What Is ‘Woke,’ and What Is So Terrible About It?

At its simplest, ‘woke’ means being awake to the facts of history and biology and life in the United States from colonial days to the present. 

 

‘Woke’ means learning not only that Africans were brought to our shores in chains but that they were considered property here for two centuries, often treated worse than livestock. It means learning that each black human body was counted as 2/3 of a person—not given the vote, you understand, but just counted so as to give Southern states greater representation in Congress. Woke is realizing that the Emancipation Proclamation was just that, a proclamation, and that enslaved people were not freed until long afterward—and then, after an all-too-brief period when their rights were protected by U.S. troops, once more treated as subhuman by white men in power. 

 

‘Woke’ means knowing the history of the indigenous peoples of North America, the litany of broken treaties, slaughter of Native women and children by the United States military, slaughter also of the buffalo so that the people would starve, leaving their land open for railroads and homesteaders. It means learning about boarding schools where Native languages were prohibited, abuse was rampant, and where many children died and were buried in unmarked graves. Native American adults were not allowed to vote in U.S. elections until 1924, but the Snyder Act passed that year left it up to states to decide eligibility, so Native peoples were still frequently barred from participation in American democracy, and even today people on reservations without street addresses have difficulty registering to vote.

 

‘Woke’ means learning that until 1870 in the United States, only white men were allowed to vote. In 1870, black adult males were supposedly eligible to vote, but poll taxes, literacy tests, intimidation, etc. kept the ballot from most men. Women were not “given” the vote until 1920, with passage of the 19^th Amendment to the Constitution. Native Americans had to wait until 1924 and, as noted above, still have trouble registering today in many places, though in 1964 poll taxes were outlawed by the Twenty-Fourth Amendment, and in 1965 the Voting Rights Act officially secured the vote for all adult Americans.

 

But ‘woke’ also means awareness that there is more to equality than voting rights. It means recognition of ways that discrimination persisted in laws and social customs, such as insurance and real estate practices, etc., that intergenerational trauma has been passed down through families and communities, affecting health and longevity, and ways in which privilege enjoyed by white Americans by virtue of their skin color is unearned and exceptional. 

 

About one percent (1%, or 1 in 100) of human beings are born gender-nonbinary, or intersex (having both male and female sex organs), with a mismatch between visible sex organs and sex hormones that activate at puberty, or with some other variation from a clear male or female identity. ‘Woke’ means recognition of this minority and respecting each individual’s way of dealing with the binary world.

 

‘Woke’ means, basically, being politically and socially aware, having an awareness that rests on thorough knowledge of history, along with recognition of privilege and its absence. The antonym is ignorance. 

 

A number of Republicans use ‘woke’ as a pejorative term and proudly declare themselves ‘anti-woke.’ In this context, the term ‘woke’ is carelessly thrown around to inhibit open inquiry and discussion. 

Ron DeSantis, for instance, calls it the belief that there exist systemic injustices in American society that need to be addressed. Does he think this is a false belief? Does he not see examples of injustice? Does he see them but want them left unaddressed? What he would have, rather than asking God to mend our country’s flaws, is that we insist that our country is flawless. Book bans and exclusion of “sensitive” topics in history are the result of anti-woke campaigns. 

 

As to the matter of gender terms, the current administration in Washington has declared, with unintentional humor, that the government will now recognize only two sexes, those fixed at conception. This is humorous because sex organs of embryos are not yet developed as male or female. And who is there at conception to conduct a sex test? 

 

As a white female American, I have known unearned privilege. I certainly did not earn the parents to whom I was born. And yet, as an adult in certain situations in company with a white male adult, I have been ignored while the man was recognized. In situations with an African woman friend, however, I was the one recognized while she was ignored, and when shopping with an elderly white woman, again I was the one recognized while the older woman was ignored. Women, people of color, people with foreign accents, old people, the disabled, the mentally ill—all experience discrimination. It’s a fact, and pretending it doesn’t exist, being indifferent to it, is downright callous.

