listen to the wails of their parents, we would not be able to repeat clichés we use to justify war. This is why war is carefully sanitized. This is why we are given war’s perverse and dark thrill but are spared from seeing war’s consequences.”

The disparity between what we are told about war and what truly occurs on the battlefields is vast. It seems to me that most Americans do not pay attention. Many of our veterans returning from Iraq and Afghanistan, grateful to be home with friends and family, are quickly taken aback at the gulf that exists between their military and civilian lives. The rate of suicide for returning vets is at an all-time high, with an epidemic of diagnosed cases of post-traumatic stress disorder, depression, and anxiety. We train our soldiers to be efficient killers, to defend one nation by annihilating the "Other." But is it possible that, when we teach our soldiers to dehumanize the enemy, we corrupt their souls and destroy all that is beautiful and sacred about life? Is this not another tragic, yet ignored, consequence of war?

We care about our returning veterans, or at least I hope we do, but we have remained remarkably acquiescent and apathetic as a nation about the reasons, the causes, the consequences, and the effects of our military excursions. The churches are particularly disappointing. A Gallup poll in 2006 found that the more frequently an American attends church, the more likely he or she was to have supported the Iraq War. It reflects a remarkable failure of the institutional church to provide true moral guidance to its flock. As we enter the eleventh year of the War in Afghanistan, the institutional church remains strangely quiet. After all, Jesus was a pacifist and the core Christian principles of love and forgiveness are radically opposed to war and violence. Walk into most churches on Sunday morning, though, and you would hardly know it.

Meanwhile, the victims of our bombs and guns remain faceless and nameless. The destruction and violence committed in the name of American liberty remains unseen.

Take for example our growing use of drone missiles in places like Pakistan and Yemen, countries with which we are not officially at war. Shrouded in secrecy and lacking accountability, decisions of who to target are made by CIA officials in Langley, Virginia, often with direct input from the Pakistani military, a price we pay for Pakistan’s consent to allow us to kill within its borders. Despite Executive Orders barring the CIA from engaging in assassinations dating back to the Ford, Carter and Reagan administrations, and despite several key principles of international law, there has been almost no debate in this country over the use of drones in non-combat regions. The use of drone technology, of course, is very tempting, for it eliminates immediate risk to American forces while enhancing the precision to which they strike their intended targets. But does not their use in certain circumstances raise many troubling ethical concerns? When real life killing becomes strikingly similar to a video game -- the controls operated remotely in places like Nevada and California -- and when killing is perceived as “costless,” war becomes seductive. Should it not be at least a matter of moral deliberation and debate in a democracy?

In 2009, Jane Mayer of The New Yorker interviewed a former CIA officer who had witnessed live drone strikes while serving in Afghanistan. He described what it was like to watch from a small monitor in the field: “You could see these little figures scurrying, and the explosion going off, and when the smoke cleared there was just rubble and charred stuff.” It had become such a common sight to see human beings running for cover that a slang term was developed for the ant-like humans on the video screen: “squirters.”

If we killed only the bad guys, and we could be certain they were the right bad guys, and even more certain that the effects would not, in the long-run, be counter-productive, perhaps there would less need for moral angst over our actions abroad. But according to the Bureau of Investigative Journalism in the United Kingdom, our first 309 drone strikes (257 of which have occurred under President Obama) have killed 175 children and up to 780 civilians. For family members of the innocent victims, it is small consolation that America means well. After all, we only wish to kill terrorists, those who would harm us. “What difference does it make to the dead, the orphans, and the homeless,” asked Gandhi, “whether the mad destruction is wrought under the name of totalitarianism or the holy name of liberty and democracy?” What we fail to consider is that, for every drone missile we fire into a distant landscape in Pakistan, every bomb we drop on a mountain village in Afghanistan, we create another “ground zero” for the people who live there.

According to the Iraq Body Count (IBC), which provides the most verifiable (and conservative) documentary record of civilian deaths resulting from the War in Iraq, over 114,000 innocent civilians died in Iraq during the eight years we engaged in that war. This figure is only of innocent civilians, and does not include the deaths of insurgents, armed combatants, the former forces of Saddam Hussein, or any other non-civilian Iraqi. U.S. led coalition forces were directly responsible for 14,704 of these civilian deaths, according to the IBC, nearly 30% of which were children. The actual figures are almost certainly higher, as additional deaths not counted in the IBC have been established in data released to WikiLeaks. We know as well that thousands of Afghan children have died during the war in Afghanistan, more than half of their deaths caused by U.S. and NATO forces. But whatever the total numbers, “before you support war,” says Chris Hedges, “especially the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, look into the hollow eyes of the men, women, and children who know it.”

Are we killing terrorists or creating them? I am not sure anyone really knows the answer to that question. But the moral and human consequences of our actions as a nation are too important to stand idly by without asking questions and demanding answers. For in the words of John F. Kennedy, “War will exist, until that distant day when the conscientious objector enjoys the same reputation and prestige that the warrior does today.”

The Role of Faith in the Public Square

2011-12-31T18:55:00.000-05:00

Say nothing of my religion. It is known to God and myself alone. Its evidence before the world is to be sought in my life: if it has been honest and dutiful to society the religion which has regulated it cannot be a bad one. – Thomas Jefferson

On September 12, 1960, then Senator John F. Kennedy, hoping to dispel concerns over the role his Catholic faith would play in the event he became President of the United States, gave a speech on the role of religion in public life before a group of protestant ministers in Houston, Texas. “I believe in a president whose religious views are his own private affair,” Kennedy said. “Whatever issue may come before me as president – on birth control, divorce, censorship, gambling or any other subject – I will make my decision . . . in accordance with what my conscience tells me to be the national interest, and without regard to outside religious pressures or dictates.”

Although he did not say how his moral conscience or personal ethics may have been shaped or molded by Catholicism, Kennedy assured his audience, and ultimately the American public, that his personal religious beliefs, whatever they might be, would not play a role in fulfilling his duties as president. In his official actions, on issues as wide ranging as the economy and foreign affairs, from policies addressing poverty at home and economic aid abroad, to prayer in school and matters of war and peace, President Kennedy would not be influenced by his religious convictions.

Kennedy’s view on the public neutrality of government in matters of faith has been the standard liberal position for most of my lifetime; whatever a candidate or elected government official may believe or not on matters of faith should have no role in how the nation is governed. It is a uniquely American belief, embedded in the nation’s founding and reflected in our Constitution. The separation of church and state as set forth in the First Amendment is as essential to American notions of freedom as any constitutional doctrine upon which our democracy is based.

For Thomas Jefferson and many of our Founding Fathers, the ideals of religious freedom were more important than one’s specific religion. In Jefferson’s time, and for the next 150 years or so when the religion of most Presidents deviated little from mainstream Protestantism and religion was not used as a wedge issue in presidential politics, it was easy to maintain a principled and neutral view regarding a candidate’s faith. For me personally, and for most liberals (and many others), the principle that religious faith is a private matter, which should have no bearing on a candidate’s public responsibilities, has always been accepted wisdom.

Kennedy’s presidency put to rest the unfounded fears concerning a Catholic president. Not until Jimmy Carter was elected president in 1976 did a candidate’s religious beliefs again become a matter of some notoriety. Indeed, Carter’s brand of born-again Christianity made certain segments of the Democratic Party uncomfortable, particularly the secular left and many Jews, 40% of whom broke from their historically Democratic leanings to vote for Ronald Reagan in 1980. Although I believe that this was the result of an unfortunate misunderstanding of Carter’s faith -- which emphasizes a concern for all of God’s people and is what motivates his passion for human rights -- and a failure to distinguish Carter’s brand of Christianity from the more conservative elements that dominate evangelical Christianity today, it was also a reflection of America’s ambivalence toward expressions of religion in public life.

Ironically, it was Reagan’s presidency and the ascendancy of right-wing conservatism in the 1980’s that introduced a more aggressive form of politically inspired religion into the public arena. It was during this era when we witnessed the rise of the Moral Majority and the prominence of televangelists such as Pat Robertson, who advocated a conservative political agenda and founded the Christian Coalition and other socially conservative “Christian” groups that advocated a reversal of Roe v. Wade and the outlawing of abortion, pushed for a constitutional amendment limiting marriage to between a man and a woman, and called for the re-establishment of prayer in the public schools and public displays of religious symbolism.

As someone who was raised in a mainline protestant denomination, one which engages in public advocacy in a manner more respectful of America’s diverse religious and ethnic makeup, I am continually perplexed that conservative, often fundamentalist, Christians so dominate our public discourse. That the media makes little effort to point out the many misconceptions these self-proclaimed Christians have concerning their own religion and their lack of respect for the religious diversity and pluralistic traditions of American democracy, only adds to my frustration.

But while religious conservatives tend to dominate discussions of morality in the public square (particularly on issues of personal morality, to the exclusion of issues like economic justice and peace), liberals too often fail to understand the significance of religion in public life and are often reluctant to openly connect religious and moral principles to the issues that most matter to them. On this, our current president is different.

On June 28, 2006, forty-six years after Kennedy’s speech in Houston, then Senator Barack Obama reflected on what he perceived to be the role of religion in public life and how his personal faith has guided his own values and beliefs. Unlike Kennedy, Obama argues for the relevance of religion to political argument, declaring it particularly apt for liberals and progressives. For Obama, it is a mistake for progressives to “abandon the field of religious discourse” in politics. “The discomfort of some progressives with any hint of religion has often prevented us from effectively addressing issues in moral terms.” Obama contends that religion is, historically and culturally, a source of political rhetoric that resonates with many Americans, who comparatively speaking are a religiously inspired and devout people. He recognizes that the solution to many policy issues, from social and economic problems to issues of war and peace, require consideration of the moral dimensions of those problems.

“Our fear of getting ‘preachy’ may . . . lead us to discount the role that values and culture play in some of our most urgent social problems,” Obama said. But to address problems like “poverty and racism, the uninsured and the unemployed” often requires “changes in hearts and a change in minds.” Obama believes it a grave mistake to insist on a complete separation of religious conviction from public life, or to insist that moral and religious convictions are irrelevant to one’s views of politics and law.

Secularists are wrong when they ask believers to leave their religion at the door before entering into the public square. Frederick Douglas, Abraham Lincoln, William Jennings Bryan, Dorothy Day, Martin Luther King – indeed, the majority of great reformers in American history – were not only motivated by faith, but repeatedly used religious language to argue for their cause. So to say that men and women should not inject their “personal morality” into public policy debates is a practical absurdity.

As different as Obama’s and Kennedy’s statements are concerning the role of religion and public life, they actually concern two different notions. For Kennedy, it was important to emphasize that a President’s duty is to his country and the Constitution. He was attempting to counter the concerns then being expressed in some parts of the country to a Catholic president. Although some of this concern was simply anti-Catholic prejudice, there was at the time a sincere worry as to whether a Catholic president would be beholden to the Vatican and Catholic doctrine in the conduct of his public affairs. Similar concerns have been raised, and properly dismissed, of the potential influence the Mormon Church may hold on a candidate such as Mitt Romney. Indeed, Romney, who holds a position of importance in the Mormon Church and who proudly identifies as a Mormon, gave a speech in 2007 not dissimilar from Kennedy’s.

That Obama believes one’s religious convictions are relevant to politics and policymaking, however, does not mean he disagrees with Kennedy’s view of the official separation of churchly influence on public policy. What Obama contends is something altogether different – the notion that one cannot truly separate out the moral and religious influences on a candidate’s life and, ultimately, his or her policy positions. As I watch from afar the Republican presidential primaries in Iowa and New Hampshire, I believe it is important to know something about what the candidates believe, religiously, morally, and spiritually, and how those beliefs may affect their actions should they become president. Personally, any candidate who believes that evolution and creationism are worthy of equal treatment in our public schools, or who doubts the scientific efficacy of climate change and its importance to our planet’s future, is not a candidate I can trust to have a reasonable conclusion about anything. If a candidate’s brand of Christianity is one of judgmental piety, or is based on a literalistic misinterpretation of the Bible, it is a candidate I cannot support.

Although I do not care what religion our past, present, and future presidents are (or are not), I do care what moral and religious influences motivate their positions on matters of policy. One’s religion (or lack thereof) is an important part of one’s worldview and should not be off limits for any candidate. President Kennedy’s youngest brother, Senator Ted Kennedy, who symbolized and articulated a consistent vision of political liberalism for over forty years after his brother’s death, noted late in life that his politics were very much influenced by his Christian beliefs, specifically in the teachings of Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount, and in Matthew 25: 44-45 (Lord, when did we see you hungry or thirsty or a stranger or needing clothes or sick or in prison, and did not help you? [Jesus replied,] I tell you the truth, whatever you did not do for one of the least of these, you did not do for me.) This religious underpinning of Christian social justice, which molded the likes of Mother Theresa and Dorothy Day, and which forms the basis of Catholic social statements on economic justice, is what motivated Senator Kennedy in his lifetime to work for laws and government programs that benefitted the poor and the working class, to fight for human rights around the world, and to oppose discrimination on the basis of race, gender, disability, and sexual orientation. It is this kind of morality, not one’s personal moral shortcomings, which are of greatest concern to me in how a candidate will govern a country as diverse and complex as the United States.

Of course, one need not be a Christian to share Kennedy’s political vision, or to believe in equality, justice, and the fundamental right of all Americans to have access to quality health care, adequate housing, and economic opportunity. There are certainly many other moral and ethical influences to his brand of liberalism and a belief in the common good. But whether one is motivated by Christian or Jewish or secular ethical principles, I believe it relevant and important to know what religious and moral influences underlie a candidate’s positions.

The separation of church and state is a fundamental aspect of American constitutional democracy, and must never be diluted. A free society depends on a proper distinction between theology and law, between the free exercise of religious belief and the imposition of religious doctrine. But the personal influences and beliefs of our political leaders is always a relevant consideration in deciding whether they can effectively lead the nation in times of turbulence and despair, and whether their vision of America is one I can abide.

Climbing the Verrazano

2011-12-15T21:53:00.000-05:00

The greatest danger for most of us is not that our aim is too high and we miss, but that it is too low and we reach it. – Michelangelo

For most of my life, I have been afraid of heights and small enclosed spaces with no windows. Last week, as part of a work related tour of bridges and tunnels in New York, I overcame both fears to stand on top of the Verrazano Narrows Bridge. A beautiful and clear sunny day, the temperature a mild 51 degrees, I stood atop the Brooklyn side tower with my arms outstretched. As I breathed in the slightly chilled air above the New York Bay, I embraced the Manhattan skyline and enjoyed a bird’s eye view of Brooklyn and Staten Island. Life offers a fresh perspective from such heights. The world looks a little different from up there; it opens the mind and forces one to take stock of life. Standing atop the Verrazano, I understood the wisdom of Thomas Carlyle, who said, “The tragedy of life is not so much what men suffer, but rather what they miss.”

The opportunity to climb the Verrazano was presented to me by chance and without planning, as part of a security assessment my firm is conducting for a government agency. Accompanied by a police captain, a maintenance worker, and a colleague, we stuffed into a very small, very old Otis elevator, with rusty metal gates, the kind of elevator one normally avoids at all costs. When I asked if it ever broke down, the maintenance man replied in earnest, “Just don’t jump up and down.” It was at about this point that my palms began to sweat and my lungs contracted. I questioned my sanity. Feelings of panic set in as the elevator moved slowly, creakily, upward, ascending into an abyss of heightened darkness. I closed my eyes and breathed deeply, imagining the rescue efforts required to excavate us from a metal box dangling 1,200 feet above the channel where the Hudson River empties into the Atlantic Ocean. I was fairly certain that my cell phone would not receive service from up here, though I was not anxious to test it.

After what seemed like several long minutes, the elevator came to a stop. Naively believing we had reached the top, I quickly realized after the metal gate opened that our ascent was only partially completed. We now had to step into another small, tightly-constricted enclosure and climb four stories of metal ladders affixed to the wall of the tower. Each ladder led through a small tank-like hole. As there were no open spaces or windows, I had no idea precisely where we were at this stage. I sensed only that we were very high off the ground with but one way down. After climbing the ladders and pulling myself up through the fourth hole, I was relieved to find open space expanding the full width of the tower. My claustrophobia slightly receding, I breathed easier as we walked up four normal flights of stairs before reaching yet another ladder and hole. We finally reached what I thought was as far as they would allow us to go, where I glanced through a small window and looked out onto Staten Island, the roadway and New York Bay a long distance below.

The police captain then unlatched a door that opened onto a small ledge with a metal railing. Stepping out onto the ledge, suspended high in the air, I experienced a sensation simultaneously exhilarating and frightening. While peering down the cables that held up the bridge, I became slightly faint and quickly remembered my fear of heights. I stood there anyway for a few moments longer, staring at the wide expanse of the horizon with the Manhattan skyline in the foreground, acknowledging the uniqueness of the experience.

Mistakenly thinking that our “climb” was completed, I was somewhat surprised when the captain led us to yet another ladder, this one thirty feet high and leading to another small hole through which, I was told, was the top of the bridge tower. Did I mention that I am scared of heights? My disdain for tall ladders? I thought good and hard about sitting this next phase out, but after witnessing the 55 year-old police captain and my colleague climb up the ladder, I did what any self-respecting, stupid, testosterone-filled man would do, and I said, “Fuck it.” So, up I went, refusing to look down and tightly gripping each prong of the ladder as if my life depended on it. To eliminate the concern over my sweaty palms, I had put on a pair of work gloves that the maintenance man had offered to me. Finally, I reached the top, climbed up and through the last hole and pulled myself to the platform. I stood straight up and looked all around, in wonderment.

The view of New York from atop the Verrazano is breathtaking. From there, one experiences a panoramic view of all of Manhattan, Brooklyn, Coney Island, and Staten Island. I looked around and soaked it in, feeling fresh and alive. Although my knees were weak and I could hardly believe I was doing it, I savored every minute of the experience, recognizing the rarity of this once-in-a-lifetime moment of overpowering proportions.

* * * *

There are times in one’s life it is important to take stock, to examine how one’s journey is progressing. Standing on top of the Verrazano, I thought of the many things I desire to do before I die. Travel to Israel and pray at the Western Wall; tour the Vatican and stroll quietly through the many small towns and villages of the Italian countryside; visit with my distant relatives in Denmark; view the Northern Lights on a clear night in Iceland; go whale watching in Alaska; spend a night at a medieval castle in England; learn to play the guitar; walk atop the Great Wall of China; and hit live batting practice at a major league ballpark. Although climbing Mt. Everest is not (and never was) on my list, I can at least find satisfaction that I “climbed” the Verrazano.

With the possible exception of live batting practice, there is no reason I cannot eventually do all or most of these things during my remaining time on earth. But for most of my life, something has often stood in the way – obligations of school and work, the strictures of time and family, and the many other distractions and excuses that so often prevent us from ever achieving that which we most desire to accomplish. But perhaps there is more to it than that. As nice as these experiences will be, how essential are they to a good and meaningful life? How important a contribution do they really make to a life filled with purpose, connection, and fulfillment?

When I returned home last week, still flying high from my experience on the Verrazano and having just parked my car in the driveway, I received a call from my very good friend who was distressed over another friend’s sudden illness. I knew his friend, Jerry, as someone I had worked with many years before in Washington, D.C. A former college basketball player and, until about two weeks ago, a very active and healthy person, he woke up one day unable to walk, and he quickly lost his ability to stand, sit, or even talk. Suddenly bedridden and fed intravenously at the hospital, the doctors completely mystified as to the cause of his condition, he confronted the possibility that he may be paralyzed forever, that he may no longer be the man he had always been, and could not be the father, husband, and man he wanted to be. “All I could think about,” Jerry said a few days later, “was how am I going to live my life in this condition?” Thankfully, Jerry has since recovered most of his physical capacities, and he is now walking (with the assistance of a walker), and trying to rehab and regain his full strength. The doctors still do not know what caused his sudden demise, but I am in awe of the immense courage and strength Jerry demonstrated in refusing to give in or give up. For the rest of us, “There, but for the grace of God…”

A very wise person once stated, “The real measure of your wealth is how much you’d be worth if you lost all your money.” Hearing of Jerry’s health problems and learning of the many tragedies and heartbreaks that people face every day, I regret not the failure to achieve certain of life’s goals, my bucket list of sorts, but in having failed to pursue a more perfect life, one full of love and laughter, passion and joy. One that constantly strives, in some small way, to assist others in finding the strength to imagine a life filled with inspiration and hope. I would like to believe it is what motivated me to start this blog and to publish my book, Eat Bananas and Follow Your Heart (Bookstand Publishing, 2011), to build a lasting legacy that will remain long after I have departed from this world. But I am never satisfied that I have done enough, because I know that I can always do more, that I am constantly constrained by the practicalities of life and the strictures of conventional thought.

“We all have two choices,” said Jim Rohn, “we can make a living or we can design a life.” When my friend told me of Jerry’s physical ailments, he confessed to his own spiritual crisis of sorts. The demands of his career, his long commute to New York, and his everyday obligations, left him with little else to give. “I’m existing, but I’m not living,” he said. It is a statement that strikes at the heart of the American conscience, a soul wrenching crisis that most of us, at some point in our lives, must confront. How often do we truly make a difference in someone’s life? What have we really done for others, for those less fortunate than ourselves, for the lonely, the sick, the poor? How many simple acts of random kindness have we initiated? Is it only when things are going well, when we are in a good mood that we do for others? How committed are we to our cherished principles and values? These are difficult questions to ask and even more difficult to answer.

“Everyone who got where he is,” wrote Robert Louis Stevenson, “has had to begin where he was.” It is a comforting thought, for it explains a lot and lessens my own disappointments in not achieving greater things. When I think back from whence I came, I am often astonished at how far I have traveled – college and law school, a career as a trial lawyer and federal prosecutor, a managing director in a worldwide risk management firm, living and succeeding in two major metropolitan areas – not too bad for a small town kid from central New Jersey. And yet, I think back on the many things I probably could have accomplished, and the places I could have been, if only I had the courage and insight to follow my heart and pursue my dreams. “If we did the things we are capable of,” wrote Thomas Edison, “we would astound ourselves.”

Justice Louis Brandeis once said, “Most of the things worth doing in the world had been declared impossible before they were done.” As the year comes to a close and a new year embarks around the corner, I vow to examine my life more carefully, to better understand my sense of purpose, and to appreciate the everyday blessings that have been given to me, my health and my family. I vow to live and not simply exist. As Diane Ackerman wrote, “I don’t want to get to the end of my life and find that I lived just the length of it. I want to have lived the width of it as well.”

November Reflections and the Passage of Time

2011-11-28T21:01:00.001-05:00

We live, but a world has passed away
With the years that perished to make us men.
--William Dean Howells

It is late November and the leaves have fallen. The trees stand upright, their branches naked and awkwardly extended, but the sun sets early now. The weather was unseasonably mild this past Thanksgiving, the Pennsylvania air providing a warm respite from the cold chill of winter that waits quietly, ready to strike, with the change of seasons. The geese have yet to depart from the lake at Alverthorpe Park near my home, as if wisely discerning nature’s shifting currents. It is a physically peaceful time of year, disguising the anxieties of a weak economy and a troubled world.

In spending time this weekend with my daughters, their friends, and Andrea's sons and nieces, I was provided an opportunity to hear the voices of college seniors discuss their studies and hopes for the future. Soon to embark on a new stage of life, one filled with career choices and financial independence, these young people collectively expressed the same concerns; a deep-seated anxiety permeates the atmosphere. As final exams and papers await their return to campus, more pressing concerns linger; the need to secure a full-time job upon graduation, the advent of adulthood, and the notion of what to do with one’s life. It seems as if not so long ago I stood in their shoes; and yet, I have lived nearly three-fifths of my life since then. The times may keep changing, but the anxieties remain the same.

“Time is not measured by the passing of years,” said Jawaharlal Nehru, “but by what one does, what one feels, and what one achieves.” In talking with our collective children, I am anxious to dispense advice, to show that I am a sage possessed of wisdom and profound insight. But I soon realize that my counsel consists of words with no guarantees, adages and maxims intertwined with the unstated reality of my own life, of choices made and opportunities lost. It seems like only yesterday when my children were just entering school, the canvas of their lives yet to be painted. As Jennifer embarks on her final months of college and Hannah prepares for her college years, their father’s input is filtered through an independent lens. They are young women now, with career paths and friendships distinctly separate from the young girls who once sought their father’s time and attention. I would not have it any other way, but I wonder where the time has gone.

“Our death is not an end if we can live on in our children and the younger generation,” said Albert Einstein. “For they are us; our bodies are only wilted leaves on the tree of life.” It is a comforting thought when I reflect on how quickly life passes us by. Try as I might not to live in the past, I nevertheless think back on decisions made and paths chosen; on what might have been had other avenues been traveled. Living in the present, my time occupied by work, financial responsibilities, and the everyday realities of life, I cannot help but feel that something is missing, that the years run too short and the days too fast. As I grow older, I long for the days of my youth, when backyard football games and basketball shootouts in our family’s makeshift court by the garage occupied autumn afternoons. With the passage of time, those days appear simpler, distant memories replaced by the serious stuff of life; the demands of careers, the costs of medical care, rising mortgage payments and tuition bills.

“Time is a cruel thief to rob us of our former selves,” wrote Elizabeth Forsythe Hailey, “We lose as much to life as we do to death.” But words are cheap. It is easy for me to advise others to make the most of life, to take risks for lives of passion and adventure. Looking back, did I do the same? Or have I simply chosen the paths of least resistance? “How vain it is to sit down to write when you have not stood up to live,” admonished Henry David Thoreau. I would like to tell these idealistic, bright-eyed college students to do what makes them happy, that happiness and success awaits them if only they pursue their dreams. And yet, there are so many things I have wanted to accomplish, so many dreams yet fulfilled.

My greatest obstacle has always been the limits of my imagination and a strong aversion to risk. Many of my career choices have been wise and satisfying; my decision to attend law school, my career as a federal prosecutor, even my present career in corporate investigations. I have successfully evaded life in a big law firm, or as a managerial bureaucrat in a large, vastly impersonal corporation. But at the end of the day, have I not merely served the interests of the property classes and status quo? Certainly, my career choices were not risky. And I am as incapable today of predicting the future as I was thirty years ago, when I stood in the shoes of a college senior.

We journey through life in search of meaning and purpose. Bounded by conventional thought, the practicalities of life often stand in the way; concerns over money, the cost of insurance, the strictures of time. I occasionally wonder if life would have been more meaningful as a writer, or teacher, or legal aid lawyer. Is it too late to do these things now, to alter my life’s course? For a moment it sounds grand, and then, conventional thinking sets in and the inevitable, practical and necessary questions arise. How can I make writing, or teaching, or serving the poor my life’s mission and continue to support my children’s education and pay my mortgage? Perhaps if I was truly committed, I could make it work, somehow. The choices I have made in life are my own and, like most, I choose to protect my own interests, and that of my family, first. I don’t apologize for these choices, for the necessary compromises of life, but I cling to the hope that there remains time to accomplish more, to complete my canvas with the colorful brushstrokes of a life well lived, a life of meaning and purpose.

For now, I can only impart to my children and their friends the wise counsel of Carl Sandburg: “Time is the coin of your life. It is the only coin you have, and only you can determine how it will be spent. Be careful lest you let other people spend it for you.” Too often we fill our time responding to the demands of others, fulfilling societal expectations. In the end, however, we must satisfy our own longings for a life of love and integrity, service and sincerity. In the words of Ralph Waldo Emerson, “This time, like all times, is a very good one, if we but know what to do with it.”

The Education of a Guinea Pig: On Love, Loss, and Pringles

2011-11-14T22:01:00.000-05:00

Until one has loved an animal, a part of one’s soul remains unawakened. – Anatole France.

When I was two years old, I stood by the front door of our house in Phillipsburg, New Jersey, and watched helplessly as our dog, a small toy fox terrier named Skippy, chased after a squirrel and crossed the street as a car sped past. He was struck and killed instantly. I can still picture the young driver, a teenager with grease-backed hair, remorsefully carrying Skippy from the street after wrapping him in a blanket. “Car kill ‘kippy, Mommy,” I allegedly repeated for several days thereafter, too young to understand why something that I loved and cared for, a member of the family really, could be taken away from us so suddenly. It is my earliest living memory. I discovered at a very young age the pain that comes from a willingness to love what death can quickly erase.

The next year we welcomed a new dog into our lives. Peppy was a little chubbier; a black-and-white terrier with no tail, he looked a bit like a pig with a large nose. For the next sixteen years, Peppy and I lived under the same roof. He was the first to greet me when I arrived home from school each day, and he kept me company whenever I sat in the big chair in the living room or watched television in the family room. I took him for walks, snuck food to him under the dinner table, and played tug rope with him on the kitchen floor. We understood each other and hung out together almost every day. When he died, during my freshman year in college, it was like losing a brother.

Anyone who has ever connected with and loved an animal understands the emotional bond that forms between people and their pets. Last week, Pringles, my daughter’s guinea pig, had to be put to sleep at the age of six – a good life for a guinea pig, but a difficult and sad day nonetheless. Pringles’ intestines had started to fail and, despite the best efforts of the University of Pennsylvania School of Veterinary Medicine, there was little they could do for him. Hannah and I were heartbroken. The death of a special pet is like the loss of a good friend. In the words of Kabril Gibran, “Love knows not its own depth until the hour of separation.”

As small and insignificant as it may seem to speak of a guinea pig, we loved Pringles. He was a member of the family and, while he could not communicate with the same emotional clarity as a dog, or demonstrate independence and contempt in the manner of a cat, deep down I know he loved us back. He regularly cuddled with Hannah, laying against her chest as she rubbed his chin or stroked his neck and back. He was extremely sociable and loved being with people. For the first few years of his life, we let him run around the living room floor and explore the nooks and crannies of the furniture as we talked, read, or watched television. He never ventured far from us and seemed to appreciate the freedom and trust we bestowed on him. This past year, he slowed down considerably and became increasingly affectionate as Hannah, Andrea and I took turns holding him as he breathed contentedly and occasionally squeaked with delight.

I am convinced that Pringles was a Cardinals fan. He was our good luck charm during the last two months of the baseball season and his presence helped jumpstart many late-inning Cardinals’ rallies. I kid you not. Forget the Rally Squirrel, we had the Rally Pig! Leaving nothing to chance, we ensured that Pringles was with us for several innings of Game Seven, an insurance policy against a potential Rangers comeback that paid dividends as the Cards put the final touches on their World Championship. Although I will confess that Pringles seemed a bit perplexed when I attempted to fist pump him during the post-game celebration.

