Thursday, November 10, 2016 An Open Letter to the Young Women of Harpeth Hall: Yesterday afternoon, I was in Texas, visiting with the 41 st President of the United States, George H. W. Bush, who served in the White House from 1989 to 1993. He s now 92 years old, in a wheelchair, but alert and still passionate about his country. On his 18 th birthday he signed up to fight in World War II; at age 20 he was shot down over the Pacific. He s a Republican, but he voted for Hillary Clinton. He didn t think Donald Trump, the nominee of his own party, was the right man for the job. But yesterday, in the wake of Mr. Trump s victory, President Bush put in a call to Mr. Trump. He congratulated him, told Mr. Trump that he and his family would be in his prayers, and that he was rooting for Mr. Trump s success. That s the way we must carry ourselves in this, the world s oldest functioning democracy. It s the way I want my own children to act: gracious in victory, gracious in defeat, for grace a generosity of spirit, a sense of hope, a concern for how other people feel and think is the essential element in a life well lived. Secretary Clinton has now said similar things; so has President Obama. This morning, the Trumps visited the Obamas at the White House. The president and the president-elect met in the Oval Office and a cordial, productive exchange. The lesson: Democracy works; decency works; as Americans we fight tough campaigns, we argue and we square off, but once the system produces a winner, we accept the result and hope for the best. For it is a great truth that we are, as Secretary Clinton argued throughout the campaign, stronger together. 1
Remember our national motto, chosen in the 18 th century but as true if not truer today than ever before: E pluribus unum: out of the many, one. I m a historian, so I like to think about the past. And the past is important to understand if we want to understand the present, because so much of what we are and what we will be is inextricably linked with what s come before. So humor this aging father for a moment for a look back. America was founded amid fear and anxiety. From the Revolutionary War to the battle over the Constitution to the emergence of Jacksonian democracy, from the war for the Union to the struggle to save democratic capitalism in the Age of Franklin Roosevelt, from the icy fears of the Cold War to the gloom of the 1970s, the story of the nation has been one of perpetual crisis and provisional consensus. And always shall. As Thomas Jefferson noted, divisions of opinion have defined free societies since the days of Greece and Rome. The art of politics lies in the manufacturing of a workable consensus for a given time not unanimity, for unanimity is the most elusive of things. Democracy is not only about winning the argument; it s also inevitably about our right and our responsibility to make the arguments we believe in. I know that many of you are disappointed about the results of the election on Tuesday. For the record, I am neither a Republican nor a Democrat. I have voted for candidates of both parties and fully intend to continue to do so. Still, a lot of us thought that we d be marking the election of the first female president of the United States this week and were excited about that potential milestone. Despite my objections to some of Secretary Clinton s proposed policies, I was excited about her possible presidency for my 2
own daughters, girls who would grow into women with a powerful female role model in the White House. But that was not to be. And learning how to deal with the things that we hoped were to be but are not (or at least are not yet) is perhaps the most important lesson all of us can absorb. For we live in fallen, imperfect world. We can t make everything work out just the way we want it to. That s true at home, with our families; at school, with your friends; and believe me, it ll be true down the decades as you go out into the broader canvas of your lives. The key thing, both for people and for nations, is what we do in adversity. Because trust me adversity is going to be a permanent feature of your life. You re going to get knocked down. What matters is how quickly you get back up, and what you do once you re back on your feet. If you re unhappy about politics right now, it might help to know that Americans have been unhappy about politics from the very beginning. I conceive the republic to be in extreme danger, Patrick Henry announced in 1788. When the American Revolution started, it was a disaster. Soldiers had no shoes; their feet were bloody and frost-bitten. Yet they endured, and won. During the Civil War, Union soldiers fighting to defeat slavery and give the country what Lincoln called a new birth of freedom would pin their names and hometowns to the backs of their uniforms before charging into combat. Why? Because they expected to be shot, and wanted their bodies to be sent home. And their courage carried the day, freeing a people and making our nation possible. During the movement for the right of women to vote and participate fully in the life of the country, some activists houses were vandalized and set afire. But 3
they stayed the course, and justice prevailed. During World War II, women who had never worked outside the house took to the factories and assembly lines and the farms to provide what Franklin Roosevelt called the arsenal of democracy. During the movement for civil rights, brave African Americans were beaten and humiliated whites would pour milkshakes over their heads as they tried to order lunch at all-white lunch counters. But they endured, and we are living in a better country for their sacrifice and their dignity. Today, in our own time, many Americans are fearful and angry about the future. They believe the institutions that govern our lives the government, the employers, the media are arrayed against them. And those voices spoke loudly this week. The work at hand, then, is how to move forward. For move forward we shall, that I promise you. Things may seem bleak and dispiriting, even ugly but Americans are a tough and good people. Our better angels will prevail. We just have to work hard to see that they do. So what to do now? First, we need to listen to each other more. Not just talk to the folks we agree with, but with the folks whose views might drive us crazy. Democracy is about not only tolerating differences but celebrating them. We have to be forgiving, for we all need forgiveness from time to time. We live in an age of division and of selfabsorption. We stare at screens; we filter our news to our ideological predispositions; we offer reflexive opinions without thought and with increasing fervor. And yet our common welfare depends not on what separates but on what unifies us. St. Augustine defined a nation as a multitude of rational beings united by the common objects of our love. The common objects of our love: what do we love in common right now? The 4