 

Years ago members of my undergraduate department had not participated in graduation and wanted to make up for my disappointment (it took me 20 years to earn a B.A.) by taking me to lunch. One of the late arrivals at lunch was the university president, who sat across the narrow table from me and never once made eye contact or acknowledged my existence. Later I compared notes with another employee in the college where I worked. She, a black woman with a Ph.D., had had a similar experience with the president and thought it was because of her race, while I’d thought it was because I was a new and very lowly B.A. We concluded, perhaps too easily, that the president’s problem was with women. It took years for me to consider that his antipathy towards women did not rule out a racist attitude. He could easily have been biased on both counts. Perhaps also fixed on academic status, I think now.

 

Much earlier in life, I was called to babysit for a couple with two young boys and a new baby. Before they left for the evening, I was given instructions about what to do “if ‘it’ [the baby] wakes up.” It? They did not use a name for the baby, which I found very strange. Later, when the baby cried and needed a diaper change, I was shocked and confused about what I was seeing, and it took years for me to sort it out. Whatever happened to that baby? How did the parents raise their nonbinary child? I was not called to babysit at that house again (had only gone once when their regular sitter was unavailable) and never talked about the baby with anyone, my parents or my friends. My parents were never comfortable talking to my sisters and me about anything to do with sex, so we were not comfortable asking them questions. I’m glad to say they did better with questions of race and religion and taught us to respect people of different backgrounds and faiths. 

 

The questions remains, why are people so afraid to wake up? Why do they fear history? Why do they fear nonconforming genders? Realizing where our country falls short is the only way we will ever make it better, so teaching history honestly is our only chance. As for gender issues, the fear no doubt arises from confusion and shock, but that can be overcome. Human beings come in many variations, a very wide range of skin colors and in a wider gender range than is generally acknowledged. 

What’s strange can be frightening. But it doesn’t have to be. We don’t have to stay stuck in fear and let it turn to hate.

Are you brave enough to explore learning? The Revolutionary Love Project is not about hating yourself if you have had privilege: You can't love anyone else if you hate yourself. Check it out. Be brave. 

Soldiers of the—Cross??? Or Something Else?

My Lutheran confirmation Bible

Persecution of Christians in the Roman Empire was bigtime. Churches were destroyed, worship meetings forbidden, clergy arrested, and followers of Jesus commanded to sacrifice to Roman gods. Margaret Nutting Ralph, Ph.D., writes that “Christians were vulnerable to persecution because they would not participate in emperor worship” and were therefore seen as unpatriotic.

Present-day countries with the highest levels of persecution against Christians are North Korea, Somalia, Libya, Eritrea, and Yemen--persecution that can involve physical attacks, legal discrimination, torture, arrest, even death. It should be noted here that North Korea is a single-party state, ruled by a single “Supreme Leader.”

 

If your Christian faith is discovered in North Korea, you could be killed on the spot. If you aren't killed, you will be deported to a labour camp and treated as a political criminal. You will be punished with years of hard labour that few survive. And it's not only you who will be punished: North Korean authorities are likely to round up your extended family and punish them too, even if your family members aren't Christians.

 

That is persecution. That is what it means to risk being a martyr to your faith in the 21^st century. 

 

On February 7, 2025, however, the president of the United States signed an order to create a national task force to “eliminate anti-Christian bias.” Official statements claim that this task force will promote “religious liberty” and increase grant opportunities (i.e., government funds) for “faith-based entities.” Presumably, focus will be on Christian “faith-based entities” (we'll look closer at that in a minute), since the formation of the task force implies bias against Christians and a need to correct that bias. 

 

Christians have never been persecuted in the United States of America. On the contrary, without any establishment of a state religion—and the Founders were very clear about wanting to leave Americans free to worship or even not worship as they might choose—Christianity has managed to be the dominant American religion from the beginning of the nation to the present day. Yet being dominant is not enough for many so-called Christians today. Nothing short of imposing their own political agenda on everyone else—and make no mistake, many groups of nominal “Christians” in America have a strong and determined right-wing political agenda—will satisfy the ambitions of those who have abandoned the teachings of Jesus but continue to use his name.