“Life is pleasant. Death is peaceful,” said Russian born author Isaac Asimov, “It’s the transition that’s troublesome.” I do not question the necessity of our decision to let Pringles go. It was peaceful and painless and best for Pringles. And I am grateful that he was allowed to spend the final moments of his life in Hannah’s arms, happy and content. But we were unprepared for the decision. Hannah and I brought him to the veterinary hospital because we thought, we hoped, that he could be treated, perhaps given some medication or other remedy that would make him better. When confronted with the prognosis, we were caught off guard and forced to choose between the selfish desire to hold onto our friend for a little while longer and the selfless decision to let him go, in peace.

As our memories of Pringles live on, we can obtain a small degree of solace knowing that, for six full and engaging years, this small, furry rodent connected with us, and we to him. “The risk of love is loss, and the price of loss is grief,” noted teacher and author Hilary Stanton Zunin. “But the pain of grief is only a shadow when compared with the pain of never risking love.”

Each morning this past week, upon entering the kitchen, I have experienced a void left by Pringles’ absence. Life seems a little lonelier now. He no longer greets me in the morning as if to say, “It’s about time, bud. Now what’s for breakfast?” He is no longer there to keep us company as we prepare dinner. In a small but significant way, he touched our lives, and we touched his, and each of us was made better because of it. And while I would like to believe that, in the words of Lord Alfred Tennyson, “God’s finger touched him, and he slept,” I know for certain that he will be missed.

Of Destiny and Miracles

2011-10-30T11:54:00.002-04:00

Until now, the Cardinals had never won a World Series with a team like this. A team that was lost, left behind and stranded in the standings. A team too proud and stubborn to accept the hopelessness of the situation. A team that fought back like no other has in franchise history. – Bernie Miklasz, St. Louis Post-Dispatch

There are some things in life that defy logic and reason. This past baseball season was one of them. As a Cardinals fan, this was a season of beauty and despair, jubilation and heartache, quirky plays and momentous comebacks. When the final out of Game 7 was recorded Friday night, a fly ball lifted high in the air towards the left field warning track that was caught by Allen Craig, I celebrated, hugged Andrea and my daughter, and yelled a cheer of joy and jubilation. But mostly I exhaled a sigh of relief, my emotions having been shot these past two months in a wild season of zany comebacks, devastating losses, and up and down swings. Invested as I was in this magical, historic season, the day after was anti-climactic, sad almost, as if something special and unique had been lost, forever extinguished to the dustbin of history, lost to the invisible forces of time and memory.

I am not certain if I really believe in destiny, or in miracles, but at least in the realm of baseball, if such things do exist, I witnessed it these past two months. To explain the Cardinals comeback in Game 6 of the World Series requires more than a mere knowledge of baseball folklore and physics. Having made three embarrassing errors earlier in the game, they trailed by two runs in the bottom of the ninth inning and were down to their last strike – their last breath really – when suddenly, magically, the forces of destiny overtook the cozy confines of Busch Stadium and willed the Cardinals to victory. The Rangers had on the mound one of the most reliable closers in the major leagues, Neftali Perez, a man who throws 99-mile-per-hour fastballs mixed with devastating sliders. But in a high intensity, pressure-filled at bat, with two strikes on him, David Freese, the Cardinals’ young third baseman, a hometown kid with two injury-plagued half-seasons under his belt, drilled a two-run triple off the right field wall to tie the game. I was delirious.

A few minutes later, when Josh Hamilton of the Rangers hit a two run home run in the top of the tenth to put the Rangers back on top 9-7, it appeared as if the Cardinals had finally run out of steam. We should have known better. Since August 25th, when the Cardinals were declared dead and finished by virtually everyone in baseball before going on a five-week run that is among the most brilliant and improbable comebacks in baseball history, this team has made clear they will fight to the finish. In the bottom of the tenth, with two outs and two strikes on Lance Berkman, the Rangers again one pitch away from a championship, Berkman hit a sinking line drive into the outfield to bring in the tying run, again. So, when Freese led off the bottom of the eleventh and hit a soaring 429-foot home run into the grassy knoll beyond the center field fence to win Game 6 in dramatic, walk-off fashion, it seemed almost inevitable, the forces of destiny having officially descended upon the Cardinals faithful.

“One of the great mysteries of sports is why some teams win and others lose,” writes Tyler Kepner of The New York Times. “Is it talent? Fate? Character? Karma?” The Cardinals seemed to have all of these things this year, although it did not seem that way in Spring Training when ace pitcher Adam Wainwright was injured and lost for the season, or when 17 key players at one time or another wound up on the disabled list throughout the first four months.

This may not be the most talented Cardinals team in my lifetime, but it may be the most memorable. The Cardinals were at times exasperating this year, blowing more saves than every other team in baseball except the Washington Nationals, and setting a National League record for grounding into the most double plays in one season. And yet, there were moments in mid-September that you sensed the possibilities. The Braves were slipping, descending into mediocrity, or worse, just when the Cardinals were putting it all together. When the Cardinals took three-out-of-four from the Phillies at Citizens Bank Park in mid-September, destiny became a possibility. And then, when the Phillies swept the Braves in the final three games of the season, the Cardinals also needing to win on that final day to even have a chance at the playoffs, there was a sense that the Gods of Baseball were believers themselves.

The rest is history now. After losing the opening playoff game to Roy Halladay, and down 4-0 in Game 2 of the League Division Series against Cliff Lee, who until then had a 72-1 career record in games in which his team led by four runs or more, the Cardinals came from behind to win, and then won two of the next three to upset the powerful and highly-favored Philadelphia team, beating them on their home turf in the fifth and final game. They were not supposed to beat the Milawaukee Brewers in the League Championship Series either, and when they lost Game 1 in Milwaukee, it seemed like their magic had run out. But then they rallied to win four of the next five games against the team with the best home record in all of baseball, and another miracle was in the books.

This World Series was exceptional in part because each team was so evenly matched. Except for Game 3, when Albert Pujols hit three home runs and propelled the Cardinals to a 16-7 win, the outcome of each game seemed determined by luck and fate and plays decided by a matter of inches. If Yadier Molina’s throw to second on Ian Kinsler’s steal attempt in the ninth inning of Game 2 is a millisecond faster or four inches lower, Kinsler is out and the Rangers probably lose Game 2. If Nelson Cruz gets a better jump on David Freese’s line drive in the bottom of the ninth in Game 6, or if he stretches out just a few inches more, he probably catches the ball and the Rangers win the Series in six games. If God had been a Rangers fan, he would not have allowed a rainstorm on Wednesday night to postpone Game 6 until Thursday and make it possible for the Cardinals to start Chris Carpenter on three days’ rest in Game 7.

I cannot remember how many times this season, down the stretch in September, and throughout the postseason, that the Cardinals were deemed all but finished. But then Friday night in Game 7, when Jason Motte retired the final Rangers batter and the Cardinals jumped for joy, embracing each other like little kids who had just won a prize, the season finally came to a close with the Cardinals on top. “You gotta be a man to play baseball,” the great Roy Campanella once said, “but you gotta have a lot of little boy in you, too.” It has been tremendous fun to watch.

* * * *

As I look out my window this morning on our quiet tree-lined street in Jenkintown, Pennsylvania, the ground is covered with snow and ice, winter having come early this year. A cold, harsh chill has replaced the crisp October air and the leaves cling desperately to their branches as if caught unawares by the forces of nature. Baseball is over now and life goes on, the long season but a collage of memories as the images of this wild and magical season quickly blend into the tide of baseball history. The Cardinals will stick around for a couple of days and enjoy the moment. They will bask in the glow of victory on Sunday afternoon as they parade down the streets of St. Louis to thousands of cheering fans, forever grateful that, for one brief and glorious moment, they could forget about the struggles of everyday life and together experience a baseball miracle. The Cardinals players will then head home for the winter, to rest, reflect, and prepare for next season, when they will endeavor to repeat the illogical, beautiful, exasperating, routine zaniness that is baseball.

In a few days, as I begin my annual sabbatical from baseball, it will again be time to rake the leaves. Meanwhile, I will join the ranks of the lucky few who can sleep with the knowledge that their team has won the last game of the season. In a quiet moment, when I have time to reflect, I will replay in my mind this miraculous season to better understand just how close things really were to a completely different, less satisfying result. And I will be forever grateful to the Gods of Baseball who, this season at least, allowed an outcome that may only properly be explained by destiny and miracles.

Howling at the Moon and the Lost American Dream

2011-10-25T22:34:00.002-04:00

We are getting kicked out of our homes. We are forced to choose between groceries and rent. We are denied quality medical care. We are suffering from environmental pollution. We are working long hours for little pay and no rights, if we're working at all. We are getting nothing while the other 1 percent is getting everything. We are the 99 percent. – “We Are The 99 Percent” (http://wearethe99percent.tumblr.com)

Although I have never been entirely comfortable with street protests and Guerilla Theater, preferring instead the traditional tools of democracy, debate and persuasion to achieve a better world, I understand the need for them. On occasion, public demonstrations have changed the course of history. When in 1963 the late Rev. Fred Shuttlesworth organized a group of black students and clergymen in Birmingham, Alabama, to protest segregation, the ensuing photographs displaying the vicious attacks and fire hoses of Bull Connor shocked the nation’s conscience. More importantly, it awakened Americans to the injustices of racism and moved public opinion, eventually resulting in equal rights for all Americans. A few years later, when hundreds of thousands of Americans took to the streets to oppose the Vietnam War, a sitting president chose not to run for reelection and influential members of Congress began questioning U.S. involvement in an immoral war. More recently, protests in Tahrir Square in Cairo helped propel an Arab Spring that has toppled corrupt dictators in Egypt and Libya.

Viewed from the broad perspective of history, the Occupy Wall Street movement may prove ineffectual and less momentous. Its message is unclear and its solutions virtually non-existent. But I do believe the protesters are tapping into something real. A sense of frustration with the lost American dream, perhaps, or a feeling that the system is rigged against the middle class, that it is no longer enough to finish school and work hard to get ahead in America, and that the rules have changed. The economy has become a high-stakes casino where the lucky 1% (or even 5%) wins all the prizes, while the rest fight for the scraps. There is something not right with America right now. The reasons are most certainly complex and not entirely understood, but the notion that our political and business leaders have for too long ignored the plight and suffering of the average citizen resonates strongly.

As far as I can discern, the protestors that make up the Occupy Wall Street movement have no definable political demands, and the vague, open-ended character of their message is a bit frustrating. But the catchphrase We are the 99 percent has a plain-speaking directness that gives voice to the widening disparity between the richest Americans and everyone else, a level of inequality not seen since the Great Depression. Consider just some of these facts:

• The 400 wealthiest Americans today have a greater combined net worth than the bottom 150 million Americans (The New York Times).

• The top 1 percent of income earners has more accumulated wealth than the bottom 90 percent (The New York Times).

• To join the ranks of the top 1 percent requires a minimum annual income of $516,633 and an average net wealth of $14 million. By comparison, 50% of U.S. workers earned less than $26,364 in 2010 (The Washington Post; Social Security Administration).

• The average salary in the financial sector in New York City is $361,330, nearly six times what the average worker makes in all other private sector jobs in New York (The New York Times; New York State Comptroller).

• 25 of the 100 highest paid CEOs in the United States took home more pay than their companies paid in federal corporate income taxes (Institute of Policy Studies).

• The average CEO at publicly-traded corporations makes 350 times that of the average worker. Only thirty years ago, this disparity was 50-to-1. (Institute for Policy Studies).

• Adjusting for inflation, the average hourly earnings of American workers have not increased in 50 years (Institute for Policy Studies; Bureau of Labor Statistics).

• The United States ranks 93rd in the world in income inequality (Central Intelligence Agency, 2010).

It is hard not to question the morality of an economic system that so greatly rewards a small few while requiring all others to struggle in a survival-of-the-fittest, dog-eat-dog world. “Call it democracy, or call it democratic socialism,” said Martin Luther King, Jr., in 1968, “but there must be a better distribution of wealth within this country for all of God’s children.” As the Rev. Jim Wallis noted in Rediscovering Values: On Wall Street, Main Street and Your Street (Howard Books 2010), “The rules of the game seem to have worked for those who set the rules, but not for those who played by them.” America’s economic system, built on a foundation of profit-motive and self-interest, an economic model based historically on a pre-industrial, agrarian society, when too-big-to-fail financial institutions and multi-national conglomerates did not control the reins of power and wealth, has reached a point where the American dream is no longer accessible to the vast majority of participants. For the past thirty years, ever since the Reagan Revolution, Wallis states:

We were promised that as the rich got richer, the rest of the country would prosper as well. If we handed our finances and ultimately our lives over to those who knew the market the best, it would benefit us all. If we took the virtues of the market and made them the virtues of our lives, we, too, would experience boundless prosperity. Fulfillment would come if we could just trust the market enough to work for us…

“Left to themselves, economic forces do not work out for the best except perhaps for the powerful.” So wrote John Kenneth Galbraith in Economics and the Public Purpose (Houghton Mifflin 1973), the last installment of his classic trilogy that started with The Affluent Society (Houghton Mifflin 1958) and The New Industrial State (Houghton Mifflin 1967). A Harvard economist and public intellectual who served in the Office of Price Administration during World War II and as United States Ambassador to India in the Kennedy administration, Galbraith wrote eloquently and plainly about the practical effects of economic theory, explaining the workings of free market capitalism in the real world of global conglomerates, oligopolies, and a powerful financial sector. According to Galbraith, how economic systems perform and for whom are very much dependent upon a society’s distribution of power and wealth. A capitalist economy is in constant tension with our democratic ideals, for “the man who spends $70,000 in the course of a year speaks to the market with ten times as much authority on what is produced as does the man who disposes of but $7000.” Although power rests with the individual, “in the exercise of that power, some individuals are more equal than others.”

This is evident in the faces and stories of the many people who have joined the protestors in 150 cities throughout the country. As Anne-Marie Slaughter, Princeton professor of international affairs, told The New York Times, “Go to the Web site ‘We Are the 99 percent’ and you will see . . . page after page of testimonials from members of the middle class who took out mortgages to pay for education, took out mortgages to buy their houses . . . worked hard at the jobs they could find, and ended up . . . on the precipice of financial and social ruin.” It seems that the economic system we have relied upon for so long to provide stability and opportunity to all who are willing to play by the rules and work hard, has left behind all but a select few.

In 2010, corporate profits as a percentage of the economy exceeded $1.4 trillion, an all-time high, while wages as a percentage of the economy have dropped to an all-time low (source: St. Louis Federal Reserve). And yet, many companies continue to downsize, cutting costs (and people) to further increase profits. Meanwhile, unemployment hovers officially at above 9% and the real jobless rate (including those who have stopped looking for work and part-time employees in need of full-time work) stagnates at 17% of the workforce. Median family income has fallen 6.7 percent over the past two years, while executive compensation has reached near-historic levels.

Of course, ask a highly-paid corporate executive why companies reduce jobs even as profits soar and you will likely receive a carefully articulated, economically rational explanation. It is precisely why we cannot rely upon the private sector alone to solve the nation’s economic ills. And it is why an economic system in which the sole legal obligation of individual firms is to maximize profits, and which rewards short-term gain at the expense of long-term stability, is a flawed and unsustainable system.

When the richest 1 percent rake in money as if perpetual winners at a gambling table, while the wages and jobs available to working class Americans are cut; when a college education goes from something that almost any middle class family could afford 25 years ago to being a huge debt burden on the young; when the richest 5% of the country controls almost all of the nation’s wealth; and when both major political parties cater to corporate interests and the needs of their wealthy donors, it is understandable that people have taken to the streets.

But income inequality is only part of the story. Occupy Wall Street, as disorganized and ineffectual as it may be, has hit a vital nerve, because average citizens do not believe anyone speaks for them. They cannot afford K Street lobbyists or $25,000 plate fundraisers. They know that when extremely well compensated executives and investment bankers run their businesses into the ground, the politicians will come to their aid, while the average citizen who loses a job, or a home, or has his retirement fund decimated, is told to make do.

There was a time when Americans had an unshakable faith that their government stood ready to help in times of need. Under the New Deal, and later during the Great Society, the nation established the concept of economic security as a collective responsibility. Putting people to work and building and repairing the nation’s infrastructure became a governmental, community imperative. Enduring programs like Medicare and Social Security, which today serves 54 million Americans, has helped tens of millions of Americans avoid poverty. At a time when corporate pensions and job security have become quaint notions of a distant past, I am astounded that government programs which aid our most vulnerable citizens, which provide a fair shake for the middle class, and which put people to work, are under constant attack.

The Occupy Wall Street movement has hit a nerve because it encompasses the majority of Americans who feel left behind, ordinary people struggling with hard times and looking for answers. It is a movement of people who yearn to be heard, whose voices are calling out for a political and economic system that truly provides economic opportunity and fairness for all. They are the 99% who wish for a country where the government wisely spends tax revenue and works to create jobs; a country that takes care of working families; an economic system that values people and encourages corporations to invest in the American workforce, even at the expense of a small portion of profit. It is a movement that wishes to retain the American Dream that has all but vanished from our grasp.

Still Believing in Miracles

2011-10-02T14:01:00.003-04:00

I think it’s really good for baseball. It’s not so good for my stomach. – Terry Francona

“I hear you’re a Cardinals fan,” a co-worker said to me the other day, as I retrieved my morning coffee. A slightly disdainful glare penetrated his raised eyebrow. He looked none too pleased.

“Uh, yeah,” I replied, resisting the need to explain myself. “Yes, I am, in fact.” There, I said it, what’s it to you? “Who told you?” I asked. If you’re surrounded by assassins, the first thing you need to know is where the sharpshooters are positioned.

It is a part of life to which I have become accustomed, rooting for a team that plays 1,500 miles away in a city to which I have no physical or familial connection. I journey through life in a baseball diaspora, wandering through the streets of Philadelphia in a permanent state of isolation, an outsider, a fan in perpetual exile. It can be a lonely journey indeed.

The hometown faithful in Philadelphia have had much to cheer about these past five years, their baseball team the dominant force, along with the Bronx Bombers, in Major League Baseball. It is not something Phillies’ fans have experienced much in the past half century. Nevertheless, here we are. For the first time in 80 years, Philadelphia and St. Louis are meeting in the postseason (in 1931, the Cardinals defeated the Philadelphia Athletics in a best-of-seven World Series matchup), and the Phillies are the prohibitive favorites. They have one of the best starting rotations in recent baseball history, with Roy Halladay, Cliff Lee, Cole Hamels, and Roy Oswalt providing an excess of pitching talent that is the envy of every other team in the league. The Cardinals, by contrast, are lucky to be here, having overcome a 10 ½ game deficit in the Wild Card standings as of August 25th, surpassing the Atlanta Braves with a wild and wonderful September run and sneaking into the postseason with the help of a Braves late-season slide. It was a comeback of historic proportions in a season filled with monumental collapses and miraculous come-from-behind victories.

Four weeks ago, it appeared as if September would be uninspiring, merely a place setter until October baseball arrived, when the dominant teams could finally go head-to-head. But in baseball, as in life, expectations can easily be destroyed. Disappointment and despair once again hovered over the banks of the Charles River as the Red Sox faithful watched helplessly as their team lost 20 of its final 27 games, its lead steadily eroded by the advancing Tampa Bay Rays during the worst September downfall in baseball history. Boston’s playoff hopes still alive on the last game of the season, Red Sox closer Jonathan Papelbon was just one strike away from securing a 3-2 win over the Orioles. Then, in a flash, the Orioles ripped three consecutive hits, scoring two runs and beating the Sox 4-3. Three minutes later, Evan Longoria put the finishing touches on a 8-7 Rays victory with a walk-off home run in the bottom of the tenth against the Yankees, who just thirty minutes earlier had led 7-0 in the bottom of the eighth. It seems the Curse of the Bambino has not entirely vacated the spiritual descendants of Fenway Park.

Meanwhile, Cardinal Nation erupted in cheers as the Cardinals put the finishing touches on an 8-0 win in Houston, while the Braves, who had led the Cards by 8 ½ games on September 1st, were swept by the Phillies during the final three games, the last an extra-inning nail biter won by the Phillies in the 13th inning. The Braves had simply run out of gas.

In the movie Moneyball, Billy Beane, the Oakland A’s general manager played by Brad Pitt, downplays the importance of a winning record, because history “only remembers the guy who wins the last game of the season.” Winning a lot of games in the regular season is fine, but only one team is left standing at the end. Thus, my exuberance and delight on Wednesday night quickly turned to nervous anxiety on Thursday, as I began listening to Philadelphia sports commentators discuss how the Phillies would manhandle the Redbirds, and as co-workers and “friends” started saying things like, “Your boys are going down!” and less publishable dispensations.

I am a modest, quiet fan (this is a general observation that, unfortunately for those around me, does not apply at game time). I believe that if I brag or boast or predict certain victory, the Baseball Gods will punish me with vengeful retribution. So, I take the potshots and ribbing offered by Phillies fans in stride, waving them off with a gentle laugh and an indecipherable, “Well, yeah, we’ll see.” After all, isn’t it always better to come into a series as The Underdog, the team expected to lose? It relieves the pressure; no one expects you to win anyway.

The Cardinals were not even expected to be in the playoffs this year. They did it with a final month of inspired play and come-from-behind victories, clutch hitting and good pitching that defied what I had witnessed during the dog days of summer, when their play was, at times, abysmal, full of blown saves, running mistakes, and fielding errors at the most inopportune times. Somehow this bandaged group of over-the-hill has beens and unproven youngsters put it all together in September, just when the Braves fell apart. So, here we are. It is why I love baseball so much. David beats Goliath more than is statistically likely, and the slow, steady rhythm of three-hour games, filled with balls and strikes and foul tips, suddenly transforms into bottom of the ninth walk-off wins and come-from-behind miracles.

The Cardinals somehow succeeded this year, despite a slew of injuries to key players, including the loss of Adam Wainwright, their best pitcher and a 20-game winner in 2010, before Spring Training even started. They will have to compete now with a hobbling Rafael Furcal and an ailing Matt Holliday. The Phillies, naturally, are speaking confidently, noting how healthy they are as a team, with no injuries presently ailing their key players. Such is my luck, of course. But I am used to it. A life selflessly devoted to one baseball team is a life filled with failed expectations and disappointing finishes, the occasional moments of sheer exuberance making it all worthwhile.

But it is October now, and the team that plays the best baseball over the next three weeks will become the World Champions. As the Cardinals discovered in 2006, when they limped into the postseason with a mere 83 wins, once you get to this part of the season, miracles really can happen.

Last night, for a wonderful sixty minutes or so, it looked like 2006 could be happening all over again. Lance Berkman crushed a three-run homer off of Roy Halladay in the top of the first and Kyle Lohse set down the first eleven Phillies batters he faced. The Cards held a 3-1 lead into the sixth. But then it all fell apart, as the Phillies erupted for ten runs over three innings. Despite a late gasp from the Cards’ bats in the ninth, game one ended with an 11-6 drubbing by the Phils, my dream of a miracle deferred for another night.

Regardless of what happens from here, however, I will savor every moment of this desperate season and dream of a miracle. I will watch every pitch and second guess Tony La Russa’s managerial calls, get my hopes up when the Cardinals do well and wither in anger and disappointment when they fail. But mostly I will be doing what I have been doing for the past five decades, anticipating an extraordinary finish, trying to will a Cardinals victory against all odds, hoping that this is all part of a real-life fantasy, when the expectant dreams of youth overcome the rational anxieties of age. Until the Cardinals are forced to pack their bags and descend into the night, when my dreams of winning the last game of the season confronts the cold, dark winter, I will continue to believe in miracles.

A Day to Remember

2011-09-22T22:47:00.000-04:00

For we are not a nation that says, 'don't ask, don’t tell.' We are a nation that says, "Out of many, we are one." -- President Barack Obama.

On September 20, 2011, the federal law and U.S. military policy known as Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell was officially repealed. No longer must gay and lesbian military professionals be forced to lie about a fundamental aspect of their humanity to serve the country they love. Consistent with the ideals of America’s founding, these patriotic Americans who wish only to serve their country can now do so without fear of rejection and retribution stemming from an unfair and immoral law.

I do not know personally what it means to be gay any more than I know what it means to be black or female. But I do know that, as human beings with sexual needs and preferences, all of us, gay or straight, are what we are; our sexual orientation is not a matter of choice. It just is. I did not choose to be straight any more than I chose not to be gay. Sometime around the age of twelve I woke up and discovered that girls were not so bad after all, that they looked better and smelled better and that I was increasingly motivated by mysterious forces to want to be in their company. Talk to anyone who is gay and you will discover that things were not much different for them, except they were not permitted to openly discuss their feelings for fear of being bullied, ridiculed, or worse.

The discovery that one is gay in America often is accompanied by great internal struggle and resistance. According to a 2009 study by the Family Acceptance Project at San Francisco State University, adolescents rejected by their families for being gay are 8.4 times more likely to attempt suicide than their heterosexual peers. As writer Anne Morrow Lindbergh has noted, "The most exhausting thing in life is being insincere." Sexual identity is not a lifestyle preference, but a biologically driven fact of life, a concept so fundamental to the issue of gay rights that I continue to be confounded by the silliness of the opposition. And yet, walk into a conference of the Southern Baptist Convention in which war, poverty, guns, and equal rights for gays are on the agenda, and guess which one they are most passionately against.

In 1948, President Harry Truman issued an executive order to desegregate the armed forces, thus ending what until then had been a disgraceful contradiction of American ideals. Although Truman was not an enlightened man by today’s standards on matters of race, he nevertheless believed that any man who risked his life fighting for America’s freedoms was entitled to the dignity and respect afforded all soldiers; that men willing to die defending the Constitution were entitled to the same protections guaranteed by that Constitution. Sixty-three years later, it is difficult to imagine that we ever felt differently. Today, many of our most decorated soldiers and some of our finest officers and generals are African Americans. With the formal repeal of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, we can begin finally to apply the same principles of justice and equality to the many dedicated and committed gays and lesbians serving our country.

According to the Servicemembers Legal Defense Network, since 1993, when Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell became federal law (a political compromise agreed to after President Clinton was lambasted for attempting to do what is now the law of the land), more than 14,500 military personnel have been discharged simply because they are gay. The United States has refused to allow thousands of highly qualified men and women to serve, not because they did anything wrong, not because they were disloyal, insubordinate, or incompetent – indeed, most served with great distinction – but simply because it was discovered that God had created them in a manner deemed unworthy of military service. That they were attracted to, or in committed relationships with, a person of the same sex caused them to be discharged, in many instances, simply because they refused to lie about who they loved, or lived with, or with whom they engaged in private, consensual relations.

“When I was in the military they gave me a medal for killing two men and a discharge for loving one,” reads the epitaph on the tombstone of Leonard Matlovich, a Vietnam War veteran who received a Purple Heart and Bronze Star and who, in the 1970’s, became the first gay service member to fight the ban on gays in the military. The Army and Marine Corps take pride in teaching values such as loyalty, duty, honor, integrity, and courage. They appropriately expect their soldiers to live up to these values. Until the repeal of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, however, it was legally required that gay soldiers violate each one of these precepts. The U.S. military expected gay service members to be disloyal to their partners, dishonest with their superiors, and to suppress the personal courage needed to publicly lead lives of integrity.

Discrimination because of race, religion, ethnicity, gender and sexual orientation in almost all contexts is morally wrong and unjust. It also is counter-productive. Eighteen years of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell has negatively impacted military readiness and weakened the nation. Since 2003, at the very moment when the country desperately needed Arabic-speaking and other foreign language specialists in the war on terror, the military discharged over 300 Arabic and Farsi translators on suspicion of being gay. As the writer Ernest Gaines asked, “Why is it that, as a culture, we are more comfortable seeing two men holding guns than holding hands?”

I am confident that someday we will look back with disbelief on the time when a decorated and capable soldier could be court-martialed simply because he or she had admitted to being gay, or was found to be in a loving relationship with a person of the same gender. Someday perhaps we will express the same sense of dismay as we do now over the racist laws of the Jim Crow South, or the outdated notion that African Americans and women were not capable of effectively serving and defending their country. That the landmark repeal on September 20th came and went with limited fanfare suggests that we are headed in the right direction, that it is just a matter of time.

There will, of course, remain people settled in their narrow and limited mindsets, convinced by misapplied biblical texts or unscientific and disproven views of sexuality that the United States, by embracing acceptance and greater understanding, is a nation in decline. In a generation or two, most of these intolerant voices will be gone. By then, the military will have adjusted to the repeal of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell with little difficulty, and we will be a stronger country. As President Obama reminded us this week, “For more than two centuries, we have worked to extend America’s promise to all our citizens. Our armed forces have been both a mirror and a catalyst of that progress, and our troops, including gays and lesbians, have given their lives to defend the freedoms and liberties that we cherish as Americans.”

As we struggle with the many challenges and issues confronting the country; as we debate the proper means of countering the threat of terrorism and the merits of our continued presence in Afghanistan; as we seek political and economic solutions to increasing poverty and unemployment at home, we can as Americans at least be proud that, by ending the shameful legacy of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, we have appealed to the better angels of our nature and have upheld the founding ideals of our nation.

Mrs. Ellis and the Power of Teaching

2011-09-06T22:42:00.000-04:00

One looks back with appreciation to the brilliant teachers, but with gratitude to those who touched our human feelings. The curriculum is so much necessary material, but warmth is the vital element for the growing plant and for the soul of the child. -- Carl Jung

Walking along the Horsham bike path the other day, I admired the fullness of the tall, green stalks enveloping the corn fields, standing tall and upright as they reached for the heavens. For a few days last week, the air turned brisk and a cool breeze whisked in from the north, the distant white clouds gliding along the bright blue expanse of the horizon. As autumn beckons, when hot August nights traverse into cool September mornings, life feels fresh and new again. As I listened to the Hatboro-Horsham High School marching band practice in the distance, the drum cadences dictating a rhythmic precision, I was reminded again of life as a young man, before September became just another month, when the end of summer marked the start of a new school year.

