The Candidates' Closing Argument (That You Will Never Hear)

On the even of the election, the candidate speaks:

Government does three things. First, it provides stability and security for the present.  It does this year in and year out almost invisibly, but because of government we have the infrastructure of our daily lives, we are protected as much as we can be from crime and foreign attack, we assume our food and water and medicines are safe. Our children go to school, our elderly receive their benefits.

 These days, this role of government is under attack, which is stunning in itself. So I must pledge to see that government has the resources and the tools to provide stability and security, and for some, that will be controversial.

Second, government responds to emergencies that are too big for anyone alone to handle.  In the depths of the Depression, when someone in the FDR government proposed something that would help alleviate unemployment and hunger in the long term,  FDR's advisor Harry Hopkins pointed out, "People don't eat in the long term.  They eat every day."  I pledge to see that government has the resources and tools to respond to emergencies.

Both of these functions are about the present.  There are other aspects of the present in which government has a role--government guarantees that Constitutional and individual rights aren't violated, and that our laws are enforced without prejudice, and without fear or favor.  I support justice and equality, and efforts to promote the general welfare.

But there is a third function of government that never seems to make it into political discussions or political campaigns.  It is government's responsibility to the future.  Today the future is imperiled by global heating and related ecological destruction, such as deforestation and species extinction.  The future this damage is creating is not very far off.  It's already begun.  But we never talk about it.

At best, most candidates mention a catch-phrase or two, or we talk about preserving the beauty of nature, as if that's all that's at stake when the Earth as we know it collapses.

We've had our heads in the sand for years now.  Nobody wants to talk about it, not in any detail, least of all political candidates.  We'd all rather fashion our applause lines out of the issues of the moment.  You can list the issues of the moment for the past twenty elections.  Some will recur, but a lot of them have disappeared.  And none--and I mean none--are going to be as important as the fate of the planet.

The fate of planetary life determines the fate of your children and grandchildren, and of everything we hold dear.  We've known the Earth as it supports us is and has been in peril for at least a generation but we politicians never talk about it, especially at election time.

But what else really should our elections be about?  There's nothing more important.   So I pledge to make the future my overriding concern.  I pledge to talk about the causes and effects of the climate crisis and related problems at every opportunity, and I promise to make these issues my top priority.

When this election is over, candidates for President in 2020 will begin to make their moves.  Whether or not I am elected this year, I pledge to badger every presidential candidate, to demand that they talk in detail about these issues of the future, especially the climate crisis.

We should have done this a long time ago.  We can't hide from it any longer.  We all know that the national attention goes immediately to the latest shiny object.  We've got to insist that the next shiny object is the climate crisis.  Presidential candidates have the forum for getting that started.  Despite whatever credentials on this issue past presidential candidates had, none of them really did this.  We must insist they do this time.

So that's something else I pledge to do if I'm elected.  Or if I'm not.

In Action: You'd Do the Same For Me in Pittsburgh

On Wednesday, another three funerals of Jews shot and killed as they prayed in the Tree of Life synagogue.  On Tuesday, a demonstration to protest Homegrown Hitler's racist language and policies, which only accelerated on Wednesday as election day draws near.  He also lied about the size of this "small" demonstration.

Money has been raised in Pittsburgh for the families of the victims, including more than $200,000 from the Muslim community.

The murderer, Robert Bowers, posted on a rabid right social media site shortly before he attacked the synagogue:"HIAS likes to bring invaders in that kill our people. I can't sit by and watch my people get slaughtered. Screw your optics, I'm going in.

HIAS is the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, which was founded in 1881 to aid Jewish refugees.  In 1975, the US government asked this nonprofit organization to help in settling refugees from the Vietnam War.  Since then, it has aided and advocated for refugees around the world.  It has helped to resettle more than four million people.  This is "you'd do the same for me" in action.

HIAS has its main offices in Maryland and New York, with an international presence.  But Pittsburgh has an affiliate organization--the Jewish Family and Community Services--and HIAS sponsored a National Refugee Shabbat in October, in which the Tree of Life synagogue participated.

Bowers followed the lead of Homegrown Hitler and Fox News in believing that the caravan of refugees now in Mexico fleeing oppression in central America presents a danger to this country, because it is comprised of violent criminals out to kill American citizens.  Rabid Right racists claim leftist Jews sponsor the caravan.

These baseless charges were amplified Wednesday by an official Republican campaign ad on the caravan that CNN labels as racist.  Meanwhile, early voting in a number of states has set records.

