We Are Not Immune

Some years ago, in a sparsely populated part of Costa Rica, I listened to the sounds of rustling and murmurs throughout the dark night. At first I envisioned large animals out hunting, which was frightening enough, but I soon realized the sounds were people moving in endless procession, and my imagination turned to guerillas, drug runners, kidnappers. In the morning I learned the travelers were Nicaraguans on a perilous journey to a better life. Some of them undoubtedly ended up at the U.S.-Mexican border, where they became part of the crisis of illegal immigration, the subject these days of so much heated talk and so little proposed action – particularly around the 4^th of July when patriots blabber on about “American exceptionalism” under siege from porous borders.

I don’t know the ultimate solution, but it seems clear that the old ways of thinking do not work. You cannot build a fence high enough or dig a moat deep enough to keep desperate people out. More importantly, what the new nativists don’t grasp is that this issue signifies, not America’s specialness, but how much a part of the world we have become.

For as more and more people gather at our borders and in our detention centers, what we face is not an immigrant problem, but a refugee problem – with a profile much like the rest of the world, where 45 million refugees, 80 percent of them women and children, live impoverished lives in squalid camps, breeding anger and discontent.

Going Backward

I do not write to flog Hobby Lobby, the company behind the latest legal challenge to Obamacare. I admire companies that are mission-driven and espouse values other than just the bottom line. What distresses me is that contraception, an issue I thought settled long ago, is again under assault. This is a form of guerilla warfare, with no fixed lines, in which women are forever forced to retake old ground. How can abortions be safe, in any sense of the word, if contraception is continually under attack? This is a women’s issue, and I’m not sure many men actually get that. The Supreme Court’s three female justices don’t just dissent on contraception cases. They seem personally affronted, as was the elderly woman who asked me 18 years ago when I was running for Congress: “Are you pro-choice or anti-woman?” When Rick Santorum attacked birth control as well as abortion in the 2012 Republican presidential primary debates, it just seemed more proof of how firmly rooted in the Inquisition his political beliefs are. Santorum is running again in 2016; his views have not changed.

But there is more than politics involved. My friend Bayard Storey spent his long career studying reproduction, for which he received scientific honors and a philosophical awakening: “A woman provides 99.999 percent of the metabolic input to development of the offspring; the male’s contribution to the process is miniscule. It’s the woman who has to do all the work and carry the burden. No legislator has the right to regulate that.”

Keep Your Eye on Mississippi

Six-term Senator Thad Cochran edged Tea Party-backed Chris McDaniel in Mississippi's Republican primary run-off, but only with the help of black Democratic voters, a tactic that has McDaniel seething and threatening to challenge. It will be interesting to watch African-American voting patterns in November, when they choose between Travis Childers, a former Congressman who opposed Obamacare and describes himself as “pro-life and pro-gun,” and Cochran, who ran on his formidable ability to bring big-government bacon home to Mississippi. And it will be equally interesting to watch how Childers and Cochran treat black voters, who make up  36% of the electorate in the most racially polarized state in America. It should be quite a tap dance, particularly since Cochran is the worst kind of pork barreler: Mississippi gets $2.47 in federal funding for each dollar it pays in federal taxes, yet it remains at the bottom of the barrel in health care, poverty, education, and general well-being. Correction. Readers picked up two big errors in my last post:

1. Adams and Jefferson died in 1826, not 1825.
2. More importantly, they became bitterly estranged after the election of 1800, then reconciled in 1812 and remained friends until the end of their lives. While this reinforces the idea that vitriolic partisanship is nothing new, it does temper the notion that their politics was not personal. “Acid does do damage,” one of you wrote. But Adams and Jefferson give hope that such damage can be overcome and they reaffirm civil discourse as the political ideal, which today seems sadly in doubt.

Civil Discourse

Kenyon is a small liberal arts college, founded in 1824, from which my son Daniel graduated and where I am attending a seminar on the “Essays” of Montaigne, which he described as his “attempts” to put his thoughts into words. Kenyon is physically and culturally an idyllic place, where civil discourse is still prized as the foundation of both learning and community. The college’s politics are predominantly liberal, and yet a longtime political science professor with neo-conservative views praised it for its openness. “No speaker has ever been disinvited here,” he said.