Although the venues change and classmates come and go, the steady march of time passes through the generations as youthful endeavors forever recede into eternity. For nearly two decades now, September has promised my two daughters each a new beginning as well – new classes and teachers, new friends, and the hope for new experiences. As they enter their senior years, one in college, the other high school, the promise of a fresh start continues to endure and rejuvenate.

I still remember my first day of school in September 1964, my stainless steel lunchbox in hand as I waited nervously at the bus stop on the corner of Parry Drive and Cooper Avenue in Moorestown, New Jersey. Although I tried to appear brave, the butterflies in my stomach betrayed any sense of coolness as the mysteries of kindergarten awaited me a mile-and-a-half away. I survived, of course, and quickly adapted to the rhythm of school. I remember little else about that first year, though, other than half days filled with simple arithmetic, snack time, recreation time, and nap time. Kindergarten was but a weigh station to first and second grade, when the real work would begin, and life would be forever altered by the ability to read and a desire to learn.

Recently, I happened across a picture of my second grade class at South Valley Elementary School taken in the spring of 1967, when I was eight years old and possessed a devilish innocence that bespoke an eternal, if reticent optimism. Though the faces are familiar, I remember few names and can only wonder where my classmates are today, where the paths of life have taken them, how history and experience have affected them. Not surprisingly, the person I remember most vividly is my teacher, Mrs. Ellis. A kind, warm, African American woman of grace and stature, she taught us during the two formidable years of first and second grade. It was Mrs. Ellis who taught us to read, to multiply and divide, to follow directions, and to think for ourselves. She was one of the best teachers I have ever had, a dedicated public servant who represents everything that is good and decent about America and the value of education.

Mrs. Ellis understood instinctively the words of President John F. Kennedy, that education was “the means of developing our greatest abilities, because in each of us there is a private hope and dream which, fulfilled, can be translated into benefit for everyone and greater strength of the nation." Mrs. Ellis did not merely teach us to read and write, add and subtract – though these she did quite well – she developed our young minds and helped us mature and to feel valued as human beings. She inspired us to want to learn, to want to achieve, work hard, and improve our lives.

I especially appreciate a good teacher, because in the United States, at least, the teaching profession has always been undervalued. “Modern cynics and skeptics,” said President Kennedy, “see no harm in paying those to whom they entrust the minds of their children a smaller wage than is paid to those to whom they entrust the care of their plumbing.” A half-century later, little has changed. When a hedge fund manager makes more money in a week than a schoolteacher makes in a lifetime, there is something wrong with the world. Someday, when we are past our prime and looking back on life, when our children are older and beyond the need of a parent’s advice, it will not matter what kind of house we live in, or car we drive, or how many stock dividends we claim on our tax returns each year. What will matter is how we influenced the lives of others and whether we left the world a better place than when we entered. Mrs. Ellis has long since passed that test.

"It is not what is poured into a student that counts,” said Linda Conway, “but what is planted." Mrs. Ellis was the gardener of my early education, planting the seeds that helped make me what I am today. Her influence over my young and developing mind was real and magical. “I have come to believe that a great teacher is a great artist,” said John Steinbeck, “and that there are as few as there are any other great artists.” Mrs. Ellis was a true artist indeed.

I have been blessed with many outstanding teachers and professors in my lifetime, but Mrs. Ellis will always be special, for it was under her guidance I learned to read, to write, and to embark on a journey of the human mind and spirit. Today, when I read a good book or write something of substance, I think of Mrs. Ellis. Looking now at the above photograph (I am in the front row, fourth from the left), I am in awe of this group of naive, innocent, wide eyed children, full of life and dreams and limitless possibility. An all-white class taught by a positive, uplifting black woman, we were oblivious to the civil rights movement and not cognizant of the many inequities and injustices of life. And yet, fully enraptured by this vibrant, strong, kind woman who led, taught, molded, and cared for us as if we were her own children, we knew we were in good hands, secure in the knowledge that if we tried and failed, if we fell down along the way, Mrs. Ellis would be there to help us to our feet and to try again.

“None of us got where we are solely by pulling ourselves up by our bootstraps,” Thurgood Marshall once said. “We got here because somebody (a parent, a teacher . . . or a few nuns) bent down and helped us pick up our boots.” When we think back on the teachers and mentors of our lives, we especially appreciate the effective ones, those whose influence left a permanent mark. But it is the few who touched our humanity that we remember with deepest gratitude. Here’s to you, Mrs. Ellis, and to all the great teachers past and present.

Some Thoughts on Faith, Politics and the Christian Divide

2011-08-27T22:07:00.002-04:00

Conventional wisdom teaches that one should never discuss religion and politics in polite company. I have never quite understood this, as I believe human interaction is at its best when people are not afraid to reveal themselves, when we are open to civil discourse and healthy give-and-take on matters of substance. Besides, the weather has never been all that interesting to me. But perhaps this is why I am not invited to many dinner parties.

It is true that mixing faith and politics often results in confusion and misunderstanding. Secular liberals immediately suspect encroachment of the wall separating church and state, failing to distinguish the many varied avenues upon which people approach politics from a faith perspective. They often assume that the only people who mix politics with religion are members of the Christian Right, a group which unfortunately excels at shoving rigid, narrowly-defined views of morality down everyone’s throats. And yet, while conservative Christians have effectively mastered the art of mixing religion in the public square, in my experience, growing up as I did in a mainline protestant denomination, it was often conservatives who complained of “liberal” preachers crossing an invisible line. “Reverend,” the conservative critic would say, “just deal with God and the Bible and keep politics out of the pulpit.”

In reality, most people who complain of mixing religion with politics simply do not agree with the message. When liberal preachers threaten the status quo by speaking prophetically on issues of economic justice and the biblical mandate of caring for the least valued members of society, it can threaten a congregation’s way of life, challenging them in ways that might require a loss in power, money or status. As Robin Meyers, a United Church of Christ pastor, wrote in Saving Jesus from the Church (Harper One, 2009), “Not all preaching can be a healing balm. If we are true to the gospel, some of it will disturb, disorient, and even distress listeners.”

On the other hand, secularists and liberals often criticize conservative preachers when they attempt to influence public policy, however misguided (and biblically incorrect) their positions may be. My problem with the Religious Right is not that it engages in faith-based advocacy, for this is a healthy part of our democracy essential to a vibrant discourse in the public square. My problem is that these so-called Christian voices have a misguided view of Christianity; that what they claim as Christian values and principles are simply not consistent with the life and teachings of Jesus.

American culture and history is dominated by an ethos of individualism. It is perhaps our core cultural value, emphasizing individual rights, individual choice and individual responsibility. We seem to avoid public appeals to the common good, believing concepts of collective effort and community responsibility are threats to freedom. We take pride that we are a nation of “self-made” individuals, people who have succeeded through individual initiative and hard work. This culture of individualism, however, fully embraced by the Religious Right, is often used to legitimate a political and economic system that maximizes rewards for individual “success” and ignores those who are not “successful.” In this line of thinking, we all get what we deserve. The rich are blessed by God; the poor, not so much.

Although individual responsibility is important, as Marcus Borg points out in The Heart of Christianity (Harper San Francisco, 2003), “none of us is really self-made. We also are the product of many factors beyond our control. These include genetic inheritance, affecting both health and intelligence; the family into which we’re born and our upbringing; the quality of education we receive; and a whole host of ‘accidents’ along life’s way – good breaks and bad breaks.” To believe that we all get what we deserve, or that our individual success is entirely attributable to our hard work and effort, “is to ignore the web of relationships and circumstances that shape our lives.”

Understanding that political and economic systems deeply affect people’s lives is crucial to understanding the Bible’s passion for justice. This is what is often missed by many conservative Christians, who fail to see that the essential message of Jesus was that of justice, compassion, and God’s love for humanity. In the Gospel of Mark, the synoptic gospel authored closest to when Jesus actually lived, Jesus spoke of establishing the “Kingdom of God,” a concept full of political meaning. At the time Jesus lived, “kingdom” referred to the dominant political systems of the day, systems ruled by powerful and wealthy elites. The Kingdom of God stood in stark contrast to the Kingdom of Herod and the Kingdom of Caesar. And while the Kingdom of God had both political and religious significance, it is clear that Jesus was speaking about what life would be like if God’s justice replaced the systemic injustice of the kingdoms and domination systems that were then in control. It is why Jesus had so much to say about justice in the here and now, and why his focus was on the poor, the sick, the outcast; why he emphasized love of neighbor and God’s unconditional love for all of humanity.

This is a concept often overlooked by many Christians today, perhaps because, as Marcus Borg has noted, the author of Matthew changed the term “Kingdom of God” to “Kingdom of heaven.” As Matthew was the synoptic gospel most widely read in churches through the centuries, generations of Christians heard Jesus speaking of the Kingdom of heaven, naturally assuming that he was speaking of the afterlife, not about God’s kingdom on earth. This also may explain in part why, in my experience, many Christians, certainly many within the Lutheran tradition, believe that the role of the Church is simply to care for the “inner" life of its members, to save souls and lead its members in prayer and worship. Many of these same Christians believe that the Church should stay silent about the “outer” life and issues confronting society, issues of politics, justice, war and peace. But as Catholic theologian John Dominic Crossan has quipped, “Heaven’s in great shape; earth is where the problems are.”

The American Christian community consists of an extremely diverse group of people, practices, and beliefs; the same schisms that divide society apply as well to the Christian faith. The media has made a habit of focusing on the outspoken voices of the Christian Right. But I have been far more influenced by a more compassionate brand of Christian clergy, including those who played a leading role in the civil rights struggles of the 1950’s and 1960’s, and who would later lead resistance to the Vietnam War. It was preachers like Martin Luther King, Jr., Paul Moore, Jr., and William Sloane Coffin, among others, who spoke prophetically against racism, inequality, and injustice. While these pastors did not ignore the spiritual needs of their congregants, they were equally or more concerned with issues of justice. “A religion true to its nature must also be concerned about man’s social conditions,” said King. “Any religion that professes to be concerned with the souls of men and is not concerned with the slums that damn them, the economic conditions that strangle them, and the social conditions that cripple them is a dry-as-dust religion.”

Just as Jesus preached of the Kingdom of God here on earth, so, too, did King and Coffin and other activist preachers involve themselves in the here and now. These pastors realized that Christianity could be a force for good in the world – or a force for bad – depending upon how one viewed and applied Scripture. Their moral vision came straight from the life and teachings of Jesus, the historical, living, breathing Jesus portrayed in the Gospels, who led a ministry of service, healing, helping, liberation and forgiveness. Unfortunately, many Christians over the years have not shared this view of the Gospels, or have selectively chosen to ignore it.

As difficult as it is to believe today, there were a large number of “Christians” prior to the Civil War who contended that the Bible justified slavery. Of course, if one believed that the Bible was the inerrant word of God, it is almost understandable. After all, Leviticus 25:44-45; Ephesians 6:5-9; Colossians 3:22-25 and 4:1; Titus 2:9-10; 1 Peter 2:18-19; and 1 Corinthians 7:20-24, each on their face condone, or at least acquiesce in the existence of slavery. It was not until the summer of 1995, 132 years after the Emancipation Proclamation, that the Southern Baptist Convention, America’s largest protestant denomination, apologized for the role it had played in the biblical justification of slavery in the United States. The apology recognized implicitly that those who owned slaves, and those who approved of slavery and racism and segregation, were often self-professed “Christians” who attended Church every Sunday, said grace before every meal, and believed that the Bible justified their racist views.

Fortunately, there were many Christians who understood that the Bible was not always to be taken literally, that it must be understood in its proper context and interpreted in a manner that captures the essential message of God’s unconditional love for humanity. These Christians fought slavery and saw it as morally abhorrent and contrary to the Gospels. The issue of slavery in fact stimulated a major theological debate about the nature of Scripture and its interpretation, a dispute that continues to this day about how the Bible ought to be read, interpreted and applied. English evangelists John Wesley and George Whitfield, among others, argued that the biblical texts used to justify slavery had been overruled by the New Testament principles of love and justice as exemplified by the life and teachings of Jesus. This message of justice, ethics, mercy, and compassion, which was also articulated by the Hebrew prophets Isaiah, Jeremiah, Amos, and Micah, would form the basis for the antislavery movements of the 18th and 19th centuries.

The political battles in Washington and around the nation today make clear that there remain deep divisions between us, including on a spiritual level. The Christian Right continues to be dominated by biblical fundamentalists, who read the Bible unquestioningly, in a vacuum, outside of its historical and literary context. As a result, some on the right oppose the teaching of evolution in public schools, are skeptical of scientific findings on global warming, and oppose full and equal rights for gays and lesbians. Over the past few decades, the Religious Right has combined forces with the anti-tax and laissez-faire capitalist crowd, opposing any and all government policies aimed at lessening the burdens of poverty and unemployment, protecting the environment, or of providing universal access to health care. I am at a loss to identify a biblical mandate for a philosophy of individualism and self-interest. I certainly cannot reconcile such positions with the teachings of Jesus.

I understand, of course, that there may be no Christian answer to complicated matters of public policy, but there are certainly moral, ethical and spiritual values that should inform how Christians think about and address these questions. Much of Jesus’s ministry was about hands on service to those in need – healing the sick, clothing the naked, feeding the hungry. But underlying all of his teachings was the pursuit of an all-encompassing justice, that by bearing witness to God’s unconditional love for all of humanity, we may heal and repair a broken world.

For me, Christian advocacy involves giving voice to those on the fringes, the forgotten people who lack money and power, the starving populations of sub-Saharan Africa, the plight of the unemployed, the poor and homeless in our inner cities. It involves challenging the existing power structures, the government, corporations, the military-industrial complex, and the news media to correct injustices. If the Church does not speak prophetically on these matters, then what right does it have to speak with authority on personal issues of morality?

Many on the left and right of the political (and theological) spectrum are often blinded by ideological differences and pre-determined political leanings. How and in what manner we raise taxes, spend federal and state dollars, interact with other nations, protect the environment and grow the economy are complicated issues. Jesus may not have spoken to the precise issues we confront today, and the Bible may not address them precisely. But to Christians I would ask, in what manner does the essence of the Christian faith speak to these issues? Were not the life and teachings of Jesus intently focused on correcting injustice? Does not the Christian faith command its followers to reject complacency and attempt to change conditions for the better?

In her lifetime, Dorothy Day, a Catholic layperson, was considered one of the leading examples of contemporary Catholic activism. A pacifist and a tireless advocate for the poor, she was the founder of The Catholic Worker, a loose collection of houses of hospitality, communal farms, and newspapers that sought to reform society consistent with her vision of Christian justice and compassion. “Whatever I had read as a child about the saints had thrilled me,” Day once wrote, “I could see the nobility of giving one’s life for the sick, the maimed, the leper.” But even as a child, she asked, “Why was so much done in remedying the evil instead of avoiding it in the first place? . . . Where were the saints to try to change the social order, not just to minister to the slaves, but to do away with slavery?” For Day, her Christian faith demanded that she work to improve the lot of humankind.

What we would like to do is change the world – make it a little simpler for people to clothe and shelter themselves as God intended them to do. And by fighting for better conditions, by crying out unceasingly for the rights of the poor, of the destitute, we can to a certain extent change the world. We can throw our pebble in the pond and be confident that its ever-widening circle will reach around the world.

Perhaps President Obama put it best when reflecting personally on his faith in 2010: “[W]hat we can do, as flawed as we are, is still see God in other people, and do our best to help them find their own grace.”

The Forgotten Man: Remembering Curt Flood

2011-08-14T09:19:00.000-04:00

I’m a child of the sixties, I’m a man of the sixties. During that period of time this country was coming apart at the seams. We were in Southeast Asia. . . Good men were dying for America and for the Constitution. In the southern part of the United States we were marching for civil rights and Dr. King had been assassinated, and we lost the Kennedys. And to think that merely because I was a professional baseball player, I could ignore what was going on outside the walls of Busch Stadium. . . All of those rights that these great Americans were dying for, I didn’t have in my own profession. – Curt Flood

In the summer of 1967, when I was eight years old, baseball grabbed my soul and the St. Louis Cardinals captured my loyalty. Like any young boy with a love of the national pastime, I had my favorite players, Lou Brock, Bob Gibson, Curt Flood and Orlando Cepeda. These were the players I imitated in my backyard and whose box scores I checked each morning. The Cardinals were a colorful, exciting team in the late sixties, a racially mixed band of brothers who played together in America’s Heartland. Today, when people ask me how a kid from New Jersey who never lived within 1,500 miles of St. Louis became a lifelong Cardinals fan, I invariably explain that, long before anyone informed me that one was supposed to root for the home team, I fell in love with the birds on the bat, the bright red and white classic uniforms, which looked especially good on the speedy Brock, the agile Flood, the athletic Gibson, and the powerful Cepeda.

In the first week of October, at the start of the third grade, I rushed home from school each afternoon to watch the Cardinals play the Red Sox in the 1967 World Series. When Gibson recorded the final out in Game Seven and his teammates mobbed him on the field in celebration of a World Championship, I was forever hooked, permanently embedded in the soul of Cardinal Nation.

The next year, the Cardinals again dominated play in the National League and made it to the World Series for a second consecutive season. My passion for the game and my favorite team became more deeply entrenched. It was then that I took notice of Curt Flood. Although I did not yet realize it, history would mark Flood as the most interesting and complex of the men included among my favorite players.

A quiet, lesser known star, small in stature, only 5’7” and skinny, a fun player to watch, Flood combined speed and agility, a masterful glove, and a quick bat. Hitting behind Brock in the Cardinals lineup to form a speedy one-two leadoff punch that wreaked havoc on opposing teams, Flood batted .301 in 1968, the Year of the Pitcher, when the league average was a mere .236. But it was Flood’s defense that set him apart. He climbed outfield walls and robbed opposing players of home runs and extra base hits. He closed outfield gaps and chased down floating bloopers that fell for singles against less skillful center fielders. His outfield play resulted in seven consecutive Gold Glove awards and, before season’s end, Sports Illustrated deemed Flood “baseball’s best centerfielder.” Flood’s stellar performance that year helped lead the Cardinals to a second consecutive National League Championship. Ironically, it was Flood’s misplay of a fly ball in Game Seven of the 1968 World Series against the Detroit Tigers that led to the Cards’ defeat.

I remember coming home from school, anxiously anticipating the game and hopeful that the Cardinals would repeat as World Champions. Gibson was on the mound, pitching another of his post-season masterpieces, having retired 20 of the first 21 batters he faced. In the bottom of the seventh inning, with two outs and two on, the score tied 0-0, Gibson fired a strike to Jim Northrup, who smacked a line drive into center field, seemingly in Flood’s direction and a ball he normally tracks down easily. But on this October afternoon, the sure footed Flood misjudged the ball, moving a few steps in before realizing the ball was sailing over his head. He quickly changed direction, then lost his footing on the slippery turf (it had rained the night before), as the ball sailed past his outstretched arms and onto the warning track. Two runs scored as Northrup hustled into third base with a triple. Bill Freehan followed with a double and, just like that, the Cards trailed 3-0. Gibson allowed another run in the eighth and, despite a Mike Shannon home run in the bottom of the ninth, the Tigers went on to win the game 4-1 to become the new World Champions. I was devastated.

Afterwards, some Cardinals’ fans and members of the press blamed Flood for the loss. If only Flood had caught Northrup’s fly ball, they said, the game’s outcome would have been different. Asked after the game if he blamed Flood for the loss, Gibson said, “If Curt Flood can’t catch that ball, nobody can. I’m certainly not going to stand here and blame the best centerfielder in the business.” But baseball, like life, can be cruel to those who fail. Flood would later admit that he never really got over his misplay.

Socially and politically, 1968 was a pivotal year in American history, and it marked the start of my political consciousness. I became increasingly aware of the world around me – the raging war in Vietnam, images of American soldiers coming home in body bags, civil unrest on America’s campuses, the assassinations of King and Kennedy, riots in American cities, growing racial hostility, and a nation bitterly divided. America grew up in 1968 and would never again be the same.

As a young boy, baseball was a reprieve from the messy reality of everyday life, the pressures of school, of trying to fit in, of the anxieties of adolescence. The majestic cathedrals of diamond-shaped fields, of grass and dirt and symmetry, of hot dogs and Cracker Jack and men playing a boys game, provided an innocent escape and an oasis of solace in a fast-paced, ever changing world. Even today, a baseball game in the background or a night at the ballpark presents a reminder that not all of life’s challenges need be resolved immediately.

So, when at the end of the 1969 season, the Cardinals announced they had traded Curt Flood to the Philadelphia Phillies and he refused to go, a breach encumbered that invisible line of innocence dividing baseball and politics. My first reaction was disappointment, not that Flood refused the trade, but that the Cardinals would trade the league’s best centerfielder and one of my favorite players. I really did not understand Flood’s stand; I knew nothing of the reserve clause or the concept of free agency. All I knew was that one of my favorite players would no longer be on the Cardinals and might not even remain in baseball. It was all too much for me to absorb.

In fact, Flood rejected the trade and threatened to leave baseball for good rather than be forced against his will to play for a team that he did not want to join (at that time, Philadelphia had a reputation as a difficult city for a black player). He believed fundamentally that the inequities to the players in baseball’s reserve system, which essentially tied each player to one team for life to be released or traded at the owner’s discretion, were too great. As Flood wrote to Commissioner Bowie Kuhn when he refused to report to the Phillies, “After 12 years in the major leagues, I do not feel that I am a piece of property to be bought and sold irrespective of my wishes. . . . Any system that produces that result violates my basic rights as a citizen and is inconsistent with the laws of the United States.”

Flood sued Major League Baseball and challenged the reserve clause, contending it was illegal and made possible only by baseball’s exemption from the antitrust laws. This exemption applied to no other business or sport and was a relic of a Supreme Court decision authored by Oliver Wendell Holmes in 1922, which most legal experts believed was fundamentally illogical and flawed. But overturning a Supreme Court precedent is extremely difficult, and Flood was warned by his attorneys and by Marvin Miller, the head of the Major League Players’ Association, that he would likely lose his legal challenge and jeopardize his baseball career. As a 32 year-old ballplayer, among the best in the game and paid handsomely (he made $90,000 in 1969, well above the league average in those days and many times more than what the average American worker made), he had a lot to lose. But he felt that, even if unsuccessful, he could at least expose a system he believed morally corrupt.

Flood later acknowledged that the color of his skin made him especially sensitive to the inequalities of the reserve system, to which he had become increasingly aware during the second half of the 1960’s as rising black consciousness began to influence African Americans, including himself, across the country. But he insisted that his legal action was not motivated by race and that he was prepared to risk his career as a ballplayer on behalf of other players. “What I really want . . . is to give every ballplayer the chance to be a human being,” he told one reporter, “and to take advantage of the fact that we live in a free and democratic society.”

Flood publicly equated the reserve system to a form of slavery. “A well-paid slave is nonetheless a slave,” he said. For black ballplayers, the reserve system was a subtle reminder of what had been done to their grandparents and great grandparents. But it was difficult for most fans to feel great sympathy for Flood. He was ridiculed as a $90,000 a year slave. He quickly found himself alone, without a job and no longer playing the game he loved. Worse, he was a black man challenging America’s national pastime. He received hate mail spewed with racial epithets. But most disappointing to Flood was the fact that he received virtually no support from active players. Even Bob Gibson, Flood’s best friend and former roommate, remained publicly silent about Flood’s efforts. As Gibson acknowledged years later, “I had a career to protect and a family to support, and I wasn’t willing to risk all that.”

The personal toll on Flood was substantial. He ran out of money and lost his businesses. Embroiled in financial and legal troubles at home, he fled to Denmark. There, Flood found temporary solace and resumed painting (Flood was a talented artist), but for the first time in his life, he was a man without a country. He drank heavily and suffered from bouts of depression. He lost contact with his five children, and though he would try to re-connect with them later in life, the damage was done.

Back in the states, a federal judge rejected Flood’s legal challenge to baseball’s reserve clause and, while the case was pending appeal, Flood found himself in more legal trouble, as several lawsuits were filed against his failing businesses. The financial pressures proved too much. The next year, Flood relented and signed a contract with the Washington Senators. But the time away from baseball – he missed the entire 1970 season – and drinking, smoking, and womanizing had taken their toll. His skills had diminished substantially, and the damage was palpable. On April 27, 1971, just three weeks into the regular season, Flood retired from baseball for good. He wrote a note of apology to his teammates and, without any notice, boarded a plane for Spain.

Although the United States Supreme Court agreed to hear Flood’s case, on June 19, 1972, the Court ruled in baseball’s favor, refusing to overturn Justice Holmes decision of 50 years earlier. Flood had lost his fight with baseball.

Flood was a virtually forgotten man, living anonymously in Spain. He ran a pub called The Rustic Inn. Behind the bar were displayed one of his old bats and his baseball glove. In Spain, people did not know much about him and no one asked any questions. But he continued to drink and eventually ran into trouble with the Spanish authorities, abandoned his bar and moved to Andorra, where he worked as a carpet layer. He later moved to Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic before returning home to Oakland in 1976.

When Flood returned home, he found that baseball had changed dramatically. Through the efforts of Marvin Miller and the players’ union, the owners agreed to allow free agency for players with six or more years of playing time. By the time Flood returned to the United States, some players had been awarded million dollar contracts with multi-year deals and no-trade clauses. For the next two decades of Flood’s life, he observed other players benefit from the fruits of his sacrifice. The only person who had lost, it seemed, was Flood himself.

As a ten year-old boy, I did not fully appreciate or understand the significance or even the motivations of Flood’s refusal to be traded to the Phillies. I recall hearing talk that players should not be “owned” and forced to play for a team that they did not wish to play for, but I failed to understand that Flood’s stand was one of principle, influenced in part by the increased black consciousness of the Sixties and the civil rights era, the Black Power movement, and the principles of American democracy. A soulful, sensitive and intelligent man, he got along easily with most everyone and, like Martin Luther King Jr., whom Flood idolized, he judged every man and woman by the content of their character. But like most of the black players that made their way up the ranks of major league baseball in his era, Flood had experienced severe racism, especially in the mid-1950’s when he played for minor league teams throughout the south, where the black players were not allowed to stay in the same hotels, or eat at the same restaurants, as the white players. It was an unending list of humiliations and degradations that only a black man living in America under those circumstances could fully appreciate.

Had I been in Flood’s shoes in 1969, I would have taken the easy, non-confrontational route, like every other major league player. As a fan, I wish I could have seen Flood play baseball for a few more years in his early thirties. But I finally understand better why he felt it necessary to take this unpopular stand. As Marvin Miller told author Alex Belth in Stepping Up: The Story of Curt Flood and his fight for Baseball Player’s Rights (Persea Books, 2006), Flood was not only a superb ballplayer and great teammate, he was “someone who thought about social problems and about injustice and who was willing to sacrifice a great deal to try and change things.” He was “a genuine role model” and a man of “integrity.”

Like most men and women of history, Flood was personally flawed. He was a neglectful father, a poor husband, a failed businessman; he drank too much and found it easier to run to Europe to paint portraits at sidewalk cafes than face his problems at home. I can no longer view Curt Flood through the eyes of a ten year old boy, who thrilled at seeing Flood climb the outfield wall and rob an opposing player of a home run. With the benefit of history and five decades of life, I can now remember Flood as a great player who sacrificed some of his best years to correct a perceived injustice and as a man willing to give up everything, rightly or wrongly, to accomplish what he thought was fair and proper. In this respect, he was a rare man indeed.

Will America Remain a Good Society?

2011-07-30T11:48:00.001-04:00

Our country is in the midst of a clash between two competing moral visions, between those who believe in the common good, and those who believe individual good is the only good. A war has been declared on the poor, and it is a moral imperative that people of faith and conscience fight on the side of the most vulnerable. – Rev. Jim Wallis

I have been reluctant to write about the partisan bickering in Washington over the debt ceiling, if only to resist the urge to become overly cynical about our political process. But it is difficult. President Obama presented Republicans with a “Grand Bargain” that should have been embraced as every conservative’s dream – spending cuts of $4 trillion over ten years, an increase in the age of eligibility for Medicare, and other structural changes to the vast entitlement programs – but House Speaker John Boehner walked away. Boehner walked, I suspect, because he has a metaphorical gun to his head by the anti-tax, Tea Party radicals in Congress. Nevertheless, walk away he did, not because the spending cuts were insufficient, but because they would be achieved, in part, through very modest tax increases and the closing of loopholes on hedge fund managers, corporate jet owners, and companies that move offshore.

There once was a time when the Republicans would have embraced the President’s proposal as an opportunity to limit the size and scope of the federal government while also preventing a default of the nation’s obligations (see Where Have the Moderate Republicans Gone?). Led by the Tea Party, Republican refusal to compromise is a symptom of a much larger problem, a dysfunction in our political process. As David Brooks of The New York Times noted recently, the Republican Party no longer occupies the realm of normalcy, but has instead “been infected by a faction that is more of a psychological protest than a practical, governing alternative.” To the Tea Party radicals, compromise is weakness. They are the Hezbollah faction of American politics, suicide bombers willing to destroy themselves to destroy their opposition. Meanwhile the country is collateral damage. “The members of this movement do not accept the logic of compromise,” Brooks noted, “no matter how sweet the terms. If you ask them to raise taxes by an inch in order to cut government by a foot, they will say no. If you ask them to raise taxes by an inch to cut government by a yard, they will still say no.”

The Democrats in Congress are only slightly better. While the Republicans are acting like children, neither side is taking into account the people who always get left behind in these debates, the poor, the weak, and the vulnerable. Senator Harry Reid presented an alternative to Obama’s plan that contained deep cuts in spending and no revenue increases, but upon closer scrutiny it involved numerical smoke and mirrors and “fuzzy math” as one former President liked to say. Only the President seems to understand that anyone serious about reducing the debt and deficits must put forth a plan that contains a balance of real spending cuts and tax increases, but he appears unwilling to insist on this. Where is LBJ when you need him?

