Muhammad Ali at the end of round 2 in his fight against George Foreman 

                                   Ali watching Foreman fall in round 8 of their fight in Zaire

A different post today. 

It is appropriate, once in a while, to put in this space some examples of real life heroes that we can all learn values from. Muhammad Ali has always been one of my heroes. 

For those who do not understand boxing, this may seem a paradox. Why would a man like me, who claims to be a man of peace and to hate war, admire and respect the most famous professional fighter of all time? 

You have to get that boxing is a sport. It is not jungle blood lust run wild. There is a referee in that ring. There are rules. But if you are even for the time being willing to allow that those things may be true, then there is a deep lesson here. 

Muhammad Ali was an intelligent and sensitive man. His poems may have sounded childish at times, but he did make them rhyme, they did scan, he did amuse people, and he did raise public awareness of his sport, his causes, and himself, all exactly as he intended. 

"The fans didn't know when they laid down their money, 

They would witness the total eclipse of the Sonny." 

He was also a man of enormous personal discipline. People who knew him as a teenager said that at the beginning of his boxing career there were boys even in his own boxing club that could beat him. But he trained with fanatic intensity, like a man driven by some larger destiny. And gradually, he became that man. 

He was a man of character and conscience. At a time of moral crisis for the US, he stood against the war in Vietnam and against the US government policy of drafting young men into an army they did not believe in anymore. He stood up for his people, the African Americans, as an effective promoter of civil rights. A champion for all, but especially for his people. 

His face was the most recognized face on the planet for over twenty years. It would still rank high, I think. It is known to boxing fans everywhere. Nearly all folk in the developing world know that face. Partly because he was the champ, but also partly because he stood against the war in South East Asia, which among the developing nations, was a huge point in his favor. He was also known across the Muslim world because of his converting to Islam and all over Africa because he was black. In short, he could have lived anywhere after his falling out with the US government, but he chose to stay in the US and fight for his beliefs. 

He faced the racist slurs and hatred of millions of whites in his country for years, but he stuck with his court battle against the government, and in the end, he won. The court found that the government did not have the right to force him to serve in the army because he really was a lay preacher for his faith. Finally, they allowed him to box again, but by then he had lost some of the best years of his or any boxer's career, namely those between the ages of 25 and 29. 

On returning to professional boxing, at first, he had mixed success, but due to the business acumen of Don King, who knew Ali would be a big box office draw, Ali got a fight against then-reigning world heavyweight champion, George Foreman, in 1974. 

Ali found Foreman to be even tougher than his reputation, but he came up with a tactic of challenge and provocation that caused Foreman to lose his temper completely and punch himself exhausted by the eighth round. Ali took some punishing blows, but he blocked or slipped most of them, and then when Foreman was so tired that he could barely hold up his arms, Ali unleashed a sudden attack that caught Foreman by surprise and put him down for the ten count. Foreman was out and Ali was champion again. 

His friends at ringside could not believe it. But it was true. The hero of millions who had opposed the Vietnam War and stood against all war and for the rights of all people of color and all of the world's poor was back as the holder of the most prestigious title in sport: heavyweight champion of the world. 

Foreman himself has said, now that he and Muhammad are both getting older and are sinking into their golden years: “Muhammad Ali is a true hero, and the fact there's something wrong with him is his badge of valor. He's a great man.”

For most readers, all of this material will probably be at least in some degree familiar. What I wanted to add briefly today is this: I ask you to look carefully at the pictures at the top of this post. They were taken during Ali's fight with George Foreman in Zaire. 

You see in the first the fear in Ali's eyes when he realized, after round 2, that he was facing a man who was younger and stronger than he was and who did not fear him in the least degree. There is real fear in those eyes, but Ali kept his head and thought out a strategy that just might work, namely the one I describe above. 

But first he had to have courage. Courage gave him that bit of time and room in which to think and devise a plan. Then, because he really had courage and also wisdom - ring generalship, it is called in boxing - and he balanced these two virtues well, he won that fight. 

