paulmuses

INSPIRED BY THE BRITISH FILM RED, WHITE AND BLUE

Two weeks ago I watched the British film Red, White and Blue directed by Steve McQueen. McQueen directed 12 years a Slave which won the Oscar for Best Picture in 2014. The setting of the film is London in the 1980s. The plot centers on a conflict between Afro-Caribbean Ken Logan and his son Leroy.

Ken drives a haulage truck and one day two cops beat him for disputing a ticket. Leroy has earned a Ph.D. in forensic science but decides to join the police force to, in his words, “bring change to this organization, from the inside.” When Ken learns of this, he confronts his son and calls him a traitor, for joining the enemy.

It is the film’s final scene that haunts and triggered this blog about race in America. Ken and Leroy are sitting alone across a table in Ken’s small kitchen. What Ken does not know, but the audience does, is that Leroy’s police colleagues commit several acts of racism against Leroy during his first six months on the force.

Ken: You know I find. The world, it just moves forward. Always do. Big change. That is a slow turning wheel.

Leroy: Sometimes I think. The earth needs to be scorched. So something good will come of it. Something good.

The second time I watched the film, I noticed something more than words. When Leroy says “the earth needs to be scorched,” for the first time in the film Ken looks directly at Leroy and lets Leroy’s words come inside him. Racism’s different disguises has brought father and son together. Ken and Leroy raise and touch their whiskey glasses and the film ends.

Red, White and Blue is about the lives of Afro-Caribbeans in Britain in the 1980s but the ideas stated in the final scene dialogue apply to America in 2021.

1. “Big Change”

I am a white man born in 1949, two years after Jackie Robinson integrated Major League Baseball. I remember one of my father’s brothers in the 1950s casually using the n-word and my father in the 1960s referring to Nat King Cole as a “good negro.” I had no black friends, no black classmates in grade school and one in high school. I wept when Barack Obama won the presidency on November 4, 2008 and again the next night in LaCrosse, Wisconsin as Bob Dylan finished a concert with Blowin in the wind.

President Barack Obama and Vice President Kamala Harris

Thinking back over America in my lifetime, big changes have occurred giving African-Americans more choices for how to live their lives. Barack Obama and Kamala Harris are the most visible figures of these changes.

I wish I knew how it would feel to be free

I wish I could break the chains holding me

I wish I could say all the things I could say

Say em loud, say em clear

For the whole world to see

In 1967, Nina Simone sang these words from the song “I wish I knew how it would feel to be free.” This song became an anthem for America’s civil rights movement. When I listen to this song, I feel Simone’s pain and yearning. I ache for her and wish America had been better for her and millions of others THEN. But it is better today. The chains are fewer. Without this change story, without this reform story, cynicism and hopelessness reign, making further reforms impossible.

2. “Slow turning wheel”

George Floyd

In Red, White and Blue, two white police officers beat Ken Logan and two white police colleagues choose not to back up Leroy Logan when a burglar Leroy is chasing beats him. In America in 2020, George Floyd dies at the knee of Derek Chauvin. After Floyd’s death, the Washington Post interviewed Sociologist Orlando Patterson about what hasn’t changed between the 1992 beating death of Rodney King and George Floyd.

The common denominator is police violence and brutality. We have these brutal acts and killings, and we have outrage, protests, commissions, recommendations, and again and again, the police still continue in their old ways. They don’t seek to respect life and are prepared to brutalize someone for something as minor as passing a counterfeit $20 bill or jaywalking.

From the perspective of George Floyd, how much progress has really been made in America? An African-American colleague told me he had been stopped for speeding on Decorah’s College Drive on the way to Luther several times his first year. I sped down College Drive most days during my 33 years at Luther and was never once stopped. From the perspective of that black man, how much progress has really been made in America?

Plantation, Plantation, Plantation

“I need everybody to stay on the plantation. I can’t have anybody leave the plantation.” Creighton University men’s basketball coach Greg McDermott about a week ago spoke these words to his players after a loss. McDermott apologized, offered to resign, and was temporarily suspended. America’s institution of slavery and plantation system died in 1865. Moline, Illinois’ Plantation restaurant where I ate many times with my family in the 1950s and 1960s closed in 1983.

Shereef Mitchell spoke these words when asked about his coach’s plantation comment. “For slaves, life on the plantation was filled with mental, emotional, physical, psychological and sexual abuse. Slaves had no rights and no voice. They were branded like cattle, forced from their homeland, and stripped of their culture, language and basic human rights.”

America’s Union Army destroyed slavery and the plantation institution. Restaurants named plantation are unimaginable. Coaches and others who use the word get in trouble. Derek Chauvin is on trial for the murder of George Floyd. And with the backing of President Biden, the congress will soon begin debating The George Floyd Justice in Policing Act that among other things would ban chokeholds.

But America’s racial history has not gone away. One’s race still impacts too many facets of life, including the chances of dying of COVID and of receiving the vaccine. Historian David Blights puts the power of history this way.

Slavery, Civil War, Reconstruction, and segregation are never purely historical. They still haunt the air we breathe. or cannot breathe. They are our present-past. They are a history never to be erased.

3. “The Earth needs to be scorched”

New police recruit Leroy continues, “so something good will come of it.” What must it be like to be Leroy? Or Nina Simone? Or George Floyd? Or my African-American colleague? Or Shereef Michell? My 26,107 days have included no race-related insults or degradations. 400 years after the first slave arrived on America’s shores, race still matters, in too many negative ways. Racism is still here but in different disguises. Just as it is in Britain, as the recent Oprah interview with Meghan Markle about the Royal Family’s concern about the skin color of Harry and Meghan’s son Archie suggests.

If I was Leroy, or Nina or George or Shereef or Meghan, or any of the millions of others who still are not as free as I am because of their skin pigmentation, maybe I would see ridding the world of all humans and starting over again as the only way forward. Maybe James Baldwin was right about America when he said a few years before his death in 1979…

America changed all the time without changing at all.

BETTER BUT STILL TOO FAR AWAY

But maybe not. While teaching at Luther College I took six student groups to Northern Ireland to study the peace and reconciliation process. One of my favorite speakers was Reverend Harold Good, a Methodist minister who was the Protestant witness to the decommissioning of arms by the Irish Republican Army. I always asked Rev Goode how far Northern Ireland had come since the peace agreement in 1998. His answer was always the same.

On a scale of 1 to 10, 1 being worst and 10 being best, from where Northern Ireland was during the worst of the Troubles, we are at an 8. From where we want to be as a fully reconciled society, we are at a 3.

I believe this is a reasonable way of thinking about America and the three stories about race. From where America was, it is now much better. From where most of us want America to be – where all, in Nina Simone’s words will “feel what it is like to be free” – America is still too far away.