Where are the statesmen in the Republican Party? Where are the moral voices in the Democratic Party who used to fight for the most vulnerable in our society? Where are the voices of reason, the men and women who believe in the end that the good of the country outweighs partisan ideology? Even Ronald Reagan, the most right-wing President of my lifetime, raised the debt ceiling 18 times and raised taxes eleven times when he occupied the White House in the 1980’s. Were Reagan around today, I suspect the anti-tax mafia of the Republican Party would metaphorically instruct their underlings to “take him to the airport” and have him “swim with the fishes”; he would be politically excommunicated. Reagan knew that the debt ceiling debate was about the country fulfilling its obligations and paying its creditors, not a fight over tax policy and government programs. That is reserved for the budget debates. But the anti-tax fundamentalists are threatening to savage the already flickering economy and the country’s long-term interests to win a political game, to humiliate the President, and to force their ideology onto an American public that yearns only for America’s leaders to act responsibly.

Meanwhile, the nation’s unemployment rate hovers at 9.2%, while the real unemployment rate consisting of those who have given up on finding work and the severely under-employed, exceeds 16.2% of the workforce. Forgotten and ignored in the debt ceiling talks are “the people who come to my church’s front door every day,” writes the Rev. Jennifer Kottler, Associate Pastor of Park Avenue Christian Church in New York City, in this week’s Sojourners. She talks of the people hurting the most from our current economic structure.

It’s the guy I met last week who is trying to make ends meet with a $300 per week job (in New York City) with three kids and a wife, on parole, and at the end of his rope. He doesn’t need piecemeal charity; he needs an economic system that rewards hard work and allows him to work and provide for his family. He doesn’t want to end up back in prison, but he knows that he might go back to the underground economy so that he can feed his family. It was 104 degrees here last week, and he’s already thinking about his kids needing winter coats and boots and school supplies.

CNN has reported that one in five males in the United States presently fill the ranks of the unemployed. But the anti-tax radicals insist this is the time to shrink government and to let everyone fend for themselves.

What is really at stake, it seems, is a much larger, more crucial debate over the role of government in a good society. How do we maintain the greatness that is America while ensuring that we remain a decent, fair and compassionate country?

We live in a country that values freedom and rugged individualism. Born of a revolution, Americans achieved independence from colonial oppression, expanded westward and made their own way. We developed the frontier, survived a civil war, and won two world wars. Through it all, we allowed our citizens to dream and innovate, compete, and create enormous wealth. We have historically, through the unfettered engines of capitalism, free enterprise, and competition, combined with substantial government support and investment, produced the richest, most productive economy in the world’s history.

But fundamental to our economic system and the free flow of capital is a dark reality, one easily overlooked by the people who most benefit from our economic system. A market-based economy requires a certain level of inequality and unfairness to function efficiently and properly; it demands that some people be left to fend for themselves. A competitive economy, consisting of winners and losers, offers great wealth to some and a long, uphill struggle for others; it is a zero sum game with millions of people left behind. In business, the bottom line is king, a dictator with an army of accountants and financial wizards whose impersonal decisions affect the lives of employees and their families. When times are good, we can be a generous nation, taking care of the weak, the vulnerable, the poor, the sick, and the unemployed. But in times of peril, when we experience phases dominated by greed and intolerance, our society begins to look less friendly, less ideal.

Throughout the Twentieth Century, it had been the government’s proper role to narrow the gaps inherent in a profit-driven, market economy; to uplift the poor and to make certain that society remains, if not equal, at least fair and compassionate. Government is needed, in part, to do the things that private enterprise, left to its own devices, cannot or will not do: protect our air and water; ensure a safe food supply; educate our children; build and repair our roads and bridges; protect our country from foreign and domestic threats; enforce our laws fairly and equally; regulate our disputes and maintain a fair judicial system; protect consumers and oversee fair and competitive markets. Following the Great Depression and American victory in World War II, the United States enacted the Employment Act of 1946, which made full employment a national priority, in which it was understood government would play a significant role whenever the private sector fell short. Although we never achieved the ideals of the Great Society, we sought as much as possible a Good Society.

In their zeal to return the United States to a 19th century world where property and privilege dominated, the Tea Party has lost sight of the world in which we actually live. The countries that shape the 21st century will be those most adept at managing the private-public partnership needed to sustain infrastructure, energy sources, scientific and medical research, the environment, and the development and nurturing of human capital. The financial collapse of 2008 that led to the Great Recession, and the rapid advances of technology that continue to eliminate people and jobs, demand reforms of today’s hedge fund capitalism. If the Tea Party insists on imposing a 19th century form of capitalism onto the nation’s economy, it will only accelerate the country’s moral and economic decline.

In the current debate over the debt ceiling, concepts of justice, fairness, decency, and hope have been forfeited to the forces of power politics. The victims are the poor, the middle class, the millions of laid-off and underemployed Americans who have settled into a semi-permanent state of economic depression. Responsible leaders are not those who force a makeshift debt ceiling bill at the midnight hour designed only to delay another fundamental debate and to prevent an economic collapse. Responsible leaders sit down together and find ways to cut spending without damaging our economy and hurting our most vulnerable citizens; they agree on ways to raise new tax revenues to pay down our debt (which merely pays for past expenditures, including the Bush tax cuts and the unfunded wars in Iraq and Afghanistan), while maintaining those programs that benefit our people and our economy; and they find ways to maintain a fair and compassionate society, while at the same time reinvigorate economic growth and success.

Budgets are moral documents. They involve choices that reveal the kind of country we are and desire to be. Do we continue to lavish tax cuts on people who make more than $250,000 a year, or do we instead increase the top marginal rates by two percentage points to help fund defense, infrastructure, environmental protection, and food stamps for the elderly poor? Do we really need the new $2 billion fighter jet if it means cutting Head Start and early childhood nutrition programs? Should we allow unlimited mortgage-interest deductions on vacation homes if it means spending less on improvements to our highways and bridges? The answers cannot simply be to cut food stamps, or to stop protecting the environment, or to eliminate Head Start, or to ignore the nation’s transportation systems. The implications of such negligence are too painful; the consequences to the nation’s soul too severe.

It is in these difficult times when the moral fabric of our society is most tested. Anyone who claims that we should cut Medicare, food stamps, and education but will under no circumstances increase taxes, does not have a plan for America’s future. Anyone who believes that millionaire hedge fund managers and corporate jet owners should pay no more while the elderly, the poor, the environment, the nation’s infrastructure, our schools and the sick must do with less, are not serious about leading this nation and solving our problems. I am not yet ready to give up on the American Dream or the hope and vision of a Good Society. And I am willing to pay for it, individually and collectively, through a reasonable, progressive tax system. But if the anti-tax radicals of the Tea Party have their way, America as a nation will have lost its soul.

Thank You J.K. Rowling

2011-07-20T22:43:00.002-04:00

It is a curious thing, but perhaps those who are best suited to power are those who have never sought it. Those who have leadership thrust upon them, and take up the mantle because they must, and find to their own surprise that they wear it well. -- Albus Dumbledore

My two daughters attended the midnight premier of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part Two while visiting my parents in Asheville, North Carolina, last week. (The thought of attending the second or third showing at a normal hour later in the day was out of the question.) It was only fitting that they went together, for together they grew up, from pre-teens to teens to young adults, with the story’s main characters. As we reach the final chapter and approach the end of an era, I cannot help but feel a touch of sadness, as if my children have graduated to yet another phase of life and are now primed for adventures of their own making. The youthful anticipation for the next installment of the Book and the hopeful excitement over the next sequel to the Movie are but memories banished to the fragments of time.

J.K. Rowling’s magnificent creation will belong forever in the annals of world literature; the Hollywood versions, though of much less artistic merit, will linger as a cultural phenomenon for years to come. An epic adventure of a normal boy with an extraordinary destiny, Harry Potter is a tale of courage and honesty, conflict and prejudice, in which a young man’s passion for life overcomes the fear of death. It is a series destined to rival the historic classics of C.S. Lewis and J. R. Tolkien.

I watched my daughters grow up with the boy wizard and his friends, and I must now observe as they forge ahead without benefit of Harry’s shared anxieties and Dumbledore’s wise counsel. They developed and matured and came of age at nearly the same pace as Harry, Ron, and Hermione; they shared the same feelings of nervousness and anxiety, of laughter and love; the same hopes and fears of their newfound and, I am certain, lifelong friends. They cried when Dumbledore died in Book Six and they worried over whether (and how in the world) Harry, Ron, and Hermione would survive the dark forces brooding over Hogwarts and the wizarding world. I will miss the energy, enthusiasm, and passion they exerted over the fictional characters that inhabited the pages of these wonderful books. But I will remain forever grateful to J.K. Rowling for creating the Harry Potter series, for providing me a pathway into the adolescent lives and developing minds of my teenage daughters, a chance to connect with them in a way that many fathers of teenage girls never do.

I am grateful to J.K. Rowling as well because, in many ways, Harry Potter is the singularly most important reason my daughters developed a love of reading. In a day of Playstation II and Wii, YouTube and Facebook, when video games and the Internet dominate the cultural landscape, Rowling succeeded in getting millions of kids to read, and to continue reading. Prior to the age of eleven, Jenny had shown little interest in reading. But then she picked up a copy of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone and connected with Harry’s life in a way that only a sixth grader can. She empathized with Harry; related to his fears and anxieties when he first boarded the Hogwarts Express on his way to the Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry; understood his confusion and bewilderment at being the Chosen One; laughed at the awkwardness of Harry and Ron, especially with girls, and recognized the tensions which slowly developed between Harry and Ginny, and Ron and Hermione, feelings of jealousy, embarrassment, and missed opportunities that every teenager experiences at some point.

After the first book, Jen and, soon, younger sister Hannah anticipated the printing and release of each subsequent book, and then consumed every word. Jen read each book multiple times (and later listened to the audio readings by Jim Dale). They lived and learned with Harry about the world of wizardry and magical spells, the ups and downs of Hogwarts, the petty jealousies and resentments of its faculty and students, and the many people (good and bad) that Harry and company encounter along the way. Because of Harry Potter, today Jen is a prolific reader of fiction and nonfiction alike, having developed an interest in religion and philosophy that stems in part from the influence of the seven Harry Potter books. Hannah already was a reader before Rowling’s creations, but she shared Jen’s intense passion for the Potter adventures, which simply reaffirmed her love of books, literature, and the power of a good story.

From my vantage point as a father, Harry Potter allowed me to talk with my children about important things, about bravery and courage, integrity and ethics, justice and oppression. We talked as well about the conflicts and tensions that envelop love and friendship. We debated the goodness and badness of Snape and discussed issues such as prejudice (half-bloods, mud-bloods, pure-bloods), the forces of evil (Death Eaters, Voldemort), the significance of being the Chosen One (Harry Potter), and the perils of growing up, of trying to live the life of a normal teenager while confronting the obligations of a larger destiny; of the desire to snog with the opposite sex and compete in Quidditch matches, while having to battle the dark forces threatening to overtake all that was good and decent about the world in which they lived.

At its heart, Harry Potter is about the transforming power of love and its ability to conquer all, to overcome the fear of death, to be willing to sacrifice one’s own life for the sake of others. Once you get past the flying broomsticks, talking centaurs, Dementors and Death Eaters, wands and magic spells, Harry Potter is really a coming of age story of three good friends who, through chance and circumstance and history are bound together, destined for a life of consequence. From the moment they first met on the Hogwarts Express, they formed an unbreakable bond with their readers. We rooted for them to win at Quidditch and to thwart the despicable Malfoy. We worried for their safety and the welfare of the many good wizards who were at risk from the dark forces on the horizon. We attended their classes on Transfiguration and Charms, Potions and Muggle Studies, the History of Magic and the Defense Against the Dark Arts. We cared about them.

There is something truly magical in watching your children connect with literary characters that they really care about, to hear them talk and argue with their friends about the importance and significance of Dumbledore’s wand and whether Snape can be trusted; to genuinely worry over the fates of these imaginary figures. Perhaps it is better to concern oneself with reality, but while Harry Potter is a fantasy, the series successfully captures our imagination because it contends with real life issues of historical import, the age-old dramas of good versus evil, life and death, oppression and violence, and the threats to liberty posed by the forces of prejudice and revenge.

Along the way, like Harry, my daughters also found solace in the wisdom of Albus Dumbledore. “It does not do to dwell on dreams and forget to live,” he reminded Harry in The Sorcerer’s Stone. “The truth is a beautiful and terrible thing,” he noted on another occasion, “and should therefore be treated with caution.” After the traumatic death of Cedric and the return of Lord Voldemort in The Goblet of Fire, Dumbledore warns the students at Hogwarts that “[d]ark times lie ahead of us and there will be a time when we must choose between what is easy and what is right.” Dumbledore’s life lessons rival those of the wisest teacher.

The death of Dumbledore in Book Six was traumatic, but perhaps a valuable lesson to young hearts and minds. “It’s the unknown we fear when we look upon death and darkness,” Dumbledore advises Harry at one point in the story, “nothing more.” In The Prisoner of Azkaban, Dumbledore admonishes Harry, whose father was murdered by Voldemort when Harry was a baby, “You think the dead we loved ever truly leave us? You think that we don't recall them more clearly than ever in times of great trouble? Your father is alive in you, Harry, and shows himself plainly when you have need of him.” In the end, these truths may have helped Harry recognize that death itself was not something to be feared, that a greater force exists within each of us.

The world of Harry Potter has been an influential part of my daughter’s lives, encompassing more than half of Jen’s young life and nearly two-thirds of Hannah’s. Part of me does not want it all to end, for the end of Harry Potter means it is time to recognize that my daughters are now young adults, two young women ready to live and explore life on their own terms, that they are less in need of Dad’s advice and company. I know that, in many ways, this is a good thing, but I am reluctant to let go. Perhaps we will find a new author or a new story to share in the coming years, some new ground of mutual interest to provide a forum upon which we can talk about significant issues without even trying. But I am forever grateful to J.K. Rowling and the world she created.

For One Brief Shining Moment

2011-07-06T21:55:00.003-04:00

For forty-nine months between 1968 and 1972, two dozen Americans had the great good fortune to briefly visit the Moon. Half of us became the first emissaries from Earth to tread its dusty surface. We who did so were privileged to represent the hopes and dreams of all humanity. For mankind it was a giant leap for a species that evolved from the Stone Age to create sophisticated rockets and spacecraft that made a Moon landing possible. For one crowning moment, we were creatures of the cosmic ocean, an epoch that a thousand years hence may be seen as the signature of our century. – Edwin “Buzz” Aldrin, Jr.

On May 25, 1961, President John F. Kennedy stood before a joint session of Congress and committed the United States to landing a man on the Moon and returning him safely to Earth before the decade’s end. “No single space project in this period,” he suggested, “will be more impressive to mankind, or more important in the long-range exploration of space; and none will be so difficult or expensive to accomplish.” Kennedy’s vision of an American space program was necessitated by the Cold War and influenced by lofty ideals of public service and America’s can-do attitude. Although the initial reaction was one of skepticism and doubt, the American spirit prevailed. Kennedy’s bold vision unleashed American ingenuity and creativity and the Apollo space program was born.

Eight years later, on a warm summer evening, my family gathered in my Aunt Shirley’s house in Bath, Ohio, to watch the world’s first moon landing. We sat on the living room floor and surrounded the television set as we watched intently Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin become the first Americans, the first human beings, to walk on the surface of the Moon. It was an inspiring and uplifting event, one that allowed us to focus beyond ourselves and reflect upon the world’s common humanity. On that July evening in 1969, less than a decade after President Kennedy first challenged Americans to reach for the stars, the human race accomplished what was perhaps its greatest technological achievement.

It was a moment of faith and revelation; faith in the American spirit and the revelation of a profound truth born of increased perspective and understanding. President Nixon called the Apollo 11 mission the “greatest week in the history of the world since the Creation.” And yet, as magnificent an accomplishment as was the moon landing, “[M]ost significant,” wrote Norman Cousins, “was not that man set foot on the Moon but that they set eye on the Earth.” A photograph taken from the Lunar Module, shown above, continues to remind us of humanity’s shared destiny and allows the world to see itself from afar, to place the universe in its proper perspective, and to look homeward. It increases our awareness of the uniqueness of life, permitting us to view the Earth as a rare and beautiful light that must be protected and cared for. Although less appreciated today, the photograph helps us better understand that we are but a tiny oasis of life in a vast and overwhelming universe.

Neil Armstrong has recalled that, while standing on the Moon’s surface, “It suddenly struck me that that tiny pea, pretty and blue, was the Earth. I put [up] my thumb and shut one eye, and my thumb blotted out the planet Earth. I didn’t feel like a giant. I felt very, very small.” Frank Borman, who orbited the Moon during the Apollo 8 mission, was fascinated by the view of the Earth from 240,000 miles away. “Raging nationalistic interests, famines, wars, pestilence don’t show from that distance.”

I have often thought back on that magical moment when, as a ten year-old boy, the mystery of the universe unfolded before my eyes, when the possibility of peace and international understanding seemed real, the world a borderless mass of humanity temporarily united in a common endeavor. For at least a few minutes on that July day, young children the world over, of every race and nationality, briefly stopped what they were doing to look up at the moon. For one brief shining moment, Russians and Americans forgot about the Cold War; blacks and whites set aside their prejudices; Catholics and Protestants prayed to the same God; and Arabs and Jews together wondered about their place in the universe. “The eyes of the world now look into space,” said President Kennedy at Rice University in 1962, “to the Moon and to the planets beyond, and we have vowed that we shall not see it governed by a hostile flag of conquest, but by a banner of freedom and peace.”

As an American, I felt a sense of national pride that day which has rarely been replicated since. It was a time when anything seemed possible, when peace and harmony momentarily triumphed, when divisiveness over the Vietnam War and the generation gap, racial tensions and immigration, drugs and crime were temporarily set aside. Only a year earlier, we had experienced the murders of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert Kennedy and our nation’s cities erupted in violence; young men were coming home in body bags and our leaders were caught in the lies and miscalculations that rendered a formerly obedient nation cynical and rebellious. On that July evening in 1969, when we looked up at the Moon, the future appeared bright and hopeful, the conflicts, bloodshed, and sectarian violence then enveloping the globe temporarily forgotten.

As Buzz Aldrin told a joint session of Congress in September 1969, the mission to the Moon “should give all of us hope and inspiration to overcome some of the more difficult problems here on earth. The Apollo lesson is that national goals can be met where there is a strong enough will to do so.” Aldrin continued, “The first step on the Moon was a step toward our sister planets and ultimately toward the stars. ‘A small step for a man,’ was a statement of fact; ‘a giant leap for mankind’ [was] a hope for the future.”

Our nation will soon embark on its final Space Shuttle mission and the United States, facing an economic crisis at home and never ending military conflicts abroad, appears to no longer strive for supremacy in space. The President’s 2011 budget called for cancellation of the Constellation program, which had planned to once again send men (and women) to the Moon and, eventually, to Mars. Although President Obama is committed to exploring space, his plans call for increased involvement of private enterprise and international cooperation, with a shift in focus to international security, scientific responses to climate change, and the development of long-term missions that remain undefined. With concerns mounting over deficits and debt, the nation’s politicians appear to have ceded Kennedy’s vision of an American frontier in space to the budgetary axe. Perhaps it is the politically wise approach, but I cannot help but feel some sadness that there is something lacking and uninspired in this vision for the future, a defect in our national character.

I understand the need to reduce our deficit and trim the national debt, but for the past fifty years, space exploration has provided tangible benefits far in excess of our monetary expenditures. The space program is why we now have television satellite dishes, medical imaging devices, improved fire-resistant materials and smoke detectors, cordless power tools, and better shock-absorbing materials in helmets. It is why we have made so many advances in global positioning devices, food freeze-drying and preservation processes, and communication and weather satellites.

Aside from practical advances, however, there are many intangible reasons to explore space with a sense of national purpose and zeal. We need the stars and the Moon, a sense of higher purpose, a chance to reflect beyond ourselves and our narrow parochial interests. We need on occasion to see the world from afar. In discussing the first voyage to the Moon, Aldrin explained, “This has been far more than three men on a mission to the Moon; more still than the efforts of a government and industry team; more, even than the efforts of one nation.” The lunar voyage “stands as a symbol of the insatiable curiosity of all mankind to explore the unknown.”

It costs a great deal of money to explore space, but great nations embrace bold visions and high ideals; they lead the way in scientific discovery and technological advancement. And they enable us to dream of limitless possibility, of shared destiny and a common purpose. “Mankind’s journey into space,” said Ronald Reagan in 1988, “will become part of our unending journey of liberation. In the limitless reaches of space, we will find liberation from tyranny, from scarcity, from ignorance and from war. We will find the means to protect this Earth and to nurture every human life, and to explore the universe. . . .This is our mission, this is our destiny.”

In The Once and Future King, the first of the King Arthur trilogy by T.H. White, the great magician teacher Merlin turned a young Arthur into a bird so that he could view the world from the sky. Arthur discovers that, from the air above, there are no boundaries below. He realizes that wars between nations erupt over borders that, in reality, do not exist. "When you see from a higher perspective, there are no boundaries, and so there’s no reason for fighting," affirms Merlin. Perhaps this is why we must continue to explore space and discover the universe – to learn Merlin’s lesson; to view the world from a higher perspective; to understand that the world in its beauty and creation is without boundaries; that we are but one people on a tiny planet in a vast universe.

Young Child with Dreams: The Enduring Power of Music

2011-06-26T22:17:00.000-04:00

Young child with dreams

Dream every dream on your own.

When children play

Seems like you end up alone.

(“Shilo” by Neil Diamond)

When I was a teenager growing up in suburban New Jersey, I often stayed up late on weekend nights, lying on our living room couch with a set of headphones, listening to my favorite music. I did not exactly share the musical tastes of my peers, many of whom strayed towards the sounds of heavy metal and whatever British invasion was then taking place on the shores of the Atlantic. I leaned instead to a more soulful, lyric-based, acoustic guitar, harmony-filled music. From Joni Mitchell and Carole King, to James Taylor and John Denver, my tastes were more gentle and emotional. Only my closest friends knew what I listened to on a regular basis. In the tentative and fragile life of a teenager, especially one concerned about his image, I was very careful to whom I disclosed my musical preferences, lest the other “cool” kids get wind of my secret life.

When during my senior year, my basketball team learned that I was to miss a practice during the first week of the season because I had tickets to see John Denver at the Spectrum in Philadelphia, it took the remainder of the season to live it down. Every time I entered the team bus following an away game, some wise-ass started singing “Thank God I’m a Country Boy” or “Sunshine on My Shoulders.” I really should have been more careful.

But my most secret and greatest musical passion in those days, what I completely related to, sang along with, imitated when I was alone in my house, was the music of Neil Diamond. I first discovered Diamond when I received a copy of Hot August Night, a double album that recorded his live performance at the Greek Theatre in Los Angeles in 1972, shortly before he took a 3 ½ year sabbatical from touring. A Jewish kid from Brooklyn who was a pre-med major at NYU before dropping out of college to pursue a songwriting career in Tin Pan Alley in the early 1960’s, by 1972 Diamond had become a world-renowned singer-songwriter and a uniquely talented concert entertainer, who performed with a sophisticated and rich musical backdrop of strings and drums, guitars and vocals, and who combined his performances with a mixture of jazzy, sequined-laced outfits and masculine charisma. He was a long-haired hippy on the cover of Hot August Night, but his performance on that album was soulful, emotional, and touching, and I was hooked. From Cherry Cherry and Solitary Man, to Soolaimon and Holly Holy, his music entered my soul and spoke to me in a way that no other artist before or since ever could.

Of course, I listened to all sorts of music back then, and still do. I love the music of Bob Dylan (everything he wrote in the sixties, plus Blood on the Tracks and Desire in the mid-1970’s); Bruce Springsteen became a favorite of mine in college, along with Steely Dan and Van Morrison; and for the past quarter century, I have grown to love traditional Irish music, Cajun music, some genres of Jazz, and string and flute-based compositions of Bach, Vivaldi, and the great European composers. But it was Neil Diamond more than anyone that played an instrumental part of my young life. His music spoke to me.

Until now, however, I have been careful not to reveal this fact to too many people. But this is a flaw in my character, not in Diamond’s music. He recently turned 70 and, while he remains a good performer, his voice is long past its prime and he has not produced an album to rival his early work in over 30 years. But the music of my youth, the sounds he created in the 1960’s and 1970’s, have remained with me like a true friend, someone you can turn to in times of need.

As explained by music critic David Wild of Rolling Stone magazine, Diamond's songs portray “a deep sense of isolation and an equal desire for connection. A yearning for home – and at the same time, the allure of greater freedom." Some of my favorite Diamond songs are his lesser known works, ones that speak to a deeper, almost spiritual place. In Captain Sunshine, which he would later sing in memory of his long-time friend and percussionist, Vince Charles, who died several years ago, Diamond sings of a man who “don’t take much, [who] don’t make much, but ah, to be such a man as he, and walk so pure between the earth and the sea.” In Lady Magdalene, another lesser known work, but among my all-time favorites, Diamond performs a soulful, eight-minute piano and violin ballad, in which he longs for “peaceful days before my youth has gone.”

Diamond’s music is, in many ways, unique and not easy to categorize; this is part of its appeal to me. To rock-and-rollers, Diamond is an outcast, yet his music is very much in the rock tradition. Anyone who has seen him in concert knows he rocks. And yet, only very recently did the Rock-and-Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland, Ohio, finally admit Diamond, one of the most successful and prolific songwriters and concert performers in music history, into its membership. Diamond has acknowledged that he doesn’t really fit in, another reason I like him so much. He’s not rock; he’s not country; he’s not Sinatra. As he told David Wild in He Is . . I Say (Da Capo Press, 2008), “I just do not fit in. . . . But I never tried to fit in, because that meant conforming what I could write or what I could do to a certain set of rules. . . . So I suppose you could say that I’ve always gone my own way.”

Diamond’s music is at times spiritual and emotional, contemplative and uplifting. Although Jewish by birth, Diamond is more spiritual than religious. He often references God in his songs in the context of universal love and acceptance. In The Good Lord Loves You, he sings of redemption and forgiveness “for the men in our prisons and jails; the junkies and juicers, and every good man who fails. For every outlaw whose got no place left to go, the good lord loves you.” In the more recent Man of God, Diamond sings, “I’m a man of God, though I never learned to pray; walked the pathways of the heart, found him there along the way.” There is an autobiographical bent to his music, which makes one feel as if, by listening to his songs, you have learned something about the man, that he really is “a frog who dreamed of being a king, and then became one.”

I learned a long time ago that there are two kinds of people on this earth: those who like Neil Diamond and those who don’t. As for the latter, I concur with David Wild: “While casting no aspersions whatsoever about their moral character, they are probably either utterly pretentious poseurs or totally vicious bastards.” But if asked on judgment day, I doubt there are many who will confess to really, truly, despising his music. It may not be one’s cup of tea, but hate it? Impossible.

As a teenage boy at Hightstown High School in the mid-1970’s who tried to be “Joe Cool” in so many ways, I failed miserably, as my long sideburns, unkempt hair, and John Travolta-like leisure suits now attest. And let’s face it, you simply could not be “hip” and be an admitted Diamond fan. To be hip, one needed to embrace the Grateful Dead, Jethro Tull, Led Zeppelin, Boston, or any number of more hard core rock bands. And yet, part of what I love about Neil Diamond is that he has always recognized that he is not perceived as the “hip” one, even though in reality, he was the coolest dude around. About his own fans, he has said admiringly, “They’re people who follow their own guts.” I simply did not care what other people listened to. While I was open to and appreciated different types and genres of music, I knew what moved me, what helped me to get through difficult times and enjoy the good times.

While everyone else boasted of their affections for the latest musical trends, that which was “in,” I stubbornly remained loyal to Neil Diamond and my other favorite singer-songwriters. To his many followers, there has always been something special, something deep and soulful and true in our connection to him, which comes forth in concert. When I first saw Diamond perform at the Spectrum in 1976, I was mesmerized. His concerts are like religious revivals; his performances are theatrical. In a sold out arena – and his concerts are almost always sold out – it is very common to see 20,000 people standing in unison, swaying and singing and clapping to Diamond’s every move.

Diamond’s songs embrace grand themes of transformation and escape, the search for meaning and for love. A Thoreau-like quality of solitude and quest for understanding have haunted and graced his work from the very beginning. And yet, when he sings about loneliness and isolation, he does so in a manner that inevitably and magically brings people together.

He is, at heart, a songwriter and a musician. When his musical peers emphasized harder, more electric sounds, Diamond added orchestral arrangements to his music. In Tap Root Manuscript in 1972, Diamond introduced African sounds and instruments to a mainstream audience. Featuring his “African Trilogy” and the rhythmic sounds of Soolaimon, his music embraced Third World soul long before Paul Simon and Graceland. There really is no other artist who sounds like Diamond or who writes like him. While his lyrics are not as clever and poetry-laced as that of Bob Dylan, and while he does not tell stories with the richness of a Bruce Springsteen or Harry Chapin, Diamond nevertheless writes and performs songs that emotionally and profoundly encompass the joys, sorrows, and rhythm of life.

He is, in concert, not merely a charismatic performer, but a true showman, the ultimate professional. While he has often been mocked for his sequin-laced and beaded shirts, it is something his fans have always appreciated. I once saw James Taylor in concert at Harvard Stadium in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Although I love Taylor’s music and voice, he appeared in a white tee-shirt (it was actually an undershirt) and faded blue jeans. I mean, I was dressed better than he was! It left the impression that he was not really interested in putting on a show, in providing his fans with their money’s worth. It was a nice concert, and I am glad I was there, but in hindsight, I could just as easily have listened to him on the radio. A Diamond concert, on the other hand, is an experience, as rich and theatrical as a Broadway show, with Diamond at the center, surrounded by brilliant musicians, strings, percussionists and conga players, pianos and organs. You get your money’s worth at a Diamond concert.

I have never met Neil Diamond, and I probably never will. But I am not alone among his fans in feeling like I know the man. I am reasonably confident that, if I ever did meet him, I would like him. I cannot say the same for Bob Dylan or Joni Mitchell, whose music I adore and fully acknowledge is, in many ways, deeper and more intellectual than that of Diamond. But while I admire their music, I cannot relate to them as human beings. With Diamond, however, one senses that, if you know his music, you know the man. Diamond’s music reaches my inner soul and extends to my youthful aspirations and dreams. And I like that Diamond has had the same band members for more than thirty years. “In a business with precious little loyalty,” writes David Wild, “Diamond has been fiercely dedicated to his band, and they to him.” His music “represents the very best and most solid kind of common ground.”

