The Fall of 1963

Everyone of a certain age remembers where they were when they heard JFK had been shot. I was eighteen. There are many things from that time that I don’t recall, but I do remember so clearly, as if watching it happen to me from one of the dorm windows in the college quadrangle, hearing someone call out the news, and then another, and another. It was the kind of thing that you had to hear multiple times to believe. I remember walking past girls standing under gothic arches crying, hugging one another. I remember being shocked by the loss without actually feeling it. John Kennedy was not my father or a close friend, so I did not feel it in that way. But I was stunned by it. I did not know what it meant.

"For young Roddy McCorley goes to die
on the bridge of Toome today."

As it turned out, it meant that I and the country would go into long period of mourning. I did not realize it at the time, and causality is still hard to be certain of, but in that moment in which the president died, something equally unthinkable happened to me: I stopped functioning. I wasn’t dead, but for all I was bringing to life I might as well have been. I stopped going to classes. I stayed up all night. I ate from vending machines because the cafeterias were closed when I was hungry.

When I got to college that fall, I met men--they seemed like men, and I a boy--who were impossibly exotic compared to my southern country club life to that point. My freshman roommate was from Bogotá, Columbia. I barely even knew where that was. I met and idolized an upperclassman who lived in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia, where his father worked for the Arabian-American Oil Company. He brought me leather sandals made from old tire treads and told stories of swimming with sea snakes in the Red Sea.

My friend from Dhahran and another from Florida were members of the Congress Of Racial Equality. The summer I graduated from high school, while I was picking out madras shirts and Bass Weejuns for college, they were Freedom Riders on the busses that took activists into the Deep South to demonstrate for racial equality. They asked me about the lunch counter sit-ins in my hometown, Nashville. Yeah, those were cool, I said. The truth was, I knew almost nothing about them.

I grew up with racial jokes--really, to get any idea how crude and savage they were, you have to call them what most did in those days, as casually as they talked about the weather: nigger jokes. I didn’t hear them at home, but I didn’t have to go far. I would slip into the men’s grill at the country club and Peewee, the bartender, would make me an orange juice, grape juice and club soda drink he called a “transfusion” while men at a nearby table slapped their thighs and chortled as if the black waiters who served them were deaf. Blacks weren’t supposed to be uppity. They sure as hell weren’t supposed to demand to sit in the white section of the Walgreen’s lunch counter. They were caddies and waiters. They looked down at their feet when a white man spoke to them. They gave way on the path. When I wanted to putt for quarters with Sammy, one of the caddies who wasn’t much older than I, we had to do it on the dirt patch in the caddie yard, where no one could see us.

My friends in college who were in CORE took me to folk coffee houses. Folk music, especially the old Irish songs like Roddy McCorley, are about protest, about social injustice, about the striving underclass. Even mainstream music was about to get onboard: Bob Dylan wrote “The Times They Are A Changin’” in 1963, Phil Ochs “There But For Fortune.”

The change in me that fall was like a flu. It made me breathe faster. It dulled my senses. I think my southern immune system was trying to fight it off. Part of the problem, of course, was that my emerging radicalization required that I admit to myself that I had been as bad as the rest of them. True, I hadn’t lynched anyone. I hadn’t hated. But I’d told a racial joke or two. I putted for quarters with Sammy, and I liked Peewee better than any of the men he served, but I had been insensible to their condition. I don’t know what I thought. Peewee wore a crisp white coat and black tie. I guess I thought his life was fine. Sammy was making a pretty good living beating me out of quarters, never mind the tips he got for caddying.

I didn’t go to many classes that fall semester, but I got quite an education. After weeks of late nights in coffee houses, I began to, if not understand, at least recognize the reality of social oppression. It was as if a part of life I hadn’t been aware of was suddenly revealed to me. I don’t mean I hadn’t understood socio-economic strata, I just hadn’t thought much about how they were imposed on some people against their will, how so often they were accidents of birth. I suppose I thought people chose to be the way they were. Or that, as the racial jokes would have you believe, they were lazy.

John Kennedy was my father’s age. They were alike in many ways, charismatic men who could make you believe anything was possible. Dad was a medical pioneer, but he was politically conservative. I think medicine--with its prescription of “First do no harm”--might make you that way. He didn’t tell racial jokes, but he wasn’t marching with MLK either. I remember having political debates with him, but I can’t say I know what he really thought about the civil rights movement. He judged men, but not, as far as I could tell, by the color of their skin. He was a libertarian, I suppose. Somehow he made it seem that racial injustice was happening somewhere else. As far as our insular community was concerned, I suppose it was.

John Kennedy didn’t awaken my social conscience--my new college friends and those old Irish protest songs, did that--but when I started listening to what the president was saying, to what Dr. King was saying, it was like waking from a dream. I was ashamed to have been asleep, and determined to make up for my obliviousness.

Then he was shot. I had been up all night the night before. Wandering around. I wish I could say I had been doing something useful, like homework or preparing protest pamphlets, but my awakening was slow. I was still groggy. And then the president was dead.

I couldn’t imagine such a thing happening. It didn’t frighten me that he was killed, but it slapped me across the face the way I thought my father might when I came home from school with such pitiful grades. Kennedy’s death and Dad’s disappointment had the same effect on me. They made me feel helpless. They made me feel like it wasn’t worth trying. I didn’t care about school. The nation didn’t care about social equality. Nothing was going to change.

