1 March 2019
Dear Interested Readers
Learning A New Way Of Being In The World Together
This week has been chock-full of important events that fall along the path of our common journey in troubled times. I am not referring to the debate over the appropriateness of “The Green Book” being awarded the Oscar as the best picture. The biggest events occured in Hanoi and Washington. In Hanoi the president suffered a foreign policy set back that was in part the result of his disregard of the advice of senior diplomats and military advisers, and falling back on his sense that he can “wing it.” One hopes that the president discovered that calling one of the most egregious violators of human rights a “nice guy” might work while trying to build a hotel, but is not a good negotiating strategy when the objective is to relieve the world of the threat of a nuclear war. “Wheeling and dealing” on your own and discarding years of diplomatic work is not a good strategy when negotiating with someone who sees maintaining the threat to be able to use a nuclear bomb as his best strategy for survival, and is probably a bigger manufacturer of falsehoods than you are. As Scott Horsley reported on NPR”s “All Things Considered,” “The president may finally be discovering that international diplomacy, like healthcare, is more complicated than he imagined.” In this case, the fact that the president realized that the deal offered by his “nice guy” was worse than no deal, and walked away, was a victory for all of us according every “expert,” I heard or read.
Bernie Sanders is the latest addition to the group of wannabes for the Democratic nomination for president, and immediately jumped to the lead in both the polls and in the fundraising contest. We are told that the odds are good that Joe Biden will soon challenge him for the current lead. Bernie wasted no time in expressing his disdain for the president:
“Our campaign is not only about defeating Donald Trump, the most dangerous president in modern American history. It is not only about winning the Democratic nomination and the general election…our campaign is about transforming our country and creating a government based on the principles of economic, social, racial and environmental justice.”
Bernie made his announcement on Vermont Public Radio. In the interview he got even more descriptive of his disdain for the president as reported by the Washington Post.
During an earlier interview with Vermont Public Radio, where he first announced his bid, Sanders called Trump “an embarrassment to our country.”
“I think he is a pathological liar,” Sanders said. “I also think he is a racist, a sexist, a homophobe, a xenophobe, somebody who is gaining cheap political points by trying to pick on minorities, often undocumented immigrants.”
The biggest piece of news that upstaged the president’s lack of success with North Korea and Bernie’s recent announcement was Michael Cohen’s three days of testimony on Capitol Hill. Many of us spent most of Wednesday watching or listening to Mr. Cohen’s testimony before the House Oversight and Reform Committee that is chaired by Representative Elijah Cummings of Maryland. We were witness to a day of political theater that we may someday realize was only the opening act of a much longer play. David Brooks attempted to answer a key question of whether or not there has really been a change of character in Cohen who once said he was willing to “take a bullet” for the president and is now labeled by the president as a “rat,” as in underworld lingo, a “snitch.” There were many “lows” during the day, and in retrospect it was just another skirmish in the ongoing battle that will continue until the president is removed from office, resigns, or loses to someone from either his own party or one of the ever growing list of Democratic “wannabes.”
The Internet has been flooded with opinion pieces about Cohen’s credibility, how he performed, what was really learned, how the Democrats might have made more of their opportunity, and how Republicans attempted their defense of the president, who is a master prevaricator, by focusing on the absurd idea of accepting the testimony of a man going to jail for his lies to congress, banks, and the IRS. For me the stars of the day were Chairman Cummings and several of the newly minted representatives, like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who asked probing questions that produced some surprising answers. All Americans, including you dear reader, must listen to the Chairman Cumming’s closing remarks which can be summarized in five words, “We are better than this!” You should judge for yourself whether the tears that ran down the cheeks of Michael Cohen while Chairman Cummings delivered his fatherly assessment at the end of the day are a genuine manifestation of remorse for what he has done to us all, or just evidence of pity for himself and his family.
