A Tribute to Our Children

Wednesday morning’s headline came like a punch to the solar plexus. For my children, though, and many of their friends and children of my friends, the election results came as more than a momentary loss of breath. They were devastated. “I’m terrified and so deeply sad,” a young friend texted me.

They had recoiled from Trump’s 18 months of bigotry and bullying tone, from his ugly threats and innuendo, and his victory could not erase that history. And there was, I think, something more: this seemingly endless campaign barely spoke to issues that concerned them. The air was so filled with immediate grievances that the future was ignored.

All politicians pay lip service to the future, but only the young have to worry about it. The solvency of social security in 50 years matters far more to them than to me, as do the cost of college and the size of the national debt. And then there is the state of the earth and its relentless warming, which is very real to my children – but which for Trump and the entire Republican Party is a subject of derision.

Now that Trump is president-elect, what are we to make of his rhetorical bile? Was it campaign tactics or is this the character of the man? There is simply no good answer to that question, but yesterday’s meeting with President Obama gives me hope of an orderly transition and a resilient system.

Most of all, though, I take heart from my children and their friends. They are seeing that the arc of their lives is not so orderly and preordained that they can live removed from the world. And each is resolved to become more involved in the public space – and to build and share a commons with people with whom, on the surface, they may seem to have little in common.

The Long Drive Home

Well, I didn’t do much good in Pennsylvania. When I arrived last week, the now-disparaged polls had Hillary up by four points. When I left yesterday, Trump had carried the state. Note to Democratic Party: Don’t send Blaines to swing states (I use the plural because my sister and brother-in-law went too). Meanwhile, while I was in Pennsylvania, my own district in northern Maine cast its single electoral vote for Donald Trump. Food for thought for eleven hours in the car. The voters spoke. The system wasn’t rigged. And Donald Trump is president-elect of the United States. He appealed to millions of people who don’t like where this country is headed, and he gave voice, he says, to “the forgotten men and women” of America. That’s a good thing. We should listen. As the saying goes, we really should get out more.

But over the last few months I have also met people who are not so much forgotten as invisible, who keep getting sent back to the end of the line, which, if campaign rhetoric is to be believed, may soon be forming in Mexico for some of them. And somehow the state of America – our broken borders and seething cities, our crumbling morals and crushing debt – is their fault.

We need to look for common ground, not scapegoats.

“What happens,” Langston Hughes asked 65 years ago, “to a dream deferred?”

After a campaign with so much ugliness, I drove home listening only to music, or to nothing at all, to silence. No news, no analysis, no talking heads. Near the end of the long drive, the radio played 12 German Dances by Franz Schubert. I’d never heard them before. Truth be known, I’m tone deaf. But they were beautiful.

And where there is that kind of beauty, there is surely hope.

Notes from the Field

Sometimes I think God sent Donald Trump to help me get comfortable with my mortality. He has poisoned the civic discourse in ways from which we won’t soon recover. But I’ll be shuffling off this mortal coil far sooner than the younger people who will have to clean up his mess.

That’s just one statistically irrelevant thought from my last few days canvassing in the field.

Another is that many people like me – old, white and male – don’t like Hillary Clinton very much, and they’re not very civil about it. “She should be in prison” has become their reflexive refrain. If you call them on the phone, they just hang up. You get kind of tired of old white men after a while.

Especially compared with my conversations with immigrants, often voting for the first time. They’re excited to be citizens, to be Americans, and to vote – although several were afraid of being challenged at the polls.

This didn’t seem a future to fear. It seemed the future that has always defined America at its best, a future I’d actually like to hang around for.

What a contrast to those who can’t get past our imperfect choices, as if we have ever had anything else in politics – “I’m voting for Donald Duck,” a man said yesterday. Great.

Finally, those who will vote for a third party might consider what the Libertarian vice-presidential candidate told CNN yesterday:

“I do see a big difference between the two other candidates,” said Bill Weld. “Trump . . . is totally unfit to be president, [while Clinton is] is a perfectly reputable, professional, responsible candidate for president of the United States and deserves to be treated as such. . . . Frankly, I think Mrs. Clinton has been receiving a pretty raw deal.”

In the last few days I’ve seen the past and I’ve seen the future. I like the future better.

Threats and Issues

It was 80 degrees in New York City last evening, which probably shouldn’t come as a surprise since 2015 was the hottest year ever recorded and, said the director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, “2016 has really blown that [record] out of the water.” If the history of this presidential campaign is any guide, global warming – or any environmental issues, for that matter – will not be the subject of much discussion in tomorrow night’s debate. This would be unbelievable, given the worldwide focus on such issues, except the campaign debates so far have been pretty much devoid of any issues.

Hillary Clinton’s website lays out her policies on climate change, which she calls “an urgent threat and a defining challenge of our time. It threatens our economy, our national security, and our children’s health and futures.”

Donald Trump’s website, on the other hand, not only has no policy position on climate change, it has no position on any environmental issues whatsoever. He is, however, on record as saying that "The concept of global warming was created by and for the Chinese in order to make U.S. manufacturing non-competitive."

This would be laughable had it not been tweeted by the Republican candidate for president. I’m not suggesting that we all must agree on issues. On the contrary, democracy is based on the free exchange of competing ideas. Trump’s campaign, however, doesn’t traffic in ideas. Instead, insults have been substituted for issues and thinly veiled threats have become the response to disagreement.

This is dangerous territory.