ABOUT HOW TO HAVE HELPED MY MOM WITH DEMENTIA

MY MOM’S QUESTION

On a visit to Decorah in the summer of 2015 and after emptying her small suitcase and settling into her favorite lazy boy recliner, my 94 year old mother turned to me and said, “I’m worried about my father and think I need to go home to see if he is OK.” My brother Pat had given me a heads-up about this issue, as mom several months earlier had started talking about caring for her father and mother. Albert Thomas died in 1942 and Florence Thomas in 1979.

MY THEN ANSWER

“How do I answer my dad with dementia when he talks about about his mom and dad being alive?” This question from an Alzheimer’s Association post on Facebook triggered the memory of that August 2015 visit and my mom’s father comments. But it was the author’s answer to the question that seized my attention and suggested how wrong my first approach to my mother’s dementia had been.

Enter into his reality and enjoy it. He doesn’t need to be oriented…If dad spends most of his time in 1959, sit with him…If he tells the same story over and over, appreciate it as if its music, and you keep coming back to the beautiful refrain.

This simple advice, “enter into [her] reality and enjoy it,” is what I wish I had known then. Instead, I fought her reality, tooth and nail. Another brother even took mom to her parents’ graves to prove to her they were dead. “How could he?” I now think. Yet I know I would have done the same if her parents had been buried in Decorah. Instead, feeling desperate on that August 2015 day, I said “let’s call your sister Fawny, Sister Marilyn Thomas, and she will tell you the truth.”

MOM’S DEMENTIA JOURNEY

In March 2016 my brother Pat put our mother in a memory care unit. A neighbor had found her wandering around outside her house late at night. During the month before this event, Pat would check on mom every day and usually find she had set the dining room table for guests who would be arriving “very soon.” He would tell her they would be coming “tomorrow” and “not today.” He had learned to “enter her reality.”

Mom would spend a little over a year at Senior Star at Elmore Place before she died on June 25, 2017. I recollect two conversations during her stay relevant to the theme of this blog. The first occurred as Rebecca and I walked with mom back to her room. She told us she was going to England the next week. We asked her why and what she was going to do and other questions you might ask someone who really was going to England. Those questions were better than “you can’t go to England.” But still short of taking mom’s reality seriously.

The second conversation took place in her room and included Pat. Our mother described herself as the leader of a group of angry residents who were planning to take over the facility. We knew she hated every minute at Senior Star, despite the staff’s competence and kindness. Mom did not want to be there, away from the home she had lived in for 65 years. Pat and I listened in awe as our mother before our eyes turned into the TRIUMPHANT CHE GUEVARA OF SENIOR STAR. We had rarely seen her so alive.

MY NOW ANSWER

As I thought about how to enter my mom’s world, I recalled the 2014 film Glen Campbell: I’ll be me. This film chronicled Campbell’s final concert tour as he descends into the mire of Alzheimer’s. Walking off stage after singing Gentle on my mind, By the time I get to Phoenix and other standards, Campbell would be confused about what city he was in. One of Campbell’s doctors was interviewed and said the last memories to go are those most deeply imprinted upon a person’s brain. For Campbell, it was his music.

For my mom, it was care for her parents, hosting friends and family, traveling with to England, and running an institution. Her father died of a heart attack in the middle of WWII with only mom and her mother at home. Brother Al was off fighting in the war and sister Fawny was in the convent. It must have been hard for mom and grandma to make arrangements. Maybe mom never had a chance to say good-bye to her dad. I don’t know because I never asked when she said she needed to get home to take care of her father.

Mom and her sister Fawny made the difficult decision to put their mother in a nursing home when she started falling at age 93. Dad talked mom into going on a short vacation to South Dakota the winter of 1979 and her mother died while they were gone. I know mom always felt guilty and when in 2015 on another visit to Decorah she talked about needing to get home to take care of her mother who had died in 1979, I could have said “what kind of care does she need?”

When mom started setting the dining room table, we could have asked “will you be serving your famous chocolate pie? or will you be playing bridge? or Uno, if grandchildren are coming?”

“Oh, so you are planning a trip to England.” And instead of the generic questions I asked I could have been more specific. For example: “Will you be going to London where you always wanted to go and finally did with Al, Jackie, Fawny and me in 1999? Will you see the Queen? Or Houses of Parliament we were not able to see in 1999? And “Is dad (who died in 1993) going with you?”

During the last 15 years of her life, mom repeated this story more than any other. I heard it hundreds of times, as did my brother Pat. Mom worked as a bank teller during WWII. Because she was a college graduate she was quickly made head of the department. This promotion put her briefly in the hospital with anxiety but she recovered and went back to her position until the end of the war. She met my dad in 1947, they married in 1948, had me in 1949, Peter in 1952, and Pat in 1954. Mom never again worked outside the home.

Mom’s Che Guevara moment at Senior Star gave me a new perspective on her bank teller story. I had often wondered “why that story?” Maybe if I had asked – “Do you wish you had continued at the bank after the war ended?” Or “Would you have liked to run some business after your three kids left home?” – I would have learned something valuable about my mother.

“MEET THEM WHERE THEY ARE”

My friend Nori Hadley is a health professional and has worked at a Decorah nursing home for 10 years. She has lots of experience with residents and their families dealing with dementia. I asked Nori what advice she would have given me in 2015. She said:

Meet them where they are. If they are searching for cows that got out of the barn, look out the window and ask about the farm.

I pride myself on being curious about the lives of people I meet. When my mom entered the world of dementia, my curiosity fled and was replaced by denial. I look back at mom’s stories and see now they were her attempts to make meaning of her life. For Glen Campbell, the last to go was music. For mom, it was these stories.

They demanded THEN a hearing I am giving them NOW.

A folk music guide to democracy

My mom often told this story about my dad. “We were riding around Davenport one Saturday morning soon after we were married and we saw a sign that read ‘Garage Sale.’ Dad turned to me and said, ‘why would anyone want to sell a garage?’ She always followed this up by saying “he was serious and not joking.” My no-nonsense, engineer dad had an unaffected, direct style. This naivety stuck around until he died at 71.

I got my dad’s naivety-gene. For example, I love the simple, direct and idealistic style of folk music. After I arrive in the next world, maybe the groups and artists listed in this flier will do a reunion concert. But folk truths are rarely good guides to understanding politics. Consider the wonderful folk song in the blog and flier title: There’s a meeting here tonight. This song is not about democracy but to my idealist self it captures what should be the essence of democracy. The people meet and decide the rules they will live under.

In What does it mean to love my country, I wrote that democracy is built upon a belief in the equal value of each human being. Authoritarian governments value leaders more than their citizens. Everything is viewed from the top down. Democracies are the opposite. Everything starts with the people. But how do 330 million Americans govern themselves?

GOVERNMENT BY THE PEOPLE

“That this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom — and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.” This was Abraham Lincoln’s answer to how people govern, from the Gettysburg Address. It gets the essence of democracy right, everything starts with the people. But if I take it to be be the final word on democracy, it sets me up to be disappointed because how, really, can millions of people govern?