 

Back in October I wrote about a book published in 1833, Three Years in North America, by James Stuart, Esq. You can go back and read what I wrote earlier, but if you don’t want to bother I’ll repeat myself briefly. The Englishman who wrote the book, as his title indicates, spent three years traveling around the United States in the early 1800s, going as far south as Mississippi (maybe New Orleans, but I’d have to check that) and as far west as St. Louis, and during his time in our nation’s capital he attended a meeting of Congress where the business of the day was consideration of a bill that would close post offices on Sunday to respect the Sabbath.

 

One argument against the bill was that it violated freedom and equality (what we since came to call the separation of church and state) by elevating one religion above others. 

 

The constitution regards the conscience of the Jew as sacred as that of the Christian, and gives no more authority to adopt a measure affecting the conscience of a solitary individual, than that of a whole community. 

 

Another argument (that I found absolutely fascinating!) was that the bill insulted Christianity by implying that its followers were so weak in their faith that they needed to be forced by government to practice it! This argument can be generalized to oppose any attempt to establish a state religion.

 

A third argument was that favoring one religion over another had not made life peaceful in European nations. 

 

One member remarked that it was “perhaps fortunate” that the question was coming up so early in the life of the nation, “while the spirit of the revolution yet exists in full vigour,” the spirit of freedom of conscience belonging to every American and not to be abridged by what we would call Congressional overreach. The Founders thought they had settled the matter in Philadelphia, and the early 19^th century Congress clearly reaffirmed the answer to the question. But now we have a president who curries favor by granting special status to the already dominant religion, pretending that it has been under attack. 

 

How fragile must be the faith of Christians who see persecution when they hear the greeting “Happy Holidays!” in December!

 

BUT WAIT! THERE’S MORE!

 

Attacks against world relief provided by Christian organizations initially seem at odds with the new protect-the-faith task force. How does it compute? For example --

 

Example #1: Relief aid around the world provided by Lutheran agencies (Lutheran Social Services, etc.) has been targeted by people in the current administration of Washington as “illegal payments.” One accuser was Michael Flynn, a Catholic, retired Army general, and former adviser to the current U.S. president. Unelected Elon Musk, a self-described “cultural Christian” (???), moved quickly to shut down payments. It is thought by some that work to resettle refugees was the blackest mark against the Lutheran relief agencies. Bishop Elizabeth Eaton, presiding bishop of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, responded (read her full statement here):

 

As a faith-based nonprofit, we have proudly served legally admitted refugees and immigrants for more than 85 years. This includes Afghan Allies who risked their lives to protect U.S. troops, as well as persecuted Christians, all of whom have been extensively vetted and approved by multiple U.S. government agencies before traveling to our country. We also remain committed to caring for legally admitted unaccompanied children forced to flee to the United States.

 

Example #2: J.D. Vance, another avowed Catholic, along with Flynn, has also targeted Catholic relief agencies. With USAID already forced by Musk to cut programs in war-torn Gaza and elsewhere, National Catholic Relief, a group founded by American bishops in 1943 to help survivors of World War II, says,

 

Now, Catholic Relief Services is facing the most serious existential threat in its history in light of proposed federal funding cuts [my emphasis added]. 

 

The director of the Office of International Justice and Peace for the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops from 2004 to 2018, Stephen Colecchi, characterizes Musk’s stoppage of USAID funds as “haphazard and irresponsible”:

 

To target this tiny portion of the federal budget in such a haphazard and irresponsible way is going to cost people's lives and livelihoods. It is not a thoughtful or humane way to go about treating programs that help the poorest of the poor all over the world.

 

In Colecchi’s words, “the poorest of the poor.” In the words of a former board chair of Catholic Relief Services, Bishop Gerald Kicanas, “desperate people, living in desperate situations, struggling day by day, hour by hour.” These are the people who have been helped, whose risk of survival is now greater than ever. You have seen photographs of present-day Gaza! 