But even more, study that second picture. It hasn't been analyzed enough in the years since that great fight. George is stunned. He's going down. Ali's right is cocked. He could have hit George once more on the way down and done much greater damage. But he didn't. He knew George was beat. It was enough. He had no desire to really physically damage another man -- out of political ideology or personal vengeance or anything else. You don't do things like that to another human being. The whole point of boxing is that it lets men test themselves against one another physically but in a restrained and controlled way. It is sport that gives us the outlet we need, as men, to keep from backing up our primitive anger until it has to erupt in an uncontrolled form and wreak havoc.   

Strong men can be good men. Or to be more complete, I think only strong men can really be good men. They know intimately what suffering is because they have risen above it themselves. They can stick by their values when the going gets rough because they've had to endure in similar ways in other contexts. Finally, they know what restraint can mean in human relations because they've known times when they were down and out and needed some compassion too. 

We don't get many real life heroes anymore. Now and then, when you're feeling low, close your eyes, and let your mind drift to these two images. They say a million times what my words ever could. 

  

Katmai

A thousand pools have pocked this valley floor,

Some plain to see, some slyly dusted o'er,

Each one a well of scalding, sulphurous mud,

Spewed up from Hell, as rank as spiders' blood.

What does it say of me that I lie here,

And idly gaze, while sipping ice-cold beer.  

                       artist's conception of ancient Greek soldiers in phalanx formation 

A serious problem with the idea of a society that is balanced, loving, peaceful, and prosperous is the problem of violence. A prosperous, orderly, just state will be envied by its neighbors, and thus it will be in danger of being attacked from without. Even within that state there will be some people who will try to get luxuries that they have not earned and to get those luxuries by either force or deceit. If we can arrive at a global system of governance at some time in the future, the outside invaders will cease to be a threat because every human on the planet will be a member of one cultural community. But the realizing of that dream is a long way off. And even then, any such state will still have people in its midst who will try to become wealthy in sociopathic ways. 

What can be done about the alien invaders and the criminals among us? Plato tackled this problem long ago. His solution is just a detailed, rational version of what most societies even in his time had been doing for centuries. (There is a link below to one of the online versions of "The Republic", Book II where these matters are discussed. *)  

We have to fund and train professionals who are skilled at individual and group forms of fighting and whose loyalty is to the community that they serve. Police and soldiers, in other words. Plato said that the community, via the state that the people set up, should pay for the training and maintenance of one professional force for both tasks. If these professionals are skilled at subduing and, if necessary, killing people who threaten the stability of the community, then logically, they should be available for those tasks whether the threats are from within or without. 

There is always a danger, however, that the kinds of people that can do the policing and soldiering may have too much of what Plato calls a "spirited nature". If we train police personnel and soldiers to not just be skilled in violence but focused and driven in their pursuit of targets, what are these people to do when there are no threats around? They can only sharpen their skills and hone their fighting edge for so long. Sooner or later, they are going to get restless. And then there will also be the ones who have already been to war and fought and killed. They will find life in an orderly community hard to adjust to. 

There are many examples of these kinds of characters in film and literature. Their stories dramatize, sometimes really well, the difficulties that restless and poorly adjusted soldiers and police personnel undergo when they are stuck in prolonged periods of inactivity or, harder yet, retirement. "The Great Santini" is about such an American. The character Al Neri in "The Godfather" is a former policeman fed up with the inefficiency and stupidity that he sees in the New York Police Department. Captain Willard in "Apocalypse Now" tried to go back to the US after one tour of duty in Viet Nam. He found he couldn't adjust. Paul, the protagonist in "All Quiet On the Western Front", knows that he and his comrades will not be able to handle civilian life if they do survive to go home. In the end, he has no idea what he is going to do. The book's ending even implies that he let a sniper get him because he didn't want to live anymore. After years of trying to adjust, Luke in "Cool Hand Luke" is destroyed by the guilt he feels over the things that he did in the war. That's what the movie is about.

