m***@use.net
2008-10-30 17:12:32 UTC
How Much Damage Has Eight Years of Conservative Rule Done to
Americans' Psyches?
By Mark Klempner, AlterNet. Posted October 29, 2008.
The Bush administration used a politics of fear to diminish our
ability to think critically and to erode our capacity to love.
When I was a teen growing up in Schenectady, N.Y., during the early
'70s, I had an alcoholic neighbor whose favorite saying was, "The
trouble with people is that they are no damn good." I was friends with
his son, and whenever I'd go over to hang out at his house, his father
would sidle up to me as though we were in a cocktail lounge, put his
hand on my shoulder, and mutter his cranky credo.
I didn't immediately make the connection between his soft-spoken,
liquor-laced presentation and my own father's hard, locked-in mistrust
of people and the world. But I realize now that if drink could have
loosened my father's tongue, he probably would have said the same
thing.
As a child, my father experienced the anti-Semitism of the Poles and
then barely escaped the Holocaust, fleeing Warsaw with his family just
one week before Hitler invaded. Still, that doesn't explain
everything. Anne Frank, born five years after my father, got trapped
in the same genocide he escaped. And yet, holed up in her hiding place
with Nazis prowling the streets below, she wrote in her diary, "In
spite of everything, I still believe that people are really good at
heart."
I don't think she was naive. On the same page, she writes of feeling
"the suffering of millions," of being able to hear the "ever
approaching thunder, which will destroy us too." Yet she held onto her
belief in the goodness of humanity.
Over the years I've come to realize how much our basic opinion about
humanity has vast repercussions -- not only on our personal lives, but
also on our politics. If you assume people are "no damn good," you
will probably favor more police officers and prisons, and you may not
see anything wrong with capital punishment. You will also favor
fences, walls and barriers of all kinds, and believe that it is
prudent and perhaps necessary to own a gun. It's likely you will have
supported George W. Bush in his pre-emptive war against Iraq, maybe
even after you learned that he depended on lies and deceptions to
carry it out. After all, life is about choosing the lesser of two
evils.
And what if you think that people are "really good at heart"? Though
you may be a dove, you will not necessarily be a starry-eyed dreamer.
Many of those making the most basic contributions to society fall into
this category: nurses, teachers, social workers, counselors. These
individuals typically believe that it's better to rehabilitate people
than to lock them up, and that negotiation and diplomacy are better
than the use of tactics of domination and the last resort of war. They
see true peace and security arising from goodwill and generosity, and
probably keep a good book rather than a gun by their pillow.
I don't mean to suggest that everyone falls solidly into one category
or the other. We have all internalized both attitudes to some degree,
and they vie for ascendancy, depending on what is happening in our
lives, and in the larger world. In times of peace and harmony we find
more people agreeing with Anne Frank. In times of suspicion and
mistrust, such as we find ourselves facing now, my alcoholic
neighbor's rant has the world's ear.
It's not because of the events of Sept. 11, 2001. Yes, 9/11 was a
defining moment, but there were many ways we could have defined it.
The way the Bush administration chose has made us more afraid and has
given us more to fear. All the wonderful promise of a new millennium
has been subsumed by alerts of yellow, orange and red.
There are many ways to make our country a safer and more secure place.
As Samantha Collier, chief medical officer of HealthGrades, points
out, far more people die each year from hospital errors than died when
the Twin Towers fell. According to Collier, "The equivalent of 390
jumbo jets full of people are dying each year due to preventable,
in-hospital medical errors, making this one of the leading killers in
the United States."
But hospital errors, infant mortality, AIDS and a host of other
threats have not been a priority for Bush. Nor does it seem they will
be for McCain if he gets elected.
We are fighting the "War on Terror." Fixated on the "War on Terror."
Spending our money on the "War on Terror." Not questioning what it
actually means to fight a "War on Terror." Not noticing that the very
expression "War on Terror" is an absurd Orwellian oxymoron.
Granted, 9/11 triggered a big "fight or flight" reaction, and when we
are swept up in fear, our immediate and only concern is with security.