 

And yet, only the other day (everything done is “only the other day” in an administration not yet a month old, God help us!), the president ordered the creation of a “White House Faith Office” to “root out anti-Christian bias” in government and protect the Christian faith by supporting “faith-based entities.”

 

The woman named to lead the president’s new faith office is Paula White, a televangelist. I will not rehash her background or go over her many public statements (you can look those up yourself if you are unfamiliar with her) but want to highlight one single aspect of her ministry. Her teaching is that of the so-called "prosperity gospel." The message is pretty simple: God wants you to be rich! Follow me, and you’re following God! You can start down the road to riches by sending money to me so I can continue spreading the word (says the television preacher), and I promise it will come back to you tenfold. 

 

Where, I ask, is the Christian gospel in this? Where is Jesus? Where are the Beatitudes? 

 

Where is Matthew 6:19-21?

Do not store up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moths and vermin destroy, and where thieves break in and steal. ²⁰ But store up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where moths and vermin do not destroy, and where thieves do not break in and steal. ²¹ For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.

 

Where is Matthew 6:24?

No one can serve two masters; for either he will hate the one and love the other, or else he will be loyal to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and mammon.

 

But put the pieces together, and they fit perfectly. 

The new administration in Washington has no interest in protecting the Christian faith or serving those truly persecuted (whatever faith they may profess, if any). Catholics and Lutherans are not "Christian" enough, in their warped view of a major world religion. The real sin of these long-established, traditional Christian churches is that by sending relief funds abroad, they are not directly enriching the greedy at home. 

What the billionaires now in charge really want to do is to make the world safe for the worship of mammon. Their sign is not that of the cross but of the dollar sign. Put the pieces together, and it all makes sense. 

Please Stop Using That Word!

 

One summer on Nagonaba Street....

What do the dictionaries say about the meaning of the term ‘conservative’?

 

The American Heritage Dictionary says it means “favoring traditional views and values; tending to oppose change.” 

 

Merriam-Webster defines it as “tending to favor established ideas, conditions, or institutions. 

 

Oxford Languages (a new “brand” under whose umbrella resides the Oxford English Dictionary, it seems) defines the adjective ‘conservative’ as follows: “averse to change or holding traditional values.” (And now I cannot find that page again online.)

 

The Cambridge English Dictionary describes the same word as meaning “not usually liking or trusting change, especially sudden change.”  

 

Britannica calls ‘conservatism’ this way: “a political doctrine that emphasizes the value of traditional institutions and practices.” 

How many “principles” of political conservatism are recognized in the U.S. Some say five, some seven, others ten. It depends on your source. Congressman Mike Johnson, present Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives, who claims to be a conservative, cites seven “core principles,” and let’s take him at his word, since he is the Speaker. Those principles are, he says: 

 

1. Individual freedom

2. Limited government

3. The rule of law

4. Peace through strength

5. Fiscal responsibility

6. Free markets

7. Human dignity

 

In your opinion, how does the current Republican administration in Washington stack up on these core principles, taken one by one?

 

As for the more general term, I do not see the present administration’s scorched earth raids on government as “favoring traditional values,” “favoring established institutions,” or “opposing sudden change.” There is nothing conservative about filling the most important Cabinet positions with loyalists (most of them unqualified, even unfit for office; many guilty of all manner of crimes and ethics violations) who see their mission as eliminating the very departments they are appointed to oversee. There is nothing conservative about handing the keys to government over to an unelected billionaire (an immigrant, therefore ineligible to be president himself) and his hastily assembled “team” of young, inexperienced tech nerds. And there is nothing conservative about the Supreme Court of the land deciding that the man in the Oval Office is above the law. None of this is conservatism. A coup d'état is by its very definition anything but conservative.

 

So if what's going on in our nation these days isn't conservatism, what is it? Perhaps anarcho-capitalism comes closest. What a dream come true that is for billionaires frustrated that none of them yet controls all the world’s wealth!  Someone else suggests technofascism for what is planned and will shortly be executed if not stopped. Question: Are anarchism and fascism contradictory? An answer to that would depend, I guess, on how one regards law.