                                    Paul Newman (and supporting cast) in "Cool Hand Luke" 

In Indian culture, "Such A Long Journey" focuses on a man who thought he was doing patriotic acts for his nation, and who finally realizes that he has been manipulated. Fortunately, he is resilient and it appears at the end of the story that he is going to survive by returning his focus to his family, where it probably should have been all along. In Canadian culture, the novel "Three Day Road" is about two aboriginal Canadians, one who is destroyed by World War I, and one who makes it back to his former life, scarred but able to go on because of the love of his aunt. They have no one else in their family any more, but they do have each other, and she refuses to give up on him. Her love saves him in the end.   

Every generation of retired soldiers and police personnel in every land has contained thousands of glaring examples of people who could not adjust to civilian life. Every nation has in its culture works of film and literature that dramatize the plight of these psychologically ruined people. Some of the real people who have seen and done horrors do go back to civilian life successfully, which proves that the human psyche can be very resilient. But many others don't. The shame on the rest of us comes when we abandon the veterans and let them sink or swim on their own. They need help, but, by and large, they do not get it. That situation is very wrong. Perhaps, in future we can do better.  

Plato does deal with some of these problems. In "The Republic", Socrates and Glaucon discuss how it can be possible for a "spirited nature" to be combined with a "gentler nature". Socrates feels that there is real evidence that the two can coexist in one living being because he sees it in good dogs. The best dogs are gentle to the persons that they know and trust and vicious to strangers when they need to be. Surely, he implies, humans can have combinations of opposite qualities in their natures as well.  

But Socrates hasn't really settled the matter. There are still problems with his line of thought. In the first place, the specially trained dogs called "K9" dogs, that is ones trained by the police or military to attack on command, have for centuries been euthanized after they reach retirement in nearly every country that has such dogs. There is just too great a danger that they may fall into the wrong hands, and be used as subtle, lethal weapons. They can look harmless until they see an event or hear a command that triggers their attack response. Is there a similar danger in retired police or military personnel? I think the answer is yes. Even in our times, the mercenaries who fight all over the world in dirty little hidden wars are often disillusioned, idle professionals who have left official service, but who were originally trained in the West.    

In the second place, Socrates does not deal with the ultimate goals toward which these professionals should be trained. What general principles are to be used as guidelines in the running of the state? Those ideas, he says, are too complex for soldiers to be concerned with. The general principles that must be used as he sets up his ideal state are matters to be understood and adjusted only by his ruling class, the philosophers. 

Ordinary citizens should concern themselves only with doing their jobs well -- farming, healing the sick and injured, making shoes, and so on. Soldiers and police should concern themselves only with staying in peak physical and mental condition, ready to fight at any time. Only philosophers have the attributes of intelligence and education that will be needed to understand the principles behind these matters and to make decisions involving the weighing of gentle, loving natures and spirited, vigilant ones. The balances that need to be struck to keep the state moving forward vigorously, but safely, are too subtle for most of the population to grasp. In fact, Socrates (who is only a voice for Plato) even favors the policy of telling "noble lies" to all who are not philosophers if those lies are needed to give focus and determination to the whole state. Whatever else happens, the state must survive. That axiom is basic in "The Republic", even though Plato never articulates it openly. And in fairness to Plato, the same axiom appears to have been basic to all nations and the states they have set up all over the world for long as we have records or artifacts of human activity. 

The people have to be brainwashed and then distracted with "bread and circuses", as the Roman poet Juvenal put it. The police and military will be drawn from those among the general population who are best suited to do soldier's types of duties without question or critical insight. The state can't afford to contain a whole lot of citizens who analyze and question. If it does, it won't act decisively in a crisis. So the thinking goes, and not just in Plato. 

If you've been reading this blog, you will know that I bitterly disagree. The whole point of the smart and educated people in society ought to be to explain to everyone what is going on at the top levels of society and why. Smart, educated people using their gifts to manipulate others are the moral equivalent of strong, trained fighters using their skills to bully. Just as wrong for either of them to do it. I tell people every nuance of every problem that I see out there in the world because that is simple justice. I don't pose as being too good for the people. I was born, raised, and educated in a working class family and neighborhood, and I disagree diametrically with all who pose as being above the people. In the end, no one is. 