Aggression is processed in the same part of the brain as fear, and it
kicks in during the "fight" response, as was evident in the aftermath
of 9/11. When an entire population feels threatened, group psychology
comes into play, increasing the possibility that a strong leader will
be able to exert undue influence upon the masses.
The Bush administration took advantage of all these psychological
vulnerabilities. Knowing that much of our capacity for critical
thinking would get washed away in the adrenaline, they methodically
exploited our fears in order to push forward their radical corporatist
agenda. But beyond the body count in Iraq and other physical
casualties lies the deeper, invisible erosion of our capacity to love.
I don't think I need to make a case that love is as compelling a
psychological factor as fear and aggression. Many others have already
done this, including the man Bush places his faith in, the one who
exhorted his followers to love their enemies.
However, in order to harness the power of love in a civic context, we
have to be able to see the good in others: to recognize that those
whom we perceive as a threat, i.e. "the terrorists," are human beings
too and might even have their good sides.
Take the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas. Though their members have
been implicated in suicide attacks and their charter calls for jihad,
much of the everyday work they perform involves helping their people.
No doubt some of the aid they provide allows them an opportunity to
indoctrinate recipients into their ideology. But does that totally
cancel out its value?
An official document by the Israel Foreign Ministry indicates that
Hamas' non-terrorist activities include "an extensive education
network, massive activity in institutions of higher learning,
distribution of basic foodstuffs 'for the holidays,' youth camps,
sports, care for the elderly, scholarships, sponsorship of light
industry and religious services under Hamas' sponsorship."
Although I condemn Hamas' terrorist actions and abhor the kind of
fundamentalist thinking that calls for the destruction of Israel, I'm
also aware they are doing good work among their own people, and thus
have some human decency. Is this such a terrible thing to acknowledge
-- or are we no longer willing or able to handle such complexities?
When we read about gang members, whether in nonfiction such as
Freakonomics or in the creative work of, say, Richard Price, they are
presented as human beings, albeit human beings who often do terrible
things. Yet the criminals Bush is obsessed with are people from
another culture who speak another language. There's a lot we don't
understand about them, and he and his staff have been able to fill
that vacuum with pure fear. Thus it has been very easy for them to
demonize certain people and organizations, and thereby create a vastly
more polarized world.
I acknowledge that there have been individuals who are almost entirely
evil. But a Hitler is as rare as a Mother Teresa. To snap everyone
onto either side of the moral grid -- as if most of them don't belong
somewhere in the middle -- is the modus operandi of fanatics,
propagandists and warmongers.
People with some degree of wisdom understand that nearly everyone is
an alloy of good and evil. They recognize, like Aleksandr
Solzhenitsyn, that "the line separating good and evil passes not
through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties
either, but right through every human heart, and through all human
hearts." They also recognize that most people do not want to live in a
world where "people are no damn good" and where fear, anger, hatred
and war prevail.
Perhaps the hardest truth for progressives to face is how the profound
political and moral disappointments of the last eight years have
eroded our own sense of hope and our own belief that the electorate
can become more informed and less divided. We, too, hate "the Other,"
but it is the guy in the grocery store with a hunting jacket and
six-pack, or the woman behind us at the gas pump with a "Rush is
Right" sticker on her Suburban. We, too, have swallowed the banefully
binary worldview of the present administration that reduces everything
to "us" and "them."
This touches on a confounding problem, one that helps to explain how
things have gotten so tangled up: Those of us who have the gumption to
push for social or political change encounter formidable obstacles
that sometimes discourage us to the point of burnout.
On a personal and neighborly level, in seeking to love, or at least to
have friendly relations, we inevitably encounter disappointment, hurt
and pain. We want to trust, but we're afraid to trust. We want to lay
down our arms, but we want the feared and despised other to lay down
their arms first. We want to create a beautiful world, but we think
that there are too many people who are going to mess it up, and we
hate them for that, thereby marring our idealistic vision before we've
even lifted a finger to materialize it.
