Returning to a nation that embraces worthy greatness
In the turmoil and changes of this year’s election, I went to only one political event. This was held in Palo Alto’s Evia Restaurant just a stone’s throw from the legendary garage where Hewlett and Packard were at the advent of Silicon Valley long before that name was coined. There I met a candidate, Joe Biden. He spoke that day of his hope for America, dreams of a better future away from the carnage inflicted the previous four years.
The speech began slowly but picked up an amazing energy quickly as he concluded with a simple fact: America has not always lived up to her ideals, but we have never walked away from them. I was moved. After, I briefly spoke to him; knowing I was once mayor, he joked about the traffic. I quoted back to him his line and said I hoped he repeated that belief until the election.
In his own way, with many formulations and in many forums, he did just that. It was something in his nature that he so believed. Our citizens responded on Election Day. Today, President Joe Biden continues that theme. He loves to quote Irish poets, Yeats and Joyce, saying jocularly, it’s not because they are Irish but because they are the best poets. Great poetry has a simple honesty that reaches for truth, a vital fact our new president understands clearly and our land cries out for.
To heal we need to remember, Biden says, echoing Santayana’s well-noted truth that “those who do not remember history are doomed to repeat it.”
All must remember the craven actions of the Republican Party, the dishonor of an elected leader trying to destroy a nation he swore to protect, and the now fractured nation that roils in its wake. The confusion and lies that afflict us, in our new president’s words, are done for “power and profit.”
Washington denizens have been craven, but much guilt lies on those who have weaponized information and sent it into battle against our democracy. Of all places, in this region of ambitious dreams and vast fortunes, truth, unvarnished and harsh, must be told to the American people. Truth is indeed the vaccine we need embraced by offenders such as Facebook and Twitter, but also by others far less responsible, but burdened, such as Apple and Google, to do as one leader once said, lean in before it’s too late. All of us must join.
Those giants are not all equally guilty, but they all are equally responsible to fight against this corrosive environment of “post truth” and feinted ignorance that has proven as dangerous as the mob attacking the Capitol. Surely, at long last, there are things more important than profit, here in a place where the previous guiding principle was to use technology to connect, empower and make our world a better one.
Being proudly Irish Catholic, the president knows much about fate. He knows that our country has changed from the coalition of immigrants and their children that elected the first Catholic president, John Kennedy, six decades ago. It has now turned to different candidates. He is aware of why and knows that they and all of us can return to an America that can embrace a worthy greatness.
This is a mighty task. I trust that he will remember the Irish poet he loves to quote most, Seamus Heaney. But instead of hope and history rhyming, reach for that poet’s Nobel Prize sentiment that sometimes you must trust and “walk on air against your better judgment,” and in memory and commitment find a healing.
No tribalism can be worse than that experienced by Ireland with the hatred and reprisals and sins enduring for centuries. Yet against all odds, hope and reconciliation and peace broke out. It still holds.
Memory can again be channeled into such a decency and love in our present, bedeviled time.
So against our better judgment, we must walk forward.
And to quote a new amazing and emerging poet, Amanda Gorman, when you see that glimmer on the horizon, reach out to it from the shadows:
For there is always light. If only we are brave enough to see it.
If we’re brave enough to be it.
All must remember the craven actions of the Republican Party, the dishonor of an elected leader trying to destroy a nation he swore to protect, and the now fractured nation that roils in its wake.