No more "exceptionalism" for Brits, French, Canadians, Americans, Chinese, Serbians, Catholics, Protestants, Hindus, Muslims, Plato's philosophers, or anyone else. The day of blind patriotism and noble lies has to end. Freedom and love, courage and wisdom don't need to be justified in that unquestioning way. These values can be justified logically to all by our showing how they connect to the roots of empirical reality. Moral realism, thoroughly understood, proves the simple good sense of pluralistic democracy. Freedom and love in balance maximize our chances of evolving and surviving over the long haul. In the end, there is no deeper or more worthy principle for any of us to aspire to. 

*http://classics.mit.edu/Plato/republic.3.ii.html    

                                                         the Golden Temple of Amritsar 

Today two interesting events coincided. In Canada, we marked the 30th anniversary of the Air India bombings, which are not widely known outside of Canada, but are hugely important here. This date coincided with the decision by the governor of South Carolina to have the Confederate flag removed from the state legislature. 

In Canada, as far as has been shown in court, the Air India bombings happened after a group of Sikh extremists based in Canada put bombs on two flights, one going to India, via Europe, and one going to Thailand, via Japan. The first bomb went off near the Irish coast, killing all 329 aboard, mostly Indo-Canadians going to visit relatives in India. The second partially malfunctioned and killed two baggage handlers in Japan as the package holding the bomb was being transferred between flights.  

None of the people who died in the Air India bombings had any personal connection to the crime that the extremists were angry about. Nor did the men in Japan. That crime had occurred in June of '84 when the Golden Temple in Amritsar was attacked by Indian Army troops. Sikh rebels had made it their last refuge during religiously based conflicts in the spring of 1984. The Indian Army cornered the last members of the movement there. When the soldiers took the temple, many artifacts in and near it were destroyed, including a library of sacred books. Indira Gandhi, the Indian Prime Minister of the time, was assassinated in Sept. of '84 by two members of her Sikh bodyguards. Then came the Air India bombings. 

So things go. Everywhere, it seems. 

Or maybe not. 

The RCMP investigation and the subsequent series of trials in Canada has dragged on for decades and to date has cost over $130 million. But about ten years after the bombing, I remember clearly one of the sons of a woman who was killed off the Irish coast saying that one good thing had come out of the disaster. He had felt a deep change come over the big majority of people in Canada who were not Indo-Canadian. Sometime in those years, people had stop shrugging off the deaths as "just a bunch of turbanned guys mad at one another" and stopped talking about "just a bunch of 'those' people dead". Canadians had come around to seeing the victims as human beings. Heart deep, the tragedy had truly become one for all Canadians. I had been struck by that very realization earlier that day. 

The connection between that event and the decision by the governor in South Carolina is vividly clear to me, but perhaps it could use some explaining. 

America is finally coming to terms with its prejudices. I feel it soul deep. The reason that Governor Nikki Haley can announce that the Confederate flag is coming down at the state capitol is the same as the reason that Walmart and Sears can announce that they will not sell any such flags or any products bearing their likeness anymore: the deep currents of decency and sense have reached critical mass all over the US, even in the South. Millions of white people are finally getting it. "Those people" are human beings. They complain about traffic and get itches in awkward places just like anyone else.  

And it's not as if people who want the Confederate flag taken down are belittling the courage of the millions of Southerners who fought in the Civil War or who supported the Confederate soldiers in that time. They were brave people. They fought with unbelievable courage. 

But they were wrong. Not in the sense that they were evil, but in the sense that they were mistaken. As were the Sikh extremists in more modern times in India and Canada. As have been many soldiers in many wars. And in fairness, as were many German and Japanese soldiers 75 years ago. They did love their homelands and their people. They did make truly noble sacrifices. They were just following a mistaken cause. 

The human race must move toward greater and greater pluralism if it is to survive. Not a uniform population of one kind of faces or a monotone chorus of one kind of voices. A rainbow of skin colors and cheekbone slants and a chorale of voices.

We live in a quantum universe. Trust me, this thought connects. The connection is crucial. 

In a quantum universe, any one of an array of possible futures may come about by any of millions of possible paths. Which will come true is, in part, shaped by the intelligent application of our skills and knowledge to reality here and now. We really do have free will. It isn't a sweet old-fashioned fairy tale told lovingly to children (as some scientists would have us believe). It's real. 

