Beads from the week of 7/5 to 7/11/2020

“Wildlife officials announced this week that for the first time in 50 years, California condors have been spotted in Sequoia National Park.” (1) That is a dream come true for Baby Boomers, (especially for whom California is home) who have watched this story for decades as it moved from the edge of extinction through hatchlings in captivity to release in the wild to now our iconic Sequoia Park.

You can put that alongside the nightmare that is Donald Trump. We needed no more evidence of pathology in our President but perhaps will benefit some from insights offered by his niece, Mary Trump whose book, “Too Much and Never Enough” charting the distortions and deprivations of the Trump family will hit newsstands soon. Virginia Heffernan in a pre release review writes, “Mary Trump’s book about her Uncle Donald is dark, right from the getgo, when it begins with this feel-good epigraph from “Les Miserables”: If the soul is left in darkness, sins will be committed. It’s a bleak story, and there’s no redemption. The country, like Donald Trump’s creditors, will not recoup its losses.” (2)

“We’ve been having a lively debate lately about what the sudden social-justice ascendancy in American institutions represents, and whether the new iconoclastic progressivism is just an organic development in liberalism or a post-liberal successor. In theological terms, we’re watching the post-Protestant elect wrestle power away from the more secular elite, which long paid lip service to the creed of social justice but never really evinced true faith.” (3)

There are those (I would count myself among them) who feel along with Senator Tammy Duckworth that “.... while we have never been a perfect union, we have always sought to be a more perfect union ….” who advocate a continued effort of discourse, deliberation, debate to keep us moving toward that more perfect union. (4)

And there are those whose believe that our forerunners never really cared about a more perfect union or didn’t care enough to sacrifice their own interests and that discourse, deliberation and debate are simply ways of delaying justice that can only come from institutional capitulation to the demands of the righteous dispossessed. Professor Amna A. Akbar speaks for this perspective - “Each demand demonstrates a new attitude among leftist social movements. They don’t want to reduce police violence, or sidestep our environmentally unsustainable global supply chain, or create grace periods for late rent. These are the responses of reformers and policy elites. Instead, the people making these demands want a new society. They want a break from prisons and the police, from carbon and rent. They want counselors in place of cops, housing for all and a jobs guarantee.” (5)

Such “demands” do seem very like the “bullying campus Marxism that passes for leftist thought these days.” (6) The threat some see in this bullying has been overlooked in the face of the Bully in Chief. Damon Linker writes, “I've been pointing to the illiberalism of the social-justice left since at least 2013. I backed off somewhat during the first couple years of the Trump administration, since it seemed a little peevish and an offense against proportionality to write frequently about the topic with the White House occupied by a man who regularly expresses contempt for civil liberties.” However “What's distinctive about the present moment is that groups of activists are demanding to be given the power to make this all-important decision within certain institutions — and they are using this newfound power to shift (and often constrict) the lines of acceptable thought and discussion, ruling certain arguments (and the people who make them) out of bounds.” (7)

Linker very intentionally engages with Osita Nwanevu's article in The New Republic. (8) Nwanevu argues that power plays by people united on party lines be they in the newsroom or wherever, are the only thing that sufficiently threatens the institutional giants into action toward a more perfect union.

Thomas Chatterton Williams and more than 150 other journalists and authors take the threat articulated by Nwanevu seriously enough to publish and sign a public statement daring to assert, “The democratic inclusion we want can be achieved only if we speak out against the intolerant climate that has set in on all sides. The way to defeat bad ideas is by exposure, argument, and persuasion, not by trying to silence or wish them away. We need to preserve the possibility of good-faith disagreement without dire professional consequences.” (9)

To make his case, Nwanevu points to what seem to be dramatic changes in the thought and advocacy of David Brooks, who some ways seems to qualify now as “woke”, that is willing to see the world divided into villain and victim classes. Linker wonders what if it turns out that Brooks persists in seeing people irreducibly complex individuals?

As it happens Linker was prescient in that wondering because that is exactly where Brooks landed in his column this week. “The first casualty in a culture, political or generational war is the willingness to see the full humanity of the other.” The unwillingness to see full humanity results in partisans who “treat speech as violence” and “attempt to ruin politically discordant people because of some tweets.” Against this propensity Brooks offers “Personalism.”. (It is a real ‘thing’. You can look it up. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personalism Personalism influence Martin Luther King and Pope John Paul II for two people you might recognize.) “Personalism is the belief that at the heart of any successful relationship, any successful organization and any just society, there is an earnest and ongoing effort to see the full depth and complexity of each human person.” (10)

Personalism opens the possibility of appreciating, even you can’t imagine ever agreeing with Immanuel Jarvis. Jarvis, a black man, is chairperson of the Republican Party in Durham County North Carolina. (Jarvis may seem like an absolute anomaly….only 2 to 3% of African Americans support Donald Trump...but do the math...that is something like a million people.) Jarvis says “People were so focused on having “a Black man in the White House, that we forgot that the most important thing is getting a Black man in his own house.” (11) Seeing the full depth and complexity of each human person.

In the first few weeks of Covid lockdown I read several articles riffing off a scene from the movie “Jaws” in which a grieving mother confronts the Mayor and charges him with the death of her son who went out into the water that the Mayor knew was shark infested but refused to close the beach because of the economic impact. The shark was simply doing what a shark is built to do, and that the true villain is not the coldblooded predator — it’s the warm-blooded mayor. In a touching intersection of life and art….It turns out that the actor who played the role of the grieving mother, Lee Fiero, has died from complications of Corona Virus. (12)

A declaration from Kareem Abdul Jabbar seems to at least harmonize with “personalism” “You can’t be in the business of social reform without a deep reservoir of hope and faith in the general goodness of people.” (13)

Country musician Charlies Daniels, who died this week evidenced some of that general goodness. He toured more vigorously than almost any other performer when asked about this he answered, “I have never played those notes perfectly. I’ve never sung every song perfectly. I’m in competition to be better tonight than I was last night and to be better tomorrow than tonight.” (14) It is common sense but not common practice - compare yourself only to who you were yesterday. That leads to growth. Everything else leads to despair.

Alex Marshall-Brown, a black woman sat down to paint her toenails in the front yard of St. Paul’s Lutheran Church in North Hollywood. The first responders…..actually more accurate to say the primary reactors to her presence made it clear that she was unwelcome there in part, if not primarily because she was black. Marshall-Brown had friends making a video of all this….and posted it to social media to put the church in the worst light possible. But she returned the next day and accepted an invitation to come into the sanctuary of the church and talk with congregational leaders. There she discovered something of their complexity and humanity and she of theirs. Bettina Winfrey, a leader of the St. Paul’s congregation said “I truly, truly believe that God put her on our lawn for a reason.” (15)

Thomas Curwen wrote a beautiful appreciation of the short lived Los Angeles Surge Hospital. LASH was one of those medical facilities thrown together in remarkably short order as the Corona virus first threatened to overtax existing facilities. The mission of LASH was caring for Angelenos under served if served at all by the medico-insurance complex. Their most typical patient was a Latinx with underlying diabetes. LASH was a marvelous experiment in common humanity medicine. Curwen writes, “Never was this more evident than when patients were discharged. LASH personnel lined the ramp to the ambulance bay and cheered as the patients made the sign of the cross, blessed the staff and whispered thank-yous, one tear-filled goodbye after another.” (16)

The sign of the cross, the irreducible complexity and unfathomable depth of every human person. There it is.