That is my hope for this blog: a forum where I can "attempt" to write what I think – or what I think I think – and invite you to do the same. I want to open the discussion to other views. I welcome your thoughts on how to do so.

I do not believe that vitriolic partisanship started only in the last few years. The Jeffersonians brutally attacked John Adams and the Federalists returned the broadsides in spades. They were ugly and sometimes violent. But Jefferson and Adams renewed their friendship before they both died on July 4, 1826, America’s 50^th Independence Day. What is different now, I worry, is that even the ideal of civic discourse is under attack, the notion that political rivals can be personal friends seems a fading memory, and forums for the true exchange of ideas grow fewer. Yet that ideal is the foundation of our political system. We cannot have a republic without it.

Irony in Black and White

When I suggest that race plays a more-than-incidental role in the opposition’s implacable opposition to Barack Obama, some accuse me of playing the race card; others just roll their eyes at my lame excuse for Obama’s presidential failings. But it’s neither lame nor an excuse. It’s a reality. How could it not be? Consider:

• Richard Nixon’s “southern strategy” explicitly used race to appeal to southern white voters, pulling the old Confederacy almost overnight into the GOP (and driving blacks overwhelmingly to the Democrats).

• Ronald Reagan expanded that strategy to white working-class voters everywhere, and “Reagan Democrats” provided his margins of victory.

• In 2005 Republican National Committee Chairman Ken Mehlman apologized to the NAACP for his party’s efforts “to benefit politically from racial polarization.”

• But perhaps the most bizarre sign of Republican race polarization is Senator Thad Cochran’s last-ditch effort to woo black voters in Tuesday’s primary run-off against Chris McDaniel. Cochran believes African Americans will find the Tea Party-backed McDaniel even more offensive than him, and he appears to be correct. The cynicism is breathtaking, but the irony is that Cochran’s desperate pursuit of black votes may do more to build an interracial coalition based on  self-interest than did the election of a biracial president who appealed to our better natures across the grim line of race.

A discouraging thought, but as I look around the world I see idealism everywhere in retreat from the sectarian forces that would keep us apart.

But I’m not giving up.

Four Ways to Create a Community

How do you create a community in a world where Sunnis and Shiites slaughter each other, Ukraine, Myanmar, Kenya seethe with ethnic hatred, and our own country grows dishearteningly divided?

• The Melting Pot is the foundation of America’s faith in assimilation. It seeks to erase cultural and ethnic differences and bring forth a new American. Marxism seeks to eradicate class distinctions in pursuit of the same goal. Such differences have proved stubbornly resistant, and policies to deal with those deemed unassimilable, whether kulaks or Native Americans, too often turned into genocide.
• The Quilt recognizes the importance of diversity by replacing the melting pot with a single fabric woven from different pieces, each maintaining its own identity while contributing to the beauty of the whole.
• Walls, topped with glass shards and razor wire, defended by heavily armed troops taught to hate what’s on the other side, seem where we’re headed now. “Something there is that doesn't love a wall,
that wants it down,” wrote Robert Frost, and it’s hard to see how our world can survive as bristling fiefdoms behind bricks and wire.
• The Retreat offers the chance to create small purposeful communities, often close to the natural world. While such a life seems increasingly attractive, I believe a retreat must be a place to recharge, and not retire.

Globalization seems bent on eradicating our differences by homogenizing the world. It has unleashed, in reaction, unimaginably brutal responses. Our survival depends on understanding that our differences are what make us human.

Personal Resistances

In his column yesterday, “Four Words Going Bye-Bye”, The New York Times’ Tom Friedman wrote, “A lot of what drives today’s news derives from the fact that privacy is over, local is over, average is over and later is over.” We can’t expect privacy in a world of cell phones, cameras and YouTube; local in a “hyperconnected” world; average in an economy of cheap labor and snowballing automation; later in a world that humans are so radically altering. This, he declares, is inevitable. We must adjust. No thanks.