And in a world where so many disasters may be coming toward us, a society that contains a variety of people with a variety of talents increases our odds of finding someone in the population who has an answer for, hopefully, any crisis that arises. Freedom makes diversity; diversity makes us flexible, nimble, and strong.   

I know it's hard to hold that kind of population together. We are built, I believe, at the genetic level to be xenophobic. Scared of people who look different. We got that way after we ran out of meaningful predators hundreds of thousands of years ago. We evolved to become our own predators. We don't eat corpses, but we do, by war, cut what is obsolete, out of the cultural pool. At least, we used to. 

But we have to smarten up. We can't afford wars anymore. Our weapons have gotten too big. 

The answer? How do we choose among the many paths that the members of the human race are preaching about? We use our best wisdom, learned hard and slow by our ancestors. We argue, debate, and discuss. We make our cases and present our evidence and then we listen. Really listen. Then we choose for the healthy balances of wisdom and courage, and freedom and love, the bywords that must inform our choices. 

Most of all, we learn to love one another. It's love that makes us listen and care.  

I am certain that we're getting there. The change is damned slow, but it is happening. The world is a kinder place than it was when I was a kid. Only a bit kinder, but it is a noticeable bit. 

My remaining fear is obvious: with the hazards we are about to face, will we come together in time? 

Go home tonight and hug your kids. Insist one more time that they say "please" and "thank-you". But before you do, take one co-worker aside and thank her quietly for what you know she did well today. We can't ever really know what effect a kind word might have maybe even years down the road.    

   

                                     hugs outside Emanuel AME church, Saturday, June 20, 2015 

                                        Dred Scott

For today, I think I will begin to discuss the kinds of values and laws that a well-designed global society of the future might be built around.

But we first need to remind ourselves that values do underlie our laws and our laws do enable and shape our way of life. It was in the days when some human beings were not valued as truly human that laws could find a man like Dred Scott to be morally not considerable, not qualified to be a citizen, and devoid of rights in all US courts. The decision was reached in 1857 and was aimed, according to the Supreme Court justices who wrote it, at settling the slavery question once and for all. It had no such effect. The abolitionists in all states, but mostly in the North, became even more vocal and more disenchanted with the whole US system. The decision was, indirectly, one of the factors that contributed to the start of the US Civil War. It comes at the top of the list for nearly all historians of the worst Supreme Court decisions ever. (Wikipedia link below.)

Today we feel that it is so egregiously wrong that we find it difficult to believe anyone at the time could reason so illogically as to tell a man who could learn how to sue for his freedom in the courts, find a lawyer, and help to organize his own case that he was not morally considerable. But that is what the Supreme Court justices found. The reasons they gave are tangled and complicated, but in the end they are a gobbledygook amalgam that only manages to reach a glaring injustice. The majority of people even in those times could see this was so. Many just were tired of fuss and wanted the whole slavery question to go away. Thankfully, some were determined that this one particular form of madness, that had been endured from the time of the signing of the Declaration of Independence, had to be stopped. They hung in there, and eventually, after much pain, it was.

How this example connects to my particular philosophical view is via the consideration of what I would have done if I had been alive in those times. And even what I would have done if I had lived in the South versus what I would have done if I had lived in Massachusetts or Illinois.

It is fashionable today to say that if we had grown up in those states and times, any of us would have gone along with the status quo. My hope and belief is that a sense of decency coming from the core of each of us eventually can't stand to look at what is simply wrong. There certainly were people in those times who became abolitionists even though they had been raised in slave-owning families. I believe I would have been one of the abolitionists.

The largest point I wish to make today then is this: the most important duty that any of us has is to his or her own soul. Or conscience, if you like.

What's fashionable, what the public thinks, and what the received opinions are have all been wrong before, and will be again. In the end, I must answer to my conscience. You have to answer to yours.

I aim to die believing fully that I did my best to be decent, even when that was the least easy option before me.

In our time, this is probably going to mean that we have to give up many comforts so that we stop polluting this planet, in my humble opinion anyway.