This leads to a lot of disillusioned idealists. Many people who set
out to change the world are changed by the world into cynics or worse.
Yet it doesn't have to be that way. The most effective social
reformers have been able to transform their idealism into something
resilient and enduring.
I believe that an important prerequisite for this is to have, as
Martin Luther King Jr. put it, "a deep and abiding faith in humanity."
Indeed, the entire American experiment in democracy would have been
unthinkable had the framers of our Constitution simply believed that
"people are no damn good."
And yet it is difficult in these times to feel our own goodness. The
validity of torture as a political tool is debated on the front pages
of our newspapers, as our president smilingly strips away huge swaths
of our constitutional rights. When our highest elected officials act
shamefully and irresponsibly in our name, it has to take a toll on our
psyches. And, indeed, in some ways our reputation with ourselves has
fallen as low as our reputation with the rest of the world. This is
what happens when one has a government in which corrupt people are on
top while persons of integrity are subservient or shunted aside.
The fact remains, however, that there are some truly great people in
the United States, and a multitude of people with high ideals and a
willingness to sacrifice for the good of all. Our leadership simply
doesn't reflect us.
When Bush got in, all the neocons came out of the closet, but if
Barack Obama wins, their divisive strategies will be challenged. The
White House will no longer welcome or be a home to born-again bigots,
torture apologists, habeas corpus revokers and the rest of the
industriofascist entourage. I also expect that censored truth
commissions, muzzled scientists, harassed librarians, bought
appointees and coerced generals will cease to be an issue under
Obama's leadership. As he extricates us from Iraq, perhaps he could
deliver us and the Iraqis from the Shock and Awe strategists,
Blackwater barbarians and Halliburton robber barons.
But none of this can happen without our making a renewed commitment to
once again throw ourselves into the struggle and subject our hearts to
the dizzying roller-coaster whereby our dreams are brought within our
grasp, but might just as suddenly be snatched away.
A crucial part of our work will be to resurrect our essential vision
of human goodness, and specifically our own goodness as a nation. This
is something Obama alluded to repeatedly in his speech at the
Democratic National Convention, reminding us that "we are better than
these last eight years. We are a better country than this."
But what if McCain wins, and we have, to quote Hillary Clinton, "four
more years ... of the last eight years"? We will then have to ask
ourselves if it is possible to continue to hold out hope for humanity
-- for ourselves, our country and the world -- after our hopes have
been dashed again and again and again.
The answer is yes; in fact, this was the attitude of the Holocaust
rescuers whom I interviewed, including two who had been arrested by
the Gestapo and ended up in concentration camps. They felt that the
Nazis may have occupied their country and perhaps even captured their
bodies, but couldn't break their spirits. By continuing to believe in
the goodness of humanity, they implicitly rejected the Nazis' ghastly
worldview and inhumane conception of what it is to be human.
Bush's reign of error has not been nearly as horrific -- for those
living on U.S. soil, at least -- but he has done more harm than any
U.S. president in my lifetime, and possibly in the history of our
nation. It appears that McCain would continue Bush's policies, as well
as the underlying attitudes behind them. For instance, at a recent
religious forum, Obama and McCain were each asked how they would deal
with "evil." Obama stated that evil must be confronted, while noting
that a lot of evil has been done in the name of good, and that good
intentions are not sufficient to ensure a good outcome. McCain gave a
purely militaristic response, identifying evil specifically with
"radical Islamic extremism" and vowing to "totally" defeat it.
Included was his well-worn line to pursue Osama bin Laden "to the
gates of hell."
Even in the event of a McCain victory, however, we must not sink to
the level of our leadership. And if the outcome of this election
causes us to adopt a cynical attitude toward humanity and succumb to
the belief that our fellow citizens are hopelessly misguided, ignorant
or "no damn good," or that our political process is hopelessly
corrupt, we eliminate the possibility that things will ever change for
the better. On a personal level, we sentence ourselves to never really
trusting other human beings. Ultimately, we forfeit everything that
makes life worth living.
