Why would any child listen to us?

This was a long, long time ago...

What happened in October 1929? Why were income taxes
very high in 1919? Your Republican member of Congress
does not know, but perhaps you should.

And this... "House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan's bold entitlement reform plan goes beyond taming spending. It recognizes that the history of cutting taxes vindicates Calvin Coolidge, not Paul Krugman," is from "today," from an editorial in Investors' Business Daily, which illustrated their desire to roll back the clock over 80 years - complete with an entertaining graph which "conveniently" leaves off what happened seven months after President Calvin Coolidge left office.

But it is not this intellectual dishonesty behind the actions of America's Republicans that disturbs me. It is not just that they will not explain why the US top marginal income tax rate was so high in 1919, or that their preferred "strategy" produced a worldwide economic collapse that took a decade to begin to dig out of. Lying is one thing...

...being defeated is another.

If you watch the whole Kennedy speech from that day in Houston, you will hear honesty you have not heard from a leader in a very long time. "All this will cost us a great deal of money," he says, "a staggering sum." He details that, saying the cost of the space program will rise to be "more than 50 cents per person per week for every man, woman, and child in America." Yes, things that matter - even something which mattered spiritually more than perhaps anything else - cost money then. And will cost money now. But societies which care about the future do what matters.

Societies which don't, don't. And, in Washington DC, in Westminster in London, in Ottawa, Canada, in Canberra, Australia, we are usually listing what we cannot do. We plan our defeats before we even let ourselves discuss our possibilities.

In the United States we cannot provide everyone with decent health care, we cannot properly fund public education or the preparation of teachers. We cannot rebuild New Orleans, we cannot create national rail travel options. We cannot even make our bridges safe, or, according to Michigan's governor, make cars which get good gas mileage. Now, 49 years after Kennedy's speech, we cannot even get a human into space.

It's not so different in the United Kingdom. David Cameron's government can't feed or house its own people - something even World War II Britain managed to do. They can't pay for decent schools either, and after doing it for 66 years, they're not sure they can provide universal health care anymore.

In Canada the Prime Minister couldn't even figure out how to stay in office without shutting down Parliament like a third rate military dictator, then gets re-elected by claiming that Canada really can't do anything anymore.

Heroism is a real thing, and we need heroes today
(The PT 109 Story from Navy Log, a 1950s TV show)

Heroism is a real thing. John Kennedy had many leadership skills, including, obviously, the gift of human communication, but he - and much of his generation - also had an understanding that the future needed to be a better place, and that creating that better place would take hard work and sacrifice.

The leaders who built the "postwar" world were risk-takers because they understood the risk of not moving forward. Whether Kennedy in the United States, or Willy Brandt in Germany, or Robert Schuman of France, they were heroes before they ran for political office, they understood real risk and reward, and they all understood the value of society and community.

Before The Great Society, Robert Kennedy sees
"Poverty in the United States"

And so John Fitzgerald Kennedy not only pushed America to the moon, he began an 8-year administration which attempted to create a nation with civil rights for all, a nation which would "wipe out" poverty (and despite what you've heard, that worked so well that ever since Republicans have been claiming that America's poor aren't really poor), which would eliminate the disaster that was then senior health care, and which helped create the real "jet age" through support for huge planes which made flight affordable.

In Berlin Willy Brandt took a destroyed, divided city and rebuilt it into one of world's great symbols of democracy, and then took huge risks to breach the Iron Curtain with friendship.

And in France, Robert Schuman, escaped prisoner of the Gestapo, began the most audacious experiment in Europe since the dawn of Rome, when he set in motion the effort to build a peaceful, democratic, united continent which welcomed the just defeated Germany as an equal partner.

See, those are actual risk-taking activities. Those attempts are not the same as finding "grand bargains" or yelling at a crumbling wall, or babbling about "big societies." They were real.

And obviously those were real attempts to create an improved future - not the hysterical whining of those who think a time of incredible oppression of minorities and women, combined with high infant mortality and starving farmers, represents "the good old days."

It is hard to even imagine JFK's "Moon Speech" in today's America. In a nation where clowns claim to be in a "Tea Party" recovering some supposed "anti-tax" past (quick question, were the original "Tea Party" rioters opposed to paying taxes, or, did they want representation in the British Parliament?), in a country where the Secretary of Education, the man charged with safeguarding the future, is constantly telling us what we cannot do, in a nation where people vote like they fully believe their greatness is in the past. It is hard to imagine what our students might say if they watched the whole speech. Or if British students actually listened to Churchill, or if Canadian students thought about John Macdonald trying to pull a bizarre collection of British colonies together with an impossible railroad...