painful but unavoidable answer is: not enough. And we must remedy that. And we will do so, in my view, by consultation with the past. History has the capacity to bring us together, for the story of the American journey is ultimately the story of obstacles overcome, crises resolved, freedom expanded. We have always grown in strength the wider we have opened our arms and the more we have opened our hearts. From Lexington and Concord to Lewis and Clark; from Fort Sumter to D-Day; from Seneca Falls to Selma, we have sought to perfect our Union. What can we in our time learn from the past? That the perfect should not be the enemy of the good. That compromise is the oxygen of democracy. And that we you and I, people making our way through the world are the true engines of change. To know that we have met and solved seemingly intractable problems in ages past should give us hope for years to come. The knowledge that Americans at home and abroad have struggled and sacrificed and fought for the good, opposing totalitarianism and seeking to expand the vision of human rights enshrined in Jefferson s immortal Declaration can itself be a common object of our love. In the lifetimes of your parents and your teachers, African-Americans couldn t vote. Now we are celebrating eight years of the first African-American president of the United States. In the lifetimes of your parents and your teachers, women could not begin to hope that they would play a large role in the politics of the nation. Now, today, we salute and honor the first major-party female nominee that glass ceiling is broken, in shards, and can t ever be put back in place. That s a cause for hope, for happiness not despair. Like life, history doesn t move in a neat pattern. It s complicated and messy; affirming and disappointing; joyful and sad. It s life. 5
I was born for a storm, Andrew Jackson once said, and a calm does not suit me. You, too, were born for a storm, for nothing worth the having is ever easy. If the men and women of the past with all their flaws and limitations and ambitions and appetites could press on through ignorance and superstition, racism and sexism, selfishness and greed, to form a more perfect union, then perhaps we, too, can right wrongs and leave the world the stage a better place than we found it. Be curious, be gracious, be hopeful. Curiosity will sustain you. You have already begun to engage what Matthew Arnold called the best that has been thought and said in the world. From mathematics to Mozart, from political history to the basics of physics, from Mandarin to Toni Morrison from, really, anything to anything else, liberal education, the kind you are experiencing here, offers us a way of knowing and thinking. And the affairs of the world of the early 21 st century are global in nature. Borders have not mattered so little since gazelles first began looping across the savannah. As Americans, we face fundamental economic, political, and moral challenges. These challenges are now the direct, personal concerns of President-elect Trump. We wish him the best as he addresses them, for his success and our success are intertwined. We must remain innovative and competitive, for experience tells us that broad, shared prosperity is crucial to the maintenance of democracy. Politically we are in the midst of a great partisan struggle in which a professional political class of activists on the Internet and on cable television appear to have more invested in the perpetuation of conflict than they do in the resolution of problems. Morally we face the question of whether the great achievement of the last century the building, often at public expense, 6
of a sturdy middle class that benefited from both private enterprise and government investment is to be sustained or discarded. Here s your job. You have to take your stand, in whatever way you find comfortable and fitting, to bend the world in the direction you think best. Your weapons in this lifelong struggle and I promise it will be lifelong are the elements that form Harpeth Hall s sure foundation: grace and strength and love. It is grace that will enable you to appreciate, and be grateful for, good fortune as you pursue, with varying degrees of success, life s glittering prizes. It is strength that will make arms strong amid adversity, giving you the will and the means to endure. And it is love that gives shape and meaning to everything, in hours of triumph and of trial, of success and of failure. And so be curious, be gracious, be hopeful; love your neighbor; vote in each and every election; never be embarrassed to put your hand over your heart and join in when a band strikes up the National Anthem. Try to look up from those screens, whether on your phone or on your wrist: yes, technology contains multitudes, but virtual reality is just that: virtual, not real. And above all, remember, in hours of joy and of darkness, that a life well-lived is judged not by the bottom line but by the big picture. If you remember this, you will make history and the rest of us can t wait to see what you all do with your own hour upon the stage. It will be fantastic, and the stories you write in your lives and in the life of the nation and of the world will be stories not of fear but of hope, not of despair but of joy, not of cynicism but of caritas. And there is, in the end, no more important story than that. 7
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