My father never did find the key to unlock his heart. His body wracked
with cancer and more emaciated than I'd ever imagined possible, he
looked in death uncannily like the concentration camp victim he always
feared he might become. My high school friend found me after more than
30 years (the Internet is good that way) and told me, among other
things, that his father had died 20 years before. We are both fathers
now ourselves: His children are about the same age as he and I were
back in Schenectady, while I, having remarried in my mid-40s, am only
just now for the first time raising a family.
I'm curious to find out what my old friend thinks about people, having
grown up with a father whose mantra was that they are no damn good. As
for me, I'm grateful that, unlike my father, I do not have any deeply
rooted fears born of trauma, and that the life-affirming worldview I
struggled to establish in my youth has stood the test of time. I
recognize, though, that the challenge of calibrating my faith in
humanity is more formidable than I'd once imagined. I wonder whether
I'll be able to impart to my own children an attitude toward human
nature that brings out the best in them and everyone whose lives they
touch, while preparing them for their inevitable encounters with
various forms of evil.
When I look into my baby girl's trusting eyes, or see the ecstatic
smile of my 3-year-old son playing with his friends, I can't help but
believe that people are really good at heart. When I read the history
of civilization, I am reminded that they often are not, especially
when they act en masse. And when I watch the news, I have to question
what business I have inflicting a world like this onto my children.
I suppose I could cycle back and forth between these positions until
my children are on their way to college and I'm on my way to the
grave, but instead I'm going to recommit myself to what I think is the
spiritual bottom line: that it is up to each of us to infuse life with
meaning -- to choose life. Anne Frank, young as she was, understood
this. The sentence that follows her quote about people really being
good at heart reads, "I simply can't build up my hopes on a foundation
of confusion, misery, and death." And neither can I, or you, or
anyone.
Mark Klempner is a social commentator, historian and author of The
Heart Has Reasons: Holocaust Rescuers and Their Stories of Courage. He
would like to thank James McConkey and others who commented on an
early version of this piece: Amy Denham, Paul Glover, Gerry McCarthy,
Alice McDowell, Nicole Sault and Richard Silverstein.
Americans' Psyches?
By Mark Klempner, AlterNet. Posted October 29, 2008.
The Bush administration used a politics of fear to diminish our
ability to think critically and to erode our capacity to love.
When I was a teen growing up in Schenectady, N.Y., during the early
'70s, I had an alcoholic neighbor whose favorite saying was, "The
trouble with people is that they are no damn good." I was friends with
his son, and whenever I'd go over to hang out at his house, his father
would sidle up to me as though we were in a cocktail lounge, put his
hand on my shoulder, and mutter his cranky credo.
I didn't immediately make the connection between his soft-spoken,
liquor-laced presentation and my own father's hard, locked-in mistrust
of people and the world. But I realize now that if drink could have
loosened my father's tongue, he probably would have said the same
thing.
As a child, my father experienced the anti-Semitism of the Poles and
then barely escaped the Holocaust, fleeing Warsaw with his family just
one week before Hitler invaded. Still, that doesn't explain
everything. Anne Frank, born five years after my father, got trapped
in the same genocide he escaped. And yet, holed up in her hiding place
with Nazis prowling the streets below, she wrote in her diary, "In
spite of everything, I still believe that people are really good at
heart."
I don't think she was naive. On the same page, she writes of feeling
"the suffering of millions," of being able to hear the "ever
approaching thunder, which will destroy us too." Yet she held onto her
belief in the goodness of humanity.
Over the years I've come to realize how much our basic opinion about
humanity has vast repercussions -- not only on our personal lives, but
also on our politics. If you assume people are "no damn good," you
will probably favor more police officers and prisons, and you may not
see anything wrong with capital punishment. You will also favor
fences, walls and barriers of all kinds, and believe that it is
prudent and perhaps necessary to own a gun. It's likely you will have
supported George W. Bush in his pre-emptive war against Iraq, maybe
even after you learned that he depended on lies and deceptions to
carry it out. After all, life is about choosing the lesser of two
evils.
