Looking back, we understand that the books we read as children may have glorified or misrepresented certain aspects of life in earlier times. Thanksgiving is the easiest example that comes to mind, where a story was woven over grim facts to make a pleasing explanation. But when I think back to grade school, it’s the biographies of famous people that made the most significant impression on me. Most of them showed us exemplary decision-making at crucial inflection points. Though I read biographies of Frederick Douglass, Sitting Bull, Jesse Owens, and Geronimo, I was taken by biographies of amazing women – Elizabeth Blackwell, Jane Addams, Maria Tallchief, Althea Gibson, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Marian Anderson, and others. You could say that most of them had to experience painful struggles to get to that astonishing right thing to do, and that is probably why we remember their stories.
Later, as an undergraduate, whole worlds of history and information opened to me at the University of Iowa, including a fuller picture of my heroes. In those days, one learned in part from “teach-ins.” It was in one of those sessions that I was able to reach back to an early biography of Mahatma Gandhi and correlate it to the behavior we were being taught as participants in the civil rights movement. At the center of the behavioral elements was Gandhi’s focus on change through non-violent action, adopted by the Reverend Martin Luther King. As the press began to cover the marches and bus rides into the South to register citizens to vote, the rest of the country began to see what non-violent protest wrought – cattle prods, fire hoses, and baseball bats all were deployed to crush the marchers and the movement. With such media attention, President Kennedy deployed federal marshals and the National Guard as necessary in the South so that schools and voting places might be integrated. His successor, President Johnson, led the fight to pass important federal legislation, including the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and the Civil Rights Act of 1968.
This is a much-simplified summary of experiences that converted reading into action by the time I was in college. I have been thinking about those years recently as I watch college campuses tear themselves apart because of issues at the center of the Israeli-Palestinian war. There don’t seem to be any teach-ins or debates, as you might expect on college campuses, only chants and rage and, in some places, property damage. Demands are both local and federal. To what point?
At the same time, we are rapidly approaching federal primaries, where it’s fair to ask, as Maureen Dowd did this morning in her column called “The Ivy League Flunks Out”:
“I think this is still America. But I don’t understand why I have to keep makingthe case on matters that should be self-evident. Why should I have to make the casethat a man who tried to overthrow the government should not be president again?”
The problem of former President Trump looms large over the next year, even given the number of appearances he will be making in court. There does not seem to be any kind of clarifying lens one can apply so that his followers understand what’s under the hood. At the same time, the Democratic Party has its own share of divisions, and cases like the two wars we are currently financing offer lukewarm support to the incumbent. For all the legislative accomplishments and holding global challenges steady, the president simply does not get credit for what he’s managed to enact. We desperately need a reassessment of key messages and movement as necessary toward finding bipartisan agreement on the budget, on borders, on wars, and on our place in the international order of things. What is hard to discern is a sense of common purpose, to which rants and rage simply do not respond. What reading should provide is moving beyond distress at not getting what you want. When you hear a speaker say that the survival of democracy is at stake in this election, please give some thought to what that means.
ASA is moving on after next month when it will have published its last student research notes. We'll start to put together the seventh and final volume of research notes with an eye toward publication by late spring. We'll add back a section called “News” to each newsletter, commenting on one or two important risk-related articles of the month. I'm working on the fourth edition of Advice From A Risk Detective, hoping to have it ready for publication early next year. Finally, I've given myself more time to assemble the new podcast series, What's at Stake. As often happens, I've begun to tweak my initial notions of what will be included.
We wish you all happy holidays amid everything going on in the world right now.