Imagine a town meeting of 330 million Americans. Or the 209 million adults. Or the 158 million that voted last November. Give each person five minutes to speak. You see the problem. Modern democracies have too many people for Lincoln’s moral definition to be a practical guide to how the people might might rule. I want the people to decide but they can’t, without help.

GOVERNMENT BY THE CONSENT OF THE PEOPLE

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.–That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.” These words form the second paragraph of America’s Declaration of Independence. The people rule through giving their formal consent to a smaller group who then make the rules for our common life.

Modern democracies have worked out a variety of tools their citizens use to govern. Limited term elections for representatives is one such tool. When you and I vote, we give our consent, knowing we will have another vote on another day.

THE JANUARY 6 ATTACK AGAINST AMERICAN DEMOCRACY

America’s democracy includes a moral core, the dignity of each person, and a practical guide, the consent of the governed. The mob that stormed America’s Capital Building attacked both elements of American democracy. With the confederate flag and other white nationalist symbols, it attacked the moral foundation of the equal dignity of each person. With its violence against America’s Consent of the Governed Building and the people inside, and with its refusal to accept the election and the peaceful transfer of power, it attacked America’s system of representation.

THERE’S A MEETING HERE TONIGHT

“There’s a meetin’ here tonight, great God; I’m glad you came along; hope all the brothers and sisters here; will help me sing this song.” I need the idealistic vision of folk music and Lincoln’s demand that democracy be “of, by, and for the people.” The WE in “We the people” can’t literally meet here tonight. But we can imagine welcoming all and asking all to join in the practical realities of governing this great nation.

That’s what unity means to me.

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*I got the idea for this blog from a terrific little book, Two hundred Million Americans in search of a Government, by the late political scientist E.E. Schattschneider.

IT WOULDN’T HAVE GIVEN US THE PRESENT

If it suits, you can substitute God for the universe. Universe works for me and I also like what the late theologian Marcus Borg calls “the more,” for whatever there may be beyond the material world. I believe there is something and it has organized the world to remind us to keep our focus on the present.

I am in what I have optimistically labeled the late autumn of life. At 71, the life expectancy tables tell me I probably have another 15 years. On second thought, I guess that puts me smack in the middle of the winter of life. Coincidently, that is where I am today, precisely in the middle of Decorah, Iowa’s winter. I tell myself, my mom lived to be 96 and her sister Fawny to 103, maybe I can beat the odds.

But trying to predict the future is a fool’s game and as my future closes in on me, I want to stop playing. Last year around this time, Joe Biden finished 4th in the Iowa Caucuses. Our Decorah caucus site was in the Decorah Middle School. Channeling the middle school vibes I looked over at the tiny Biden group from the cool and much larger Mayor Pete group. I had always wanted to be in the cool group and now I had finally made it. I looked over at that group of uncool Joe schmucks and felt so superior. Joe was the past and Pete or Bernie or Elizabeth was the future, until they weren’t.

On Sunday, I was among the 50% of Americans who did not watch the Super Bowl. So that I could revel in my superiority in choosing not to follow the sports crowd, I decided to catch up on my Schitt’s Creek viewing working my way up through the 4th of 6 seasons. No mindless following the herd for me.

Among the 100 million who did watch the Super Bowl, were 108 football experts ESPN had asked to predict the winner. 81 or 75% picked the loser Kansas City over the winner Tampa Bay. Prognostication ought to come with a truth in advertising warning.

Last February, Joe was a loser, COVID had just arrived, Tom Brady was finishing up his 20th year with New England, and to most of us Zoom was a verb. How much precious time and energy did I spend THEN thinking about what is now NOW. And how wrong I was about so many things.

I think about how our unwillingness to live with uncertainty causes so much harm to ourselves and the world. Our thirst for certainty makes us vulnerable to demagogues, propagators of conspiracies, and religious and secular fundamentalists.

The present when it comes will be challenging enough without the fog of predictions.

Life’s too precious to waste time thinking and worrying about the future. Just wait and while you are waiting, LIVE. The future will be here soon enough.

WE LOVE AMERICA ONLY IF WE LOVE ALL OF ITS PEOPLE

When Rebecca and I returned from Malta the summer of 2018 after directing Luther College’s Malta Program, we read about Mayor Pete, a young South Bend, Indiana mayor running for president with a funny and hard to pronounce name – Buttigieg (pronounced Boo-Tuh-Judge). We met a few Buttigieg’s in Malta and so started following Maltese-American Pete, liked what we heard, and settled on him as our presidential candidate.

Living in Iowa, America’s starting line for the 2020 presidential race, we had plenty of opportunities to see Pete. Throughout 2019 we attended four Buttigieg rallies and heard this line each time.

I’m talking about the love of a country that is only possible if you think about the fact that our country is made up of people and you can’t love our country if you hate half the people who are in it.

I wrote this sentence down the first time I heard it thinking its words contained an essential truth about any country but especially a democracy. It is easy to love the idea of America. I can fill up my image of America with whatever content I want. And I can pick the people I want to put in my America. You can do the same.

It is also easy to love God, in the abstract. That is why Jesus’ filled his parables with fleshed-out people such as the Samaritan woman at the well because its easy to love and care for our own kind. I don’t need a parable to nudge me toward someone who looks, thinks or worships like I do. It’s the other kind, the Samaritan, who is easy to hate and thus requires an upside down story to get my attention. Jesus commanded us to love, particularly the Samaritan. Democracy requires us to love, particularly the other side.

JESUS COMMANDED LOVE. DEMOCRACY REQUIRES LOVE

We usually think of democracy as a form of government and distinguish it from its opposite, dictatorship. Modern democracies differ in their particularities. Some are parliamentary systems where the people elect members of Parliament who then select the Prime Minister. Others are presidential systems where the people elect their presidents and members of Congress separately from each other. Regardless of form, all modern democracies share one moral idea in common.

“Democracy begins as an act of imagination about people.” Political Scientist E.E. Schattschneider (1892 – 1971) suggested we begin our thinking about democracy with this statement. He then asked “why people should have any say in how they are governed?” And answered that “the discovery that when we get beyond the externals, the inner person is a human being like ourselves, that all men are human is the greatest discovery in history and the most influential idea in the modern world.”

Democracy, to Schattschneider, is not about “the people” as an abstraction but about the “warm, breathing, feeling, hungering, loving, hating, aspiring, living being with whom we identify ourselves.” And, “the democratic concern for people is not selective…it takes a lot of indiscriminate affection for people as people to run a democracy.”

Buttigieg said we can’t love America if we hate some of its people. Schattschneider told us democracy requires we feel affection for everyone. Jesus turned his world – and our world – upside down by showing us how we should treat whomever we label the other. And then he gave the world two commandments, each found in other religious and humanist traditions.

Jesus said unto him, Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind. This is the first and great commandment. And the second is like unto it, Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself. On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.

Jesus links love of God with love of neighbor. Thus I love God through the ways I treat the people I meet each day. If I don’t treat them well, I am not loving God.