I think I’ll resist living in a world that chips away at my humanity. Technology cannot prevent me from having my own thoughts nor keep me from places of beauty, solitude and contemplation. Globalization can’t stop me from nurturing the friendships of a long life nor engaging in the life of my community. I will keep struggling to excel, but only in Lake Wobegon are all the children above average, and it does me no harm to be reminded that I am, in countless ways, very average indeed. After a lifetime of procrastination, I know well the dangers of “later”, but there is not enough “now” for all I still intend to see and do.

My little resistances are more than private refuges from an overbearing world. They are not a retreat, but an effort, however feeble, to assert my unique self, to make my voice heard among the cacophony. They are what make me – what make all of us – human.

Open Season

This just in. The people of Georgia, speaking through their elected officials, have voluntarily limited their right to carry guns in public. In a law signed by Gov. Nathan Deal, Georgians may not carry weapons past metal detectors in airports and public buildings. And they need permission from their pastor to pack in church. These concessions were part of an overhaul of the state’s archaic gun laws – and yet more evidence of the National Rifle Association’s willingness to compromise in the aftermath of the Sand Hook Elementary School tragedy 17 months ago. In exchange, the Safe Carry Protection Act of 2014 – or the “guns everywhere bill” – allows people to carry their firearms into bars, school zones, public buildings, libraries, really just about anywhere they want, including elementary schools with permission, and right up to the security gate in airports. The legislators did prohibit guns from the state Capitol, which some have suggested is hypocritical. Still, said GeorgiaCarry’s Jerry Henry, “If you are one who likes to protect yourself, you have a whole lot more places to protect yourself.” While Atlanta’s Episcopal bishop told his parishioners, “The prince of peace isn’t spelled P-I-E-C-E. It’s P-E-A-C-E,” past-and-future GOP presidential candidate, Rick Santorum, told “Face the Nation, “I think a well-armed family is a safe family. A well-armed America is a safer America.”

So now we can take our guns to church and open public meetings with sectarian prayer. Not so long ago we seemed to be going in the other direction.

Assessing Obama

Barack Obama is taking a beating these days, from “America the Shrunken” to a president who “doesn't seem excited about all the possibilities for America.” And his “you hit singles” remark brought people back 35 years to Jimmy Carter’s “malaise” speech. Carter actually never used the world “malaise” in his speech that asked us “to join hands [and] commit ourselves together to a rebirth of the American spirit.” But his call for unified sacrifice didn’t go over any better in 1979 than Obama’s description of a diplomacy that seeks to “steadily advance the interests of the American people and our partnership with folks around the world." Such comments are deflating for those who prefer exceptionalism to alliances and robust bellicosity to quiet diplomacy.

While the president’s foes have defied him at every turn, his disappointed friends now give him too little credit for his accomplishments. I admit I miss the Obama who captivated a nation in 2008 by helping us imagine a country in which our economic wellbeing didn’t depend on destroying our environment, our values didn’t countenance torture, and our political discourse actually included dialogue – the Obama who literally embodied a nation ready to transcend black and white.

I wonder sometimes if I mistook his biography for vision, his oratory for leadership, the image for the man? I haven’t given up on Obama. But my belief in his – or anyone's – ability to transform Washington's culture is diminished, and so I will look elsewhere for the possibility of real change.

Redemption

Last month the Colorado River crossed the Mexican border for the first time in years. It is on its way to the Gulf of California amid hopes that it will revive its delta, which Aldo Leopold described in 1922 as an ecological paradise but which is now a barren, saline desert. In the midst of the worst drought in the region’s history, prolonged negotiations between the U.S. and Mexico – spurred by scientists and environmentalists – have brought water back to the southern Colorado, and there is hope that the once-grand river, destroyed by economic forces bent on extracting every drop of its water, will flow again to the sea. For the past 13 years, John Trotter has been documenting that story in his photographs. He first went to the Colorado after the attempted-murder conviction of a street gang leader, who had orchestrated a beating so severe that John was “left for dead in a pool of blood.” He had been taking pictures of children playing for the Sacramento Bee.

Still traumatized, he sought relief in something “bigger than my own experience.” He started at the bottom, in the delta where the river is only a dry bed, and he found a landscape as damaged as he was, its people eking a living out of dead land. He empathized. He taught himself Spanish. He kept returning. He watched people working for years to bring water to the delta. It had become, for the Colorado and for his own life, “a redemption story.”

