This morning, I was listening to MSNBC as I drove to the bagel store for our Sunday morning bagels. Ali Velshi was speaking with presidential historian John Meachum and Meachum was referencing Frederick Douglass who said, among many great things, “If there is no struggle, there is no progress.” That stayed with me as I drove on my errand. This has become a Sunday ritual for me and I almost always call ahead to the deli and order the exact same thing. I order and everything bagel with cream cheese for Kim, and everything bagel with American cheese for me, and two dry everything bagels in the separate bag that I drop off for Mike and Melisa. I like doing the chore of buying two extra bagels for my friends and I like stopping to drop them off as a part of my Sunday ritual. It gives me a chance to visit with Mike and Melisa for a few minutes and it starts my day (especially my Sunday) with a very small act of giving.
I recently subscribed to Scott Galloway‘s weekly email where he describes what’s on his mind at the moment. I consider Scott Galloway a kindred spirit for several reasons. To begin with, he’s a business school professor at NYU. I was a business school professor for 10 years at Cornell. He’s very much a business person who is liberal in his mindset and seems to enjoy grappling with the contradiction of being liberal and being business-oriented all at once. That feels very familiar to me. In his email on Friday, he ends his update with an admonition about love. Galloway was raised in Los Angeles and he discusses how upsetting it is to him to see the city of his youth burning during the recent wildfires. He quotes, a philosopher friend of his who says that asking someone if they need help or what they need is a false attempt at love. Instead, he says that a truly loving person should simply do what is needed rather than ask if they can help. This struck me as quite profound because we are all raised to think that we should ask people if they want or need help rather than assume that they do indeed want it. And this gives rise to a social rule where we disingenuously offer help not really expecting to be called upon.
The very next thing I did was to pick up the phone and call FTD Florists to order a flower bouquet to send to Kim‘s nephew Josh and his family who I thought were moving back into their house in Pasadena after being evacuated for 10 days due to the Altadena wildfire. It made me feel good to do something, and by the way, to do something without discussing it with my wife about whether or not this was something she wanted to do for her nephew. Then, that evening, the thought occurred to me after speaking to my half-sister, who lives in Santa Monica and has been under an evacuation order for more than a week due to the Palisades fire, that both she and our nephew needed some help. Specifically, my half-sister was wearing a mask as she went about town and drinking bottled water, never thinking that there may be some toxicity in her environment that she needed to properly assess and deal with. On the other hand, our nephew and his family had returned to their home in Pasadena, and had concluded, based on reports from neighbors, that the toxicity level in the air and water was simply too great to be safe and that they needed to consider renting another home that was less affected by the fires. I had seen an article from the Wall Street Journal that talked about the mad rush in the LA community to secure rental properties and how the price gouging and bidding wars that were underway was making people struggled to improve their own lot in this traumatic time, “forcing” them to fight against the great unwashed masses that shared their problem. This made me think about how sad the human condition can be under times of duress, but it also made me realize that our nephew was not likely to find suitable rental housing to solve his problem. This caused me to put my thinking cap on, and I remembered that my brother-in-law‘s brother is an environmental engineer who lives in Sacramento. At this moment, knowing who to contact on the issue of dealing with the water and air toxicity problems that my two relatives we’re having, seemed like an important thing. It was clear to me that this connection was something that I could perhaps help them both with by connecting them with someone with a unique knowledge base and skill set that could help them deal with a rather immediate and troubling problem.
I called up my brother-in-law and he texted me his brother’s contact information. Since I had met his brother on several occasions over the years, I simply picked up the phone and called him. I know that in today’s Miss Manners approach to life, one is supposed to text before calling, but I have never adhered to that philosophy. And quite frankly, I wanted to get to the bottom of this issue more quickly than that. He answered the phone on the first ring and when I told him the situation of my two relatives, he immediately had some interesting opinions to share. He thought that our nephew was over-reacting to the toxicity issues and that they could be managed around. He also thought that my half-sister did not need to hire a testing company since the wildfire-related toxicity issues (especially for unburned properties) was well understood. There were, however, certain steps needed in both cases that he could held advise them on…not to mention his specialty of advising on the insurance claim process (he had lost his own house in the 2004 Rancho Bernardo fire). I gave both my half-sister and our nephew his contact information and felt good about doing something to help rather than just offering to be of help. Scott Galloway would be proud of me.
Now back to Velshi and Meachum. They were pondering how we should be feeling on the eve of the second inauguration of Donald Trump. To begin with, as Frederick Douglass would say, “If there is no struggle there is no progress.” Meachum reminded us that if a black ex-slave could say this in 1857 when the Supreme Court promulgated the Dred Scott decision, establishing that the Declaration of Independence did not intend for black Americans to be citizens of the United States, we have no reason to wail too loudly about this current turn of political events. We have to bear up under the struggle and accept the fact that the human condition dictates that man will always default to whatever path seems better for him rather than the collective and that it a part of our struggle to continuously and probably forever push away our lesser angels to be better, more responsible human beings.
I don’t always do the best things, the right things. Who among us does? We all have moments of frailty, but this is not supposed to be one. We are supposed to stand up and, without asking or seeking pseudo-permission, reach out and help America be the better place people like Frederick Douglass knew it could be. This is not a fretful moment, but this should be and needs to be our finest moment, when we stand up to the struggle and keep moving the ball forward to a better America and a better world.