We can think of American democracy in a parallel way. I love America through my feelings and actions toward the people I share this country with. If I hate them and treat them poorly, I am not loving my country.

Feeling affection for all my brother and sister citizens does not require that I agree with them or that I see the world the way they do. Rather, this affection comes from a mature understanding of what my country requires from each of us to live together peacefully. America requires that I see each of the 330 million Americans as another version of the imperfect being I am. And with the same yearnings to be seen and heard.

Those things overwhelm our differences and set forth an ideal that can withstand the challenges of our living together. This shared humanity is the foundation of democracy and the source of my love for all Americans.

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The E.E. Schattschneider quotes are from Two Hundred Million Americans in Search of Government.

DID YOU ALWAYS KNOW WHAT YOU WANTED TO DO?: LESSONS FROM THE KINGSTON TRIO* AND ME.

Growing up for me came in baby steps, with an occasional baby leap. One leap occurred at 13 in 1962, when my parents gave me a transistor radio. At night, with the lights out in a bedroom I shared with a younger brother, I could put the speaker next to my ear and listen to KSTT’s deejay Lou Gutenberger play rock and roll and something he called folk music. The Kingston Trio made folk cool in the late fifties, with help from Lou and 100s of other disc jockeys who loved their first and biggest hit, Tom Dooley. “Hang down your head Tom Dooley, hang down your head and cry…,” 60 years later the words come easily to me.

I wonder: how did Dave Guard, Bob Shane and Nick Reynolds become The Kingston Trio? Maybe even more important, to me: how did I become a teacher? What about you? Did you always know what you wanted to do in your life? If you are, ahem, young, do you think you should know what you want to do by now and the exact route to take?

A STRAIGHT LINE THEORY OF LIFE

“The shortest distance between two points is a straight line.” Babe Derouin, my high school Geometry teacher and golf coach, taught us this principle on the first day of class. Even geometrically-challenged me, with a low spatial abilities’ IQ, could get this simple idea. Freed by my intellectual limitations from having to think much about geometry, I applied the shortest distance notion to life.

Surely The Kingston guys always wanted to be folk singers, following my straight line theory of life. Here’s how Bob Shane** describes the Trio’s history at a benefit appearance for PBS in 2002 filmed at Carnegie Mellon University.

We started the group after graduating from college in 1956. We started as a Calypso Group and took the name from Kingston, Jamaica. To this day none of us have ever been to Kingston. After a couple of years we thought there are groups playing Calypso that are much better than we are. In 1958 we put together our first album that had a mix of calypso, off-broadway tunes, and a few folk tunes, including one song that dee jays would start playing. Tom Dooley would sell 3 million records and when Capital Records handed us the Dooley bonus check and said ‘you are Folk singers,’ we said ‘you bet your ass we are.’ 1958 was the first year of Grammy Awards and they wanted to give us a Grammy but did not have a Folk category. So they looked around at the music business to see what was dying or needed help and gave the Kingston Trio the first grammy for best Country and Western song. The next year Grammy added a Folk category and Kingston Trio won that for best album at large. Two of us were from Hawaii and so a couple of years later printed teeshirts with the caption THE HAWAIIAN CALYPSO FOLK GROUP THAT SAVED COUNTRY MUSIC.

No straight line line for The Hawaii Calypso Folk Group that Saved Country Music. What about me? I have spent my adult life as a teacher, from my first year in 1972 teaching social studies to 6th graders to last year Zooming with Romanian American Studies graduate students, to this winter co-leading Life Long Learning courses for Luther College. By all appearances, I am a teacher. But I have always thought myself an imposter because I never planned to be a teacher.

Over the years, many of my teacher colleagues talked about how they had always: wanted to be a teacher, loved being a student, enjoyed school, and felt passion for their subject matter. In other words, a straight line from A to B. I felt none of those things growing up. I choose teaching out of desperation, my serendipitous version of The Kingston Trio’s folk choice.

A SERENDIPITOUS THEORY OF LIFE

In 1969 newly elected President Richard Nixon knew America would have to get out of Vietnam. The war was unpopular, with demonstrations routine, across the country. Many of the demonstrators were young men who did not want to go to Vietnam.

Nixon and America’s military leaders decided to move toward an all volunteer army, with the first steps the introduction of a yearly lottery that would assign a number to all American males born between 1944 through 1952. Thousands of young men, including me born in 1949, would now know their chances of being inducted.

Numbers ranged from 1 to 365, with those assigned the lowest numbers given the highest chance of being drafted. Many got lucky and began to plan their lives without the fear of being drafted. Not me. In December 1969, I learned my draft lottery number was 66.

My college deferment, however, would not lapse until I graduated in the spring of 1971, an eternity to a 19 year old. So I didn’t think about the draft until May 1971 when I received an order to present myself for a draft physical at the Fort Des Moines Army base in Des Moines, Iowa.

About 40 of us got on a bus in Davenport for the two hour trip to Des Moines, had our physicals, and returned late evening. My most vivid memory was that I was one of only a handful who had passed. The guy next to me on the bus failed his physical because he was 5 pounds too heavy. He vowed to lose those five pounds so that he could enlist. Me, reality had smacked me up against the head. Soon after I received orders to report in August to Fort Des Moines. What would I do now?

I tried the local national guard unit and it had a long waiting list. I thought about fleeing to Canada. Like most of my buddies, I had marched against the Viet Nam war and believed it to be a mistake. But leave my country, family, and friends, for an unknown life? That was beyond this cautious young man. But somehow I learned of another option.

Although I had graduated and lost my college deferment, there was a provision allowing for an additional deferment year if one was a full time student pursuing another degree. So I signed up to get a teaching degree. That involved a semester of classes and a semester of student teaching. With America’s involvement in the war winding down, that was just enough time to put me out of harms way.

Why did I become a teacher? To stay out of the Vietnam.

WHAT REALLY MATTERS

When young, it makes sense to want life to be a straight line. From roughly my orange transistor year forward, I thought “I just want to get moving on this life adventure.” Being patient, letting things happen, feeling confident one will be able to handle whatever comes along, these skills come later, if at all.

Maybe Dave, Bob, and Nick felt the same way. If someone had told them in 1957 they weren’t very good at Calypso, maybe there would never have been a Kingston Trio folk group. What about me?

Today, I love teaching, learning, and politics. This love came after, and not before, I committed myself to each. In The War of Art, Stephen Pressfield describes what happens after one decides to commit to something, something like Folk music or teaching.

Something mysterious starts to happen…a process is set in motion by which, inevitably and infallibly, …unseen forces enlist in our cause; serendipity reinforces our purpose.

Pressfield adds something that will help bring this essay to an end.

When we make a start…something wonderful happens.

Looking forward one wants certainty, a straight line from A to B. That’s true for me even today, with less time left than when I was 13 or 19. Looking backward what seemed serendipitous turns out to have been full of possibility. That’s as true at 71 as it was at 19.

Pressfield is right. There is something out there that is on our side. That surrounds us with support once we commit.