I believe that music has the power to heal and transform our lives, to change our moods, to comfort us when we are down and to uplift our spirits. Music can help us to know that we are not alone, that whatever we are feeling, there are others who understand, who feel and experience the same things we are feeling and experiencing. Neil Diamond, more than any other artist, helped me to maneuver and get through those difficult, awkward teen years. And, though I resort to him less nowadays, I know that his music will forever be a rock upon which I can turn, a place to soothe my soul and heal my spirit. And at 52, I can finally admit that in public.

Book Announcement: "Eat Bananas and Follow Your Heart" by Mark J. Ehlers

2011-06-16T22:02:00.004-04:00

From his inspirational and thought-provoking blog "Ehlers on Everything" comes a collection of interesting and touching essays on life, politics, baseball and religion by Mark J. Ehlers. Eat Bananas and Follow Your Heart: Essays on Life, Politics, Baseball and Religion is a book for anyone who believes that life is too short to remain uninvolved, time too precious to cease learning, thinking, caring, and laughing. -- Back Cover

I am not generally much of a self-promoter, but I am happy to announce that my book, Eat Bananas and Follow Your Heart (Bookstand Publishing, 2011), has just been published and is available at the following sites:

Bookstand Publishing

Barnes and Noble

Amazon

The book is a collection of many of the essays that I first posted on this blog from August 1, 2009, through December 31, 2010. My daughter, Jennifer, designed the book cover. She also took many of the photographs that are placed throughout the book. I hope that you will consider obtaining a copy and, more importantly, sharing my passion for the diversity of life and for the need to ponder and ask questions. For only if we allow ourselves to grow and to learn, to love and to laugh, can we truly say in the end, "We have lived."

The Ballplayer

2011-06-12T22:15:00.002-04:00

You will hear people say all the time that they don't want to live in the past. But I think that, more often than not, is a half-truth. Don't we all want to live at least a little bit in the past? Don't we all want to remember those moments when the sun was brightest, when the children were little, when the hole-in-one dropped, when we were the ninth caller to the radio station? Don't we all save the scribblings and trophies and photographs that remind us? – Joe Posnanski

Ever since he could remember, Jack Jablonski wanted to be a ballplayer. When he was seven years old, Jack played for the first time with a loose collection of neighborhood kids that hung out with his older brother at the local park. “Little Jack” they called him. He was the youngest boy on the field, a bumpy collage of grass and dirt with no fences or foul lines and old Frisbees as bases, but he held his own against boys three and four years his senior. When he hit his first line drive, he was hooked. Every day that summer, Jack couldn’t wait until the next game and the chance to develop and refine his newfound skills. From that moment forward, it was all he wanted to do, all he did do, it seems. Nothing else mattered. There was no other possible destiny. Jack Jablonski was a ballplayer. Period.

* * * *

Jack didn’t know which hurt more, his head or his pitching arm. He rubbed his eyes and looked over at the clock. The red light flashed 2:15, but the sun shining through the window shades betrayed any possibility that it was 2:15 a.m. Jack tried to get up, but the weight of his throbbing head forced him back on his pillow. Shooting pool last night at McGuffey’s Tavern, where aging ex-ballplayers from the Carolina League regularly held court, Jack had lost track of how many beers he had downed. Last night, though, he didn’t care. The six innings he pitched for the Lynchburg Hillcats earlier that night were likely his last. He had allowed three runs on only four hits, two bloops, a bunt, and a seeing-eye groundball, which combined with some ill-timed walks and shoddy defense resulted in a loss to the Kinston Indians, though Jack’s memory of the game faded long before his last drink.

As he lay motionless, staring at the ceiling, Jack thought about what his mother had asked him last Thanksgiving. “Jack, dear, have you thought about what you might do when you’re through with baseball? Maybe it’s time to settle down; find a nice girl and a steady job.” Before Jack could protest, his father offered, “Maybe I can get you a job selling paper supplies at Jim Mason’s company in Aberdeen. I hear the benefits are good.” Jack’s dad had been pushing a career with the Mason Paper Supply Company for the past five years, when Jack’s baseball career began a steady descent. His head still pounding, Jack was in no mood to think about his future. But he could not escape the cold reality of the night before.

Following the game, Charlie Howser, the Hillcats’ manager, called Jack into his office. Howser was seated in a large leather chair that seemed oddly placed in his sparsely furnished office; legs outstretched, his feet rested firmly on his steel desk. A small Budweiser calendar held up by a thumbtack and a framed picture of his wife and two children were the only other decorative touches. Howser lit a cigarette. “Good effort tonight, Jack,” he said in a gruff voice as he exhaled a stream of smoke. Jack glanced over at the “No Smoking” sign in the corner of the manager’s office, and then looked back at Howser. “Too bad we couldn’t give you a little support. I mean Christ, these kids today, you just can’t teach ’em how to field anymore. All they want to do is swing for the fences and pimp on ESPN. Gonzalez catches that little flare in the third and you’re home free. The little shit.”

“These things happen,” Jack said politely. He had pitched for too many teams over too many years not to know that, on any given night, the outcome has as much to do with luck as with how you perform. Over time, things even out, but some nights the ball has a way of finding the holes. To a pitcher, “Hit ‘em where they ain’t” is not a cliché, it’s a nightmare. Yeah, Jack had seen enough to know that much. “What’s up, Skip?” Jack knew Howser didn’t much care for small talk.

Howser looked at his cigarette and flicked some ashes onto the concrete floor amidst a pile of discarded sunflower seeds. “It seems the organization wants to make a change,” Howser said, his eyes focused on his fingernails.

It seems the organization wants to make a change. The kiss of death to a ballplayer. Jack had heard the words a lot these past few years, in places like Pawtucket, Rhode Island; Lakeland, Ohio; and Bismarck, South Dakota.

“What kind of change?” asked Jack, as if he didn’t already know, his face becoming slightly red.

“They’ve sent me your release papers,” Howser replied. He put the cigarette to his lips and exhaled another cloud of smoke. “I’m sorry, Jack.”

“Jesus Christ, Charlie, I just got here!” Jack picked up a paper clip from Howser’s desk and threw it at the wall. “Doesn’t sixteen years of pro ball mean anything?” Jack put his hands on his hips and shook his head. The room became silent. Howser once again inhaled his cigarette.

“Tell them to give me one more chance,” Jack insisted. “I threw the ball good tonight. A couple of breaks and I have a shutout. You said so, yourself.” He paced back and forth, gesturing and pleading. “I mean, you know I’m better than everyone in this league. Hell, I’m at least as good as three or four guys on the big league roster. Even now.”

Howser looked at the floor. “I’m sorry, Jack.”

“What am I supposed to do now, Charlie?” Jack knew his dream of one day pitching for the Baltimore Orioles – or any big league team that would have him – evaporated long ago. But baseball was in his blood. He was what they called a journeyman ballplayer. Worse really. He was a journeyman minor league ballplayer. Sixteen years in the minor leagues. Eighteen different cities. He had lived on modest salaries and $25 a day or less in meal money for as long as he could remember. He never signed a lease for longer than six months. He had forfeited too many deposits during his first six years in the minors to make that mistake again.

“Ah, who am I kidding,” Jack said resignedly, "I'm thirty-six and out of options." Jack looked over at Howser, who continued staring intently at his fingernails. “It’s over, isn’t it, Charlie?”

“Yeah, it’s over, Jack. Let me know if there’s anything I can do.”

Jack walked from Howser’s office and retrieved his belongings, which even after all these years consisted of little more than his two gloves, a pair of spikes, some extra socks, and a few magazines to pass the time. He said goodbye to some teammates and, on his way out, glanced one last time at the ball field before burying himself in a bottle.

* * * *

Jack forced himself from bed and went to the kitchen, where he mixed a concoction of orange juice and alka-seltzer. He was not prepared to think about his future. Outside of baseball, his only professed skill was spotting the inexpensive, but respectable restaurants in each new town. He refused to eat at the fast food joints and instinctively knew where to find homemade Italian cooking, a good Jewish deli, the occasional Mexican dive with char-grilled burritos, or an acceptable Chinese carry-out. The younger players were content to stuff themselves at McDonald’s and Burger King, but Jack prided himself on his culinary standards. That would do him little good now.

Jack understood his life wasn’t glamorous, but he had somehow managed to make a living playing a kid’s game. The smell of the grass, the feel of the raised seams on his fingers, the popping sound of a leather glove as his pitches landed in the webbing of the catcher’s mitt. He had played before small, rain soaked crowds of less than a dozen people in places like Mason City, Iowa, and before as many as 15,500 in a sold out Franklin Covey Field, when he pitched for the Salt Lake City Bees in the Pacific Coast League. That was as close as he ever made it to the bigs. Life seemed good then, playing for a Triple-A team, the elite of the minor leagues, one call away from The Show. But the call never came and, at the end of that year, his elbow sore and his velocity down, Jack was released.

He should have quit the game then and moved on, taken the job in Aberdeen and started his life anew. But he simply couldn’t let it go. For five more years, Jack refused to give up on baseball, even if it had given up on him. He played in Low-A ball, Independent Leagues, anywhere he could find a team willing to pay for an aging pitcher with a rubber arm, someone who could eat innings and take some pressure off the rest of the staff. But now the minor league clubs were giving up on him. It was time to hang it up.

He opened his refrigerator and pulled out the one remaining egg in the carton. He lit up the stove, cracked the egg on the outer edges of the frying pan, and watched as the raw yoke landed perfectly in the middle of the pan, slowly surrounded by egg white. It sizzled in the background as he picked up the phone and dialed home.

His mother answered. “Hi Mom. It’s Jack.”

“How’d the game go last night?”

“Not so well. We lost.” Jack instinctively wanted to add that he had pitched well, that his breaking balls were working, that his fastball had good movement, that he had just caught some bad breaks . . . but he figured there was no point.

“Sorry, honey. Well, you’ll get ‘em next time.” Jack’s mom always looked at the bright side.

“They let me go, Mom,” Jack said. “Tell Dad that maybe he should finally give me that number for Mr. Mason.”

* * * *

Jack spent the day packing his belongings and stuffing what he could into his used Pontiac. He drove that evening up Interstate-95 to his parents’ house in Abingdon, Maryland. He had decided he was finished with baseball. He had been living a distorted dream, a life based on fantasy. He needed to put some normalcy into his life. His mom was right. It was time to grow up. Maybe selling paper supplies wouldn’t be so bad.

When he arrived home, his parents greeted him like a returning war veteran. His dad grilled some steaks as Jack sat by the pool and sipped iced tea. The next morning, Jack put on a red tie and a dark suit, the only one he owned, and then left for the Mason Paper Supply Company. Jim Mason had been best friends with Jack’s dad in high school. Mason went off to college at Ohio State, but when his father died his senior year, he returned to Aberdeen to take over the family business. Jack greeted Mr. Mason and told him how much he had looked forward to the chance to work for him.

“I need a real go getter, Jack. The competition in this business is fierce.” Mason had a successful look. A sharp dresser, he always wore custom-tailored suits with starched shirts and bold ties. “I need you to travel the state and keep my customers happy. You can wine and dine ‘em. They’ll like the fact that you played ball. Tell them a few war stories and then close the deal.” Mason gave Jack a broad, teethy smile. “So what do you say, Jack?”

Jack looked at Mason and glanced around his office. So, this is what the real world looks like? Financial statements and stacks of paper lined Mason’s large, oval shaped glass desk. Pictures of his boat on the Chesapeake Bay filled the walls, mixed with some old plaques touting “Maryland’s Number One Paper Supply Company.”

“Sounds great, Mr. Mason,” Jack tried his best to sound enthusiastic, to not let on that he felt like a fish out of water, that the pit of his stomach felt a deep invisible force pressed against his gut. “I just need some time to get settled first.”

“Take as much time as you need, Jack. Congratulations!” Mason shook Jack’s hand and showed him to the door. “You’re making the right decision, Jack. There’s a good future for you here.”

Jack spent the next ten days getting settled into a new place. He bought an assortment of suits and dress shirts that he would need for his new job, his first real job. “In sales, first appearances are everything,” Mr. Mason had instructed him. He bought a subscription to The Wall Street Journal and learned everything he could about business and the paper supply industry.

Within about six months, Jack had achieved a reasonable degree of competence. He knew how to deal with people and, after all, paper supplies weren’t all that complicated. He did well. Mr. Mason was pleased and, in December of that year, Jack was paid a handsome bonus and offered a raise and a nice title – Assistant Vice President of Sales.

Ever since returning home, Jack had convinced himself that he was finished with baseball. He stayed away from ballparks and didn’t so much as watch the Orioles on television; he didn’t read the sports section, didn’t glance at the standings, and he made no effort to see how any of his former minor league clubs were faring. No, Jack Jablonski was through with baseball.

* * * *

It was early April and Jack had an appointment in Baltimore to meet with some potential clients, owners of a retail food store chain who were building their new headquarters near the Inner Harbor. They needed a good source of paper supplies but drove a hard bargain and would not take less than a major discount. Jim Mason had wanted Jack to schmooze them a little before he personally became involved in the negotiations.

For the past twenty months, Jack was making good money. He liked living in one place all year round. He bought a town home in a new development just outside of Aberdeen and, as his mother had hoped, he met a nice woman, an elementary school teacher from nearby Timonium. His life was good, stable, the classic middle-class American Dream. But Jack felt twinges of sadness, as if something was missing, though he couldn’t place the cause. Maybe he just needed a few days off, some time to reflect.

With time on his hands before his afternoon appointment, Jack felt the urge to drive past the local community college where he had played ball for two years after high school. It was here he was spotted by a pro scout eighteen years earlier, and where his professional baseball career had all started. It was funny, Jack thought to himself, but in the nearly two years since being back in Aberdeen, he had not once stopped by to see the old ball field, or to say hello to his old coach, Mike Yeager, the man who helped develop Jack into a pitcher good enough to play professionally.

Jack parked his car and walked past the science building, down a path leading to the baseball field. He was glad to see that it had been maintained nicely, its grass a dark green, evenly manicured, the infield dirt smooth and claylike. The foul lines were white, freshly placed. There must be a game today, he thought.

Jack looked at the field and the pitcher’s mound, the wide expanse of green in the outfield, and the sun reflecting off the dugout roofs. He breathed the spring air and the freshly cut grass and began to remember what baseball had meant to him, before the innocence of youth gave way to the cold reality of life. Aberdeen was the place where it all started, when Jack had discovered his love of baseball. On his eighth birthday, Jack’s father bought him a Rawlings Player Preferred leather glove with closed, flexible webbing, signed by Jim Palmer. To this day, it’s the only present he ever really cared about. Too big for his small left hand, his father had wrapped duck tape around his palm to keep the glove from sliding off. When he was old enough to play in junior little league, Jack stood apart from the other players. Gripping the ball with his index and middle fingers on the seams, he threw accurately and with extra zip, just enough to sting the hand of whoever caught it. He learned to play almost any position, but as a pitcher, he truly stood out. Early on, his coaches knew that Jack was something special. “He’s a ballplayer,” they exclaimed.

There was a reason Jack stayed in baseball for as long as he did. It wasn’t just about the dream of making it to the major leagues. The game is what he loved. He could try to ignore baseball and avoid talking about his life in the game; he could try to move in different directions, but the game would always be a part of his innermost soul. Standing here on a crisp Spring morning, the timelessness of baseball reflecting back at him, he realized that he would always love the game.

Jack removed his suit coat and walked out on the field and onto the pitcher’s mound. His tie swinging with the breeze, he stood with his right foot on the pitching rubber and looked to home plate for an imaginary sign from his imaginary catcher. He shook off the curveball, and waited for the next sign. The fastball, yeah that’s the one. Low and outside. He started into his windup and . . .

“Establish the fastball and keep them off balance,” shouted a distant voice. Startled, Jack looked over to the first base dugout, where he saw a smiling Mike Yeager sitting on the dugout bench with a notepad and a pen.

“Mr. Yeager,” Jack replied, “I was just checking out the field. Sorry, I didn’t see you.”

“You always were a fruitcake, Jablonski” Yeager blurted. He walked toward Jack and extended his hand. “How are you, Jack? I lost track of you after you were released by Salt Lake City.”

“I’m good, I guess, thanks,” Jack said in a less than convincing voice. He gave the coach an abbreviated history of the past ten years, telling him the ups and downs of his minor league journey. He had owed a lot to coach Yeager and was sorry that he had lost touch with him.

“What are you doing now?” Yeager asked.

“I’m finally giving the real world a try. I’m an Assistant Vice President of Sales at Mason’s, the paper company.”

“Oh yeah? Assistant Vice President, huh?” Yeager looked at Jack’s shirt and tie. “You come here to sell me some paper supplies?” He looked Jack in the eyes, as if to say I’ve got your number, Jablonski.

“Uh, no. No, I was just checking out the old ball field.” Jack was a touch embarrassed.

The two men stood together silently for a short while, looking out over the expanse of the empty ball field. There is something about a well manicured baseball field that lovers of the game find mesmerizing and soothing to the soul. Yeager finally broke the silence. “You ever thought about coaching, Jack?”

Jack thought for a second, and then replied, “I guess I never thought much about it. Until a few years ago, I still thought I might one day make it to the majors. Stupid, huh?” Jack let out a nervous laugh.

“You always were a stubborn son-of-a-bitch,” Yeager said with a grin. “But I liked that about you.”

The two men chatted for a few more minutes. Jack asked Yeager about this year’s crop of pitchers and how he prepares them for each game, what pitches they throw, how they work with their catchers and with each other. He showed Yeager the grip of his changeup, something he learned to master during his unusually long minor league career. They talked about pitching and defense, team chemistry, and other topics of the craft. Yeager was impressed with the depth of Jack’s knowledge, his clear love of the game. After a few more minutes, Yeager said he had to get back to his office and prepare for the upcoming game. He offered to walk Jack back to his car, but Jack said he wanted to stay back for a little while longer. They exchanged numbers and said they would get together again when they could chat longer. Jack waved to Yeager and wished him luck.

Yeager walked a few paces, then stopped and looked back. “You know, Jack,” he said, “I have an opening for a pitching coach. The pay’s not very good, but I could really use your help. You can even pitch batting practice, if you think you have anything left in the tank.” He glanced over to the dugouts, which were now empty, but would later be filled with fresh young players, more than a few of whom hoped to soon play professionally. Yeager knew that most would be disappointed. “And I think these young players would really listen to you.”

Jack looked at Yeager and felt a sudden and overwhelming rush of gratitude, as if a vision had just appeared to him, an opportunity to live life on his terms. Suppressing a tear, Jack told Yeager that he would think about it. They shook hands again and Yeager walked back to the admin building.

Jack stayed back for a few more minutes and looked out at the empty field. For the first time in a long time, he was home.

In Search of a Difficult Peace

2011-05-31T23:36:00.000-04:00

There is perhaps no nation that tugs at the heart, draws upon emotion, or is filled with such political and historical nuance as the State of Israel. Founded on a moral imperative just three years after millions of Jews perished in the gas ovens and concentration camps of Hitler’s Germany, the birth of Israel is an inspirational, heroic tale, involving an unprecedented culmination of political, cultural, and religious factors that continue to confound and intrigue the world. When in 1948 the British Mandate of Palestine ceded to official U.N. recognition, Israel became a haven to Jews from all over the world, embraced them as family, provided sanctuary, and built a national community of citizens devoted to a common cause.

Aided by the courageous, last-minute support of President Harry Truman, whose recognition of Israel’s provisional government went against the advice of his foreign policy team, most of whom favored the oil-rich Arab nations, and by American Jewish support, Israel and the United States formed a lasting bond that has remained strong through Israel’s 63-year history. It has not, however, been an easy history. Peaceful coexistence between Israel and its Arab neighbors has proved difficult; many of Israel’s citizens discovered early on that they had merely exchanged the insecurity of pre-War Europe for the insecurity of the Middle East.

Israel declared its independence on May 14, 1948. The next day, 23,000 Arab troops from Egypt, Jordan, Syria, Iraq, and Lebanon, lined the borders of the tiny new nation and sought its destruction. From its very founding, Israel has been surrounded by hostile forces intent on its annihilation. Virtually every decade of its existence, Israel has been forced to defend its very survival. It is a nation uniquely and existentially attuned to the constant risk of extinction and what it takes to survive. In 1967, when Nasser’s Egypt and the Arab Legion once again threatened Israel’s destruction, Israel in self-defense launched a pre-emptive strike, conquering the West Bank, East Jerusalem, the Golan Heights, Sinai, and the Gaza Strip. No longer content to be history’s victims, the Israel Defense Forces now ranks among the most capable military forces in the world.

It was Israel’s success in defending its borders during the Six-Day War that resulted in occupied territories and prompted U.N. Security Council Resolution 242, which called on Israel to withdraw to its pre-1967 borders in exchange for the normalization of relations with its Arab neighbors. Despite the PLO’s and other Arab states’ failure to officially acknowledge Israel’s right to exist, the smallest and most basic of concessions, Israel has gradually and willingly made peace whenever true compromise and sincere negotiation was in the offering. In 1979, Israel exchanged the Sinai Peninsula for peace with Egypt. In 1994, it ceded a large swath of land in exchange for official recognition by Jordan. Both agreements resulted in a stable, if narrow, peace among the nations involved. Peace with Syria has proved more difficult, notwithstanding Israel’s repeated offers to give up the Golan Heights in exchange for peace on its northern borders. Israel has had even less luck on its southern border, as its full and complete withdrawal from the Gaza Strip in 2005 has provided no peace in return, as Hamas continues to seek Israel’s complete and total destruction, firing missiles on Israeli villages and towns, and provoking Israeli reprisals.

There are times, it seems, that whatever Israel does, regardless of how many olive branches it offers, rockets continue to rain down on Israeli civilian targets. Hamas in the Gaza Strip, Hezbollah in southern Lebanon, and suicide bombers from the West Bank remain an ever present threat to Israel’s population. Israelis themselves are intensely divided between doves and hawks, between those who would willingly exchange land for peace and those who take a more hard-line approach. But all Israelis are united on the need to defend their country.

I understand that Israel is far from perfect, and there is considerable room for debate on how it should respond to the threats it faces. While Israel must be entitled to defend itself, its actions in the West Bank and East Jerusalem are more complicated. There, Israel’s actions, particularly under Netanyahu, have been counterproductive and resulted in unnecessary friction with the United States and Western Europe. The expansion of Jewish settlements in the West Bank and Arab East Jerusalem on the eve of planned peace talks and in violation of U.S. policy, has been unhelpful. And the building of a security fence along its eastern border, while providing a justifiable defense to suicide bombers, has encroached upon 7% of West Bank territory in order to include the largest settlements.

Why is peace in this land so elusive? Every U.S. administration for the past half century has made concerted efforts to broker peace between Israelis and Palestinians, with little to show for it. The Oslo Accords in 1993, when Yitzhak Rabin and Yasser Arafat shook hands on the White House lawn between the outstretched arms of Bill Clinton, accompanied the promise of peace; the PLO finally recognized Israel’s right to exist and Israel agreed to formation of an independent Palestinian Authority as a starting point for future peace negotiations. But peace has been fleeting. In 2000, in what should have been a turning point in the conflict, then Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak, in concert with President Clinton, offered Arafat a Palestinian state on 100 percent of the Gaza Strip and 95 percent of the West Bank, including sovereignty over half of Jerusalem and the surface area of the Temple Mount. Although it was the first time that Israel had ever offered to give up a portion of Jerusalem, and although the vast majority of Israeli settlements were set to be disbanded, Arafat and the Palestinians responded with a flat “no.” That the Palestinians might ever again receive such a generous offer is almost unimaginable, and yet, somehow, Israel is too often portrayed as the bad guy in this sordid affair.

It is true that history has not been kind to the Palestinians. Displaced upon Israel’s founding, then rejected and scorned by the very Arab nations which claim to be concerned with their welfare and political existence, the Palestinians have been deprived of statehood, suffered affronts to their dignity and experienced second-class status as their successive leaders have persistently rejected compromise and perpetuated their people’s suffering. President Obama understands and, to some extent, empathizes with the Palestinians’ predicament, which is why I believe he recently called for “bold action” and insisted to Prime Minister Netanyahu, and in a speech before AIPAC, that the starting point for peace negotiations must be the pre-1967 borders with “mutually agreed swaps.” Although the American press made much ado about the alleged rift between Obama and Netanyahu, Obama’s statement in fact was merely a continuation of U.S. policy and the public articulation of what has been the basis of virtually all peace talks between the respective parties.

The formula for peace is relatively easy to outline, which only serves to render the elusiveness of peace so frustrating. The only hope for peace in Palestine is a two-state solution that guarantees Israel’s security and officially acknowledges its right to exist among the world of nations, while uplifting and respecting the dignity and peoplehood of the Palestinians. Land for peace -- Israel’s withdrawal from the West Bank and the dismantling of settlements, including in East Jerusalem, in exchange for a demilitarized Palestinian state that officially recognizes Israel’s right to exist -- is precisely the formula required for a lasting peace.

It appears that Netanyahu and Obama do not fully trust each other, and that is a shame, really, for it is simply another pothole on the road to peace. Netanyahu is less willing than his predecessors to take a chance on peace, to lead Israel into courageous and bold action, to risk political disfavor among his Likud supporters, even as his party occupies a minority of seats in the Knesset. Unlike Rabin and Barak in the Clinton years, and Olmert in the Bush years, each of whom understood that the security and very existence of Israel demands that Israel take risks for a lasting peace, Netanyahu seems more interested in his political survival at home than his historical legacy as peacemaker. Israel cannot move forward until it fundamentally addresses the cruel reality that it continues to effectively rule over and occupy territory outside of its internationally recognized borders containing more than a million non-citizen residents, including families with children who want and need a country of their own. To absorb the population of the West Bank into Israel proper would be to compromise the democratic character of Israel, its Jewish nature, or both.

Of course, the Hamas-Fatah reconciliation further complicates matters, for as long as the dignity of the Palestinian people and their hope of independent statehood resides with the leaders of Hamas, peace will remain an empty promise. President Obama is right to call for bold action. He must, however, demand as much from the Palestinians as he does from the Israelis.

U.S. policy is and will remain, rightly so, pro-Israel. Israel is a staunch U.S. alley and strategic partner. It is the most democratic country in the Middle East. It generates more life-saving medical research than all of Europe combined. When natural and man-made tragedies happen around the world, whether in Haiti, Indonesia, Turkey, or anywhere else, Israel is among the first to respond in providing medical and technical aid. Because of Israel, Jews will never again be without sanctuary. But like his predecessors, President Obama must develop the capacity and credibility to push and prod and pressure both sides of the conflict, or he too will make little progress towards peace. Bold action is required if the vision of a peaceful world is ever to be attained. We must remain firmly committed to Israel’s safety and security, while continuing to push for the establishment of a legitimate, independent nation for the Palestinians.

I will always believe that the possibility of peace remains our best hope. I envision a world in which Palestinians and Israelis exchange currencies and commerce, and tour each other’s countries; where friendships develop and thrive across borders; where the boundaries are open and the fear of rocket fire and terrorism a thing of the past. Is it such an unrealistic dream? Perhaps, but I refuse to give up the possibility that the dream of a democratic Palestine living peacefully, side-by-side with a secure and democratic Israel will one day become reality. Let us hope that President Obama’s call for boldness and courage will not go unheeded, that pride and egos and power struggles will not again prevent meaningful progress in the quest for peace.

Coffee with Hertzberg

2011-05-21T22:51:00.001-04:00

Arthur Hertzberg (June 9, 1921 – April 17, 2006) was a rabbi, college professor, international scholar, writer, and political activist. Born in Poland, at the age of five his family immigrated to the United States, where he remained loyal to his traditions while embracing the American spirit. Raised as an Orthodox Jew in Baltimore, Maryland, Hertzberg strayed from his traditional upbringing to become a Conservative rabbi, though his love of Judaism and the Jewish texts remained the center of his life as a scholar, educator, and Jewish communal leader. I recently picked up a copy of his memoir at the Free Library of Philadelphia, A Jew in America: My Life and a People’s Struggle for Identity (Harper San Francisco 2002). Although I never met Rabbi Hertzberg and knew of him only from a distance, his writings inspired me to write the following fictional conversation, one that I imagine may have occurred in some form between Professor Hertzberg and many of the young people he taught and influenced over the course of six decades. Some of the quotes and comments attributed to Hertzberg below were adopted, literally in some instances and loosely in others, from A Jew in America.

The first time Mike Wilkerson encountered Professor Hertzberg outside of class was in the student lounge. He had sought sustenance in his afternoon cup of Joe before heading to the library, adding a touch of cream and heading for the exit, when he spotted the professor seated in a lounge chair and reading a copy of The New York Times. The professor looked in Mike’s direction and greeted him with a friendly nod. Sensing an invitation to conversation, Mike walked on over.

“Hi Professor,” he said. “Anything interesting in the news today?”

“Ah, Mr. Wilkerson,” the Professor replied. “Have a seat.” He glanced at the inside pages of The Times, frowned, and folded the paper in two, placing it next to him on his armrest. “All the usual stuff. War, famine, poverty, inequality.”

“Thanks for brightening up my day, Professor,” Mike said with a grin as he sipped on his coffee. “But I have enough problems on my own.”

“To compete with war and famine? These must be large problems.” The professor smiled. “So what’s on your mind, Mr. Wilkerson?”

“Well,” Mike hesitated, momentarily reflecting on the professor’s war and famine remark, “I’m having trouble making an important decision.” Mike took another sip of coffee and glanced at his shoelaces. “I have a good job offer from a large accounting firm and, well, I know I should be grateful and all, but . . . I’m just not sure. When I entered college four years ago, I was hoping that I could graduate with a decent job. But now, I’m not sure that’s enough. I don’t want to wake up in twenty years wondering if there was more to it than that.”

“You want to know what to do with your life,” the professor stated rhetorically. “How to make the most of the gifts God has bestowed on you?”

“Yes, precisely,” Mike replied hopefully.

“Welcome to America, my friend,” the professor said nonchalantly. “I can still remember the opening lecture in a course I took in American history my sophomore year at Johns Hopkins. The professor was discussing Frederick Jackson Turner and his thesis on the uniqueness of American society.”

Mike was not certain where this story was heading, or its relevance, but he was intrigued. Professor Hertzberg had a compelling presence. When he spoke, people listened. He possessed an air of authority.