A Wandering Mind: Thoughts on Language

My mind wandered during Monday’s debate, as I grew weary of listening to one man’s rambling refusal to recognize any source of knowledge or wisdom beyond his “gut.” Doing so is the purpose of education – and Donald Trump seems to have missed a few classes. A friend of mine believes that this election is payback for a public education system that no longer turns out students grounded in civics, history and literature. The result is millions of voters unable to see through the hologram that is the Republican candidate.

I believe the current educational insistence on quantitative inputs that produce quantifiable outputs a computer can grade denies children a vast range of possibilities to explore the world with their imaginations. Robert Macfarlane writes that the Oxford Junior Dictionary now includes “MP3 player”, “voice-mail” and “chatroom” but has dropped “heron”, “otter” and “pasture”. Instead of “blackberry” we have “Blackberry”, a change the editors justify because modern children spend so little time outside.

“Technology is miraculous,” writes Macfarlane in Landmarks, “but so too is nature – and this aspect of the world’s wonder seems under threat of erasure in children’s narratives, dreams and plots.”

But there are seeds of hope. My local paper’s lead story tells of opening day at Henry Wadsworth Longfellow Elementary School on Great Cranberry Island, closed since 2000 due to a lack of students. Reopening a 13-student school is not the conventional notion of progress, but perhaps these kids’ intimate explorations of island life will save more words from extinction – and so provide a small step toward reinvigorating our civic discourse.

Reclaiming our Country

Like many others, I experience the tension that Welsh poet Edward Thomas noted between the desire to ‘go on and on over the earth’ and the desire ‘to settle for ever in one place,’ words I recently came across in Landmarks, Robert Macfarlane’s extraordinary book about the intimate connections between language and place. The words struck me because I have reached an age when wandering is increasingly difficult and often lonely, but settling forever seems like giving up. So on I go. Lately I’ve been musing about where I might go if Donald Trump should get elected president. I find the idea unthinkable, and yet I realize it’s possible, despite the fact that each time the man opens his mouth he discloses an emptiness of spirit, a disdain for truth and a capacity for self-glory that is simply unfathomable – reminiscent of Mussolini, “the master of make-believe,” in the words of Luigi Barzini, who “could not help being corrupted by his own spectacle.”

Mussolini once asked an ambassador who had just returned from a conference on poison gas, which gasses were the most dangerous. “Incense is the most lethal of all, your excellency,” the old man answered.

I’ll keep wandering. But the Trumpean spectacle – its bombastic language so alien to the America I want for my grandchildren – has reminded me how strongly rooted I am in this land. That we have enabled a man so unfit to get so close to the presidency is a testament to our carelessness. It’s time to reclaim our country.

Instead of Blowing It Up, Let’s Fix It

In his epilogue to “Fractured Lands: How the Arab World Came Apart,” Scott Anderson writes:  “On a more philosophical level, this journey has served to remind me again of how terribly delicate is the fabric of civilization, of the vigilance required to protect it and of the slow and painstaking work of mending it once it has been torn. This is hardly an original thought; it is a lesson we were supposed to have learned after Nazi Germany, after Bosnia and Rwanda. Perhaps it is a lesson we need to constantly relearn.”

Maybe it’s a matter of age. When I was younger, in the late 1960s and early 1970s, just out of the army, maybe then I was willing to “blow it all up.” Vietnam. Selma. Nixon. George Wallace. Mayor Daley. Kent State. Two Kennedys and King. It was time for a revolution. “No matter who you vote for,” read the graffiti on the Ann Arbor Bank, “the rich always win.”

On Aug. 24, 1970, a bomb set by anti-war radicals at the University of Wisconsin killed Robert Fassnacht, a young graduate student and father of three, who was working late in his lab. Blowing it all up wasn’t an inspiring slogan any more.

The fabric of civilization is more than a veneer for exploitation. It’s the guardian of culture. Not art and music only, but all the attributes of a people – their cooking, their clothes, their icons, their stories. Those who want to blow it all up want to annihilate the nuances that make us unique. They understand that diversity is the enemy of conformity, that self-expression is speaking truth to power, that our civilization, however imperfect, is our defense against the demagogue.

The answer to what ails America is not the simple slogan of blowing it all up. It’s the hard work of fixing it.

Should We Just Blow It All Up?

A reader responds to The Potemkin Don: “One could say this [emptiness] is true of all politicians in the modern era. Agendas are biased to the lobby efforts they are tied to. Look at Obama. The guy has done a decent job on many fronts but ran on an agenda that doesn’t reflect his actual presidency. Things change when you arrive in Washington because control and direction are not your own. At a minimum, regardless of how bad Trump is, this could be the only way to completely throw Congress and the Senate into a 180 and change things for decades to come. . . .I would hate to have my kids, aged 7 and 8, think Trump embodies what it means to be president, but equally, how do I explain to them Hillary and all the favors she will need to fulfill when she gets there?”

I find this response challenging and chilling – and I wonder: How many others feel the same way? Polls show two deeply disliked candidates: 53.5% of voters view Clinton unfavorably; Trump fares worse at 61.8%.

“None of the above,” I often hear. Does that mean it makes no difference who’s elected?

I disagree with the writer, and I will explain why later, but first I’d like to get input from you, the readers – and in particular, young readers.

Have we reached the point in America, where the best we can hope for is to blow things up and start again? If so, how did we get here? When did it start? In what ways is the country – or at least its political (and corporate?) leadership – so much worse than a decade ago? Two decades ago? Fifty years ago?

Look around America, and then look around the world. Is ours a failed government . . . even a failed country? What will it take to fix it? And what are you willing to risk to do so?

And how will you choose on November 8th?

I welcome your thoughts – but no diatribes, please.