At the start of the hearing, Chairman Cummings had answered the assertions that Cohen’s testimony was inappropriate because he was a convicted liar by saying that it was not for the committee alone to decide whether his words were to be trusted, but rather individual citizens should form their own opinion after listening to what was said. As inspiring as Chairman Cumming’s remarks were at the end of the day for those of us who were emotionally exhausted from the drama, or as surprising and impressive as the business side of Representative Ocasio-Cortez might have been for many who were seeing her for the first time perform her duties outside of a social media platform or talk show, the real dramatic pinnacle of the day for me was Michael Cohen’s admonition to the president’s defenders to take a personal lesson from his experience.
I can only warn people the more people that follow Mr. Trump as I did blindly are going to suffer the same consequences that I’m suffering.
Who knows where the circus goes next? It is hard to know what follows, or how, or if we will resolve the issue of what to do with President Trump before some disaster occurs. There were several references during the day to the Watergate hearings and the Clinton impeachment process. I remember Watergate, and I am sure that everyone who reads these notes who is old enough to transport themselves back in memory to January 1999 and Clinton’s impeachment. I was a senior resident when John Dean made his famous testimony before Congress early in the Watergate process. I thought that Nicholas Kristof’s opinion piece in the New York Times put the day in a very balanced perspective with Watergate. He wrote as the introduction of his piece:
More than 45 years ago, as a 14-year-old farm kid in Oregon, I watched on a flickering black-and-white television as Richard Nixon’s former White House counsel, John Dean, testified about presidential misconduct in the Watergate scandal — and the second-most-corrupt administration in American history began to crumble.
Now, watching Michael Cohen testify before Congress, I sense a similar historic temblor, only this time it may be the No. 1-most-corrupt administration that is beginning to teeter.
Cohen’s testimony was staggering because of the cumulative sum of alleged misconduct, because of the overall portrait it provided of Donald Trump as a “mobster.”
“I know what Mr. Trump is,” Cohen said, summing up what he learned working at Trump’s side for a decade. “He is a racist, he is a con man, and he is a cheat.”
Just as the Republicans pushed back hard on Michael Cohen’s credibility, there was push-back on Dean’s credibility. Like Cohen will do, he served time in prison, and like Cohen hopes to do, he made money by writing a book and becoming an analyst on television. Like Watergate, when many months passed before the whole drama played out by the airing of the president’s White House recordings , many months are likely to pass before we will know the ultimate impact of Cohen’s testimony. He dropped enough leads to fuel several months of follow up hearings.
It is also possible that like Watergate when after that dramatic discovery of the tapes which were “smoking gun” made the facts undeniable, some future discovery may be ahead for us now. After the tapes were heard, Nixon realized there would likely be a bipartisan majority opinion, not unanimous, that his presidency should end. Nixon and his closest advisors were convinced that he could no longer govern, would surely be removed from office, and needed to end it all by resigning. We are probably still in Act I of this latest drama. Our challenge is to carry on and try to make progress in the midst of uncertainty, which brings me to what was the most important event of the week for me.
I had been looking forward to February 27 for over six months. My great sense of anticipation for the day had nothing to do with Michael Cohen or Donald Trump. It was all about the opportunity to see and hear one of the most noble Americans of our time, perhaps of any time, Bryan Stevenson, the founder of the Equal Justice Initiative in Montgomery, Alabama. Stevenson is the author of Just Mercy, perhaps the most profoundly moving and potentially life changing book I have ever read. If you are an Interested Reader with an exceptional memory, you know that I have discussed Stevenson and his book in these notes before.
My wife and I have subscribed, along with some friends, for many years to the “Boston Speakers Series” offered at Symphony Hall by Lesley University and WGBH. We have heard some wonderful speeches at these monthly presentations during the fall, winter, and early spring over the years. The series has allowed us to hear Stephen Breyer, Bill Clinton, James Comey, Rita Moreno, Cokie Roberts, Ken Burns, Jon Meacham, Bill Bryson, Rick Steves, and dozens of other influential thinkers, writers, performers, politicians, and figures of note. When the list of the speakers for the 2018-2019 series was published last spring, I jumped for joy when I saw Mr. Stevenson’s name on the list of speakers.