A Short History of Drugs

For some reason, this story, reproduced in its entirety, caught my attention last week: “The Australian Michael Rogers can race again after cycling’s governing body accepted that meat he ate in China probably caused his positive doping test.

“Rogers, 34, an Olympic bronze medalist, raced last October in China, where clenbuterol is widely administered to livestock. He tested positive days later at the Japan Cup.”

I’d never heard of Michael Rogers or clenbuterol and have little interest in professional bicycling. Yet the 51-word article, oddly complete in itself, seemed a parable for the modern world, with its randomly connected elements of big-time athletics, widespread drug use and Chinese food production.

“Clen”, it turns out, has a lot of uses. It relieves asthma, makes horses run faster and cows grow quicker, gives athletes bigger muscles and celebrities smaller waistlines. It was made famous by Kirk Radomiski, the NY Mets felonious batboy and Major League steroid supplier, and by the anorexic look of Victoria Beckham, Britney Spears and Lindsay Lohan. It is discussed ad nauseum on bodybuilding web forums and provides one more way for China to poison its people in its relentless push for economic growth.

Remember when we took drugs to take us out of our bodies, instead of because we were obsessed with how those bodies looked? It seems a long arc of history from a bunch of stoned hippies trying to levitate the Pentagon to a man eating a steak in China and testing positively for anabolic steroids in Japan.

Patriots and Immigrants

On Monday, Patriots Day, a year after the terror bombings, an American won the Boston Marathon for the first time since 1983. His name is Meb Keflezighi. Meb Keflezghi? Was I the only person to do a double take? Does he sound American to you? So I did some digging: birth certificate (long form), called Ed Snowden in Moscow, Wikipedia. His full name is Mebrahtom Keflezighi, and it’s pronounced: mebrāhtōm kifl'igzī. Seriously. I’m surprised they let him within 26 miles of Boston, where they still call John A. Kelley, who ran 61 marathons, won two and has a statue on the course, an “Irishman.”

The last “Bostonian” I remember running Boston was my determined friend John Mason, Justice of the Massachusetts Appeals Court and a direct descendant of John Adams. When I couldn’t find his name in the next day’s Boston Globe, I accused him of not finishing. I should have known better. He just didn’t cross the line until after all the reporters had gone home. That’s Boston – and that was John, who fared less well in his race with cancer 10 years ago.

Meb Keflezghi was born in Asmara, Eritrea, from which his family fled in 1987. He was an All-American at UCLA and became an American citizen after graduation. In these times, when defining an American is so contentious, it’s inspiring that a man named Meb Keflezighi won America's oldest race. And I know no one is cheering more loudly than John Mason, who believed passionately in both America and the American Dream.

Leading from the Rear

Following its decision to report on its stranded assets,” two weeks ago, ExxonMobil has agreed to disclose its research on the risks of fracking. Both decisions, long resisted by Exxon, came because of shareholder pressure. Enter Harvard University in response to pressure from its shareholders – students and faculty – to divest its portfolio of fossil-fuel corporations. “Climate change poses a serious threat to our future – and increasingly to our present,” wrote university president Drew Faust. “Harvard has a vital leadership role to play [and] a special obligation and accountability to the future.” It will do so in three areas: “supporting innovative research focused on climate change solutions, reducing our own carbon footprint, advancing our commitments as a long-term investor.”

While the last includes laudable and long-overdue initiatives – joining other organizations to develop best-practice guidelines and drive corporate disclosure – it specifically rejects divestment.

I have no problem with that, but Faust seems to suggest that Harvard cannot use its vast fortune in support of its core values. The endowment, Faust wrote, “is not an instrument to impel social or political change,” but a sacrosanct fund that must be above politics. Harvard is a voracious fundraiser, and in building its $32-billion endowment, it made plenty of political decisions.

Small investors are increasingly taking responsibility for their investments. If Harvard is truly committed as an institution to tackling climate change, how can it refuse to put its money where its mouth is? Don't they teach ethics in Cambridge anymore?