P.S. Don't lose heart!

Meeting Challenges/Why I Write

Ready for a Challenge!

I thought I was well prepared for cold weather and was not surprised on Monday morning to learn that the outdoor temperature was a frigid three degrees Fahrenheit, not expected to rise above 10 degrees by afternoon. After all, that’s what the forecast had shown in preceding days. And it is January in northern Michigan. So, from under the bedcovers, with coffee and book and dog at hand, it seemed like a pretty ordinary winter morning until, finally, I noticed that the bedroom was colder than it should be, the house unusually quiet. Why wasn’t the furnace blower coming on? Up to investigate! Only 45 degrees in the living room? Even I am not that frugal! 

 

Four days earlier I’d checked the outdoor propane tank and called to order a refill, but no way could I have gone through 20% of a tank in four days! Checked the circuit breaker box. No problem there. Emergency call to my furnace guy (had to leave a message), and then Sunny and I went out for a very short, quick run. As snow quickly turned to ice between her paw pads, she gave me no argument about cutting short our first sortie of the day.

I won’t go through my Monday morning hour-by-hour but instead will cut directly to the chase to say that the furnace guy found the propane tank was empty, after all. I’d probably gotten a false reading from the gauge, he said, sharing that his home tank gauge had once read zero when the tank turned out to be 85% full. I called for propane delivery once again, explaining the emergency situation, and by 12:30 p.m. my house was on its way back to normal. By 2:30 the chicken I’d planned to cook in the big cast iron pot, braising with it vegetables, was at last underway, and I’d managed to read almost 40 pages of Eig’s biography of Martin Luther King, Jr., much of that reading accomplished—before the propane delivery—with a sleeping bag over my legs, throw around my shoulders, wool scarf around my neck, and knitted cap on my head. 

 

Life lesson: No one is coming to save us. Now that’s not 100% true, is it? After all, the furnace guy came, and the propane delivery came, and my goose would have been cooked—no, frozen!—without them. But, no one made the calls for me or unearthed the space heaters to aim at pipes under kitchen and bathroom sinks or filled the bathtub and kitchen sink and washing machine with hot water to keep things under control until the situation was resolved. Weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth wouldn’t have gotten any of those jobs done. Wishin’ and hopin’ and dreamin’ would not have accomplished a thing.

 

People are often asked what advice they would give to their younger selves, if such a thing were possible. I’d say, “Cowgirl up! What’s the first step? Take it! Then take it from there.” 

 

When someone says “Cowgirl Up!” it means rise to the occasion, don’t give up, and do it all without whining. [Source of quote online here.]

 

Sometimes, honestly, the first step is hard to see. What does need doing? What should I do? For me, even if I can’t see right away the first step to resolve a particular situation, there’s always something that needs doing. It may be completely unrelated, but experience has taught me (I only wish it hadn’t taken so long!) that doing anything constructive, even if it’s nothing more than cleaning the bathtub, makes me feel more effective, more capable in general, and that staves off the paralysis of helplessness and hopelessness. 

 

That’s probably the reason I keep writing these blog posts, these little-noticed bits of thought that I toss out into the great uncharted ocean of humanity, like messages in bottles, without knowing if they will ever even make landfall. Writing is something I feel capable of doing, and when I do it, I feel more capable of dealing with life in general. 

Strength comes from dreams, too.

Playing Defense, Yet Again

No, not football (sorry, Lions fans!), but ah yes, philosophy. If a book review in last Sunday’s New York Times Book Review section, a review of a new book on Henri Bergson, is any indication of the contents of the book, I can certainly skip ordering Herald of a Restless World: How Henri Bergson Brought Philosophy to the People, by Emily Herring. As it is, I’m only worried that too many people will read either the review or the book or both and never read Bergson to realize how inaccurately his philosophy is too often portrayed by others. 

 

(I see that the reviewer of Herring’s book, Anthony Gottlieb, a British historian of ideas and admirer and defender of Leibniz, has a book on Wittgenstein coming out in the coming year. Will he also find the later Wittgenstein “nonintellectual”? We shall see.)