What I did not know then was that on the same day Mr. Stevenson would score yet another victory for mercy and for all of us in the Supreme Court by helping a marginalized individual avoid impending execution. Last fall he had asked the Supreme Court if it was constitutional for the state to kill an individual whose neurological disease or dementia was such that they did not understand why they were to be executed. On Wednesday the Court said it was not right to execute a person whose mental capacities were altered by dementia or a neurological condition, and sent the case back to a lower court to settle the question of the plaintiff’s mental capacity.
A few years ago an Interested Reader, Dr. Jim Cox-Chapman who was then the Chief Medical Officer of ProHealth Physicians of Connecticut, introduced me to the work of Bryan Stevenson after I had written a letter about inequality and injustice related to race. If you want a taste of Bryan Stevenson and his ideas, I highly recommend his TED talk which has been viewed over 4 million times on the TED website, and almost a million times on YouTube. It appears on the list of the Eleven Must See TED talks.
Mr. Stevenson spoke for an hour and fifteen minutes, and yet I could have sworn it was only ten minutes. Though I had previously heard much of what he had to say, his core message was new. He had four simple points. His message resonates with anyone who cares about social justice and believes that we all suffer, and will suffer more in the long term, when anyone is discarded or abused. Just this week, Paul Krugman has laid out the economic case for how social policies that lift the disadvantaged, lift us all.
Neither Stevenson’s message or his four points would make much difference to many of the people that we hear talking about what we need to fear from immigrants, abusers of welfare, those with a history of substance abuse, or any of the many non contributing and marginalized members of our society. If you are not interested in justice and the amelioration of economic inequality, and can only feel comfortable in a gated community, then do not bother to listen to Bryan Stevenson. If you think that there was some better decade in our past when America was a great place for everyone, and you long to return to that moment, pay no attention to anything Bryan Stevenson has to say. If on the other hand, you would like to believe that we have the ability to move toward a better day for everyone, and if you feel that none of us are ultimately better off than the most disadvantaged among us, then Bryan Stevenson is someone to whom you should give a few minutes of your attention.
LIke a good preacher, he revealed his points sequentially laced with unforgettable stories and analogies. For those who of you who might want to know his formula for how to move toward a world without injustice and inequality, Stevenson’s four points were:
1. Get proximate to the problem. Go to the places where people suffer. Walk among the people who have needs. Go see and try to understand the circumstances that define the lives of those who suffer injustice and inequality. Meet people where they are. In terms of healthcare this means get into the community. Understand the public health challenges. Visit your patients in their homes and in the street. Understand their work environments. Visit schools. Check out the recreational opportunities in the inner city. Ask people in need what they think needs to be done to improve the safety and quality of their lives and the opportunities available to their children.
2. Change the narrative. I think this is Stevenson’s most important point. If the narrative is about who is deficient and who we should fear, we will see what our narratives tell us to see. If the narrative is that immigrants are often violent and dangerous people, we will never be able to articulate policies that will succeed in resolving the questions of migration and immigration. If men of color are always seen as potential criminals that need to be locked up, we will have even more than our current 2.5 million incarcerated men in the future. If we continue to think of many children and young people as “super predators,” we are on pace to insure that an African American male infant born today has a one in three likelihood of spending some of his life in prison. How can that narrative be good for any of us? Stevenson asserts that we are responsible for the outcomes of our narratives. We must change the narrative about race and recognize that if we don’t we are favoring a narrative of white supremacy. When we developed a narrative that drug dependency was a manifestation of crime rather than a manifestation of societal inequities that created illness, we guaranteed that we will be locked in a “war on drugs” that we can never win.