The professor continued, “Turner pointed out that the early immigrants who came to the New World discovered they had a whole wilderness in front of them. Most had left their previous lives behind. When they arrived on the shores of America, they found they could reinvent themselves, begin life anew. You see, the men and women who came here lived on the frontier of Western civilization. If things went badly in Philadelphia, or New York, or Boston, they could pick up and move west, where the land was untamed and unspoiled. If the circumstances demanded, they could move still farther west, as far as the eye and the imagination could take them.” He gestured with outstretched arms and looked in both directions. “Americans were shaped by the frontier. We are a country of second chances.”

“That’s very interesting,” Mike said, “but. . . .”

“The point of this story is not Turner’s thesis,” the professor stated patiently, sensing Mike’s bewilderment, “but the question it raises.” He stared at Mike as if waiting for him to fill-in the blanks.

“I’m afraid I don’t know the question,” Mike said, somewhat embarrassed at his inability to match the professor’s gift of philosophical discourse.

“Ah, but I think you do,” the professor insisted. Mike looked at the professor and took another sip of his coffee, hoping a jolt of caffeine would inspire his brain. The professor continued, “It is the question that all of us must confront at some point in our lives.”

“I’m sure you're right, professor, but I’m still not sure of the question.”

“Well,” the professor said, “think of it this way. If a man comes to this country to reinvent himself, if he leaves his past and his heritage behind, as millions of American immigrants have done over the course of our history, by what compass does he steer?” He looked at Mike as if expecting an answer.

“By what compass does he steer?” Mike repeated the question to himself. “I guess that depends on a lot of things.”

“Precisely, and it is different for everyone. It all boils down to the values by which he chooses to live his life. How else to keep from turning in the wrong direction?”

“Yes, yes, exactly,” Mike said with some excitement. “But how does one find the answer?”

“I wish I could provide you with an answer, Mr. Wilkerson. However, I am just a lowly professor and rabbi. I can only ask the questions and insist that the questions be asked. If the last half century has taught me anything, however, it is that only a lucky few dare address these questions while they are still young. Most confront the meaningful questions only after the frustrations of life have beaten them down, often when it is too late.”

“But how do I find my compass?”

The professor smiled ever so slightly. “Aristotle taught that we dare not live the unexamined life. But I am afraid, Mr. Wilkerson, that there is no alternative to the difficult journey of questioning and self-questioning. The task of the inquiring mind is to ask all the questions, and to keep asking them.” The professor paused and looked around. “It is much easier to live by the accepted clichés and standards of the day, to not ask questions of ourselves. It is easier still to not upset others by raising questions. To go against the larger culture can be a lonely journey.”

“How so?” Mike asked.

“Take our common patriarch, Abraham. He was the first to break with idolatry, to insist that there is only one God. But when he came to this conviction, he was the only person in the world who believed this. He was alone, a man truly steering by his own compass.”

“OK. I think I understand,” Mike said. "But can I ask," he decided to turn the tables on the professor, “by what compass do you steer?”

“I thought you might ask me that, Mr. Wilkerson. Well, let me explain that, first and foremost, I am a Jew. It is the core of my identity. This hardly makes me unique, of course, but unlike many of my fellow American Jews, I do not consider myself a Jew because I like bagels and lox, or Borscht Belt humor, or because I occasionally speak a little Yiddish. My most serious act as a Jew is that I continue to study the historical literature of the Jewish people: the Torah, the Talmud, and the Tanach.”

“What is the Tanach?” Mike asked.

“The Hebrew Scriptures,” the professor replied, “Or, as some of you Christians like to call it, the Old Testament. But there is nothing old about it to me, you understand. No offense.”

“None taken,” Mike offered.

“It is the literature of my people, and it presents a set of ethical and moral precepts by which I measure my conduct each day, values and standards taught in these books. This is my compass. I have insisted all my life that being a Jew is rooted in the values that you affirm and not in the food you eat or the enemies that you fight. The prime teaching of the Jewish tradition is why I have spoken out on behalf of the poor, why I fought so passionately for the civil rights of blacks and minorities, why I opposed the Vietnam War. It is why I helped found the Peace Now movement and advocated, as a Zionist and lover of Israel, for the creation of a Palestinian state and for the rights of Palestinian refugees under Israeli occupation. My positions have not always been popular, but I am steered by my Jewish compass. It is my moral duty to be on the side of those who struggle for respect and dignity, even at the expense of some longstanding friendships.” The professor paused as if to further collect his thoughts.

“I’m not Jewish,” Mike offered. “I mean, does that matter?” Mike shook around his coffee cup to see if any steam was left.

The professor looked directly at Mike. “Of course not, Mr. Wilkerson. You need not be a Jew to contemplate these things. Perhaps your compass is in the teachings of Jesus or the writings of Paul. Perhaps it is in the inspiration of the great Prophets of the last half century, Martin Luther King, Gandhi, the Dalai Lama. There are many others.” He took a last sip of his coffee, which was undoubtedly getting cold. “It can be a lonely journey, but it is not an empty one. You must find your compass, Mr. Wilkerson and, like Abraham, lead your life by its guide.”

Mike suspected the professor was right, but he remained uncertain, paralyzed almost, of trusting his instincts and examining his values. Life’s demands and daily pressures too often stood in the way of a contemplative, morally pure life. Was he strong enough to live his life by the principles and values he holds dear? Was he all talk and no action? He would need to confront these questions for a long time to come.

Mike thanked the professor for his time and his thoughts, stood up and said goodbye. His journey had begun.

The Girl from Ohio: A Mother's Day Tribute

2011-05-07T23:04:00.001-04:00

A mother is the truest friend we have, when trials heavy and sudden, fall upon us; when adversity takes the place of prosperity; when friends who rejoice with us in our sunshine desert us; when trouble thickens around us, still will she cling to us, and endeavor by her kind precepts and counsels to dissipate the clouds of darkness, and cause peace to return to our hearts. – Washington Irving

Richard Nixon once said that his mother was a “saint.” On this point, at least, he may have told the truth. Even saints give birth to sinners. It is a sentiment shared by many sons, including me, about their mothers. But we are often reluctant to speak of our mothers in such sentimental terms. I am not trying to suggest that my mom is a saint in the ecclesiastical sense. In the movie Michael, John Travolta portrays an angel who protests, “I’m not THAT kind of angel.” My mother might also protest that she is not THAT kind of “saint,” but her life is surely a testament to the goodness of God’s creations.

Born and bred a country girl, Mom spent the first three years of her life in Parkersburg, West Virginia, then moved with her family to a large, white-pillared estate in Akron, Ohio, the place she called home the remainder of her childhood. But it was neither an ideal setting nor an ideal childhood. Her father was an attorney who made his money in construction and real estate, a conservative and serious man with traditional notions of gender roles and class structures. Although he never showed my mom much love or affection, she continues to hold firm to the notion that he tried his best. You see, my mom always sees the best in everyone and refuses to believe that some people can be simply self-absorbed or cruel.

When my mom was eight years old, she was sent to live in West Virginia with her Aunt Boe, her father’s sister, for part of the summer. She had fun there, but looked forward to returning home to her mother’s embrace. When she arrived home, however, her mother was not there. Annoyed at her questions - “Where’s Mom?” - her father deployed Norm, Mom’s 13 year-old brother, to inform her of the news. “Mom is no longer living with us,” Norm said, “Pop and Mom are getting divorced.” Her father never said one word about it nor concerned himself with the effect of this news on his daughter. Although unusual in those days, Mom remained with her father in the cold, formal house in Akron, only occasionally seeing her mother, until she could be sent away to boarding school. Never really understanding why it happened, Mom remained close to her mother and chose not to assign blame to anyone for this turn of events. Years later, it was my mom who took care of my grandmother when she was old, sick, and lacking financial means; and Mom was by her side the night she died.

For any young child, the news that your family is breaking apart is devastating, as it surely was for my mom. Yet, she always possessed a soulful, powerful sense of God’s presence. Anyone who does not believe in God should speak to my mother. Raised in a religiously indifferent family, her father rarely attended church and did nothing to encourage it. But from the time her parents divorced, Mom awoke every Sunday morning and walked alone to the local Presbyterian Church, where she attended Sunday school classes and worship services. When she returned home, she would find her father and two brothers asleep, or off to the racetrack, or attending to their more secular concerns. Looking back, Mom has said, “I really think God took me in my arms and held me. It is something I always felt.”

When Mom was thirteen, her father sent her away to Hathaway Brown, a select all-girls boarding school in Shaker Heights, Ohio, just outside of Cleveland. Her classmates came from some of the wealthiest and most accomplished families in Ohio. They were fast and sophisticated, far different from Mom, who remained in many ways the innocent country girl from West Virginia. Alone among her peers, she continued to attend church each Sunday – a prominent American Baptist church with an engaging pastor and innovative worship services. Many of her classmates would go on to attend some of the nation’s finest universities – Smith, Wellesley, Radcliffe and Barnard. As a straight-A student, Mom could have attended any of these schools, but my grandfather believed her education was sufficient at Hathaway Brown, which he perceived as a finishing school, a reflection of the times and of women’s role in society in the late 1940’s. Though she rarely contradicted her father’s decisions about her life, Mom had other ideas about college. There were no father-daughter college visits, but at least Grandpa accepted Mom’s ambition to attend college. Although she seriously considered all-girls Smith College in Massachusetts, she opted instead for the less pretentious, coeducational Wittenberg University in Springfield, Ohio, where she would eventually meet my dad and begin a new life.

Mom and Dad exchanged vows on September 1, 1951, and, nearly six decades later, they remain happily married, two people who share a love and devotion rarely seen in today’s fast-paced culture. That she has remained with my Dad for sixty years alone may qualify my mother for sainthood. I tease my father often that he “married up,” but he only laughs a little at this remark, for secretly he realizes just how true is the sentiment, and what a lucky man he has been.

Although a lesser person might well have despaired of the kind of childhood that my mother lived, separated from a loving mother, living with an uncaring father and sent away to boarding school. But the fact that she maintained such a deep and abiding faith explains a lot about my mom. It is, I believe, why she remains to this day secure in the face of life’s challenges and why her life is devoted to serving others: her family and her church, her former students, the PTA, a neighbor grieving over a lost relative, a homeless man on a street corner, anyone needing a helping hand. She is a woman of great empathy and compassion for others, almost to a fault, with little concern for self-recognition. Everyone who has ever met my mom has been swept away by her abundant optimism and sunny disposition. Whatever life throws her way, she can turn darkness into sunshine with an almost surreal energy.

My mother has always been compelled to serve. When I was growing up with my sister and brother in New Jersey, Mom took care of everyone and everything. She tended to our family in a way that is less appreciated in our current times, but was profoundly important in developing our family’s character and strength. She was always there for us and, even when she started work, first as a librarian and, later, as a school teacher, she always managed each night to have dinner on the table, to keep the house neat, to clean and fold the laundry. She fed and walked the dog, cleaned the dishes, chauffeured us to basketball practices and orchestra rehearsals, helped with our homework and still had time to prepare her lesson plans for the next day. When I played Little League, it was Mom with catcher’s mitt in hand, crouched down from forty-five feet away, who caught my formidable fastballs. She would never allow me to take something off my pitches to her, to treat her as a “girl,” for she was a solid athlete in her own right. At Hathaway Brown, she often reminded me, she was a star field hockey, basketball, and softball player, one who could keep up with her older brothers.

If that were not enough, Mom also faithfully fulfilled the role as a pastor’s wife and, later, “First Lady” of the New Jersey Lutheran Synod when my dad was its President. She hosted dinner parties on Saturday nights, attended both church services on Sunday mornings when my dad preached, helped with the coffee hour, and then volunteered for church activities during the week. She rarely said no to anyone, constantly overextending herself to serve as a Sunday school teacher and chairperson of the Lutheran women’s group. She coordinated a prayer chain one week, visited shut-ins the next, and made cookies for the Girl Scouts when she was not otherwise packing our lunches or folding our laundry or putting us to bed. Come to think of it, Dad, what the hell did you do?

“A mother is a person,” quipped Tennerva Jordan, “who seeing there are only four pieces of pie for five people, promptly announces she never did care for pie.” Self-sacrificing to a fault, there have been times that my mother’s excessive zeal to serve her family and others has caused me to become a touch exasperated. When we visit, even now, I will enter the kitchen in the morning and exclaim, “Don’t worry, Mom, I’ll make my own breakfast.” But I have to elbow her out of the way, as she insists on buttering my English muffin (“I don’t want butter”) or pouring my coffee (“I can do it myself”). If she would only listen to me, I painstakingly protest, I could go about my business and all would be well. But it is to no avail.

I know, I know. What’s a son to do? I feel guilty for insufficiently appreciating Mom’s unwavering efforts. Despite my exasperation, I know that Mom’s insistence on doing these things is an expression that she wants only the best for me and for all of us, that her love is infinite and endless. If she could, she would give us the world. Instead, she has attempted to serve the world. As a schoolteacher in the 1970’s, Mom taught scores of first-graders to read and, as the letters from her students attest, she greatly influenced and molded their young lives. Today, as a grandmother of six and the adopted grandmother of several young families in her neighborhood, she continues spreading to others a bright and shining love that perhaps, in today’s cynical and fast-paced world, only young children can fully appreciate.

“Most of all the other beautiful things in life come by twos and threes, by dozens and hundreds,” wrote Kate Douglas Wiggin. “Plenty of roses, stars, sunsets, rainbows, brothers and sisters, aunts and cousins, comrades and friends – but only one mother in the whole world.” There is a reason why mothers are special, for they bring us into this world, then watch over us as we try to find our way. In the end, for a special few, they remain true to their lifelong purpose, to make their children feel the unique love that only a “Mom” can dispense. And that is what makes a mother a “saint.”

Happy Mother’s Day, Mom!

The Swiftness of Youth and the Search for a Meaningful Life

2011-04-28T20:06:00.000-04:00

When I consider the short duration of my life, swallowed up in the eternity that lies before and after it, when I consider the little space I fill and I see, engulfed in the infinite immensity of spaces of which I am ignorant, and which know me not, I rest frightened, and astonished, for there is no reason why I should be here rather than there. Why now rather than then? Who has put me here? By whose order and direction have this place and time been ascribed to me? – Blaise Pascal

This past week, Hannah and I visited several colleges on our way to a family gathering in North Carolina. A high school junior in search of the right fit, Hannah began the week with a blank slate and few preconceived notions of what she is looking for in a college. Together we walked the campuses of some of America’s finest universities, combining urban and rural settings with modern landscapes and historic architecture that collectively formed a collage of physical beauty and academic excellence.

This is the second time around for me, Jennifer having left for Washington three years ago to pursue a double major in religious studies and graphic design at American University. It seems like only yesterday when the most significant decision was where to take Jenny for horseback riding lessons and whether Hannah should play travel soccer in the spring or fall; now, such quaint notions as horse shows and soccer matches on Saturday mornings are a distant memory, the passage of time marching forward ever so steadily. Although she turns 21 in September, I still picture Jenny at five years old helping me wash my car in Kensington, Maryland, holding a soapy sponge in one hand and gesturing with the other as she asked me how trees grow, the origin of grasshoppers, and other questions I could not answer. Only yesterday did I watch Hannah run through the pumpkin patches of a farm in Blue Bell, Pennsylvania, in search of the gourd with the right shade of orange, a pumpkin with just the right size and shape. Fifteen years later, Jen discusses with me her course selections and weekend travels to the south islands of New Zealand, where she presently studies abroad, while Hannah begins her journey into the gradual walk of adulthood and independence.

As Hannah and I sat through information sessions and tagged along on student-led tours, anxiety mixed with excitement, worry with hope for the future. The opportunities available to the youth of today are immense -- to study abroad, to experience different cultures, to design one’s curriculum through inter-disciplinary studies; the marriage of technology and academics in pristine settings, filled with the hope and optimism of youth, offers unlimited potential, there for the taking. I want Hannah to be happy and content in life, to find a college that will help her grow as a person and learn the skills needed to succeed in today’s world. But I worry that, at the “wrong” school, the competitive and social pressures of college will overwhelm her and not allow her to make the most of these unique years. As a parent, however, we often worry in vain, for in the words of Hodding Carter, Jr., “There are two lasting bequests we can give our children. One is roots. The other is wings.”

When I think back on my college years, I am filled with rich memories and feelings of grace. College was for me a time of social and intellectual growth. It expanded my mind and fed my soul. It is where I became an adult and developed an independent spirit, accumulating life-long friendships along the way. As Hannah and I admired the historic elegance of Georgetown and William & Mary, the beautiful landscapes of Duke and Davidson, the energy of American and the friendliness of Elon, I reflected, as well, on opportunities missed. "Twenty years from now,” Mark Twain once said, “you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn't do than by the ones you did do.” Thirty years after leaving the rolling hills and tree-Iined campus of Wittenberg University, I find this sentiment ever so true. I wish I had tried out for the college baseball team to extend my playing days by a few more years. I wish I had studied abroad, written for the college newspaper, taken more English and History classes. I wish. . . . Now, I can only hope that Hannah will have the foresight and confidence to take advantage of the many opportunities available to her, to make the most of what promises to be an eventful period in her young life.

I worry today about things I did not comprehend when I was younger. The safety and security of my children, their emotional well being, their ability to achieve financial independence and to find their niche in life; to be inspired to a life of meaning and purpose. “How can one meditate on life without meditating too on its brevity, its precariousness, its fragility?” asked French philosopher Andre Comte-Sponville. Four days together provided Hannah and me time to talk about the things that are important, about what to expect in college and in life, about our hopes for the future. At dinner one evening, my heart warmed when Hannah said, “I don’t need to make a lot of money. I just want to be happy.” Her heart and mind are in the right place. But we live in a competitive world with decreasing job opportunities. Life presses forward swiftly. It is important to find a good mentor and people in your life that will support you and believe in the power of your dreams and potential to achieve them. Finding the right balance between financial security and meaningful, life-affirming work is no easy task.

Love and friendship, art and nature, faith in God, these are the things that allow some of us to achieve true happiness and give meaning to our existence. But there is also the harshness of life, the thousand little humiliations one experiences along the way; inequality and injustice, the unfairness of an illness, the death of a loved one. They are the hidden demons ready to attack at inopportune and unexpected moments. In between the positive and negative times, in between the feelings of elation and the burdens of our pain, is when our lives are lived. In a world so often heartless and unforgiving, in which generations pass by in the blink of an eye, we can only try our best to create a life of meaning. Four years of college does not provide all of the answers, but for some it can help one find the right path in life, or at least figure out in which direction to proceed. The gift of learning, the study of literature and music, poetry and art, history and science, can help us develop the tools to find our purpose in life and our special place on this earth.

As Hannah and I looked upon the diverse and beautiful array of young faces on each campus, faces full of dreams and energy and hope for the future, it became apparent that each of us possesses unique and very individualized gifts. If my daughters can allow themselves to develop and explore their talents, some of which they may not yet be aware, they will be headed in the right direction, hopefully to a life filled with harmony and optimism, knowing that life has a purpose and that they have found theirs. “There may be trouble ahead,” said Irving Berlin, “But while there’s moonlight and music and love and romance, let’s face the music and dance.”

The Decline of American Justice and the Lessons of Nuremberg

2011-04-07T22:35:00.003-04:00

That four great nations, flushed with victory and stung with injury stay the hand of vengeance and voluntarily submit their captive enemies to the judgment of the law is one of the most significant tributes that Power ever has paid to Reason. . . . The real complaining party at your bar is Civilization. . . . [It] asks whether law is so laggard as to be utterly helpless to deal with crimes of this magnitude.
– Robert H. Jackson, Chief Prosecutor, Nuremberg Trials

In 1945, with the victory over Nazi Germany complete and the leading architects of the war in captivity, the Allies were powerfully tempted to impose vengeful retribution. Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau Jr. urged that all captured Nazi leaders be executed immediately. British Prime Minister Winston Churchill initially advocated a policy of summary execution, suggesting that Acts of Attainder would circumvent legal obstacles.

In the end, justice and the rule of law triumphed. Following a series of negotiations between the United States, Britain, France, and the Soviet Union, an international court was established in which to hold public trials of European war criminals charged with crimes against humanity. The first such trial commenced on November 20, 1945, before the International Military Tribunal in Nuremberg, Germany, as the world witnessed the 20th century’s most resolute attempt to achieve justice without vengeance. Those charged – 24 high-ranking German officials and dignitaries (two died before trial; one was tried in absentia) – were granted a presumption of innocence, legal counsel to assist in their defense, judicial objectivity, and procedural fairness. Over the course of ten months, the prosecution systematically presented evidence of German war crimes with full public disclosure of the European Holocaust. Eleven more trials were held over the next four years and, from 1945 – 1949, over a hundred defendants were charged and tried at Nuremberg.

The Nuremberg trials demonstrated with certainty that only when the rule of law is paramount can justice legitimately be achieved. “We will not ask you to convict these men on the testimony of their foes,” declared Supreme Court Justice Robert H. Jackson, who served as Chief Prosecutor at Nuremberg, in his opening statement. "The wrongs which we seek to condemn and punish have been so calculated, so malignant, and so devastating that civilization cannot tolerate their being ignored because it cannot survive their being repeated." The evidence of the defendants’ guilt in the first Nuremberg trial included 485 tons of diplomatic papers secreted in the Harz mountains, Hermann Goring’s art loot, Alfred Rosenberg’s hidden files, and Luftwaffe records that had been stashed in a salt mine. A German soldier’s home movie showed soldiers clubbing and kicking naked Jews. In one scene, naked women are forced into a ditch, then made to lie down as German soldiers, some smiling for the camera, shoot them. An American film documented the liberation of the concentration camps at Bergen-Belsen, Dachau, and Buchenwald; courtroom observers watched in horror the frightful images of skeletal survivors, stacks of cadavers, and bulldozers shoveling victims into mass graves.

The international panel of judges at Nuremberg established that there were certain crimes for which an accused could not defend on the basis of obedience to superiors; that there were some crimes so atrocious and so counter to the laws of humanity that individuals must be held personally responsible, even if their country had approved or required those actions. Eleven of the most despicable Nazis, including Hermann Goering, second in command to Hitler and the highest figure in the Nazi hierarchy to issue a written memo detailing “the complete solution to the Jewish question”; Wilhelm Frick, author of the Nuremberg Race Laws; Hans Frank, Governor-General of occupied Poland, nicknamed “the Jew Butcher of Cracow”; Ernst Kaltenbrunner, highest surviving SS leader; and Alfred Rosenberg, Minister of the Eastern Occupied Territories and racial theory ideologist, were adjudicated guilty and sentenced to death. Eight others were sentenced to lengthy prison terms.

Nuremberg has stood the test of time in part because the trial was not always smooth sailing for the prosecution – fair and contested trials rarely are – and though successful, the outcome was not pre-determined. The defendants were charged with a criminal conspiracy lasting 26 years (1919 – 1945), but the judges effectively limited their verdicts to hard evidence and held only 19 of 22 defendants guilty, and only for actual wartime crimes beginning September 1, 1939. The court’s rulings essentially eliminated close to one-third of the prosecution’s evidence. Three defendants were acquitted (each of whom were subsequently charged by German prosecutors with committing German war crimes). The overly expansive conspiracy and the prosecution’s heartfelt attempt at imposing a broad application of collective guilt were rejected. But the public nature of the trial and the permanent record it established has been open to examination ever since. The Nuremberg trials created a definitive and irrefutable record of the Holocaust and the atrocities committed during the reign of the Third Reich.

The triumph of Nuremberg stands in sharp contrast to the decision this week of Attorney General Eric Holder and President Obama, both of whom capitulated to congressional pressure and caved to the notion that there exist two classes of American law. In reversing its decision to try Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (KSM) in a U.S. District Court subject to the procedural protections afforded all criminal trials, the Obama administration has surrendered to fear mongering and to those who lack faith in American justice. All of the unpersuasive claims have prevailed – that open trials are too dangerous, too expensive, and too uncertain; that they will radicalize the enemy; that too many secrets will be spilled. By deciding to prosecute KSM in a military tribunal that lacks transparency and the basic evidentiary and procedural protections of the U.S. federal court system, the administration has backtracked on a principled and courageous stand that sought to uphold the Constitution and the rule of law.

The history of Guantanamo Bay and its secret military commissions attests a lack of confidence in the American system of justice. The presumption of innocence, the right to counsel, the right to confront adverse evidence – bedrock principles of evidentiary and procedural fairness upon which our constitutional republic was founded – have been compromised for the sake of a guaranteed outcome, guilt at all costs. The paramount concern at Gitmo, and in preventing KSM and others from being tried in civilian courts (for crimes that occur on U.S. soil against U.S. citizens), is to ensure that the alleged terrorists are indefinitely detained regardless of the nature and quality of evidence that may or may not exist in each individual case. It violates everything our democratic heritage stands for, an ironic rebuke of the very ideals that were attacked on 9/11.

We seem to be demanding a system of justice more akin to Alice in Wonderland:

“No, no!” said the Queen. “Sentence first – verdict afterwards."
“Stuff and nonsense!” said Alice loudly. “The idea of having the sentence first!”
“Hold your tongue!” said the Queen, turning purple.
“I won’t!” said Alice.
“Off with her head!” the Queen shouted at the top of her voice.

That an accused cannot be tried in an American court of law because there exists the possibility that, if given a fair trial, he or she might be acquitted, or convicted of a lesser charge – a possibility heightened in the case of the remaining Gitmo detainees, because some evidence against them is inherently unreliable and likely inadmissible, obtained as it was through torture and coercion – is anathema to American jurisprudence and our founding principles. There are presently 172 detainees remaining at Gitmo. What specifically have they done? What is the evidence against them? Your guess is as good as mine. It goes against everything this country stands for. If KSM is guilty of what we accuse him of, then we should not cower from granting him a public and fair trial, before a judge and a jury, and prove his culpability to a sufficient degree of certainty. While there may be cases in which a military-style tribunal is appropriate, for criminal acts of terrorism committed on U.S. shores, we must be true to our constitutional values or forever risk their permanent dilution.

Politics and the judiciary are a bad combination. By cutting off funding for the transfer of Gitmo detainees to federal prisons on the U.S. mainland, Congress has tied the administration’s hand (Republicans and Democrats are equally at fault here), leaving it with little room to maneuver. To sweep the most fundamental principles of justice under the rug simply because we have labeled the detainees terrorists, without requiring reliable proof and a fair and open proceeding, is an embarrassment to American notions of justice and decency.

The fact remains that an open and transparent system of justice is the best guarantor of a fair trial. At Gitmo, most of the detainees have been held without charge for several years, many denied the right to counsel and the right to know the nature of the evidence and charges against them. This is America? Absent a transparent judicial process, one is left to wonder whether there exists hard evidence against many of the remaining detainees.

As we learned from Nuremberg, the most effective means to undermine the extremists is to expose their crimes for the entire world to see, in a neutral and public setting. The Nuremberg trials were a classic case. Nothing more effectively educated the world to the evils of genocide than the trials of Goering, et al., at Nuremberg in 1945-1949, and of Adolph Eichmann, the bureaucrat who engineered the Holocaust, in Jerusalem in 1961. As The New York Times editorialized earlier this week, “How fitting it would have been to put the [9/11] plot’s architect on trial a few blocks from the site of the World Trade Center, to force him to submit to the justice of a dozen chosen New Yorkers, to demonstrate to the world that we will not allow fear of terrorism to alter our rule of law.” That the federal courts have successfully convicted hundreds of terrorists since 9/11, and that federal prisons safely hold over 350 convicted terrorists, apparently means little to the pandering politicians. But the President’s decision to backtrack on what had been a principled stand represents a missed opportunity to showcase American justice and prove to the world that we are not afraid of our Constitution; that even when victimized on our own shores, we remain willing and able to provide justice for all.

Remembering the Triangle Fire and the (Mixed) Legacy of the American Labor Movement

2011-03-27T15:45:00.001-04:00

Labor is prior to, and independent of, capital. Capital is only the fruit of labor, and could never have existed if labor had not first existed. Labor is the superior of capital, and deserves much the higher consideration. – Abraham Lincoln

This past Friday marked the 100th anniversary of the fire at the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory in New York City, when 146 workers died in a blaze that was, until September 11, 2001, the deadliest workplace tragedy in the city’s history. Most of the victims were young Jewish and Italian women, many with no choice but to jump to almost certain death or remain trapped in a deadly inferno that was rapidly consuming the ninth floor of the building. It was later discovered that the factory’s managers had padlocked exits to all but one stairwell to prevent workers from leaving with leftover scraps of cloth. To compound matters, the door to the open stairwell swung inward, making it nearly impossible to open amidst the onrush of workers attempting to flee the quickly spreading fire. The factory building contained no automatic sprinklers and the one open stairwell was swiftly consumed by flames. A rickety fire escape, built to accommodate only a few people at a time, collapsed as panicked workers piled on. With no way out for the remaining workers, their only hope was to be rescued by the fire company, but the firefighter’s ladders only reached to the sixth floor, thirty feet below the igniting flames. Nearly fifty trapped seamstresses, mostly young teenage women, one as young as fourteen, leaped to their deaths, bodies accumulating on the sidewalk below, as a stunned and horrified crowd looked on from Washington Square.

When the cramped and unsafe working conditions endured by the garment workers were later exposed, a public outcry ensued and a credible workers’ rights movement was launched. In direct response to the Triangle fire, the New York State Legislature passed laws requiring automatic sprinklers in high-rise buildings, mandatory fire drills at large companies, and fire doors that swung out. Later reforms included a 54-hour workweek for women and child workers. The tragedy spurred the growth of American labor unions and influenced the passage of national laws outlawing child labor, further limiting the work week, and imposing minimum standards of workplace safety and more humane work environments.

A great irony of the Triangle fire is that, two years before the fire, the factory owners, themselves immigrants who became wealthy by employing new immigrants at low wages and long hours, successfully resisted a 13-week strike aimed at achieving union representation and safer working conditions. The fire and resulting deaths of 146 workers achieved what the strike could not.

One of the onlookers of the Triangle fire in 1911 was a young social worker named Frances Perkins. She and a friend were having tea in Greenwich Village when they heard the fire trucks and anguished screams of “don’t jump” from down the street. Perkins rushed outside and ran toward the commotion, where she witnessed flames and black smoke coming from the top floors of the Triangle factory. Young girls and women, some alone, some clutching hands, stood on window ledges with terrified looks in their eyes, as no good options existed. Perkins watched helplessly as many of the young girls and a few young men jumped to their deaths.