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*The last surviving member of the original Kingston Trio, Bob Shane, died on January 26, 2020. Dave Guard passed away in 1991 and Nick Reynolds in 2008.

**Bob Shane’s history of the group can be found on the DVD My Music: This Land is Your land, The Folk Years

JANUARY 6, 2021: THE ATTEMPTED ASSASSINATION OF AMERICAN DEMOCRACY

ASSASSINATIONS

“What is happening in America?” exclaimed my father on June 6, 1968, the day Sirhan Sirhan assassinated Bobby Kennedy. Kennedy was running for president and had just won the California primary. After giving a late night victory speech, Kennedy was walking through the Ambassador Hotel when Sirhan shot him.

Two months earlier, on April 4, in Memphis, Tennessee, James Earl Ray executed Martin Luther King jr. who was standing on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel. On the night of April 4, Bobby Kennedy was campaigning in an African-American section of Indianapolis. Kennedy addressed the crowd with these words:

For those of you who are black and are tempted to be filled with hatred and mistrust of the injustice of such an act, against all white people, I would only say the I can feel in my heart the same kind of feeling. I had a member of my family killed, but he was killed by a white man.

Five years earlier, on November 22, 1963, Lee Harvey Oswald fired thee bullets from the 6th floor of the book depository building at President John Kennedy who was riding in a motorcade through Dealy Plaza in Dallas Texas. November 22nd was a Friday and the announcement of Kennedy’s death came over a loud speaker just after lunch at Davenport Assumption, the catholic high school I was attending.

When my father asked that question in 1968, I felt for the first time his anxiety about America. I was 19, disagreed with my father about almost everything, but that question must have been lurking just beneath the surface because when he said those words he gave me permission to think deeply about what was going in our country.

My father did not vote for John Kennedy and would not have voted for Bobby Kennedy if he had become the nominee of the Democratic Party. He supported Civil Rights for blacks but he thought MLK jr. a rabble rouser, a common feeling among whites in the 1960s. But he considered each of those assassinations attacks on America democracy and not just the killings of public figures.

THE ATTEMPTED ASSASSINATION OF AMERICAN DEMOCRACY

The January 6, 2021 mob attack against America’s Congress and its Constitutional duty to certify the election of Joe Biden as President of the United States of America was an assassination attempt against American democracy. Three pillars hold democracy in place: competitive parties offering citizens a choice, free and fair elections, and a peaceful transition of power.

Democrat Biden and Republican Trump offered the record 158 million voters a clear choice. By America’s long standing election rules, Joe Biden won the popular vote by 7 million ballots and the decisive Electoral College tally 306 to 232. President Trump’s legal team challenged the vote totals in many states, with no success. Election officials in each state and the District of Columbia certified their states. On January 6, Congress was meeting to vote on those certifications. That’s when the mob tried to kill American democracy.

WHAT ELSE HAPPENED IN AMERICA ON JANUARY 6?

But that is not the only thing that happened on January 6. Two men, one African-American and one Jewish, won Senate seats in Georgia, a former Confederate State with a long history of racism and anti-semitism.

Two images of America: a mob laden with racist and antisemitic symbols attacking the American Capital Building, and the two Georgia senate winners, each part of a group once marginalized. Both images are partial answers to my father’s question still relevant today: “what is happening in America?”

The realities behind each image have always been part of the American story. Many of the men who wrote the Constitution owned slaves. And they placed within that document a provision protecting the importing of slaves until 1808.

But America’s Constitution, ratified in 1789, also includes the great aspirational Preamble., with the words “more perfect union” and “establish justice” suggesting “we the people” still had work to do. The United States was still not a perfect union.

One horrible but necessary task toward perfection would be the destruction of America’s system of slavery. In 1863 President Abraham Lincoln used the backdrop of Gettysburg to make clear to Americans that America was a “new nation brought forth” not by the Constitution, with its slavery-heavy-weight, but by the Declaration of Independence, with its great aspirational declaration about the equality of all.

Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth, upon this continent, a new nation, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. 

Last spring I was in Romania teaching two classes on American politics to Romanian students (and one student from Slovakia) in an American Studies graduate program at the University of West in Timisoara. During the first class period, I asked the students, “when did America become a democracy?” “1965” answered one student and anticipating my follow-up question said “that’s when African-Americans in America’s south got the right to vote.”

The story of America is a story of competing visions of what America should be. One vision is the age-old dream of dominance and exclusion by one ethnic or racial or religious or gender group. On January 6, on the sacred floor of the American Capital, the man carrying the Confederate Flag and the man with the Auschwitz shirt represented this vision.

A competing dream – built upon the equality clause of The Declaration of Independence and the Constitution’s Preamble – calls for a more perfect and just union that extends liberty to all Americans, regardless of race, ethnicity, gender, or sexual orientation.

On January 6, 2021, there were two competing visions of America for all to see.

What is happening in America today? Something that is always present – the continual struggle between exclusion and inclusion. I don’t know what side will win but I do know what side I am on.

SOMETIMES LYING IS THE ONLY WAY TO GROW UP

“In a room where you do what you don’t confess,” wrote my friend Dave in an email chain among friends about the goings-on in a motel in a small Iowa town. I knew that line – I don’t usually remember song lyrics – and a quick Google search reminded me it came from Gordon Lightfoot’s 1974 folk rock song Sundown. And Dave knew it enough to use it. But it meant nothing to the other seven in the email chain, all around the same age. Why did this line stick in our memories?

I thought about it for a few minutes and shot an email to Dave, with a hunch. Dave’s answer below confirmed my “it’s because we are Catholics and they are not” guess.

“Sundown is a favorite of mine. I think the Confess line gave me a guilty pleasure. I went to confession weekly for years during grade school and junior high. I confessed impure thoughts and that I didn’t honor my parents week after week. Penance was one Our Father and three Hail Mary’s. I often would hang around when I was finished with my prayers to see how long it took my friends to finish their penance.”

FIRST CONFESSIONS

Dave and I made our first confessions in second grade. Confession is a Sacrament in the Roman Catholic Church and a big deal. I remember mine was on a Saturday, my 40 classmates were all dressed up, and our parents and relatives joined us in church. That is why song lyrics with the word confession made an impression on Dave and me. Especially when the line described above is preceded by “I can see her lying back in her satin dress.” 

Dave’s “impure thoughts” also made my list of sins even though I hadn’t a clue at 8 years old what impure meant. My other regularly confessed sin was “lying to my parents.” I needed to say something in that confessional but truth be told I didn’t lie any more than I sat around thinking lewd thoughts about Becky, the 8 year old daughter of friends of my parents who hung out with me for reasons neither of us understood. The serious-confession-requiring-lying wouldn’t start until I was 16.

FIRST GIRLFRIEND

“You can’t get serious about her, you know,” my mother said to me in 1966 when I told her about Sharon, my first girl friend. Sharon was Jewish. If Sharon had been Protestant, my mom would have said the same thing. My mom came by this thinking in a hard-earned personal way because she had married a Protestant. By the time I was a teenager, I knew the story.