3. Stay hopeful. Hopelessness is the enemy of justice. Hopelessness in anyone drags us all down. Hopelessness for a minority, or for any individual among us, insures continuing generations of poverty, avoidable disease, and deeper divisions in our society. Data like the facts that Krugman reports confirms that we have a lot of work to do, and that we must change the narrative from a fairytale for a few to a reality for many, if we are to make the American dream a plausible reality for every child. Hope provides the energy and the resolve to do that work.
4. Do things that are inconvenient and uncomfortable. There is no glide path to a better world. Getting to a better world may be more like freestyle rock climbing than sledding. We must be witnesses to what is, and then take the difficult and often risky steps required to initiate positive change. Stevenson asks, “Why do we want to kill the broken people among us?” He questions why we tolerate, and try to rationalize, the crimes and misdemeanors of the privileged while we demand that “justice” requires substantial penalties for the broken and disadvantaged.
I think there is a healthcare application for each of these four points. The sum total of what Don Berwick has been trying to teach us over the last thirty years is totally consistent with Stevenson’s four points. Berwick’s Era 3, the moral era of healthcare, is a beautiful manifestation of a similar philosophy applied to the practice of medicine.
Stevenson asks one final question, “Why do I do what I do?” His answer, “I do what I do because I am broken, too.” He says that he comes from a broken community, and I do not think that he is specifically speaking about the African American community. He is talking about all of us and all of America. He sees himself and his life as a reason for hope. He has reason for hope because we changed the narrative in the fifties and did away with a segregated system of public education, and he was given a chance. He closed with a final comment about poverty for which he is famous. The opposite of poverty is not wealth; it is justice. In his book he gives the full description of the concept in a paragraph that summarizes the message that he is repeating again and again with the hope that someday it will have been incorporated into our collective consciousness as a truth that drives us toward a better world.
My work with the poor and incarcerated has persuaded me that the opposite of poverty is not wealth; the opposite of poverty is justice. Finally, I’ve come to believe that the true measure of our commitment to justice, the character of our society, our commitment to the rule of law, fairness, and equality cannot be measured by how we treat the rich, powerful, the privileged, and respected among us. The true measure of our character is how we treat the poor, the disfavored, the accused, incarcerated, and condemned….An absence of compassion can corrupt the decency of a community, a state, a nation. Fear and anger can make us vindictive and abusive, unjust and unfair, until we all suffer from the absence of mercy and we condemn ourselves as much as we victimize others.
The if you think the phrase
Finally, I’ve come to believe that the true measure of our commitment to justice, the character of our society, our commitment to the rule of law, fairness, and equality cannot be measured by how we treat the rich, powerful, the privileged, and respected among us. The true measure of our character is how we treat the poor, the disfavored, the accused, incarcerated, and condemned…
sounds Biblical, you might be right. It is certainly similar to the worlds of Hubert Humphrey that are carved on the walls of the offices of the Department of Health and Human Services on Independence Avenue at the foot of Capitol Hill in Washington.
It was once said that the moral test of government is how that government treats those who are in the dawn of life, the children; those who are in the twilight of life, the elderly; and those who are in the shadows of life, the sick, the needy and the handicapped.
Nature and Nurture
I have spent a fair amount of time over the years trying to figure myself out. Who am I really, and how did I happen to be me? The attempt to answer those questions has included several years of psychoanalysis as well as many hours of focused thought during thousands of long runs and walks in nature over more than forty years. Lately, I feel like I am getting closer to the answer given the freedom from ambition and professional responsibility afforded by retirement.
