Are Americans still fair, as my parents were? It’s unfair that I must ask
Idea
When I was growing up, if someone broke a window in our house, my mother would carefully wrap the glass pieces before sending them to the garbage collectors. “I don’t want them to cut their hands,” he said. If you break a glass, it would only be fair to make sure the sharp edges don’t hurt anyone.
He once told me I wasn’t being fair when I complained about the amount of commercials on a TV show we were watching. “Advertisers are paying for the show,” he said. “They have the right to be heard.”
Later, while living on crutches in an apartment building, he delivered meals to the men and women working in the building at Christmas. He said it was only fair since they couldn’t be with their families.
In the 1990s, when Hillary Clinton and Monica Lewinsky were pitted against each other, my mother chose both of them. He said they were both very smart and beautiful and had a lot to offer. “That’s the fair way to look at it,” he said. Plus, she still had a soft spot for Bill.
My father was the same. When our neighbor in a Maryland beach town fell on hard times, my father went to the bank and co-signed the man’s mortgage without saying a word to anyone. It was only fair. The neighbor not only paid his debt; When my father died, the man went to DC and waited in line for an hour in the freezing cold to attend the funeral so he could tell my mother what my father was secretly doing.
When the Ku Klux Klan burned crosses on the lawns of his other beach neighbors, the only Jewish family in town, my father tracked down the local Klan leader and told him to stand down or stand down. My father, a police detective, made sure the Klansman saw his service pistol in his waistband.
When my father was in charge of security for the U.S. Senate, he judged politicians not only by their ideology but also by how they treated people. Did they mistreat elevator operators, Capitol Police officers, and cafeteria workers? This wasn’t fair.
My parents didn’t think they were behaving in any unusual way. They viewed justice as a very American trait, as did their fierce patriotism. (On July 4th, our clothes, napkins, and candles always had to be red, white, and blue.)
Because of my family, I always thought that justice was also an American trait. My father was an Irish immigrant, and my mother’s parents were also Irish immigrants, and that’s where they built the working-class life of their dreams. America was fair to them, and they wanted to be fair to everyone else.
My family, for all its flaws, believed in the government as the protector of the people. My first cousin, Peggy Dowd, was secretary to Tommy Corcoran, an aide to Franklin D. Roosevelt who was one of the chief strategists of the New Deal. After working together for 10 years, they got married and started a family. The social safety net created jobs for millions of people and helped the country emerge from the Great Depression. People treated public goods as public goods rather than money-making opportunities for a well-connected few.
For decades until President Donald Trump, the government was relied upon to protect food, water, climate and the disadvantaged. It wasn’t about which party you were in. President Richard Nixon signed into law the National Environmental Policy Act and the Endangered Species Act. George HW Bush pioneered the Americans with Disabilities Act.
Of course, we have sometimes fallen spectacularly short of this ideal in our nation’s history, including the original sin of slavery, the Alien and Sedition Acts, segregation, and the internment of Japanese American citizens during World War II. But I always thought most Americans were trying to be fair. The country was founded on this great goal: All men are created equal.
But a lot of things seem unfair lately. Renee Good and Alex Pretti were shot and killed in Minneapolis. The Trump family’s kleptocracy and apparent fraud have been brilliantly reported New York TimesEric Lipton and a team of reporters are on a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigation. Racism and antisemitism reared their head in a raw and ugly way.
Jeff Bezos destroys the legendary newspaper Washington Postaimed at pleasing a thin-skinned president, and David Ellison’s destruction of the legendary news division at CBS was aimed at pleasing a corrupt Federal Communications Commission chairman who kissed the ring of a thin-skinned president who aspired to be king.
Trump and his congressional friends are cutting critical safety net programs and doling out huge tax breaks to billionaire friends. The gutting of the landmark Voting Rights Act and the mistaken view of the conservative Supreme Court majority that racism is over in America.
The obscene salaries of CEOs and the obscene wealth of the tech world, which grew 20 times faster than workers’ pay last year; money flowing into the hands of greedy billionaires who lack empathy or even noble obligation. “They are so rich,” Rahm Emanuel told me with disgust. “I call it ‘3-2-1.’ They go to the third house, the second wife and the first plane. They’re in a hermetically sealed world.”
Trump is leading the country to war with Iran, partly at the insistence of his friend Bibi; without any rational plan, discussion, enforcement from Congress, or consideration of how this might harm Americans who are already struggling to make ends meet.
Trump is gleefully tearing down huge chunks of the White House and my hometown, trying to build a solipsistic arch, a private golf course, a giant ballroom, and a garden of heroes; all of which suits the acidic characteristics of Versailles. He desecrated the Kennedy Center, slapping its name and interfering with its artistic content, until a judge ordered his name expunged. The President tears apart scenes from my happiest childhood memories; the modest but beautiful White House, Jackie Kennedy’s gardens, the golf course at Hains Point where I went with my brother.
The astonishing failure of government hackers and masters of the cloud to figure out how to safely regulate AI and create a kill switch to save humanity even as AI leaps to superintelligence and consciousness sooner than we think.
I try to instill my family’s sense of justice into my life. And despite the malevolent noise of social media and Trump’s malevolent noise and all that is stacked against us, I continue to believe or hope that most Americans are fair. It’s unfair to even wonder: Are Americans still fair?
This article was first published on: New York Times.