Before they married in 1948, my mom talked my dad into going through the Right of Christian Initiation for Adults program to prepare for conversion to the Catholic faith. My dad loved my mom and so gave it a try but was treated so badly by the priest he eventually said “no more, not ever again.” My dad accepted that his children would be raised Catholic but rarely went to church with us. Mom and dad had a good marriage but even as a kid of 16 I knew religious difference was a source of tension between them. So when mom said “you can’t get serious,” I knew she was serious.

THE LYING STARTS

That’s when I started lying. I also had laid out the welcome mat for impure thoughts a couple of years before and more than a few hung around, with the help of an occasional glance at a drugstore Playboy. It was, however, the lying that I needed because I did not have it in me to openly rebel, to say NO to my mother. And until Dave’s “confession” line got me thinking about this time of my life, I had not accepted that my mother knew all along exactly what I was up to, what I HAD to be up to.

To grow up, we have to grow away from our parents. There is no easy or perfect way to do this. And no way that does not cause guilt. I liked Sharon and without really giving it much thought, I started to lie. At first, it was lies of omission. Occasionally Sharon would drive me home from a date and I asked her to drop me off at the top of East Street, a block from our house and a spot not visible from the windows. Sharon and I dated for almost two years and never once did I tell my mom what I was up to.

My lies of commission were more numerous. I routinely asked my parents to use one of our family cars for Saturday drive-in dates. When asked where and who with, I always replied a movie and buddies. Riding to church Sunday mornings in that same car with my mom always made me feel guilty and more to the point anxious about whether there was any evidence of my deception.

“PAUL, I KNOW EXACTLY WHAT YOU’RE DOING”

As I started writing this blog about lying, a memory of another incident with my mom came to mind. In The Discovery of Being, Rollo May writes “One’s present determines what he recalls from the past.” It is early evening on a weekday because the setting is the #1 Little League diamond in Duck Creek Park in my hometown of Davenport, Iowa. My brother Pat is playing and my mom and dad are sitting in the the bleacher section behind home plate.

I don’t remember where Sharon and I were going that night but I needed a car for a date. They are sitting about 1/3 of the way up and so I step around people to get to my mom. I always asked my mom, never my dad. “Can I have the car,” I asked. “Where are you going?”, mom responded. “Over to Jerry Spaeth’s,” I yammered. Jerry was a high school friend and usually a safe answer. Today, as I recollect this episode, I see my mother turn, look directly at me, and say quietly, “Paul, I know exactly what you’re doing. Don’t think I don’t.”

At 16, I thought about what my mom said for about 1 minute, the time it took me to walk to the car. Today, I think about what my mom said in a different light. She knew all along about my lying. Despite her religious concerns, she probably knew my first romance would go the way of most first romances as it eventually did. But I think my mom knew something else.

Dody Gardner died in 2017. She was 96. At the lunch after her funeral I met one of only two contemporaries of hers still alive. I had met John Bishop a few times when I was a kid, at bridge parties my parents hosted. John, a physician and life-long bridge player, told me my mom was the finest player he knew. I asked a few of her younger friends, all bridge players, about this and they all nodded their heads. They did not know anyone better. I had no idea. And it gave me this thought.

Good bridge players think strategically. My mom knew my personality. She knew I could not rebel directly. To take the necessary next step toward maturity, toward separating myself from her and my father, I needed to use disreputable means I would eventually discard. That is exactly what happened. Momentarily, at 16, I took her “I know exactly what you are doing” as a warning. It wasn’t a warning. It was a forecast. The skillful bridge player had made a successful opening bid.

I no longer go to confession. But if I did, lying would not be one of my sins. Impure thoughts?, well, I will leave that topic for another blog.

THE GOOD, BAD, UGLY AND HOPEFUL

“Why doesn’t American politics work better?” When I talk to classes or groups, this question is asked more often than any other. “What do you mean by work better?” I ask. “Well, you know, work out their differences, work together, get things done.” “Get things done,” I repeat, and add, parroting Lincoln, “doing things for us we can’t do for ourselves.”

That’s the ugly in American politics, too many modern challenges, including COVID 19, seem beyond government’s capacity to manage, let alone solve. The ugly story is connected to two additional stories, the good and the bad, and the three together will give you a shorthand way to understand American politics and see a way forward. There is a way forward and that is the hopeful story.

THE GOOD

We need government to solve problems. But you and I also need choices, for how society’s problems ought to be solved. I want businesses to shut their doors to lessen the spread of COVID; you believe the economic and other costs of closing businesses are too great. Most solutions require trade-offs and democracy is superior to its authoritarian alternatives because it offers citizens choices. The clearer the choice the better. In 2020, Democrat Joe Biden and Republican Donald Trump presented America’s record 158 million voters exactly that.

When I was growing up in the 1960s, I knew my mom voted Democratic and my dad Republican. But I don’t think they disagreed about anything political other than their party ID. Paul and Dody Gardner supported the Vietnam War, opposed the protesters, accepted the necessity of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and worried about giving more money to the poor. When it came time to vote, they carried their agreements into the voting booth, and voted for different parties.

In the sixties America was full of division, with the assassinations of President Kennedy, Malcolm X., Martin Luther King, Jr. and Bobby Kennedy. Street protests against Vietnam imprisoned Lyndon Johnson in the White House leading to his decision not to seek re-election in 1968. But America’s inside-the-tent politics – its two major parties – did not accurately reflect its outside-the-tent divisions.

America’s Republican Party included plenty of liberals and its Democratic Party conservatives, from the south. Liberal Republicans supported the 1964 Civil Rights Act and conservative Democrats did not. In 1968, Republican presidential candidate Richard Nixon developed a southern strategy, including racial code words such as “law and order,” to appeal to southern conservatives opposed to civil rights legislation and a northern strategy, including supporting affirmative action and environmental policies, to appeal to northeastern liberals.

Until the mid 1960s, America’s two political parties worked pretty well together because neither took a decisive stand on America’s racist policies. Once the 1964 Civil Rights Act passed under the leadership of a Democratic President Lyndon Johnson, America’s two parties would morph over the next six decades into the two perfectly sorted parties that exist today.

The Democratic Party would become the party of inclusion and equality on controversies related to race, gender, sexual orientation, and immigration. The Republican Party would be the party of saying NO or slow down. Ronald Brownstein refers to the voters who supported Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden as the coalition of transformation. He labels the supporters of Republicans John McCain, Mitt Romney and Donald Trump the coalition of restoration.

THE GOOD: IN 2020 AMERICA’S TWO MAJOR POLITICAL PARTIES OFFER VOTERS DISTINCT VISIONS FOR WHAT KIND OF COUNTRY AMERICA SHOULD BE. AMERICA’S POLITICAL DIVISIONS MIRROR ITS SOCIETAL DIVISIONS.