Twenty-two years later, Perkins became the first female cabinet member in U.S. history when she was appointed Secretary of Labor by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt. During her twelve-year tenure, the Triangle fire’s victims embedded in her memory, Perkins worked to guarantee the rights of workers to organize, form unions, and collectively bargain. With the firm backing of President Roosevelt, she helped win passage of the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938, which called for the “elimination of labor conditions detrimental to the maintenance of the minimum standards of living necessary for health, efficiency, and well being of workers.” Perkins was instrumental as well in securing implementation of the Social Security Act, unemployment insurance, and the minimum wage.

Before the Triangle fire, and for virtually all of the 19th century and the first part of the 20th century, the balance of power in this country steadily favored wealthy industrialists and the owners of capital. The government’s willingness to interfere with the operations of American businesses and impose humane working conditions was greatly influenced by the principle of laissez faire, which instructed that government take a hand's off approach to commerce and business. The growing political power of the corporate class, tied to vast concentrations of wealth of a small number of conglomerates, contrasted sharply with the pitiful working conditions of most American laborers, who toiled in coal mines and garment factories, plantations and steel mills. Businesses and corporations predictably resisted virtually every effort at reform, arguing that mandatory workplace health and safety protections, and laws allowing workers to organize, would result in economic calamity.

“Such complaints, of course, are with us still,” writes Harold Meyerson of The Washington Post. “We hear them from mine operators after fatal explosions, from bankers after they’ve crashed the economy, from energy moguls after their rig explodes or their plant starts leaking radiation. . . . A century after Triangle, greed encased with libertarianism remains a fixture of – and danger to – American life.” Often ignored by the anti-regulation crowd is the fact that workplace protections were necessary precisely because of unfettered corporate greed and neglect and, despite such laws, the American economy experienced its greatest prosperity in the decades following corporate and labor reforms.

A. Phillip Randolph said, “A community is democratic only when the humblest and weakest person can enjoy the highest civil, economic, and social rights that the biggest and most powerful possess." The rights of workers to organize and bargain collectively, to strike if necessary, helped shift the balance of power from the owners of capital to the laborers that made capital possible. "If capitalism is fair,” said Franklin Lloyd Wright, “then unionism must be. If men and women have a right to capitalize their ideas and the resources of their country, then that implies the right of men and women to capitalize their labor."

Although the rise of the American labor union helped, at least in some cases, to even the playing field between the large corporations and the workers on whose labor they profited, times have changed. Today, the word “union” is typically invoked in complaints about teachers resisting school reform or the excessive pension costs that are burdening state and local governments. “I pay for three police departments,” is a common complaint of township and borough mayors, “one active and two retired.” The growing power of certain labor unions in the 1950’s and 1960’s led to corruption and greed within labor’s own ranks. Many unions in the industrial northeast and Midwest demanded ever increasing wage and benefits packages, sometimes making near extortionate demands on their employers and ignoring the impact of ever increasing international competition. These unions often missed the big picture and eventually priced themselves out of a job, as manufacturers closed shop in the United States and took advantage of cheap labor overseas.

The protections afforded workers by occupational and safety laws, restrictions on child labor and excessive hours, and protections against discrimination and harassment, coupled with the wage increases unions won through the 1960’s, rendered the need for unions in some industries less compelling. Some powerful unions lost sight of their mission and seemed insufficiently grateful to a country that had enacted many progressive workplace protections. Government regulation of business and the enforcement of workplace rights is today a generally accepted part of the American economy, yet certain unions failed to acknowledge that the U.S. workforce was in a far different place at the end of the century than it had been when the Triangle fire shocked America’s conscious.

In the garment industry, for example, workers who were supposed to benefit from the wage and benefits packages negotiated by their unions found themselves with less work as jobs moved first to the south, where unions are less welcome, and eventually to India, China, and places with sweatshop-like conditions in factories that employ masses of people at low wages. Retail stores like Macy’s and Bloomingdales continually demanded steeper discounts and the ability to return goods they could not sell. Manufacturers in turn scrambled to reduce costs in piece work and outsourcing, as more and more U.S. jobs were lost. In 1975, 90% of all clothing sold in the United States was made in America. Today, the U.S. garment industry supplies only 5% of America’s clothing needs.

Increasing concentrations of wealth in the hands of a very few, along with international trade and globalization, have complicated and hampered the ability of the American workforce to maintain its standard of living. I have always been a strong proponent of free international trade, but when U.S. workers lose their jobs so that investment bankers can make millions of dollars on the backs of exploited laborers working in Triangle-like conditions in Thailand and other impoverished countries, I begin to lose my enthusiasm for tariff-free trade. We must open our eyes and insist upon more equal treatment of workers worldwide and, if necessary, impose tariffs and trade restrictions on countries and industries that fail to protect its workers in a manner required by modern decency and U.S. law.

I am fully aware of the labor movement’s failures. I recognize that certain unions became corrupt and undemocratic, some almost criminal and thug-like as extortionate contract demands wreaked havoc on businesses that were already struggling to compete in an increasingly global economy. In the fall of 1975, during a bitter and prolonged strike at The Washington Post Company, members of the pressmen’s union jumped the night foreman and pinned him to the floor with a screw driver at his throat, then severely beat him as other striking workers vandalized the pressroom, sliced the cushions of the press cylinders, ripped out electrical wiring, cut air hoses and sabotaged almost every piece of equipment before setting the presses on fire. Although twelve union members were eventually convicted of crimes of violence and The Post essentially broke the worst elements of the union, the damage was done.

A friend of mine, who owns a small trucking company in Ohio, once told me that his non-union drivers were threatened with violence by members of the Teamsters and, in retaliation for failing to unionize, found their tires slashed and, in a few instances, had pipe bombs set off in acts of intimidation. Such acts quickly dispel any romantic notions one may have of labor unions.

Nevertheless, it is easy to forget that a significant portion of U.S. prosperity from the end of World War II to the 1970’s was in part the result of union contracts and union advocacy. A strong labor movement contributed to a broad middle class with spending power and economic security that resulted in low unemployment and high wages. As Gerald Seib of The Wall Street Journal noted recently, for 48 straight months, between 1966 and 1970, the United States enjoyed an unemployment rate at or below four percent. Although unions were not wholly responsible for this prosperity, they helped maintain a fairer distribution of income and were, in the words of E.J. Dionne, Jr., “important co-authors of a social contract that made our country fairer, richer and more productive.”

Union excesses and short-sightedness notwithstanding, there would never have been a need for unions in the first place had businesses and corporations treated their workers more humanely and decently in the days before they were required to do so. In 1911, more than 100 workers died on the job each day. The Triangle fire was but a symptom of a much larger problem. Even today, despite all of the worker protections and all of the complaining of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and other business groups about the burdens of government regulation, industrial workplaces remain dangerous places. In 2009, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, 4,340 workers died in workplace injuries. In 2010, 29 miners died in one day at the Upper Big Branch Mine in West Virginia, a non-union shop. The tragedies at the Triangle factory in 1911 and Upper Big Branch mine in 2010 spurred legislative investigations and calls to action. But in both cases, had workers had a stronger voice, a union, and the ability to insist on better and safer working conditions, both tragedies likely would have been prevented. In both cases, efforts by workers to organize, and their calls for safer work environments, were bitterly resisted by their employers.

So, while I have my problems with certain aspects of the American labor movement, as some unions are often their own worst enemy, I understand their importance and value to American economic life. In the words of Clarence Darrow, "With all their faults, trade unions have done more for humanity than any other organization of men [and women] that ever existed. They have done more for decency, for honesty, for education, for the betterment of the race, for the developing of character in men [and women] than any other association." I am not yet ready to give up on the American labor movement, and we must never forget what happened a century ago at the Triangle factory in New York.

Writer's Block, Japan, and Hopes for Our Children

2011-03-15T23:12:00.000-04:00

The easiest thing to do on earth is not write.
--William Goldman

Novelist Ernest Hemingway once said that the most frightening thing he had ever encountered was "a blank sheet of paper." Though I am no Hemingway, it provides me with some comfort to realize that even he had moments of doubt and uncertainty in the writing process. For me, there is always the concern that I have nothing worthwhile to say. Only when I acknowledge that I write for myself, to understand what I am thinking, to expand my thoughts, to feed my appetite for learning, can I put pen to paper. If others take something from my writing, discern a glint of understanding, if they are moved, angered or inspired, I will have achieved what I set out to do.

Writing is excruciatingly difficult at times, and there is nothing worse than staring at a blank computer screen uninspired. I am in good company. Tom Stoppard said that the hardest part to writing is “getting to the top of page one.” Stephen King has said that the "scariest moment is always just before you start [writing]. After that, things can only get better." Perhaps I am distracted lately, but even with everything there is going on in the world, from the battles in Wisconsin over public employee unions, to democratic uprisings in the Middle East, to the Supreme Court’s recent First Amendment decision upholding the right of mean-spirited people to protest at military funerals, I am at present uninterested in addressing what are admittedly important issues.

* * * *

For now, my thoughts and prayers are with the victims of the tragic earthquake and tsunami in northeastern Japan. The death toll now exceeds 10,000 and we can only pray that these days of tragedy will soon transform into months of recovery and healing. The destruction caused to the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant 170 miles north of Tokyo, and the announcement by Japanese officials that they are preparing to distribute iodine, which helps protect the thyroid gland from radiation exposure, reinforces my decades-long concern with the safety of such plants. I have always worried that the brilliant and exquisite technology of nuclear power is ultimately overmatched by the natural forces of the earth. In addition, there remains the still unresolved issue of safely disposing of radioactive waste. A nuclear power accident can turn into a disaster of huge proportions in the blink of an eye. It is simply not worth the risks.

The situation in Japan is worsened still by the psychological stress the Japanese people are experiencing. Having once confronted directly the destructive forces of radiation sickness on a mass scale, the only country ever attacked with atomic weapons, Japan is a nation uniquely sensitive to the dangers of radiation. It is moments like these when national boundaries look less significant and our common humanity becomes paramount. In spite of everything that has occurred, the world cannot help but be impressed with the manner in which the Japanese people are dealing with it all, with their calm, cooperative spirit, their resilience in the face of monumental disaster. It is a reminder, as The Washington Post editorialized on Sunday, “of the fortitude and neighborliness for which Japanese society has long been known.”

* * * *

The Japanese earthquake hit just a few weeks after the slightly less destructive quake in New Zealand, where my daughter Jennifer is currently studying abroad. The New Zealand earthquake was in Christchurch, while Jen is studying at Victoria University in Wellington. But when news of the quake first came over the wires, my thoughts immediately turned to Jen’s well-being. The night of the Christchurch quake resulted in a phone call from Jen’s mom, another from my parents, and two more from my sister, each asking if I had heard from Jenny and was she okay. She was fine, of course, as Wellington is 200 miles from Christchurch, but when none of us could get through to her that night, I momentarily lacked perspective until her health and safety were confirmed. When Wellington was struck by an earthquake a week later, though nothing on the scale of the Christchurch quake, anxieties were once more heightened.

There is a difficult line to draw between allowing your children to experience life in all its dimensions, letting them take risks, and continuing to hover over them with a protective glare. As parents, we want only the best for our children. I do not mean the best material possessions; rather, the best experiences, good friendships, all the things that I believe contribute to a life of happiness. Health, safety, economic wellbeing, making lifelong friends who will stand by and support them when they’re down; someday as well, finding the right spouse or life partner, or being secure enough to not settle for the wrong one, all of these things are important. Ralph Waldo Emerson said, “What lies behind us and what lies before us are tiny matters compared to what lies within us.” A sense of self-awareness and inner peace, to be content with who they are and secure in what they believe, is what I desire most for my children. But as a father, how do I bestow such wisdom when I have yet to figure it out myself?

Much of life is a search for meaning, a quest for answers to life’s most pressing questions. Tragedy and loss merely reinforce such thoughts. To understand one’s true self, confident enough to journey forth in the security of that knowledge, is no easy task. For all of humanity’s searching, I know of few people who possess a deep well of life wisdom. In this, I am reminded of the movie City Slickers, in which Mitch (played by Billy Crystal) and his two best friends venture west for a month-long cattle drive, hoping to renew their spirits and to find meaning and fulfillment in their lives. In one scene, Mitch finds himself alone with their guide, Curly, played by Jack Palance, a John Wayne-tough, true-to-life cowboy who has spent his entire life on the range, riding horses and conquering the American west. If anyone has mastered life, it is Curly.

"Do you know what the secret of life is? One thing. Just one thing,” Curly says in a deep, gravelly voice as he holds up his index finger. “You stick to that and everything else don't mean shit."

“Yeah, but what's that one thing?" asks Mitch, eagerly anticipating the wisdom of a sage.

Curly looks out over the barren land, then turns back to Mitch, "That's what you've got to figure out."

Contentment in life, happiness, wisdom; these are the things we must find for ourselves. We can hope that our children find happiness; we can teach them to value an ethical life, honesty and hard work; and we can provide them the tools and education to prepare for the long journey ahead. But in the end, we must understand that moments of true happiness are linked to nature, to finding time, to the transcendent power of the human spirit. Emotional well being does not arise from the next e-mail in a relentless life of work and toil.

Emerson said, “To be yourself in a world that is constantly trying to make you something else is the greatest accomplishment.” Children today are overwhelmed with technology and information, much of it worthless and, worse, destructive to the human spirit. Eleven years into the 21st century, the cult of celebrity has remained America’s secret altar, with an emphasis on sex appeal, thin bodies, and fashionable styles. It is particularly difficult for young women, though how it affects the attitudes and sensitivities of young men is equally concerning. Add to that, the competition for grades and high SAT scores, increased economic anxieties and the uncertainties of the global marketplace, the prevalence of drugs, sex and narcissism that compete for the minds and affections of our children, and you have a full plate of worries. I thank God every day that my daughters have developed into responsible and independent young women who are genuinely nice people and who belie the pressures of youth. I have tried to instill in them the notion that they should pursue what interests them and be patient to life’s callings. But in the words of Angela Schwindt, a home-schooling mom in Oregon, “While we try to teach our children all about life, our children teach us what life is all about.”

In truth, there are no real answers. I cannot explain why the people of Japan were victims of a tragic flaw of nature, or why people every day experience loss, pain, and unfair fates. I will attempt to make sense of the world, to strive for happiness even in the face of despairing times, because I must continue to hope and dream, for myself, but mostly for my children.

The Reunion

2011-03-01T23:09:00.002-05:00

As Rob parked his car on College Road and walked toward the Chapel grounds, a familiar scent permeated the air, the hopefulness of youth, perhaps, captured in the stillness of the oak trees, gentle reminders of years gone by. In the distance, gathered around the hollow, Rob could see the faces of his best years. Brian Miller, his roommate from junior year, leaned casually against the railing as he held court with an assortment of classmates and fraternity brothers. Each displayed the beginning signs of aging, with thinning hair and expanding waistlines, yet their faces were as familiar now as then, as if time had stood still for two decades.

Rob always looked forward to reunion weekends, for they offered a chance to re-live the one time in his life when everything clicked, when the carefree nature of youth harmonized with the ambitions of an engaged mind. He had loved everything about college, the independence, the enduring friendships, the academic challenges. Every five years for the past twenty-five he has reconnected to a past life that has long since alluded him.

As he made his way toward the purple-and-white banner that shouted, “Kenyon College, Class of 1986,” he smiled magnanimously when his eyes met Brian’s; greetings and handshakes abounded, mixed with hugs and hearty back slaps. They caught up on family and work, and Rob’s divorce. They joked, as they always did, about the night Tommy McDuffy, in a drunken stupor, dreaming he was in the men’s room, pissed on a soundly sleeping Jim Rogers. This will be great, Rob imagined, just like old times.

Then, without warning, he saw her. She was as tall and almost as thin as he remembered. Her hair was shorter and less blond now than when he knew her, but it had remained shiny and straight, gently falling off her neck and shoulders. From the bar, she looked Rob’s way. He averted her glance, pretending to laugh at one of Brian’s stupid jokes.

They had met as freshmen, two weeks into the first semester. The next three years were full of passion and jealousy, hormones and fun. Rob had suspected they were not right for each other. Julie was outgoing and flirtatious, he shy and studious. She was irreverent and cynical, he respectful and idealistic. His heroes were men with names like Roosevelt and Kennedy, Stevenson and Humphrey. She could care less about politics. She was an Army brat who embodied the values of Midwestern patriotism and political independence. He came from a long line of Methodist ministers and took his faith seriously. She had no use for organized religion, no need for the very things that, at least then, defined Rob – the great institutions of church and state. He had thought that this mattered then.

They broke up in the middle of junior year, believing they should date other people. Thinking back, Rob could not recall a seminal event, a huge fight, or any profound talks. But he was convinced at the time it was the right thing to do. Now, years later, sobered by a failed marriage and the perspective that only time and experience can offer, he was less sure.

“Hey, Rob, isn’t that your old fling?” Brian nudged Rob with his elbow, as he spilled beer onto the grassy surface below. “She looks good. You better be careful, old pal. I can see it in your eyes.”

“What? Come on, man,” Rob let out a laugh. “You’re still an asshole, aren’t you?”

“Yeah, maybe,” Brian replied, “But am I ever wrong about these things?” Rob did not respond. His mind was elsewhere. The last time he saw Julie was the day after graduation, when Rob was taking one last look at the place he had called home for four years. He saw Julie and Matt Higgins, the man she would later marry, walking along the commons. Rob stopped to wish them well, or at least her well. They spoke for less than a minute, having very little to say to each other, both realizing that their lives were descending upon different paths in opposite directions. Although he has lived nearly half his life since then, he has occasionally thought of her, wondering how things might have turned out had the reckless pride of youth not interfered.

After graduation, Rob joined the Peace Corps and spent two years in South America teaching English to poor Peruvian children and helping to build huts for a small community of campesinos. When he returned to the States, he studied journalism at Columbia University. He became engaged to Rebecca Steinberg, an Ivy League educated lawyer from New York. Rebecca was smart, ambitious, and completely unlike Julie in every way. She was unconventionally attractive, but lacked Julie’s wholesome good looks, her athletic energy and grace. More importantly, she lacked the chemistry and ease of laughter that defined Julie.

Rebecca compensated by introducing Rob to a more expansive world, friends from Yale and Columbia, New York Jewish life, money and culture. As a modestly successful news correspondent for a national magazine, he became friends with people of status, power, and wealth, men and women who had studied at the best schools and talked with authority about the great issues of the day. Rebecca introduced Rob to the worlds of art and theater, feminist politics and Jewish enlightenment, ethnic food and modern dance. After Kenyon, after Julie, Rob had embraced a larger world, shaking free from his quiet, sheltered, suburban existence.

With the passage of time, though, Rob’s relationship with Rebecca weakened. Rob started taking long walks, retracing his life in the hopes of validation. He had a career that provided great satisfaction and professional attribution, a comfortable standard of living. He had lived in the centers of finance, government, and commerce, places like New York, Washington and London, where things happened, where world history is made. But with each passing year, he realized more and more that he did not love his wife. They were simply not right for each other and probably never were. Their relationship had been held together, not on passion or love, but by notions of financial convenience and social acceptance.

Rob was haunted by thoughts of Julie during these walks. Before Rebecca, there had been other women that competed for his affections, but he came to believe that Julie had been his one true love, his one chance at pure happiness, an opportunity lost of which he had only himself to blame. Had the beach house, the career, the intellectual pursuits, made it all worthwhile? Logic and persuasion – the arts of his trade – failed him. He knew, in the deepest segment of his soul, that he would have made different choices the second time around.

Rob handed Brian his unopened beer. “I’ll be back,” he said. He walked a straight line in Julie’s direction, nodding to familiar faces along the way, disguising the deep seated anxiety brooding within.

Her back was facing Rob as he approached. She was talking to Dave Glickman. Oh, shit, Rob thought, wasn’t he Matt’s best friend? I never liked that son-of-a-bitch. Julie had begun dating Matt a month after she and Rob broke up. He and Matt were friends once, but that was a long time ago. Matt had seen his opening and, well, Rob could hardly blame him. During senior year, whenever he saw Matt and Julie together around campus, Rob was convinced that he didn’t care, that he was happy for them. When Julie became engaged to Matt after graduation, Rob moved away, determined to flee this sleepy Ohio town for a life full of adventure and meaning.

But Dave Glickman he had no use for. Maybe I should come back later, he thought.

“Hi Rob,” Dave said. It was too late. Dave offered his hand amidst a look of quiet distrust. Rob quickly glanced at Julie as he shook Dave’s hand. She was looking down at her drink. “How’s life treating you?” Dave asked.

“Fine. How are you?” Rob could think of nothing original or clever to say. He had always hated small talk.

“I’m good,” Dave replied, shaking his head in affirmation to combat the awkwardness. Both men knew the conversation had already outlived its usefulness.

Rob turned to Julie, who was still staring at her drink. “Hey, Jules. Long time no see,” he said. He tried to act chipper, but was presently feeling as stupid as the cliche.

“Hi, Rob.” She briefly caught Rob’s eyes before re-focusing on her drink and shuffling the ice in her glass. “Where is your other half?”

Rob hesitated. “There isn’t one,” he offered. “At least not anymore. . . . I’m divorced.”

“Oh. I’m sorry,” she said, her expression warming as she lifted her head and glanced at Rob. Dave started to fidget uncomfortably. “I think I’ll get a re-fill,” he said, and walked off towards the bar.

Rob and Julie stood alone in shared silence. Julie broke the ice. “How is your new job?” she asked. She had read the class notes in the latest issue of the alumni magazine. Rob Morris, Class of ’86, has been appointed senior editor for urban affairs at the Baltimore Sun-Times.

“It’s great, so far. But Baltimore takes some getting used to.” Rob looked around for signs of Matt. He saw none. “How is Matt doing?” he asked with a look of feigned sincerity.

“He had to stay in Colorado Springs and take our oldest son to his football tournament.” Julie glanced at Rob fleetingly.

“He let you come here alone? He must be more secure than I ever was.” Rob grinned. Julie’s face reddened as she betrayed a slight smile.

Rob asked Julie about her children and life in Colorado. “Do you enjoy being a mother, Jules?” Rob asked.

“I love it, Rob. More than I ever imagined.” She suddenly relaxed as she spoke pridefully of her son’s athletic achievements and her daughter’s dance recitals. She was surprised to learn that Rob had no children. “Didn’t you once tell me that you wanted a big family, you know, the picket fence and a houseful of kids?” She asked sincerely.

“Rebecca, my wife, uh, ex-wife. . . . Well, she never wanted children.” Rob admitted it was a decision he initially thought appropriate, though he often wondered why he had so quickly agreed. “I don’t know, Jules. We were too busy, I guess, too into our careers to want children. We liked having the freedom to travel on a whim, to attend cocktail parties on a Tuesday night, to sleep in on Sundays. For a while, anyway, it was nice to have some time when your only cares are the nearest Starbucks, The New York Times and a walk in Central Park. Children would only interfere with such things.” Rob thought for a moment, then said, “Under different circumstances, I’m sure . . .” He did not need to finish the thought.

“You would have made a great Dad,” Julie said, as she gave Rob a warm, appreciative smile.

“Thanks,” Rob replied. “It’s funny, though, how things turn out.” They looked at each other and, for a brief moment, it seemed, they communicated without spoken words, implicitly understanding that which need not be said.

Over the years, as his dreams faded into reality, Rob often imagined Julie and Matt together at soccer matches and barbecues. He wondered if, with a twist of fate, he and Julie could have made a life together. Rob wanted to ask if she had any regrets, if she was content with how life turned out. But something held him back. Maybe it was that Rob feared Julie was truly happy, that her life had turned out grand while he had squandered the years away with a loveless marriage, secretly longing for the past. He thought of the night before graduation, when Julie cornered Rob at a party and kissed him, gently whispering that she would always love him. Was this still true, or was Rob now just a reminder of a distant, irrelevant past?

“How are your folks?” Rob asked benignly. When they were in college, Julie’s family lived near the air base about two hours from Gambier.

“My father died last year. Mom’s living in Cincinnati now.”

“I’m sorry . . . about your dad.” Rob touched Julie’s arm and gave it a gentle squeeze. Rob had liked Julie’s father. He remembered the time he first met him. He had challenged Rob to a game of ping pong, an ice breaker of sorts, thinking he would trounce him, as he had all of Julie’s past boyfriends. Rob beat him three straight games. Frustrated, if somewhat bemused, her father challenged Rob to one-on-one basketball, and Rob beat him at that too. In the end, Rob won him over. No one had ever beaten her father before, at anything.

“Thanks. He always liked you.” She looked squarely at Rob and added, “I mean, it made it really hard on Matt for quite a while.” Julie smiled in the manner that says, I’m not kidding. They both laughed, then Julie became serious again. “It’s been tough on my Mom, though, being all alone.”

Rob thought immediately of Julie’s brother. During his first year in graduate school, Rob read in The New York Times a list of the Marines who had died in the first Gulf War. He read the name, Michael Woodbridge, 19, Park Layne, Ohio, and his heart immediately ached, saddened by the news, and knowing that Julie was in pain and he could do nothing about it. Rob desperately wanted to call Julie that night, but didn’t think it was his place. He regretted his inaction ever since. “You know, Julie. . . . I meant to . . . I wanted you to know. . . .”

“It’s alright, Rob. Let’s leave the past where it is.” Julie gazed momentarily into Rob’s eyes with a warm, understanding expression.

Rob looked at Julie and saw, for a glancing moment, the young girl that had captured his imagination nearly three decades earlier. Now, standing on the campus hollow surrounded by old friends and faces of his past, Rob needed to find peace, to forgive his past mistakes. He did not believe in destiny and fate. He knew that choices were made and consequences ensued, although luck played its part as well. Timing was everything in life, and his was always a little off. He had come back in the hopes of learning that his journey had purpose and meaning, that he was not entirely to blame for life’s shortcomings, that he did not throw happiness aside in a misguided quest to live large.

“Are you happy?” he asked, his words filled with meaning beyond their superficial content. Julie implicitly understood what he was asking. She looked into Rob’s eyes, studying his intentions, sensing his unspoken hurt, contemplating her next words. Just then, Dave Glickman returned with his drink and three of his fraternity brothers in tow.

“Come on, Jules, it’s time for the group photos,” Dave said as he grabbed Julie by the wrist and escorted her away.

Rob was left standing alone. He gestured a slight wave. “Have fun,” he mumbled, his face reddened by the awkwardness of the moment. Julie glanced back at Rob as she was led away, the shades of a tear running down her cheek. “It was nice to see you, Rob. Be well.” She tried to say something else, but Rob could not make it out.

It did not matter, though. He understood. There would be no sequel to their conversation, no heartfelt confessions. Some things are better left unaddressed. Rob stood and watched Julie walk away. He knew implicitly it would be the last time he would ever see her. It was the way it had to be. His thoughts wandered to a passage by Virginia Woolf, “In solitude we give passionate attention to our lives, to our memories, to the details around us.” Perhaps he needed less solitude, less time with his thoughts. He looked around, took a deep breath, and walked to the bar. There would be time, later, to think about life, past and present. Now, it was time for a drink.

The End of Winter

2011-02-20T22:02:00.000-05:00

Don't tell me about the world. Not today. It's springtime and they're knocking baseballs around fields where the grass is damp and green in the morning and the kids are trying to hit the curve ball. ~Pete Hamill

Pitchers and catchers reported a week ago. The “regulars” rolled in just the other day. In Arizona and Florida, at least, spring has officially started. For those of us restricted to northern terrains, a sunny day and a picture of young men tossing long-ball will suffice. Baseball is as much about imagination as reality, allowing grown men to overcome abandoned dreams and to be transported in time to the simpler days of youth. For baseball fans, spring is when the cool winds of March and the smell of a leather glove awaken in the senses the hope of new beginnings, when every team is a contender. This year is no exception.

Winter in Philadelphia lingers as the last remnants of snow refuse completely to disappear, the sun’s rays meekly penetrating the cold air. Although nature bequeathed us a day or two of softness, a February flirtation with the gentle touches of spring, the winds quickly strengthened in intensity and the temperatures dropped once again, permitting us to escape the harsh chill of winter only in the daily reports of the Grapefruit and Cactus Leagues.

My normal excitement level for the start of spring training and anticipation of a new season has been tempered this year by a reminder of the darker, business side of baseball, talk of money and contracts, revenue and payrolls. I speak particularly of the Albert Pujols contract negotiations, which for Cardinals fans is the source of sleepless nights and intestinal distress. For those of you living on the planet Zortec, let me explain. Pujols is in the last year of an eight-year, $111 million contract. If the Cardinals cannot find a way to sign him to a new deal by the end of this season, he becomes a free agent and the Cardinals, a team of moderate wealth and a payroll that befits its Midwestern television market, will have to compete potentially with every team in the Major Leagues to bid on his services. That means that the Yankees, the Red Sox and, God forbid, even the Cubs, will legitimately be allowed to offer Pujols any amount of money they are willing to dish out to lure him to their team. Some might call that free enterprise. I call it Armageddon.

Being a fan requires certain fortitude and a willingness to endure pain and heartbreak. Only true fans can really understand this. When everyone else says, “Grow up” or “Get a life”, we just shake our heads with the knowledge that the non-fan lacks discernment. A true fan connects to a team the way one connects to immediate family; we are wrapped up in our team’s identity, its players form part of our secret inner circle. I can criticize a player on my team, but if a Phillies fan knocks my second baseman, they just may find extra spices in their cheese steak, if you catch my drift. The star players, of course, are extra special, for they disappoint us less and provide us with the hope of a winning season and the dream of a championship. The longer a star player remains with us, the more we identify with him.

I became a Cardinals fan in the spring of 1967, when I was eight years old. Yes, I know, I am from New Jersey. It is simple really. My second grade class was studying the many different species of birds. Always one to choose favorites, I took an immediate liking to the cardinal, lured by its magnificent, bright red coat and distinctive black trim. There was simply no other bird like it. As it happens, my ornothological studies coincided precisely with when I fell in love with baseball. I had started to play the game with my older brother and his friends and learned that baseball and me were a natural fit. I quickly became consumed by it. When that summer I discovered the St. Louis Cardinals and the “birds on the bat” that adorned their uniforms, I was an immediate fan. Soon I was following my favorite team and my favorite players – Orlando Cepeda, Lou Brock, Bob Gibson, Curt Flood, Mike Shannon, and Tim McCarver – colorful players who lit up a ballpark with their grace and athleticism. The bond permanently cemented in the fall of 1967 when the Cardinals won the World Series; I was forever hooked. (Only years later did I discover that it was somewhat frowned upon to root for anyone other than the home team. I have finally stopped looking surprised when someone asks me, “Are you from St. Louis?” after confiding my team loyalties.)