A Couple of Sicilians

My plane had barely landed in Palermo when I read that Antonin Scalia, one of America’s most infamous Sicilian-Americans, had paved the way for the oligarchs to buy the American government, as the Supreme Court continued to dismantle campaign finance reform in McCutcheon v. Federal Election Commission, a decision, in the words of dissenting Justice Breyer, that effectively makes the limit on individual contributions “the number zero.” That mattered little to Chief Justice Roberts, who wrote, “There is no right in our democracy more basic than the right to participate in electing our political leaders” – ignoring the fact that most of us are now less able to participate in a system that facilitates private conversations between people who have money and want legislation and those who make laws and want money. For an example of how that works, see Republican Congressman Dave Camp’s effort to write a tax-reform bill that was loudly acclaimed by the business lobby – until individual businesses noted parts they didn’t like. Suddenly, tax reform is dead and Camp is leaving Congress. Meanwhile, those of us who don’t want to buy the government will be endlessly pressured for donations to stop those who do.

Here in Sicily, where government is assumed to be a wholly owned subsidiary of La Cosa Nostra, President Rosario Crocetta seeks to eradicate corruption and open the government to the people, despite nonstop threats to kill him. The fact that he is an openly gay Catholic must really drive Scalia nuts.

If You Can't Beat 'Em

I have had a lot of response to my “Stranded Assets” post, with requests for more information – and a correction: “Exxon is not the worlds largest energy company. The national oil companies of the Persian Gulf all make it look like a peanut.” Some shared stories of token votes overwhelmed by management and expressed wonder that small shareholders could have any impact. But the perception of the almost mythic power of “multinational corporations” – like that of "big government" – overlooks their origins as a democratic concept that made, at least in theory, economic participation available to a broad public. Perhaps it’s time to stop the impotent handwringing and get involved in the process of governance.

• And from The Economist: “Exxon Mobil, surely the world’s least tree-hugging company, became the first oil giant to say it would publish details of its ‘stranded assets’ – the value of oil and gas fields that it might not be able to exploit if there were a high carbon price or tough rules on greenhouse-gas emissions. Giant Exxon is not doing this because it has gone mushy or caved in to green activists. Rather, it is heading off a shareholder resolution by Arjuna Capital, a fund manager, demanding explanations and actions on environmental threats to the firm. Exxon’s decision is the biggest step so far in a wider business trend: companies publishing information on their environmental impact and vulnerability to green regulation, to attract or placate investors.”

There is more than one way to occupy Wall Street.

Stranded Assets

They probably found it pretty laughable at headquarters when the resolution arrived, signed by DeWitt Sage and me, asking ExxonMobil to disclose to shareholders its plans for dealing with fossil-fuel reserves in a future when political regulations and market forces could significantly reduce their value. The resolution came swiftly back, rejected. But Sage and Blaine, who were merely agreeable front men for the investment strategists at Arjuna Capital, persisted – and, to our amazement, prevailed. It was an ingenious – and important – argument. We approached ExxonMobil not as tree huggers or monkey wrenchers, but as investors concerned about our investment. Exxon carries its reserves as huge assets on its books – even as studies increasingly show they will lose significant value in a carbon-constrained world. The oil and gas may never even get out of the ground, which would be good for Earth’s future but not for Exxon’s shareholders. What, we asked, is the company’s long-range plan to address the risk to these “stranded assets?”

In case you missed it in The New York Times, Wall Street Journal and Reuters (which headlined a “landmark agreement), I am pleased to announce that Arjuna withdrew our proposal after Exxon agreed to report publicly on its plan to deal with its carbon asset risks. This doesn’t yet mean Exxon will reduce its carbon footprint – there’s also a shareholder proposal on that – but the world’s largest energy company is the first to consent to this unprecedented level of transparency. Thanks to Arjuna.

Both Feet Out of the Grave

Last time, I wrote about the gloomy coincidence of humankind on the verge of discovering the origins of the universe as we race toward Armageddon, as if human existence were in the last act of a Greek morality play. And yet, our quest to unlock the secrets of life is not just the drive to break free of our mortality and become gods. It also manifests our craving to understand the essence of being human. As Satan recognized in the Garden, we have to know because, well, we just have to know. One theory that came out of the recent discoveries I wrote about is that the Big Bang obliterated everything that came before it; and it set in motion a cosmos that will continue to spin off new universes forever. I have no idea if this is true, but it offers us a new way of thinking about the world and our place in it. We’re the only species that strives to separate ourselves from the rest of creation and then subdue it, with the aim of controlling our future. But if these scientists are right, we aren't in control of this journey, and maybe we should rejoice in the gift of our moment here and simply live, doing less harm, seeking more harmony.