And what if you think that people are "really good at heart"? Though
you may be a dove, you will not necessarily be a starry-eyed dreamer.
Many of those making the most basic contributions to society fall into
this category: nurses, teachers, social workers, counselors. These
individuals typically believe that it's better to rehabilitate people
than to lock them up, and that negotiation and diplomacy are better
than the use of tactics of domination and the last resort of war. They
see true peace and security arising from goodwill and generosity, and
probably keep a good book rather than a gun by their pillow.
I don't mean to suggest that everyone falls solidly into one category
or the other. We have all internalized both attitudes to some degree,
and they vie for ascendancy, depending on what is happening in our
lives, and in the larger world. In times of peace and harmony we find
more people agreeing with Anne Frank. In times of suspicion and
mistrust, such as we find ourselves facing now, my alcoholic
neighbor's rant has the world's ear.
It's not because of the events of Sept. 11, 2001. Yes, 9/11 was a
defining moment, but there were many ways we could have defined it.
The way the Bush administration chose has made us more afraid and has
given us more to fear. All the wonderful promise of a new millennium
has been subsumed by alerts of yellow, orange and red.
There are many ways to make our country a safer and more secure place.
As Samantha Collier, chief medical officer of HealthGrades, points
out, far more people die each year from hospital errors than died when
the Twin Towers fell. According to Collier, "The equivalent of 390
jumbo jets full of people are dying each year due to preventable,
in-hospital medical errors, making this one of the leading killers in
the United States."
But hospital errors, infant mortality, AIDS and a host of other
threats have not been a priority for Bush. Nor does it seem they will
be for McCain if he gets elected.
We are fighting the "War on Terror." Fixated on the "War on Terror."
Spending our money on the "War on Terror." Not questioning what it
actually means to fight a "War on Terror." Not noticing that the very
expression "War on Terror" is an absurd Orwellian oxymoron.
Granted, 9/11 triggered a big "fight or flight" reaction, and when we
are swept up in fear, our immediate and only concern is with security.
Aggression is processed in the same part of the brain as fear, and it
kicks in during the "fight" response, as was evident in the aftermath
of 9/11. When an entire population feels threatened, group psychology
comes into play, increasing the possibility that a strong leader will
be able to exert undue influence upon the masses.
The Bush administration took advantage of all these psychological
vulnerabilities. Knowing that much of our capacity for critical
thinking would get washed away in the adrenaline, they methodically
exploited our fears in order to push forward their radical corporatist
agenda. But beyond the body count in Iraq and other physical
casualties lies the deeper, invisible erosion of our capacity to love.
I don't think I need to make a case that love is as compelling a
psychological factor as fear and aggression. Many others have already
done this, including the man Bush places his faith in, the one who
exhorted his followers to love their enemies.
However, in order to harness the power of love in a civic context, we
have to be able to see the good in others: to recognize that those
whom we perceive as a threat, i.e. "the terrorists," are human beings
too and might even have their good sides.
Take the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas. Though their members have
been implicated in suicide attacks and their charter calls for jihad,
much of the everyday work they perform involves helping their people.
No doubt some of the aid they provide allows them an opportunity to
indoctrinate recipients into their ideology. But does that totally
cancel out its value?
An official document by the Israel Foreign Ministry indicates that
Hamas' non-terrorist activities include "an extensive education
network, massive activity in institutions of higher learning,
distribution of basic foodstuffs 'for the holidays,' youth camps,
sports, care for the elderly, scholarships, sponsorship of light
industry and religious services under Hamas' sponsorship."
Although I condemn Hamas' terrorist actions and abhor the kind of
fundamentalist thinking that calls for the destruction of Israel, I'm
also aware they are doing good work among their own people, and thus
have some human decency. Is this such a terrible thing to acknowledge
-- or are we no longer willing or able to handle such complexities?