I was blessed with certain gifts that were granted to me by my genome. I guess that is the nature part of “the explanation of me.” I was also blessed by being born at a time when we, as a nation, were still investing in the professional development of white men. In the fifties the public schools were pretty good, and public colleges and universities were priced within the reach of the middle class in the sixties. It was also true in the sixties that students like me, white and from the middle class with limited financial resources, could hope to graduate from an elite professional school school without a burden of crippling debt. On top of those advantages there was a reasonable expectation that along the way one could be nurtured by caring neighbors, committed teachers and coaches, and other adults who were good examples of both caring about community and professional success. For me it was a very generous world that was populated by equally advantaged white boys and girls, many of whom have gone on to have remarkable lives of contribution to their communities. Perhaps that is the America that is remembered by those who wear the red MAGA hats. I do not believe that world went away because of immigrants, drugs, or any of the other explanations that we often hear. I think that world went away because it was a racially exclusive invention that was dependent on investments in a limited segment of the community. Perhaps as we resisted broadening our concept of the community, and endeavored to avoid taxes that would be spent on education, social programs, and infrastructure for the whole population, we killed what was ultimately good for even the wealthy. But I digress.
The core of my very positive nurturing environment that more than balanced the negative elements in the environment was my mother. Like many errant sons, I feel guilt about the ways in which my decisions and actions hurt my mother. She never said a word to add to that self induced guilt, and sense of failed responsibility. The guilt that I feel most painfully is from my failure to consistently follow the lessons she tried to me teach me about the importance of having a deep love and concern for other people. If there is a foundation for professionalism or social responsibility within me, she laid it. That statement is not meant to diminish the contributions of my father who was always challenging me to do everything I did with all of my energy and to the best of my ability, but it was my mother who instilled in me the attributes that would enable me to provide care, and to try to care without question for anyone who came my way. She believed that every human being deserved respect and love because we all are loved by God, and we should honor that love in everyone we meet. She clearly agreed with the wisdom of St. Paul when he wrote about our relationship to one another, realizing that in the end we are more alike than different, as he expressed in his letter to the Romans:
For all have sinned, and come short of the glory of God;
Romans 3:23 King James Version (KJV)
Through my mother’s eyes I saw the world as a place where I was required to try to help others, and where I should always try to be part of the solution and not the problem. Gandhi also advocated for trying to be part of the change we want to see as a good strategy for life.
My mother died two months short of her 94th birthday on January 6, 2013. The last decade of her long life was not easy. She suffered quietly from inflammatory bowel disease, CAD, CHF, crippling arthritis, and the stress of watching her children struggle to find their way, but she never complained. She never lost any of her personality or her great intellectual capacity. Right up to the time she died she was an avid reader and would regularly beat me in Scrabble in person or over the Internet. She put a Tandy computer system together in the early eighties and was active on her MacBook and iPad until the last few days of her life. Seven months before she died she reasoned that the best way forward for her, and everyone she cared about, was through hospice care, and asked for it over the objections of my father.
On this Sunday, March 3, 2019 she would have been 100 years old. That fact takes my breath away because in my memory she has the youthful appearance that you see in today’s header. Last Sunday I was an usher at church which was lucky for me because it meant that I was standing at the back of the sanctuary when I began to feel tears running down my cheeks as we began to sing a hymn that reminded me of the many times as a little boy that I would stand beside her as she let me hold the hymnal with her while we sang. I was embarrassed, not by my tears, but by the fact that I have not shed more tears for her over the last six years since she calmly announced to me though a drug haze that prevented her from another seizure, “I will see you in heaven.”
She was a generous person of great intelligence and enormous curiosity. My father always joked that he was attracted to her because she was the smartest person in a class where he first saw her in the seminary they both attended. I know of no person who ever met her who does not eagerly recount some kindness or help that she offered. She was not much interested in acquiring things. She valued people and ideas more than possessions and always sought ways to be of service to others. She did not dote on her children, but she supported us when we needed support, never chided us for letting her down, and let us go without instilling any guilt in us when life took us away from her and we became too busy to offer her much of our time. Ironically, now that she is gone, she is never far away in memory, and it will be so sweet to be able to say this Sunday, ”Happy Birthday, Mom. Thank you for all the gifts you gave me.
Be well, take good care of yourself, let me hear from you often, and don’t let anything keep you from doing the good that you can do every day,
Gene