THE BAD

America is an evenly divided country. It is true that in two presidential elections, Donald Trump lost the popular vote by 10 million votes. But America’s Presidential election rules favor small, rural states. The candidate that wins the most votes in a state wins all of the state’s Electors.

Even though Joe Biden won the 2020 popular vote by 7 million votes and the Electoral College 306 to 221, 44,000 votes in three states – Georgia, Arizona, and Wisconsin – out of 158 million votes cast, separated a Biden victory from a tie vote. Even though Donald Trump in 2016 lost the popular vote by 3 million ballots, he won the Electoral College by an identical margin and a change in 77,000 votes in three states – Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin – out of 137 million ballots, and there would have been a President Hillary Clinton.

The blue and red map does not lie. America is an evenly divided country and it is an increasingly angry country. Its two parties give us a clear choice on the most difficult of all political controversies, what kind of country do we want America to be? But this is where America’s election rules begin to let us down. These rules favor two dominant parties because the candidates of third parties have no chance of winning office. In elections for the House and Senate, there is only one winner and that winner must receive a plurality of the vote.

Not even scraps for the candidate who can get 10 or 20 or even 40 percent. The Democratic and Republican Parties are the only game in town. Support for more parties is higher than ever, with more than 50% of Republicans and Democrats wanting more choice. Many Americans intuit that two dominant parties exaggerate our differences. A choice of two reduces the complexity and nuance required to manage our way through our difficult problems. More important, and the bad, a choice of two reinforces the bane of all societies, the human proclivity to tribalism.

THE BAD: AMERICA’S ELECTION RULES AND SORTED TWO PARTY SYSTEM PRESENT AMERICA WITH TRIBALISM AT ITS WORST, THE HUMAN TENDENCY TO DIVIDE INTO US VS. THEM.

THE UGLY

Americans are evenly divided into two well sorted parties. The Democratic Party is America’s reform party, urging the country toward its promise as a large, multi-racial democracy that extends rights and privileges to all. The Republican Party is America’s conservative party, emphasizing traditional perspectives, and a cautionary approach to change.

What unifies Americans is their shared disgust for how government works. This is the “why can’t they get things done?” response I get in my talks, usually uttered with a combination of frustration and wonderment. The WHY to this question is the ugly part of the story.

The American Founders did not like political parties and built a governmental system that would depend upon politicians working together. Separation of powers and checks and balances were built into the system forcing each national government institution to share power thus giving each part – the House, Senate and Presidency – a veto over the other. For long stretches of American political history this sharing power system worked reasonably well because one party dominated national politics. For example, from the 1930s to 1980, the Democratic Party controlled the House and Senate most of the time. This meant the congressional Republican Party had the incentive to cooperate because they rarely could win enough seats to control. Single party dominance = bipartisanship.

Since 1980 each party has controlled the House and Senate roughly half the time. This means THAT in any given Congress BECAUSE the minority or out party sees a reasonable chance of taking back the institution in two years it has little incentive to cooperate. In 2009, why would Republicans help President Obama craft the Affordable Health Care Act if they could run against ‘Obamacare’ and win back the House and Senate, exactly what they did in 2010. In 2021, evenly divided parties means bipartisanship is irrational. Because America’s system of government requires cooperation, the system is stymied in its main task of “doing for us what we can’t do for ourselves.”

THE UGLY: IN 2021 EVENLY DIVIDED PARTIES MEANS BIPARTISANSHIP IS IRRATIONAL. BECAUSE AMERICA’S SYSTEM OF GOVERNMENT REQUIRES COOPERATION, AMERICA’S GOVERNMENT IS STYMIED IN ITS MAIN TASK OF “DOING FOR US WHAT WE CAN’T DO FOR OURSELVES.”

HOPEFUL

Americans are resilient. In the midst of COVID – the fear, sickness and death – more Americans voted in 2020 than ever before, a record 158 million. Since 2009, millions of Americans have organized on the right and on the left, from the Tea Party to Black Lives Matter, to take to the streets in mostly peaceful protests. Americans have not given up on American politics. And their two dominant parties provide clear, different and compelling answers to the question Americans have argued about from the beginning, “who are we?” Unfortunately, America’s evenly divided two-party system does not work well with its governmental structure that requires a sharing of power. And Americans know that. How long will they accept gridlock?

If politics is to help a country of 330 million answer the “who are we” question in a way that most of us can accept, we need more than two options, more than two parties offering alternatives. On any political issue, but especially an issue of national identity, the best politics gives its citizens a more nuanced and complicated way to think about their challenges. Two parties reinforce our human tendency to divide into tribes. Four or five offers us a chance to find common ground with others. Most democracies in the world – including all countries that became democratic in the 20th and 21st century – understand this and so crafted election rules that produced multi-party systems.

The single most important change in America’s election rules that would give America a multi-party system is ranked choice voting. Wikipedia provides an excellent description as does Lee Drutman in Breaking the Two-Party Doom Loop: The case for Multiparty democracy. Drutman tells the stories of how Maine and New Zealand moved from single seat, plurality elections to ranked choice voting. It took each about a decade and the reform efforts were a combination of elite leadership and grassroots organizing.

RANKED CHOICE VOTING AND THE JANUARY 6 ATTACK ON THE AMERICA’S CAPITAL (AND DEMOCRACY)

Adopting multi-winner ranked choice election reforms will also help America manage its extremists. The mob that attacked the American Congress on January 6 demonstrated by its violence and symbolism that it was outside the norms of American politics. We learn more everyday about the involvement of many of America’s far right extremists and groups. Many believe President Trump has empowered these groups. That they find solace and comfort inside one of America’s two major parties. The rules of America’s politics have given these extremist groups and their sympathizers power beyond their numbers. Thus you have half the members of the Republican House delegation voting to overturn the election of Joe Biden hours after this violent assault on Congress.

At Luther I taught a course on terrorism for more than 15 years. One of the things I learned from our study of of terrorist groups, from the Irish Republican Army to America’s Klu Klux Klan to Al Qaeda, is that these groups’ political goals are shared by many who would never engage in violence. For many of those in DC last Wednesday, accepting the election results means their grievances and resentments will no longer be aired by the most powerful person in the world. What are those grievances? I think a combination of cultural, demographic, and economic changes in America that reduce their status.

These folks are not going away. In fact, if America continues to become the kind of country I want it to be, a truly equal multi-religious, multi-racial and multi-ethnic democracy, that is not the country many of these people want. America’s very progress toward its Declaration of Independence and Preamble to the Constitution aspirational goals make it vulnerable to the kind of backlash we witnessed on January 6th. How does a modern democracy manage this inevitable conflict?

America’s current election rules and its two party system have given this anti-diversity, anti-tolerance group significant influence in the Republican Party. For this group, represented in ends if not means by the mob that stormed Congress, the election loss in 2020 is impossible to accept. How does a modern democracy manage this group?