When we read about gang members, whether in nonfiction such as
Freakonomics or in the creative work of, say, Richard Price, they are
presented as human beings, albeit human beings who often do terrible
things. Yet the criminals Bush is obsessed with are people from
another culture who speak another language. There's a lot we don't
understand about them, and he and his staff have been able to fill
that vacuum with pure fear. Thus it has been very easy for them to
demonize certain people and organizations, and thereby create a vastly
more polarized world.
I acknowledge that there have been individuals who are almost entirely
evil. But a Hitler is as rare as a Mother Teresa. To snap everyone
onto either side of the moral grid -- as if most of them don't belong
somewhere in the middle -- is the modus operandi of fanatics,
propagandists and warmongers.
People with some degree of wisdom understand that nearly everyone is
an alloy of good and evil. They recognize, like Aleksandr
Solzhenitsyn, that "the line separating good and evil passes not
through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties
either, but right through every human heart, and through all human
hearts." They also recognize that most people do not want to live in a
world where "people are no damn good" and where fear, anger, hatred
and war prevail.
Perhaps the hardest truth for progressives to face is how the profound
political and moral disappointments of the last eight years have
eroded our own sense of hope and our own belief that the electorate
can become more informed and less divided. We, too, hate "the Other,"
but it is the guy in the grocery store with a hunting jacket and
six-pack, or the woman behind us at the gas pump with a "Rush is
Right" sticker on her Suburban. We, too, have swallowed the banefully
binary worldview of the present administration that reduces everything
to "us" and "them."
This touches on a confounding problem, one that helps to explain how
things have gotten so tangled up: Those of us who have the gumption to
push for social or political change encounter formidable obstacles
that sometimes discourage us to the point of burnout.
On a personal and neighborly level, in seeking to love, or at least to
have friendly relations, we inevitably encounter disappointment, hurt
and pain. We want to trust, but we're afraid to trust. We want to lay
down our arms, but we want the feared and despised other to lay down
their arms first. We want to create a beautiful world, but we think
that there are too many people who are going to mess it up, and we
hate them for that, thereby marring our idealistic vision before we've
even lifted a finger to materialize it.
This leads to a lot of disillusioned idealists. Many people who set
out to change the world are changed by the world into cynics or worse.
Yet it doesn't have to be that way. The most effective social
reformers have been able to transform their idealism into something
resilient and enduring.
I believe that an important prerequisite for this is to have, as
Martin Luther King Jr. put it, "a deep and abiding faith in humanity."
Indeed, the entire American experiment in democracy would have been
unthinkable had the framers of our Constitution simply believed that
"people are no damn good."
And yet it is difficult in these times to feel our own goodness. The
validity of torture as a political tool is debated on the front pages
of our newspapers, as our president smilingly strips away huge swaths
of our constitutional rights. When our highest elected officials act
shamefully and irresponsibly in our name, it has to take a toll on our
psyches. And, indeed, in some ways our reputation with ourselves has
fallen as low as our reputation with the rest of the world. This is
what happens when one has a government in which corrupt people are on
top while persons of integrity are subservient or shunted aside.
The fact remains, however, that there are some truly great people in
the United States, and a multitude of people with high ideals and a
willingness to sacrifice for the good of all. Our leadership simply
doesn't reflect us.
When Bush got in, all the neocons came out of the closet, but if
Barack Obama wins, their divisive strategies will be challenged. The
White House will no longer welcome or be a home to born-again bigots,
torture apologists, habeas corpus revokers and the rest of the
industriofascist entourage. I also expect that censored truth
commissions, muzzled scientists, harassed librarians, bought
appointees and coerced generals will cease to be an issue under
Obama's leadership. As he extricates us from Iraq, perhaps he could
deliver us and the Iraqis from the Shock and Awe strategists,
Blackwater barbarians and Halliburton robber barons.
But none of this can happen without our making a renewed commitment to
once again throw ourselves into the struggle and subject our hearts to
the dizzying roller-coaster whereby our dreams are brought within our
grasp, but might just as suddenly be snatched away.
A crucial part of our work will be to resurrect our essential vision
of human goodness, and specifically our own goodness as a nation. This
is something Obama alluded to repeatedly in his speech at the
Democratic National Convention, reminding us that "we are better than
these last eight years. We are a better country than this."
