Owning It All

Owning it All

I was worried about having time to write my blog this weekend. We are in Ithaca staying at our house there, with my daughter and her husband and kids. Their Ithaca life is heavily dominated by the pool, the yard and fireflies at dusk (as it should be) and my weekend is dominated by seeing old acquaintances from college. These are not my usual classmate crowd that I lived with for most of four years, attended weddings for and now attend reunions with. These are several guys who were one or two years ahead of me and who I was friendly with for a year or two due to our all being in the same fraternity. I was part of the newbie pledge class that got taught the ropes, as they were, from these guys. I attended none of their weddings nor they any of mine. They do not know my kids’ names nor do I even know which of them have kids. Their wives are pleasant, age-appropriate women who they have mostly been with a long time.

For some reason, I kept a connection with them. I think it was less about being a bit friendlier with one of them during school (he taught me how to drive a car, since I only rode and was licensed for a motorcycle back then). I suspect my connection has more to do with a strange and tragic event that occurred to one of them. Back in the bad old hitchhiking days, before the existing of the Amber of Amber Alerts, this guy’s sister was abducted and gone missing on a lonely upstate road. There was a massive search for her that spread across the northeast in one of the earliest high-profile instances of what we now think of as gritty grist for the Dateline mill. We were all in shock and tried to be as supportive of our fraternity brother in his pain and angst.

She was eventually found and her abductor caught. I do not remember the how, where or when of the capture, but it was quickly confirmed by finding her beaten and raped body in some lonely spot. The physical evidence against the perpetrator was overwhelming and he was convicted and sentenced to a very long time in prison. Well, even long times run out and starting about fifteen years ago he was up for parole, having never admitted to nor shown remorse for the crime. He had been a less-than-ideal prisoner but he came up to the parole board nonetheless. As part of the victim’s voice efforts of the modern legal system, the young girl’s family (my fraternity brother and his kin) launched a concerted effort to supply the court with abundant evidence that the pain and suffering of the family and friends of the girl had not been assuaged adequately to consider leniency on this evildoer. I was one of the people asked by my fraternity brother to write a letter to the court, which I dutifully did. Thereafter and approximately every five years since (most recently earlier this year) I have been asked to send another letter to the court to do likewise. This small act of kindness, a trivial task for someone like me, especially compared to the lingering pain this family feels, was easy to justify and to do. But it re-created a bond with this fraternity brother of old and reconnected me to his coterie of fraternity friends who knew me and seemed to welcome me to their group.

So, this weekend began as an idea from my friend to all gather for an informal reunion in Ithaca in August if someone would be kind enough to plan the arrangements. I volunteered given my ongoing connection to the town and my home here. I got them the nicest Inn in town and booked the nicest restaurants for Friday and Saturday dinners. I also set-up a winery tour around Cayuga Lake, which seemed to be something they all articulated by email would interest them. That is what I will be doing with my day today. We met for dinner last night and learned each other’s names and generally caught up. One thing I was determined to not do was talk politics. I sense quite strongly that this group is more populated with red flags than blue flags and one of the wives seems quite strident in her red views, having published a recent New York Times op/ed on why luck had nothing to do with her success. A famous Cornell economist wrote a whole book on how that view was distinctly conservative versus the liberal view that wealth mostly came about due mostly to luck versus inherent skill or hard work. It’s a long debate worthy of its own story, but suffice it to say that if I was lucky, I would be able to stay away from politics for these two short days.

Strangely enough, in an “it’s a small world” way, one of the couples knows a friend of ours from my motorcycle group. This is a lovely couple that we have ridden through Sicily, Greece and Croatia with and will be riding through Turkey with in October. They are diehard Republicans and we still get along with them. They are Trump supporters and we still get along with them. When we ask them how they stomach his words and deeds they have a standard “you have to look at the big picture and look at the good things he is doing.” comment. We have agreed to disagree and remain friends. Indeed, these folks have a daughter who is an addict and led a very rough life until turning herself around. This has caused our friends to be socially liberal and fiscally conservative. They do not see supporting Trump as being contrary to that view.

We learned last night that one of our crowd (indeed the one with the reddest op/ed-writing views) has a daughter who is gay and has adopted children. She is happily residing in Brooklyn, but her and her partner’s views are “Sooooo liberal and awful” in their attempts to overthrow the world their parents hold sacred. I am nonetheless sure that the parents, our friends, love their daughter and her family very much.

Yesterday I heard Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Eugene Robinson, talking about the recent controversy about racist rhetoric from the white White House, say that it’s time that conservatives stop suggesting that they can like one part of the president’s program (usually the fiscal part) and not support another part (specifically the social consciousness part). In other words, this is not an ala carte menu. As a citizen and a voter, we must choose the whole package. We must own it all if we vote for it. It is a strong point and it clearly favors those of us who despise Donald Trump and what he has stood for.

So, to my motorcycling and winery-going friends, neither of whom I suspect read my blog, it is now time for you to own it all. If you want to continue to support and vote for Donald Trump, it is your right and I respect that. But that means you own every tweet and every racist act and comment that comes out of his mouth. You no longer get to say, “you have to look at the big picture.” You now must say, “I’ve looked at the whole ugly picture and I still want to support this man and all that he stands for. I am comfortable owning it all.”