I drive a hybrid, minimal miles. My wife and I compost and re-cycle almost all of our garbage. I live in a geo-thermal townhouse complex. But I know I am going to have to do more. We can't go on as we have been for so long.

Right is what it is.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dred_Scott

Tamara Holmes and son, Trenton, lay flowers outside of church in Charleston, S.C., USA 

One of the hardest balances to strike in a modern democracy is the balance between freedom and love. People who love one another want each other to be safe from criminals hidden among the members of the community and from foreign invaders who would force their way onto the territory of the democratic country if they could and then take from citizens their goods or their lives. 

The tricky part is what we face when we try to insure that honest citizens are protected while also allowing all people in the country to move about freely, assemble peacefully, and express their opinions when they wish to. 

What we want is for people to be able to go about their business secure in their persons and their property so that the whole community can flourish and grow, always aiming to keep drawing closer to the goal of creating a respectful community, with prosperity, dignity, and freedom for all. 

The hard part lies in detecting and neutralizing those among us who would by trickery or by force take things that they have not earned from the rightful owners of those things. We want to stop the thieves and con men. They are like leeches on the body of the community, sucking away its lifeblood and giving only more treachery in return. 

In the U.S., the murder on Wednesday night of 9 African-Americans attending a prayer meeting at a church in Charleston, South Carolina, dramatized once more what this love-freedom balance is about. That shooting has stunned the nation and the world yet again. When he spoke of the event, President Obama looked like a dad in the morgue identifying the body of a beloved child. Millions of us, right now, are thinking, "Surely to God, not again. This can't be happening again." But it is. 

The murder rate in the U.S. is four or five times the rates found in all other countries of the developed world. Those of us in other lands who admire and love America are in disbelief once again. This so decent nation surely should be able to solve this problem. Maybe not in a day or a year, but gradually and steadily in real numbers in the real world. Reduce the numbers of homicides down to levels like those found in Western Europe and Canada. Surely it should be possible to take reasonable legal, economic, and social measures that reduce those numbers. 

Unfortunately for the Americans, their constitution gives citizens a right to bear arms, a right that will likely not be restricted in any meaningful way for the foreseeable future, if ever. Also unfortunately, Americans have so far been unable to face the fact that the second amendment was written at a time and in a society that was very different from the way the world is now. Jefferson's original intention in the second amendment, i.e. of citizens keeping the government honest by their being armed, no longer makes sense. Ordinary people armed with sporting arms or even assault weapons would not be able to stop a tyrant, if such a person gained control of the U.S. Armed Forces, or even slow that tyrant down very much. The armed forces today are much more sophisticated, so much beyond the abilities of ordinary citizens in killing power, intelligence gathering, and in fact every other activity involved in doing organized, sustained violence to human beings, that citizen resistance against a modern army in the hands of a dictator seems almost a pathetic concept. If the U.S. Marines really did come to occupy an American town, the local people wouldn't slow them down for anything more than a few days.

Instead, the net effect of the second amendment in this time has been to make it absurdly easy for people to settle disputes or even just give vent to impulsive anger by means of their guns. 

And still that immovable second amendment defies those who are so weary of the killing. 

Or is it immovable? 

I am no lawyer and no expert on U.S. constitutional law. However, it seems to me that if local governments in some states are permitted to ban or severely restrict automatic weapons, multi-shot magazines, and so on - which they are - then there is the thin edge of the wedge that peace-loving people need to begin to make real progress toward stopping the madness. 

Groups of people who really don't want guns roaming about in their communities and too easily falling into the hands of incapable people might be able to band together and create towns and cities of their own. They then could pass laws which require all citizens inside the common space to travel unarmed, or perhaps be allowed to transport sporting arms from a locked cabinet in their homes into the wilds where they can be used legitimately to hunt game, where the law permits. Then the spaces in which firearms are truly controlled could be expanded as new people who just wanted to raise their families in peace chose to move into the safer towns. 

These kinds of towns and cities would be living examples of a balance of citizens' rights and the rights of society, a balance of freedom and love created by the nuanced intervention of wisdom. 