What would they say?

And what would they say about us, the collective "we" who have lost our imagination and our ambition. "We" who ask about everything, "what will it cost me?" "We" who choose to not even invest in our own children?

Will they expect us to be - just a little - heroic? To take real risks? To try big things? To make sacrifices for something we may not live to see?

I hope so.

- Ira Socol

Edward Kennedy

On a June night in 1980 I was a young guy living in Brooklyn and Ted Kennedy was a United States Senator running for President. A friend and I were crashing the primary election party at a Midtown Manhattan hotel.

For reasons lost in memory this involved an elevator ride up to the top. On our way down the elevator stopped and Ted Kennedy and Paul O'Dwyer got on. As we looked in shock, Ted put out his hand and greeted us. He asked our names, where we lived, what we were doing. He asked about my Brooklyn neighborhood - an edge of the Bed-Stuy community his brother Bobby had done so much to help - and how I felt living there. Even after we reached the ballroom level we stood there, Ted asking questions, and listening.

It was no more than ten minutes of my life - less certainly - and surely not my only celebrity meet, but I learned something essential in that encounter. Or, should I say, learned it again.

As a child I would watch my father enter a pub, a pub anywhere, or enter any other social situation, and I would hear him ask questions, and I would watch him listen. If I watched for an hour I would see him learn all about the people who surrounded him. "There is no one you meet," my father told me, "who you can not learn from."

Like Ted Kennedy, my Da had his demons, Like Ted Kennedy he had suffered through nightmare tragedies. Like Ted Kennedy his life was certainly filled with mistakes. Yet, like Ted Kennedy he had two touchstones which ruled his life - his love of his family and his commitment to the idea that everyone on the planet deserved not just political and legal respect, but human respect and personal respect.

My father touched a small circle of relatives and community in relative anonymity. Ted Kennedy touched hundreds of millions across America, across Ireland, and around the world. But that scale is not really a difference.

We are all born to differing circumstances, and opportunities will never be equal. Ted Kennedy had chances to touch those millions through the circumstances of his birth and his life and my father had chances to touch those he touched through the circumstances of his. But both used those opportunities to learn, to teach, to fight, and to make those who surrounded them feel less alone in the world.

I don't have the magic skills of either of these men. I have a harder time 'meeting' a room, approaching strangers, making people comfortable. But I have learned the trick to the magic of a life well lived.

So I try to listen as well as I can. And I try to ask questions that allow the people I meet to be who they are and need to be. And throughout my life I have tried to do work which allows me to contribute to the world I dream can become reality.

My son is fond of quoting the first few words of F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby:

"In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I've been turning over in my mind ever since.

'"Whenever you feel like criticizing any one," he told me, "just remember that all the people in this world haven't had the advantages that you've had."

"He didn't say any more but we've always been unusually communicative in a reserved way, and I understood that he meant a great deal more than that. In consequence I'm inclined to reserve all judgments, a habit that has opened up many curious natures to me and also made me the victim of not a few veteran bores. The abnormal mind is quick to detect and attach itself to this quality when it appears in a normal person, and so it came about that in college I was unjustly accused of being a politician, because I was privy to the secret griefs of wild, unknown men. Most of the confidences were unsought--frequently I have feigned sleep, preoccupation, or a hostile levity when I realized by some unmistakable sign that an intimate revelation was quivering on the horizon--for the intimate revelations of young men or at least the terms in which they express them are usually plagiaristic and marred by obvious suppressions. Reserving judgments is a matter of infinite hope. I am still a little afraid of missing something if I forget that, as my father snobbishly suggested, and I snobbishly repeat a sense of the fundamental decencies is parcelled out unequally at birth."

"Reserving judgments is a matter of infinite hope." Now neither myself nor my son was born to what most would describe as "advantages." I grew up with six living in barely four rooms. My son has experienced lack of many material things and many losses. But both of us know the advantages we were born to, and like Ted Kennedy and like my father, we know the responsibilities which come with those advantages.

And for me that responsibility begins with listening. With the willingness to listen. With the capacity to learn from anyone. With the capacity to be surprised and delighted by the new discovery. With that "reserving judgment." With belief in our shared humanity. And with hope.

On Monday - or whenever - as I walk through my university building, as you walk through your school - remember that all of those children, those students, are humans with stories, and voices, and things to teach us all.

And let us pause, and listen.

May God welcome home our brother Ted. I hope he and my Da meet and share a heavenly pint.

- Ira Socol