 

Gottlieb quotes Bertrand Russell:

 

Bertrand Russell complained that Bergson rarely argued for his views, relying instead on “their inherent attractiveness, and on the charm of an excellent style.” 

- Anthony Gottlieb, in New York Times Book Review, "The French Philosopher Whose Romantic Theory of Time Was All the Rage," 11/23/2024 review of Herald of a Restless World, by Emily Herring 

Is Russell’s accusation itself an argument? I think not. (Was he jealous of Bergson’s style? Perhaps.) Russell’s critiques have always made me wonder if he ever read Bergson at all. He certainly did not do so carefully. Russell once wrote that Bergson’s views on duration based on sensory perception were all vision-based. Absolutely false. Possibly because Bergson’s artist daughter, his only child, was deaf, he focused more than once on auditory perception, one example involving a clock chiming the hours. We don’t have to have begun counting with the first sound, Bergson notes, to have a sense of the final number, because we have retained the whole in memory (as we hear a melody, not simply one note and then another).

 

As for Einstein and Bergson, working in very different domains, neither one understood the other’s concerns.

 

Gottlieb winds up his review of Herring’s book by speculating that the reason for Bergson’s falling out of fashion was (“Perhaps”) that his “ideas were not substantial enough to endure.” It’s true there is no school of “Bergsonism,” but careful reading of the French existentialists and phenomenologists reveals a strong debt to Bergson, all too frequently unacknowledged. Merleau-Ponty, for example, takes great pains to distinguish his views from those of Bergson, but methinks he doth protest too much. Read Bergson first, then Merleau-Ponty, and the genealogy of the ideas is clear. 

 

 

Bergson was not “nonintellectual” or anti-intellectual. He did not denigrate intellect at all but recognized its essential function in our daily, practical life. His concern, as a philosopher, was that our mind’s analytic powers, equipping us brilliantly to deal with the material world, were misplaced when called on for answers in areas outside its expertise. 

 

Similarly, he was an admirer of physical science and all its (intellectual) achievements but opposed to what we now call ‘scientism,’ a worship of the scientific method that leads us astray when we seek to apply it outside its domain. Chemistry, for example, rests on a base of discrete and separable elements, physics on invariable laws, but human psychology as a subject of study, particularly as applied to human emotions and motivation, can only be deformed if submitted to rigors such as found in chemistry and physics laboratories. So must the intellect, in order to act effectively on the material world, deform time by representing it as a series of intervals (le temps, time as objectively measured in segments) rather than a continuous flow (la durée, time as intuitively experienced). 

Call me strong, don’t call me resilient. (Or do.)

Standing or caving?

‘Resilient’ is an important and strong and wonderful word, but I have to admit I’m weary of it. 

 

Widows and widowers, traumatized children, oppressed communities of color, survivors of cancer and war and natural catastrophe—and on and on and on—are all called resilient. When we say someone or a group or someones are resilient, are we saying anything more than that people keep putting one foot in front of the other and taking the next breath instead of lying down, giving up, and dying? Sometimes, in spite of my admiration for strength and perseverance, I want to say, Can’t we just realize that life is resilient and move on?

 

Really, though, my annoyance with that word is simply what I see as its overuse, and I’m being petty. It’s an important word and not at all offensive. It’s important to celebrate strength. Yeah. Forget I said anything. ‘Resilience’ is a good word. Let’s keep it going.

 

Ah, but what about ‘hack’ used as a noun? I am really sick of hearing any helpful tip or shortcut referred to as a hack, and overuse is not the only problem here. Let’s remember that hacking started out as a kind of virtual breaking and entering. Not a good thing. In fact, criminal. So when we offer an easy way to open a pomegranate and call it a hack, we’re erasing an important distinction. I have a similar gripe with anything beautiful being called ‘porn,’ as in bookshelf porn—God forbid! Whose bad idea was it to start calling helpful or beautiful ideas or things by ugly names, as if there’s no difference between good and bad?