One answer is taking place right now, inside the Republican Party. The anti-Trump forces have a bit of wind to their back by the almost universal condemnation of the January 6 attack and for many the close connection between the words of President Trump about a fraudulent election the violence on the 6th. This together with the recognition that over Trump’s term the Republican Party lost the House, Senate and the Presidency may lead to a more moderate Republican Party. Even if this does happen, there is no guarantee that another extremist element might take over one of America’s two main parties in the future.

Changing America’s election laws to a form of ranked choice voting with multi-member districts would encourage the development of four or five parties. With the choice of multiple parties, the American extremes can be heard, may even win seats in Congress, but are very unlikely to ever dominate politics. Giving these folks a voice allows us to see them, to hear them, and to manage them. This is certainly a better alternative than to risk again the chance that tomorrow’s extremists will again gain functional control of one of America’s two major parties.

CONCLUSION

A multi-party system will not solve America’s problems. But the real world experiences of countries that have adapted this system suggest multi-party systems encourage compromise and discourage negative advertising. Increasing comity and decreasing negativity are exactly what America needs. There is a proven way forward for our country. Educate yourself; talk with your neighbors; support candidates and referendum in favor of ranked choice. There is a way out of this mess.

America’s election rules in combination with its governing rules do not serve American well in the 21st century. The problem is not America’s politicians but its election rules. As America grapples with its growing diversity and as it struggles to bring its aspirations in line with the realities of many of its citizens, it needs a politics that will not exaggerate its divisions. Ranked choice voting with multi-winners leading to a muilt-party system is a straightforward and proven remedy.

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I recommend three books for follow-up reading: Ezra Klein’s Why We’re Polarized?, Lee Drutman’s Breaking the Two-Party Doom Loop, and Frances Lee’s Insecure Majorities.

AND OF BEING A GARDNER?

Last week Spotify brought my parents back to me through The Ray Conniff Singers’ We Wish you a Merry Christmas album. Dorothy Mae Thomas married Paul John Gardner on August 13, 1948. I came along on September 20, 1949 followed two years later by Peter and three years after that Pat. I am a proud member of the Gardner clan.

Today, Spotify delivers music to us through a fat hot dog shaped speaker we bought in Romania last spring. In 1962 delivery men hauled up our 60 foot drive-way a stereo of the sort pictured to the right. 50 years later – just before our mom entered a Memory Care facility – my brother Pat would pull this sucker down the drive-way, to be picked over by metal scavengers.

I accommodate many identities: partner to Rebecca, son to Dody & Paul, father to Ben, college professor, retiree, friend to Ed & Carol, Democrat, liberal, and American. In this blog, I want to reflect upon what it means to be a member of a family and how that might throw some light on what it means to be a member of a nation. I will begin with two stories.

NO SEATBELTS

In the summer of 1955 my mother’s mother was driving with five year old me in the front seat and my mother in the backseat with my two year old Peter. My grandmother’s car is not equipped with seat belts and so no one is secured in place when another car slams into the left side. The force of the collision ejected me out the windowless right passenger seat to a soft landing on a boulevard and Peter through the windowless back seat onto a hard landing on a curb.  My grandmother and mother end up with minor injuries, as do I, while my brother Peter’s left leg will require several operations.  He still walks with a limp today.

BUT THERE WERE OTHER KINDS OF BELTS

Throughout the 1950s & 1960s as the three Gardner boys were growing up our dad, on at least three occasions I can remember, threatened his belt as punishment for some wrong-doing. I once climbed up on a chest of drawers and pulled it down as I jumped off. Hearing the crash, dad ran into our room and once he saw we were alive and uninjured started his belt routine. This included: clenching his tongue, moving both hands to the belt buckle,  and retracting the tip from the buckle. I don’t remember my dad ever pulling the loosened belt out from its loops. The belt-pause-routine likely saved our butts. But the fact that my dad – a gentle, kind and decent man – would threaten to use a belt suggests where American culture was at that moment, as the cartoon* makes clear.

TODAY’S GARDNER CLAN AND BELTS

No Gardner adult child has ever threatened to use a belt on their kids. Every Gardner adult child has developed the habit of strapping on a seat belt.  

The Gardner label moves on but the content of it is changing all the time.  What is the essence of being a member of the Dody Thomas and Paul Gardner clan? In The Lies That Bind: Rethinking Identity, Kwame Anthony Appiah writes that we ought to think of identity as a verb and not a noun.

“Identity is an activity and not a thing. And its the nature of activities to bring change.” I like the idea of thinking of my Gardner identity as always evolving. This gives me ownership, to stamp my own imprint. So too for my brothers who add their own particularities to our clan identity. Time for one more Gardner story.

About thirty years ago Pat and I were playing golf at Davenport, Iowa’s Duck Creek public golf course. We teed off on the 1st hole that borders the 9th. I hit a tee shot that sliced into a group coming up the 9th fairway. Angry, one member of this group went up to my ball and hit it back to us.

This ticked me off and so I ran toward him. He reciprocated and advanced toward me. And he was bigger, I could see that the closer we got to each other. With golf clubs in hand – hadn’t I inherited my dad’s belt-pause? – when we were about 10 feet apart I felt my younger but much bigger brother Pat at my side and heard him to say to the other guy “if I was you, I would put the club down.”

Pat and I are different in so many ways, including our politics. He is red America and I am blue America. But on that golf course our Gardner identity trumped our political and other differences.

WHAT IS THE ESSENCE OF BEING AN AMERICAN?

What do these Gardner stories have to do with being an American? Like the changing content of the Gardner label, America moves on. Today, seat belts in America are mandatory and have become routine. We look back at the ‘no seatbelt age’ as if it was the Stone Age. Sadly, parents still beat their children, but the cartoon above makes most of us cringe. That’s because beating our children with a belt or any other weapon has became unacceptable.

Just as being a Gardner is a verb and not a noun, the same is true of being an American. Americans are always recreating their country. This dynamism, this evolving America, is the background for so many of America’s political brawls.

I just watched one of my favorite movies, Miracle, about the 1980 American Olympic Hockey Team’s victory over the Soviet Union’s team. The film demonstrates how America’s differences, for a moment, were overwhelmed by the emotional connection so many had to their country.

This brings me to my final point. There is a reservoir of good will among the members of the Gardner clan, despite our differences. We are committed to sharing our lives as Gardners.

I believe there is this same reservoir of good will among the America’s large, diverse and boisterous clan. America’s differences come from America’s guaranteed freedoms that encourage us to go our own ways. Just as Pat and Paul were encouraged by their parents to carve out their own lives.

Pat’s conservative-red-state-world-view irritates the hell out of me. I am sure Pat would say the same about my liberal-blue-state-ideas. The essence of the Gardner clan is not sameness, it is a commitment by its members to a name that signifies traditions, stories, and a common life together.

The essence of being an American is not the disagreements we have with our neighbors but, according to Anthony Appiah, it is “sharing the life of a modern state…”

TOGETHER

*A friend, Don Fisher, emailed this cartoon to friends with the comment that although he and his wife Laurie cringed at its meaning he decided to send it along anyway. I am thankful he did.