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

He Took a Stand

Moment of decision

October 18 was the birthday of French philosopher Henri Bergson. Born in 1859, Bergson presented his French doctoral thesis (two were required then, one in French, a second in either Latin or Greek) on “The Immediate Givens of Consciousness,” in English usually titled “Time and Free Will, to the examining faculty in 1889. The question he addressed was that of determination vs. free will: When we come to a fork in life’s road, are we free to choose which path to follow, or has our path forward been predetermined before we reach what looks like a point of decision? Bergson’s answer was that a "path" ahead in time does not exist. The fork does not exist. The future does not exist. We only create our path and our direction forward by going forward. Moreover, although we are definitely creatures of habit and perform countless habitual actions every day without thinking about them at all, we always have a measure of possible freedom, and when we act out of that freedom it is the expression of our whole life up to that moment.

 

Bergson died on January 3, 1941, of bronchitis. But it is what he did before he died that matters, not the manner of his death. Refusing the occupying Nazis’ offer of exemption from their race laws against Jews (inspired by American race laws against Blacks), just as he had already refused “honors” they wanted to bestow on him, Bergson stood in line to be given the yellow star indicating his heritage. He didn’t have to do it. He could have let himself be bought off. But he took a stand. 

 

What good does it do for one person to make a stand? Wasn’t his a futile gesture? His wearing of the yellow star did not save anyone from the gas chambers, and he himself did not even live to see Paris liberated.

 

I say, he died a free man, a man of integrity – perhaps with a broken heart, but not with a broken spirit. 

What kind of future do you hope to create? What legacy do you want to leave behind?