 

Then there’s the business of referring to something bad or ugly with a neutral term or one that can even sound (if you don’t look too closely) positive? The worst such phrase in my book (I’ve written about this before) is ‘ethnic cleansing.’ Think about it. It’s good to be clean. Genocidal policies and practices, therefore, when called ethnic cleansing, are put forth as something good for a particular country, and it’s easy to see why a dictator or any other oppressive government would want to cloak its sins in clean-sounding language, but why do journalists around the world allow themselves to be led around by their noses, parroting this term in print, online, and on the airwaves? Trampling on human rights, deporting people because of their religion or ethnic background, putting their very lives at risk, sometimes taking their lives—there’s nothing clean about using euphemisms to refer to cruel and ugly actions and policies. 

 

Before I started writing this post, the words I first thought of were simply annoying. Words that elicited in me a peevish response. Modern locutions like ‘monetize,’ ‘privatize,’ incentivize,’ etc. Then came ‘hack,’ and I had a sudden insight as to why it strikes me as so offensive, and my post turned serious. I could never make a living as a nightclub comedian. Guess I’ll stick to bookselling. 

The Man from Plains

President Carter attended high school here.

 

You often hear it said: “Funerals are for the living.” For years, whenever I experienced anticipatory grief over the inevitable death of President Jimmy Carter, I couldn’t imagine him having a huge state funeral. He was such a modest, unassuming man, not the kind of person to take on the trappings of royalty or to exalt himself personally in any manner. His concentration on negotiating for the release of hostages instead of his re-election campaign in 1980, for example, may have helped him (along with the hostage crisis) lose a second term in the White House, but he was never in doubt about the priorities of that time. 

 

Political ambition is necessary in a political campaign, but Carter’s was not egoistic ambition. Rather, he saw a job that needed doing and that he believed he could do. I have written before today about Jimmy Carter’s presidency and how I see it. The words of Stuart Eizenstat, Carter’s chief domestic policy advisor, go far beyond my own and are worth reading carefully. But every tribute at the state funeral for President Carter in Washington, D.C., was moving. Ted Mondale read the words his father, former Vice President Walter Mondale, would have spoken had he not preceded Carter in death, words he and Carter agreed best summed up their four years of the Carter-Mondale White House: “We told the truth. We obeyed the law. We kept the peace.” 

 

The first Carter news conference I watched when he was president astonished me. People from the press asked him questions – and instead of evading the questions, he did his best to answer them! 

 

Obeying the law – shouldn’t that be a necessary basic assumption for any man or woman fit to sit in the Oval Office?

 

President Carter went beyond keeping peace by pursuing it for other parts of the world, notably the Middle East. 

 

Since mine is a TV-free house, a friend who knows my longstanding devotion to Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter invited me to her house to watch the funeral, a state event with all the pomp and dignity and ritual owed to a man who probably had greater integrity than any other occupant of the White House in United States history. And the point was made that Jimmy Carter himself had planned his funeral, speakers and music selections and all. 

 

It wasn’t long into the service that I realized why. He wouldn’t have done it for himself. After all, he was not in the audience, and, as I say, he was never a president to showcase himself as royalty. No, it was for us. His funeral was for the American people. He knew we needed it. And he was so right. We needed his reminder that we are one country and need to love our neighbors as ourselves.

 

Do you believe in miracles? Are you a dreamer? Or do you think that only hearts like mine, already yearning for the integrity of our 39^th president, would or could be moved by the tributes spoken in memory of this good, good man? I want to think that words of praise for Jimmy, like the man himself, might open hearts and turn them toward the good. 

 

Accomplishments are important, and Eizenstat among others listed many of President Carter’s, but the very least, I maintain, that we must ask of anyone coming to preside over our country is this: 

 

We told the truth.

We obeyed the law.

 

Keeping the peace is undoubtedly harder--perhaps not always possible--but any human being has it in his or her power to tell the truth to the American people and to obey the laws of the land. We cannot do better than to honor the legacy of this great man by following his example.

Carter's boyhood home, Archery, GA