A law banning anyone other than officers of local, state, and federal agencies from carrying guns would be enforceable and fair. Cameras and guards on the entrances to airports, malls, etc. already exist. To build safer towns, we would only need to expand on already existing practices. And hunters who just wanted to shoot some ducks or a deer on the weekend would still be fully able to do so. In a few years, even the carrying of machetes, nunchakus, and so on would be under control. Restraint as a way of life would permeate the thoughts of the people.  

Essentially, this strategy is the one that was used by lawmen in the 1800's to clean up the Old West. Many brave and capable lawmen existed then. They were pretty tough hombres. And effective ones. If it could work for them, in those far more violent and lawless times, the strategy could work for us here and now. Calm, reasoned debate. Compromise. Local pockets of sanity, growing larger with each year that passes.

It could be done.            

                                                   Bass Reeves, lawman of the Old West 

                              Cady Stanton 

                                         Mohandas K. Gandhi 

                                                                    Nelson Mandela 

                           Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. 

I meet people regularly who will quietly, but firmly, tell me that writing a moral code for the whole human race, a code that will bring about a society that will work, and also that we can make stick in human minds so that people really do live by it -- that project is a daydream. It will never be a reality, they insist to me, and they smile wryly like they are telling a harsh truth, reluctantly, to a naive child. 

I've seen some hard times in life. I'm 65 years old, 65 years of acquiring experience in this world, and I was no fool to begin with. 

Yes, I believe we can keep our eyes fixed on the virtues of courage, wisdom, freedom, and love and use these stars to navigate through the "reefs of greed" and the "squalls of hate" (Leonard Cohen), and find our way to a world of peace, prosperity, and love. Our vague, confused, and contradictory moral codes are what stand in our way, and these can be rewritten. Only with a lot of work and some pain, I admit, but the barriers can be overcome and the dream realized. 

Think of Mahatma Gandhi, Nelson Mandela, Martin Luther King, Cady Stanton, and Susan Anthony. How long they worked, how much they suffered, and how much they sacrificed to make real changes in society happen. It can be done. 

America is coming to the end of the second term of an African-American president, the first African-American to win that high office, and America is poised to elect her first woman president. Did Barack Obama live up to every hope that his supporters had for him back in 2008? No. But he has done a lot of good. I am convinced that he will be seen by history as a great man. Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln -- read and see how often they failed and how they were vilified in their own lifetimes. And Hilary, if she makes it (I think she will) will also be a great president. These realities would have been literally unthinkable just a few decades ago. 

We are becoming a kinder, wiser species. India became independent in 1947. The Civil Rights Act was passed in the U.S. in 1964. Apartheid ended in 1994. Even the USSR came to an end without a world war. People of my generation sometimes still can't believe it. 

I will not listen to those who smile cynically and shake their heads. They're the dreamers, not me. They seem to think we can cruise on the values and mores of the past, as we work at ignoring the wrongs in the world, and that all the problems will somehow take care of themselves. That really is puerile dreaming. 

History says otherwise. Those who shrug off their social responsibilities are nearly always the same ones who can hear you describe the horrors of tyrant states in the past and then say, "Yes, yes, but it can't happen here." Oh. Yes. It. Can. 

Democracy has always been hard work. Engage in the debate over a global moral code. That is what the prime value of freedom means. No code has any chance of being accepted by the children of the future unless the large majority of us now find consensus and commit to it, and we will only do that if we have a part in writing it. Freedom means responsibility. 

Keep thinking of John Peters Humphrey and the Universal Declaration On Human Rights.

And never give up. It is fascists who call on their citizens to sacrifice mightily in a crisis. Democracy asks that we work hard to see it realized, extended, and protected every day, and especially in the times when it would be easy for us to be smug and lazy. Those easy times contain the opportunities for progress that we must seize on and work with if we are to enhance the odds of our species' future coming to success and not disaster. 

"When I despair, I remember that all through history the ways of truth and love have always won. There have been tyrants, and murderers, and for a time they can seem invincible, but in the end they always fall. Always. Think of it."      (Gandhi) 

                                                  John Peters Humphrey