To this day, I identify the Cardinals of my youth with Lou Brock and Bob Gibson. Although the surrounding cast occasionally changed, especially since the advent of free agency, Gibson, like Stan Musial before him, was a Cardinal for life. So was Mike Shannon, who still does the play-by-play more than 40 years later on the Cardinals’ radio network. Brock, who the Cardinals acquired from the Cubs in 1964, remained a Cardinal until he retired in 1979. I can still recite the daily lineup card for the Cardinals teams of the late 1960’s and early 1970’s. At the age of eleven, I started playing Strat-O-Matic baseball, an extremely realistic, statistic-based board game, played with dice and individual player cards formulated from the previous season’s statistics. I “managed” eight straight 162-game seasons of Cardinals games, keeping box scores and calculating the season’s at bats and innings pitched, hits, runs, RBIs, walks and strikeouts, batting averages and earned run averages. To this day, I can compute batting averages in my head. I spent more time in study hall writing out that day’s lineup card and studying my team’s statistics than I did doing homework. Hmmm. Perhaps this is why I did not attend an Ivy League college, or why I wince when asked about the works of William Shakespeare. I mean, what was his batting average?

More than four decades hence, you must forgive my indulgence, then, of Albert Pujols. When a player is as uniquely talented and identified with one team as Pujols, it takes a bigger man than me to resist the need for common sense and patience in something as mundane and legalistic as a long-term contract. There is something a little disconcerting about the business of baseball. I am a fan because, for 2 ½ hours each night, baseball reminds me of what life was like when I was twelve, when the most important event was how the Cardinals did against the Mets. I did not know or care about the players’ salaries, or how much money the team made in a given season. I knew nothing of television royalties, ticket sales and merchandise revenues. I paid little attention to union disputes and work stoppages. It was the game and what it represented, devotion to a team and identification with its players, which captured my imagination.

I understand that the Cardinals must protect the future of the franchise. Pujols is 31 years old. He will turn 32 before season’s end, when his present contract expires. According to unsubstantiated reports, Pujols and his agent have asked for a contract in the range of 10 years, $300 million. The Cardinals reportedly offered Pujols somewhere in the neighborhood of $200 million over nine years, plus an equity interest in the team for life. Cardinals’ management is naturally reluctant to commit 30% of their payroll for ten years on a player who, in six or seven years, will be in the twilight of his career. The Cardinals would likely agree to pay him $30 million a year for five or six years, but they do not want to be tied into a deal that pays even a player as great as Prince Albert upwards of $30 million a year when he is 39, 40, and 41 years old. Pujols is a great player, and there is no reason to believe he will not continue to be among the best players in baseball for the next several years. But even the great ones do not play at 39 the way they played at 29.

I cannot justify the amount of money we are talking about here. And yet, despite my past moralizing over the inequality of income between the rich and the poor in the United States, when it comes to baseball you can dismiss all talk of economic justice, morality and politics. There is really only one consideration. Do what it takes to win! Pujols is a once-in-a-lifetime player. His first ten years are matched historically only by Ted Williams and Joe DiMaggio. In ten seasons, Pujols has accumulated 1,900 hits, 408 home runs, 1,230 RBIs, 1,186 runs, 426 doubles, and 914 walks (compared to only 646 strikeouts). Divide each number by ten and you have pretty close to what he has done each season. He is that consistent. He has a career batting average of .331 and an on-base percentage of .426. He has never batted below .312, has never knocked in less than 103 runs, has never scored less than 99 runs. He has twice won the Gold Glove Award for his superb defensive play at first base. By all accounts, he is a great teammate and clubhouse leader.

The famous actress, Tallulah Bankhead, once said, “There have been only two geniuses in the world. Willie Mays and Willie Shakespeare.” I don’t know about Shakespeare (see above), but Albert Pujols must be added to the list. If the Cardinals do not sign Pujols and make him a Cardinal for life, I dread the amount of therapy that will be needed to restore my sanity. All of Cardinal Nation will be on Prozac. I know that it will take a lot of money to sign El Hombre, and I hope he means it when he says he wants to remain a Cardinal for life. But if somehow it doesn’t work out, if Prince Albert someday betrays Cardinal red, it will induce panic-stricken psychosis in the annals of Cardinalville. He is the franchise. He is the St. Louis Cardinals.

Perhaps it is as simple as what one Cardinal fan recently advised Bill DeWitt, Jr., the Cardinals' owner, in an email to ESPN's Mike and Mike in the Morning, “He wants it. You have it. Give it to him.” I really do not know what to think about it all. In my moments of dispassion and sanity, I can understand the reluctance to give away the store. Then the fan in me takes over, and I don’t want to hear about contracts and money and long-term revenue projections. For the past six weeks, I have awakened each morning with the hope that the headlines would read, “Cards Sign Pujols for Life.” So I have stopped trying to think about it, and will focus on the game and prepare for another long and beautiful season, when my childlike fascination with baseball and the Cardinals will overtake all the messy details of life.

Ernie Harwell, the longtime announcer for the Detroit Tigers, once said, “Baseball is just a game as simple as a ball and bat. Yet, as complex as the American spirit it symbolizes, it is a sport, a business, and sometimes almost even a religion.” As a rational man with a sense for business and economics, I understand the arguments on both sides of the Pujols contract negotiations. But as a Cardinals fan, I simply cannot comprehend life without Pujols.

The President on Prayer, Humility, and the Search for Wisdom

2011-02-06T20:14:00.002-05:00

We see an aging parent wither under a long illness, or we lose a daughter or a husband in Afghanistan, we watch a gunman open fire in a supermarket -- and we remember how fleeting life can be. And we ask ourselves how have we treated others, whether we’ve told our family and friends how much we love them. And it’s in these moments, when we feel most intensely our mortality and our own flaws and the sins of the world, that we most desperately seek to touch the face of God. – President Barack Obama, February 3, 2011

In a time of political and social turmoil around the world and divisiveness at home, as the world watched street protests and the march for democracy in Egypt and Tunisia, and as the United States continued to recover from the tragic shooting in Tucson, the President took a moment this past week to speak from the heart. For the past sixty years, ever since Dwight Eisenhower occupied the White House, our presidents have attended the National Prayer Breakfast in Washington, D.C. This year was no exception and it permitted an opportunity for President Obama to speak thoughtfully and passionately about his personal faith journey, his closeness to God, and his belief in the power of prayer to provide comfort and guidance. The speech, which was both humorous and moving, should finally put to rest any lingering questions regarding the authenticity or sincerity of the president’s faith, which goes far deeper than the majority of U.S. presidents over the past century.

Obama spoke publicly “as a fellow believer” and as one who entered public service through his work on behalf of churches. He acknowledged as a child that he was exposed to very little organized religion and that he “did not come from a particularly religious family.” His father, whom he had met only once his entire life, and then only for a month, was “a non-believer throughout his life.” The president’s mother, who wielded great influence on Obama as a child, and whose Midwestern values remain embedded in his soul, was the product of Baptist and Methodist parents. But she “grew up with a certain skepticism about organized religion” and, like many apathetic and agnostic Christians, took young Barack Obama to church, if at all, only on Easter and Christmas. Despite her skepticism, however, she also was a very spiritual person, “who was instinctively guided by the Golden Rule and who nagged me constantly about the homespun values of her Kansas upbringing, values like honesty and hard work and kindness and fair play.”

It was through his mother that Obama learned to value equality between men and women, the imperative of living an ethical life, and of acting on one’s beliefs. And “despite the absence of a formal religious upbringing,” he was inspired by the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., and the many prominent Christian leaders of the civil rights movement who sought to “transform a nation through the force of love.” He also was influenced by more ecumenical leaders, such as Father Theodore Hesburg and Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, whose “call to fix what was broken in our world, a call rooted in faith,” led Obama to become a community organizer and to work on behalf of “a group of churches on the Southside of Chicago.” From this experience, “working with pastors and laypeople trying to heal the wounds of hurting neighborhoods," did Obama come "to know Jesus Christ for myself and embrace Him as my lord and savior.”

Like many of us, Obama’s “faith journey has had its twists and turns.” Along the way, “[i]n the wake of failures and disappointments, I've questioned what God had in store for me and been reminded that God’s plans for us may not always match our own short-sighted desires.” As with President Lincoln, who knelt often in prayer when faced with the daily pressures of saving a nation at war with itself, Obama’s Christian faith “has been a sustaining force" during his time in office. In addition to prayer, he finds “consistent respite and fellowship” at the Chapel at Camp David and starts his mornings with “meditations from Scripture.”

At the prayer breakfast, the president subtly alluded to his critics; “when Michelle and I hear our faith questioned from time to time, we are reminded that ultimately what matters is not what other people say about us but whether we're being true to our conscience and true to our God.” He emphasized, however, the uniting force of faith. He referred to Senator Tom Coburn, a conservative Republican who disagrees with Obama on most issues, as “not only a dear friend but also a brother in Christ. . . . Even though we are on opposite sides of a whole bunch of issues, part of what has bound us together is a shared faith, a recognition that we pray to and serve the same God.”

As Obama travels around the country, he is often asked what he prays for. While he resorts to prayer on a host of issues (one of which concerns the length of Malia’s dresses), a few “common themes” recur. One arises from “the urgency of the Old Testament prophets and the Gospel itself. I pray for my ability to help those who are struggling. Christian tradition teaches that . . . we're called to work on behalf of a God that chose justice and mercy and compassion to the most vulnerable.” He spoke of those who have lost their jobs and struggle to take care of their families; people in pain, who have suffered a loss of self-esteem, or worse, their homes and access to affordable health care. He knows that, as president, he cannot help everyone, and that fixing the economy and seeking peace takes time and patience. But as he moves forward, “it is my faith [and the] biblical injunction to serve the least of these, that keeps me going and that keeps me from being overwhelmed.”

The president talked proudly of the many churches, synagogues, and faith-based organizations that work every day to solve human problems, but noted that there are limits to what private charities can do. “Now, sometimes faith groups can do the work of caring for the least of these on their own; sometimes they need a partner, whether it’s in business or government.” As an example, he discussed the work of the Office of Faith-based and Neighborhood Partnerships, an initiative started under President George W. Bush, and which under Obama is working to expand “the way faith groups can partner with our government. . . . helping them feed more kids who otherwise would go hungry. . . . helping fatherhood groups get dads the support they need to be there for their children. . . . [and] working with non-profits to improve the lives of people around the world.” And while such work must be “aligned with our constitutional principles,” it also should be rooted in “notions of partnership and justice and the imperatives to help the poor.”

The nature and scope of some problems necessarily require a more active public involvement, for “in a caring and . . . just society, government must have a role to play.”

[T]here are some needs that require more resources than faith groups have at their disposal. There’s only so much a church can do to help all the families in need -- all those who need help making a mortgage payment, or avoiding foreclosure, or making sure their child can go to college. There’s only so much that a nonprofit can do to help a community rebuild in the wake of disaster. There’s only so much the private sector will do to help folks who are desperately sick get the care that they need.

And that's why I continue to believe . . . that our values, our love and our charity must find expression not just in our families, not just in our places of work and our places of worship, but also in our government and in our politics.

This is, of course, an area that distinguishes philosophically the president and most Democrats from many Republicans, who place greater emphasis on acts of charity and resist the role of government as compassionate benefactor. It is a debate that goes to the heart of our democracy and the role of government. There is certainly room for principled disagreement. But there is no room to question the president’s faith, or patriotism, or love of country. Perhaps this is why the president also spoke of the importance and need for humility. For however polarized and divisive our politics may become, it is always “useful to go back to Scripture to remind ourselves that none of us has all the answers -- none of us, no matter what our political party or our station in life.”

“The full breadth of human knowledge is like a grain of sand in God’s hands. And there are some mysteries in this world we cannot fully comprehend.” It is this challenge, then, the need to balance uncertainty and humility and to be open to other points of view, with the need to fight for what is right and to remain committed to one’s deeply held convictions, which forms the core of our democracy and underlies the president’s need for prayer. Only by constant “reminders of our shared hopes and our shared dreams and our shared limitations as children of God” can Americans travel forward together.

At the conclusion of his speech, the president noted that, while he hopes his prayers will be answered, he knows “that the act of prayer itself is a source of strength. It’s a reminder that our time on Earth is not just about us; that when we open ourselves to the possibility that God might have a larger purpose for our lives, there’s a chance that somehow, in ways that we may never fully know, God will use us well.” Amen, Mr. President.

Remembering an American Idealist and Regretting a Wasted Year

2011-01-27T18:49:00.001-05:00

The natural idealism of youth is an idealism, alas, for which we do not always provide as many outlets as we should. --Robert Sargent Shriver (1915 - 2011)

He embodied everything good and decent and optimistic about America. Sargent Shriver, who died this month at the age of 95, was a genuine American idealist. He believed in the power of individuals to make a difference and the power of youth to transform the world. He devoted much of his life attempting to inspire a culture of service and community activism. Few Americans today really know much about Sargent Shriver. Although his intellect and political skills were formidable, he was overshadowed by his connection to the Kennedy’s; the husband of Eunice Kennedy Shriver, he was perpetually relegated to status of brother-in-law.

In the early 1960’s, when the United States resonated with optimism and the nation’s youth felt inspired to serve, Shriver radiated all of the positive energy and spirit of JFK’s New Frontier. When a young and charismatic President Kennedy declared in his inaugural address, "Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country," it was Shriver who led the way. Shriver created the Peace Corps and was its first director. In its formative years, he inspired an entire generation of Americans to commit 27 months of their life in far off lands; to live among peoples and cultures that had, until then, been alien to them. Now in its fiftieth year, the Peace Corps has sent over 200,000 young people to impoverished and developing countries, building bridges literally and figuratively, teaching, learning, relating, and spreading all that is good and decent about American democracy.

Since his passing, story upon story has been told of how Shriver’s commitment and dedication, his passion for youth, and his unparalleled belief in the power of relationships helped change lives forever. He sent an army of bright, energetic young Americans on a mission of peace, armed only with smiles and a helping hand, and asked them to spread friendship and understanding throughout the world.

The Peace Corps emerged from an unformed idea articulated in a series of speeches in 1960 by presidential candidate John F. Kennedy, who called for the creation of a “Peace Corps of talented young people” to boost America’s attempts to win the hearts and minds of developing nations; an effort, according to Kennedy, that had been hampered by “ill-chosen, ill-equipped, and ill-briefed” ambassadors who were losing influence to the Soviet Union. Kennedy called on Shriver to transform style into substance. No one was better suited to the task. Shriver combined the organizational skills of an experienced and pragmatic businessman (he had spent several years as the manager of Merchandise Mart, part of Joseph Kennedy’s business empire) with compelling salesmanship and sincere idealism to turn Kennedy’s untested concept into a lasting legacy of success.

When the brief reign of Camelot ended and many of Kennedy’s aides and advisors left for home, Shriver stayed behind to lead the Johnson administration’s War on Poverty, a more logistically difficult and politically complex task that required immense discretion and tact. Political enemies and ideological opponents abounded. Once again, Shriver succeeded where others had failed. He built a series of institutions – Head Start, the Job Corps, VISTA, the Legal Services Corporation, and other services for the poor – that thrive to this day, making the United States a better, more compassionate country. In 1972, when George McGovern asked him to be his running mate in a losing presidential election, Shriver was the one bright spot in an otherwise regrettable year. Along the way, Shriver assisted his beloved wife of 56 years in creating the Special Olympics, a cause Eunice championed the rest of her life, and which provided opportunities for young persons with intellectual disabilities to overcome stereotypes and to be recognized for their own incredible talents and abilities.

Shriver always challenged others to work harder, to do more, and to dream bigger. Not surprisingly, the root of Shriver’s concept of service was his faith. A devout Catholic, he tried to model his life after the teachings of Jesus. He admired Dorothy Day, founder of the Catholic Worker Movement and, starting in high school and throughout his life, asked himself every day, “What have I done to improve the lot of humanity?” As Jonathan Cohn noted recently in The New Republic, “Shriver’s Catholicism was in some ways analogous to Day’s: rooted in the ethics of the Christian Gospels; dedicated to working toward peace, social justice, and redemption of suffering here on earth; and concerned especially with easing the plight of the poor and the disabled.” Always filled with good spirits and good humor, it would be difficult not to be inspired by the life and times of Robert Sargent Shriver.

One of my enduring regrets in life is the lack of vision I demonstrated at the age of 22, the time in life when one’s youthful energy, spirit of adventure, and freedom to set one’s path are at their peak. I graduated from Wittenberg University in May 1981 with plans to attend business school at Indiana University at Bloomington, where I had been accepted as a teacher’s assistant in accounting and could expect an MBA degree two years hence. For the summer, I had a job lined up in the financial accounting department of Dresser Industries in Houston, Texas, where my brother-in-law was employed in oilfield services. He had arranged what seemed at the time a great opportunity, a summer working in a real-life, good paying job at a Fortune 500 corporation. So, off to Houston I went.

It did not take long, however, before I sensed that something was missing and that I had sold myself short. Although my intellectual interests had always pointed in other directions, I was captive to conventional notions of economic security. I could feel myself heading for the life of the “Everyman” and emulating Willy Loman in Death of a Salesman, “Before it's all over we're gonna get a little place out in the country, and I'll raise some vegetables, a couple of chickens..." I lacked vision and, worse, the courage of my convictions. I needed more from life and work but did not know how to make it happen. How could I devote my life to something more meaningful than the pursuit of money and profit, necessary perhaps to sustain the economy, but spiritually unfulfilling? I needed more.

Three weeks before leaving for business school, I experienced an existential crisis of sorts. While I did not yet know my direction in life, I was pretty sure it should be more in tune with my passions. Law school, which more closely appealed to my interests in politics, government, and society, had until then seemed out-of-reach. As the son of a minister and a school teacher, two traditionally low paying professions that could not easily support the ever increasing tuition at U.S. law schools, I could not reasonably expect much financial assistance, especially after my parents had just put three children through college over the previous eleven years. Ever the pragmatist, my father pushed me to pursue the practical professions, accounting and business. “You need to make a living,” he would say. When I took a course in Native American Literature in college, he snorted, “What kind of a job will that get you?” Although my father’s advice was well intentioned and influenced in part by his having been raised in the Depression, it glaringly ignored his and my mother’s own paths in life, in which service to others was their calling, their raison d’être. Even then, I felt conflicted by pragmatism and idealism.

When the manager of the accounting department offered to hire me as the full-time replacement for another accountant who was leaving at the end of summer, I mustered the courage to inform my parents that I was withdrawing from business school and staying in Houston. “I want to go to law school,” I said. My parents were accepting, but skeptical, afraid that I would not follow through and would find it difficult to make the transition back to school after a year or more of reality. But this was the first truly independent decision of my young life and, given where I sat in August 1981, it was the right decision. Later that year, I was accepted into a very good law school on a full-tuition scholarship and have been very fortunate in my career opportunities. I have no regrets about the path I eventually took.

When examined from a broader, historical perspective, however, my year in Houston was uninspired. Looking back, it was a wasted year, full of idle, unproductive time in which my most creative thoughts consisted of how to get through the day until happy hour arrived. Now, as I ponder the life of Sargent Shriver and all of the young Americans he inspired to serve; as I think of all the young men and women today who serve in the military, or tutor and teach inner city kids in programs like City Year and Teach for America, or commit to a year of community service in AmeriCorps, I cannot help but wonder why I was not more thoughtful in how I chose to spend that period in my life, before I was tied down with mortgages and children and college tuition. “If a young person has any idealism at all,” Shriver once noted, “it's strongest about the time he finishes college.”

A few years after arriving in Washington, I learned of the Lutheran Volunteer Corps (LVC), a social justice ministry founded by Luther Place Church, at Thomas Circle, when it was led by the Rev. John Steinbruck, a passionate and articulate preacher of the Social Gospel. Based in part on the spirit and model of the Peace Corps, since its founding in 1979, LVC has placed young college graduates (and others) into year-long stints with homeless shelters, HIV-AIDS clinics, low-income housing agencies, immigrant aid services, and public policy advocacy on behalf of poor and low-income people in cities throughout the country. Similar to the Jesuit Volunteer Corps and the Mennonite Voluntary Service, LVC was inspired, consciously or not, by the vision and practical guidance of Sargent Shriver. Although I was fortunate to have later served, in the late 1980’s and early 1990’s, on LVC’s Steering Committee and National Advisory Board, I have always felt somewhat cheated for having never been among the more than two thousand LVCers who devoted a year or more of their lives in selfless service to the world, and who learned more from the people and organizations they served than they could ever impart.

I know, of course, that we cannot change the past or travel back in time. Sargent Shriver, as much as anyone, would insist that we look only to the future and commit to it. But if I could have done one thing differently in my life, I would have listened more carefully to the voices of people like Sargent Shriver and his cadre of Peace Corps volunteers. And maybe, just maybe, I would have made better use of my time in the fall of 1981. Everyone I have ever known who spent time in the Peace Corps, or LVC, or many of the other outstanding service organizations, have said the same thing, “It changed my life.” I cannot answer precisely why I was so clueless and unadventurous in 1981. But a touch of the Sarge would have done me some good.

First and Foremost a Preacher: The Anti-War Imperative of Martin Luther King Jr.

2011-01-17T22:36:00.000-05:00

As I have walked among the desperate, rejected and angry young men, I have told them that Molotov cocktails and rifles would not solve their problems. I have tried to offer them my deepest compassion while maintaining my conviction that social change comes most meaningfully through non-violent action. But they asked, and rightly so, what about Vietnam? They asked if our own nation wasn’t using massive doses of violence to solve its problems, to bring about the changes it wanted. Their questions hit home, and I knew that I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today, my own government. For the sake of those boys, for the sake of this government, for the sake of the hundreds of thousands trembling under our violence, I cannot be silent. – Martin Luther King Jr.

On April 4, 1967, Martin Luther King Jr. stood at the pulpit of Riverside Church in New York City and delivered the single most powerful indictment of the Vietnam War by a leading voice of moral dissent in American society. Before a large gathering of Clergy and Laymen Concerned About Vietnam, surrounded by such heavyweights as Jewish theologian Abraham Joshua Heschel and Yale University Chaplain William Sloane Coffin, King explained why it was time to break his silence on the war. Though he had become closely allied with President Lyndon Johnson, he acknowledged that “when pressed by the demands of inner truth, men do not easily assume the task of opposing their government’s policy, especially in time of war.” Over the course of the next 45 minutes, he articulated his opposition to war in principle and to American involvement in Vietnam in particular, condemning in the strongest terms the policies of a Democratic president who had, just a few years earlier, helped King secure passage of the most significant civil rights and voting rights laws in American history.

King chose Riverside Church to demonstrate that the anti-war cause he embraced was not a subversive movement, but resulted from a life-long commitment to Christian principles. He had “come to this magnificent house of worship tonight because my conscience leaves me no other choice.” He anticipated, correctly as it turned out, that his statements would be criticized by many of his own supporters, including members of the black community who believed that King’s foray into the anti-war movement would dilute his efforts to secure civil, economic, and human rights for all Americans. He was “greatly saddened” by such criticism, however, “for such questions mean that the inquirers have not really known me, my commitment or my calling.”

For King, there was nothing inconsistent in speaking out on behalf of the poor and opposing an unjust war. The build-up in Vietnam was diverting resources away from anti-poverty efforts at home and, because of draft exemptions that disproportionately benefited affluent whites, the poor increasingly were called to “fight and die in extraordinarily high proportions relative to the rest of the population.”

We were taking the black young men who had been crippled by our society and sending them 8,000 miles away to guarantee liberties in Southeast Asia which they had not found in Southwest Georgia and East Harlem. And so we have been repeatedly faced with the cruel irony of watching Negro and white boys on TV screens as they kill and die together for a nation that has been unable to seat them together in the same schools. . . .

King was first and foremost a preacher whose faith and calling exceeded national allegiances and compelled him to act within the meaning of his commitment “to the ministry of Jesus Christ.”

To me the relationship of this ministry to the making of peace is so obvious that I sometimes marvel at those who ask me why I’m speaking against the war. Could it be that they do not know that the good news was meant for all men – for Communist and capitalist, for their children and ours, for black and for white, for revolutionary and conservative? Have they forgotten that my ministry is in obedience to the One who loved his enemies so fully that he died for them?

King also had an abiding faith in American democracy and the principles upon which our nation was founded. Four years earlier, from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C., he spoke to the hopes and dreams of all American citizens that the nation would one day rise up and embrace the ideals of justice and equality for all. “I have a dream,” he said. In 1964, when he accepted the Nobel Peace Prize, King understood that beyond the race problem in America was the problem of violence and “the need for man to overcome oppression and violence without resorting to oppression and violence.” By 1967, however, his movement for non-violent social change was under attack from some of the very people he was trying to help, from the growing militancy of urban blacks and the rise of the black power movement, to the competing visions of more radical and less conciliatory forces. Yet as a follower of Jesus and as a student of Ghandi, King never wavered in his commitment to non-violence, in his belief that love was more powerful than hate, that to break down the walls of oppression and injustice required an appeal to the hearts and souls of his fellow human beings.

From the pulpit at Riverside Church, King ached for the soul of America and believed it “incandescently clear that no one who has any concern for the integrity and life of America today can ignore the present war.” In a manner exceptional for an American social critic and prophet of his day, King’s voice of conscience crossed national boundaries. He reviewed the history of colonial repression in Vietnam and saw how western powers repeatedly sided with the forces of despotism and oppression in squelching the revolutionary forces of independence. Although in 1945 the Vietnamese people proclaimed independence from French and Japanese occupation, U.S. policy makers believed the people of Vietnam were not ready for independence, and for nine years “vigorously supported the French in their abortive effort to re-colonize Vietnam.”

As a result, the peasants of Vietnam were denied a chance at real and meaningful land reform, something they genuinely needed, and instead were ruled by one of history’s most vicious modern dictators, Premier Diem. By the time King stood in the podium at Riverside Church, superior American air power and napalm had destroyed an ancient culture, its farms and forests; U.S. forces had killed over a million people, including tens of thousands of children. If King was to take his calling as a Christian pastor seriously, if he was to remain committed to his moral and ethical beliefs, he could not remain silent as the United States subjected a country the size of Italy to more than three times the tonnage of bombs dropped in all of World War II.

We have destroyed their two most cherished institutions: the family and the village. We have destroyed their land and their crops. . . . We must speak for them and raise the questions they cannot raise. These, too, are our brothers.

As a pastor and as an American, King also was deeply concerned with what the war was doing to the American soldiers who had to fight it, for “what we are submitting them to in Vietnam is not simply the brutalizing process that goes on in any war where armies face each other and seek to destroy. We are adding cynicism to the process of death, for they must know after a short period there that none of the things we claim to be fighting for are really involved.”

It was time, King said, for the madness to cease. In demanding an end to the war, he spoke in language consistent with his pastoral calling and which implicitly embraced the Christian concept of care for the “least of these” as expressed in Matthew 25:

I speak as a child of God and brother to the suffering poor of Vietnam. I speak for those whose land is being laid waste, whose homes are being destroyed, whose culture is being subverted. I speak for the poor of America who are paying the double price of smashed hopes at home, and death and corruption in Vietnam. . . . I speak as one who loves America.

King encouraged churches and synagogues to protest the war and to take creative actions in opposition to it. He then looked beyond Vietnam and addressed the wrongs of war itself.

A true revolution of values will lay hands on the world order and say of war, ‘This way of settling differences is not just.’ This business of burning human beings with napalm, of filling our nation’s homes with orphans and widows, of injecting poisonous drugs of hate into the veins of people normally humane, of sending men home from dark and bloody battlefields physically handicapped and psychologically deranged, cannot be reconciled with wisdom, justice, and love. A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.

King called for a unilateral cease-fire, an end to the bombing, and the withdrawal of U.S. troops from Vietnam. Although in seven years, U.S. policy makers would accept the wisdom of King’s words, in April 1967, King was very much in the minority. President Johnson never forgave King for breaking ranks. A large segment of the civil rights movement deplored King’s violation of an unspoken contract. The mainstream press also turned on King. The New York Times called King’s sermon at Riverside Church “wasteful and self-defeating.” Life magazine said it was “demagogic slander that sounded like a script for Radio Hanoi.” The Washington Post suggested that King’s followers “would never again accord him the same confidence” and said he had “diminished his usefulness to his cause, his country, and his people.”

King answered his critics during a television interview on July 28, 1967. When asked about the supposed contradiction between his efforts for civil rights and his statements against the war, King replied, “Justice is indivisible. Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. And wherever I see injustice, I’m going to take a stand against it whether it’s in Mississippi or in Vietnam.”

King was assassinated on April 4, 1968, one year to the day after his remarks at Riverside Church. We will never know how American history might have changed if the nation had followed King’s advice in 1967. Had America listened to King, thousands of young American boys would have come home and lived to work and love and raise families of their own; the people and environment of Vietnam would have been spared some of the worst destruction in the annals of warfare; and America would not have ended its involvement in Vietnam on the wrong side of history.

As I look back 43 years later, it is apparent that the moral courage of a Martin Luther King Jr. is exceedingly rare. His was a lonely courage. He spoke out against the war at a time when the majority of Americans remained in support of U.S. policy. He branched off when the civil rights movement was divided, when supporters of non-violence were dwindling, and when the easy thing to do would have been to remain silent. He publicly broke from a president who had risked his political support in the South to help the causes for which King had fought his entire adult life, and he rejected conformity to an anti-Communist dogma that had dominated American politics for a generation. He exercised a most difficult form of courage, risking everything for a cause greater than himself.

I recognize that Martin Luther King Jr. was not a saint. He was not perfect. Like all of us, he was a mortal human being with human flaws. No one understood this better than King. But today more than ever we need people with King’s exceptional courage and prophetic insight, his moral voice and passion for justice, his vision of peace and universal love. As a people, we are less complete in his absence.