Scientists believe there is a yet-undiscovered “fifth force” that complements gravity. Some call it “antigravity.” I like to think of it as “levity.” In a world filled with gravitas, maybe we just need to lighten up.

Hubris and Hope

Scientists have reported detecting the origins of the universe 13.8 billion years ago. Please don't ask me to explain the details, but “less than a trillionth of a second after the Big Bang, the universe expanded faster than the speed of light” to its full size of 28 billion light years. To be sure, the theory has its skeptics, from those who insist the earth is 6,000 years old to those who say it’s impossible to go faster than the speed of light. I had two reactions – three, including incomprehension – wonder and depression. With regard to the last, if we truly are on the edge of unlocking the secrets of the universe, we should hurry, because the closer we get, the closer we seem to come to annihilating ourselves. We can’t say we haven’t been warned: from God’s rebuke of Adam in the Garden to the gods’ punishment of Prometheus, from Marlowe’s Faust to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein have come dire predictions of the consequences of our hubris – warnings that seem particularly apt at a time when someone simply steals an airliner filled with people, nuclear powers thump their chests, the American Association for the Advancement of Sciences issues a “stark” report on global warming, and manmade water crisis imperils the American West.

It’s easy to get depressed by the gap between our technological might and our human folly, but (as I’ll try to explain in my next post) I believe our unquenchable sense of wonder is our greatest hope.

Mud

Unlike many of my friends, I thrived this winter on the invigorating air and blinding beauty of bright blue skies and white snow (before plowing). But I am ready for the suggestion of spring now in the air, with its lengthening days and the stirring of life anxious to be born. And then there is the mud, ubiquitous, oozing under foot, forming deep tire ruts in the lane. Mud, the curse of early spring, the stuff sleazy politicians dig up on one another. But mud is but the mixture of soil and water, the two critical ingredients in growing our food – the same ingredients that modern agriculture seems bent on destroying: half the earth’s topsoil has disappeared in the last 150 years and water scarcity is endemic in many parts of the world. So I was interested to read that the new farm bill reflects changing American priorities. It provides unprecedented support to small farmers, organic farming and healthy food, all three of which have received the back of the hand in previous bills written by big agriculture. Passed with bipartisan support (although no Republicans showed up for the signing), the bill reflects changing attitudes in the country more than in Congress, where some are still slinging mud at Michelle Obama’s campaign for healthy eating. But childhood obesity is down by 43%, and small local and organic movements are spreading across the landscape, spurred on by dedicated young farmers and demanding consumers. It is the season of mud -- and of hope.

Justice Denied

On Wednesday the Senate rejected Debo Adegbile as Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights because of his work at the NAACP Legal and Education Defense Fund. The Fund filed a brief on behalf of Mumia Abu-Jamal, who was convicted of killing a Philadelphia police officer in 1982 in a case that still ignites passions in the region. I thought of Owen Walker, a friend I haven’t seen since college, who was for 25 years the Federal Public Defender for Massachusetts. One of his clients was Richard Reid, who in 2001 tried to blow up an airplane by detonating a bomb in his sneaker. Curious about Owen’s reaction to the Senate vote, I called him and asked whether his defense of Reid means he is soft on shoe bombers. He is not. “In fact,” he said, “my views on criminal justice are very conservative. I am also very proud of the work my office did on behalf of our clients.” To punish Adegbile because of someone he represented, Walker said, is “outrageous”, and he pointed out that John Adams, who defended the British soldiers after the Boston Massacre, “went on to become president of the United States.”

Adegbile, raised by a single mother, has lived what we used to call the American Dream. That dream is not just for the dreamer. It is the mythic glue that holds this country together. I expect Republicans to reflexively vote against Obama nominees. But it took seven Democrats to put politics above the promise of American life.