But what if McCain wins, and we have, to quote Hillary Clinton, "four
more years ... of the last eight years"? We will then have to ask
ourselves if it is possible to continue to hold out hope for humanity
-- for ourselves, our country and the world -- after our hopes have
been dashed again and again and again.
The answer is yes; in fact, this was the attitude of the Holocaust
rescuers whom I interviewed, including two who had been arrested by
the Gestapo and ended up in concentration camps. They felt that the
Nazis may have occupied their country and perhaps even captured their
bodies, but couldn't break their spirits. By continuing to believe in
the goodness of humanity, they implicitly rejected the Nazis' ghastly
worldview and inhumane conception of what it is to be human.
Bush's reign of error has not been nearly as horrific -- for those
living on U.S. soil, at least -- but he has done more harm than any
U.S. president in my lifetime, and possibly in the history of our
nation. It appears that McCain would continue Bush's policies, as well
as the underlying attitudes behind them. For instance, at a recent
religious forum, Obama and McCain were each asked how they would deal
with "evil." Obama stated that evil must be confronted, while noting
that a lot of evil has been done in the name of good, and that good
intentions are not sufficient to ensure a good outcome. McCain gave a
purely militaristic response, identifying evil specifically with
"radical Islamic extremism" and vowing to "totally" defeat it.
Included was his well-worn line to pursue Osama bin Laden "to the
gates of hell."
Even in the event of a McCain victory, however, we must not sink to
the level of our leadership. And if the outcome of this election
causes us to adopt a cynical attitude toward humanity and succumb to
the belief that our fellow citizens are hopelessly misguided, ignorant
or "no damn good," or that our political process is hopelessly
corrupt, we eliminate the possibility that things will ever change for
the better. On a personal level, we sentence ourselves to never really
trusting other human beings. Ultimately, we forfeit everything that
makes life worth living.
My father never did find the key to unlock his heart. His body wracked
with cancer and more emaciated than I'd ever imagined possible, he
looked in death uncannily like the concentration camp victim he always
feared he might become. My high school friend found me after more than
30 years (the Internet is good that way) and told me, among other
things, that his father had died 20 years before. We are both fathers
now ourselves: His children are about the same age as he and I were
back in Schenectady, while I, having remarried in my mid-40s, am only
just now for the first time raising a family.
I'm curious to find out what my old friend thinks about people, having
grown up with a father whose mantra was that they are no damn good. As
for me, I'm grateful that, unlike my father, I do not have any deeply
rooted fears born of trauma, and that the life-affirming worldview I
struggled to establish in my youth has stood the test of time. I
recognize, though, that the challenge of calibrating my faith in
humanity is more formidable than I'd once imagined. I wonder whether
I'll be able to impart to my own children an attitude toward human
nature that brings out the best in them and everyone whose lives they
touch, while preparing them for their inevitable encounters with
various forms of evil.
When I look into my baby girl's trusting eyes, or see the ecstatic
smile of my 3-year-old son playing with his friends, I can't help but
believe that people are really good at heart. When I read the history
of civilization, I am reminded that they often are not, especially
when they act en masse. And when I watch the news, I have to question
what business I have inflicting a world like this onto my children.
I suppose I could cycle back and forth between these positions until
my children are on their way to college and I'm on my way to the
grave, but instead I'm going to recommit myself to what I think is the
spiritual bottom line: that it is up to each of us to infuse life with
meaning -- to choose life. Anne Frank, young as she was, understood
this. The sentence that follows her quote about people really being
good at heart reads, "I simply can't build up my hopes on a foundation
of confusion, misery, and death." And neither can I, or you, or
anyone.
Mark Klempner is a social commentator, historian and author of The
Heart Has Reasons: Holocaust Rescuers and Their Stories of Courage. He
would like to thank James McConkey and others who commented on an
early version of this piece: Amy Denham, Paul Glover, Gerry McCarthy,
Alice McDowell, Nicole Sault and Richard Silverstein.