HIAS has also experienced a flood of donations.  Here is their website, where donations can be made.  I've made mine.

You'd Do the Same for Me

The Squirrel Hill community stands together at Murray & Forbes

So far the echoes from the gunshots that killed 11 in Squirrel Hill continue to reverberate and dominate.  I've begun hearing personal stories of current and former residents, and media stories bare the unspeakable and the unbearably poignant.

The Washington Post notes, concerning the shooter Bowers:

"Rep. Mike Doyle, a Democrat representing the Pittsburgh area, said FBI Special Agent in Charge Bob Jones told elected leaders Saturday evening that Bowers possessed 21 firearms. The tally included the semiautomatic assault-style rifle and three handguns found in the synagogue, as well as a shotgun that Doyle said authorities recovered from Bowers’s vehicle. Other weapons were found in his apartment."

CNN reproduced the comments of a first generation American Jew whose parents were caught in the Nazi horror called the Holocaust:

"We all felt the same thing: how glad we were that our parents weren't alive to see this happen in America; how we always felt safe as Jews living in the US and going to services, and how we must be the voices for our parents to make change and hold those who incite hatred accountable..."

USA Today described one of many memorial gestures and events in Pittsburgh:

Jewish girls from a nearby Chabad orthodox school had walked to the Tree of Life Synagogue, prayer books in their hands and blue ribbons tied to their hair and wrists, to sing. They harmonized in Hebrew about how Jews have prevailed despite persecution through generations. They wrapped each other in their arms. They swayed. Their music, from the Maimonides’ Thirteen Principles of Faith, told of a time free of war and full of peace.

The story quoted one of the young participants:“I don’t want to be hated,” Talia said. She wore blue bows in each of her pony tails and a ribbon around her neck.“I know how it feels to be hated, and I don’t want that for other people.”

It is a dark moment in America.  When I started calling the resident of the White House by the name of Homemade Hitler, and illustrated posts with photos from Nazi Germany, something like this was part of what could be foreseen.  When the highest official in the country foments hate and incites violence, it focuses violent feelings and gives them permission to be expressed.  This is, as it was for Hitler, a source of his political power.

But the contrast is not only, not chiefly, with songs of peace and love.  The contrast is with a certain kind of civility, that was defined for me in Squirrel Hill more than 20 years ago.

I was reminded of that moment again when I read accounts of most of those who were murdered as they prayed in the Tree of Life synagogue.  I've since learned that the degree of separation between me and several of them is no more than two. All of them were old enough that I may have passed them on Murray Avenue, held a door open for one at the Post Office, or been at an event with others.  A couple sound familiar, though I didn't know any of them well.

My lesson back then also came from a stranger, though not any of these.  It came from a black man who worked at the Eat & Park on Murray Avenue, half a block from the corner with Forbes Avenue where the first memorial vigils took place.

That was my air-conditioned refuge in the sweltering summers of the early 90s, and at any time I could talk myself into a piece of their strawberry pie.  But mostly they kept filling my coffee cup, as I sat at the counter or a table, reading and writing.  For a few years at least it was my clean, well-lighted place.

On one such afternoon I knocked a pen off my table as I read.  Before I could bend down to get it, a black man who worked there had picked it up and returned it to me.  I thanked him.  He was already on his way when he said, softly and simply but with quiet meaning, "you'd do the same for me."

I'd heard the phrase before (just as I've told this story before) but at that moment it hit me with particular force.  I realized that it was nothing less than  a summary of the social compact, of human relationships among strangers.  The Golden Rule doesn't quite cut it--it's a formula that is essentially self-centered.  "You'd do the same for me" says much more.

It is not only a moral formula but a statement of faith, not only in the principles of kindness and helping as automatic responses, but faith that this principle is shared.  It's the faith of every day.  It's how a complex human society works--perhaps the only way it can work.

Reading what others said about the victims suggests to me that they all shared this faith.  It was a basis of their daily lives in the Squirrel Hill community and beyond.  It was certainly something I felt present every day on Murray Avenue in Squirrel Hill.

Political action is necessary, voting on Tuesday is necessary, symbols of community solidarity are necessary.  But so is the civility made real by the daily assumption of "you'd do the same for me."

Civility isn't always polite silence, and it isn't ignoring the realities of politically or economically motivated violence--let alone ignoring the reality of evil.  It isn't only a live and let live tolerance, though this itself is clearly endangered.  The only way people in this country are going to get through the challenges of the next decades is if "you'd do the same for me" is the motivating center of  how we live with each other.