The nation and I followed similar paths to recovery. I dropped out of that first Gothic limestone college, went to night school, enrolled in another university, got married, had kids, went to law school, went to work for a corporate law firm in Los Angeles, became a dealmaker for the masters of finance, wore expensive shoes, tipped well, and had Hispanic gardeners and nannies rather than black ones. It was as if I hadn't learned a thing in those early college days. The fetus of my social consciousness had been stillborn.

The country’s path was, by my reckoning, similar to my own. We struggled through the loss of Martin and Bobby, the war in Vietnam and the oil crisis, stagflation and our "national malaise" and, about the same time I began doing deals for Wall Street, elected Reagan as president. Sure, there were important civil rights gains in the sixties, but the work of those years, both the nation’s and mine, became finished business. The Voting Rights Act passed. I graduated. That was all done. Out in California, where I had moved to get out of the bigoted South, the racial jokes were about Mexicans. At the California Club in downtown L.A., white businessmen, many my peers by then, joshed about how California had to be next to Mexico so Beverly Hills would have access to domestic workers.

Now we have a black president. If I went back to the men’s grill at my old country club, I can imagine the jokes I would hear. Racial and gender discrimination are illegal, but still widespread. Income disparity is greater than ever. Public schools have fully re-segregated. With the consent of the Supreme Court, granted just a few short months ago, Southern states are bringing back onerous voting requirements designed to disenfranchise minorities. The Tea Party is as virulent as the old Ku Klux Klan.

My father delivered babies for poor families and gladly accepted a country ham or baked apple pie as payment. But as the country has grown bigger and more diverse, the sense that a community can and will take care of its neediest members has dissipated. By default, that job has fallen to government. With that has come a kind of depersonalization of need. People who fifty years ago would not have turned away a beggar looking for a handout at the back door now have no compunction about eliminating public funding for food stamps and health care.

Those of us born right after WW II were nurtured in the relative comfort of the nineteen fifties. By the sixties we were, like all adolescents, restless for change. But our dreams, so eloquently invoked by President Kennedy, were never fully realized. It’s our own fault, of course. No one made us give up our idealism. And yet, looking back, I wonder whether on that bright fall day fifty years ago Lee Harvey Oswald did more than put a bullet through a man. I wonder whether he mortally wounded our youthful passion to be better than we had been.

Trick or Treat

On his first Halloween outing, when he was almost two, our son Chris got a piece of candy and sat on the porch to eat it. When he finished, we went to the next house. He sat on that porch and ate the candy he got there too. At the third house, he sat on the porch with his candy and burst into tears. He must have thought Halloween was some primitive force-feeding ritual.

Chris’s brother Nick, when he was in high school, used to dress up like a dummy and sit on our front porch bench, holding a basket of candy and a sign that said “take one.” He had on jeans and an old sweatshirt and a mask and he sat so still kids big and small thought he was a mannequin. When they came up onto the porch, he would say “boo” and they would scream. His fame must have spread over the years, because by the last year he was home for Halloween middle-schoolers would stand on the sidewalk and toss bits of candy at him to see if he moved. “Do you think he’s real? I’m afraid he might jump at us. I don’t want to be scared.”

For some parents, it’s Christmas that brings on bouts of nostalgia. Others, Thanksgiving. For me, it’s Halloween. All those kids and masks. I can almost imagine my children are in the costumed group I see coming up the walkway. Maybe one of the little ones will sit on the steps and eat the Snickers bar I give him. Maybe an older one will rest on the bench and be so still no one can tell if he is real.

I’ve been through this before. I have older kids who are long gone. But Meg’s and mine, Chris and Nick, are still in the process of leaving. Just out of or just finishing college, on their own but not quite settled in places they are ready to call their new homes. They will both be here for Christmas. I made up their beds the other day and thought about their being back in them, although it’s not quite the same when I don’t tuck them in but the other way around.

We have a double bed that my grandfather made for my grandmother in 1920 as a wedding present. It will make a nice (and badly needed) guest bed in the room the boys always shared. There aren’t that many more times they will both be visiting at the same time, so we’re taking the first halting steps toward dismantling the shrine to their childhood. I put up my grandfather’s double bed yesterday, but I left one of the twin beds set up so that the son who loses the coin toss for the bigger bed will still have a place to sleep.

The new bed looks nice in the room. The smaller twin bed is up against the wall at the foot of the new bed, like something for a footman for traveling royalty. It has the red comforter the boys used for many years and both of the red shams, so it looks plush and cozy. I put away everything last night and turned out the light, but as I passed the room this morning I stopped to look in again at that twin bed with the red comforter. I flicked on the light with the giddy anticipation of those middle-schoolers tossing candy at my mannequin son, afraid he would pop up, afraid he would not.

Taking Sides

Why do we take sides? Friend or foe. Most issues aren’t black or white, but when we line up on one side or the other, often we make them that way. Views harden, Nuance vanishes.

Most of us know we have gaps in our knowledge. To really understand many of the complex subjects debated today, you have to dig into the data. When I ask my son Chris, an economist, what he thinks about some new theory in his field, frequently his answer is “I’d have to see the underlying research.”

Whether we’re talking about climate change or tax policy, most of the time we don’t see the underlying research. Even when we do, even when we understand it, the deeper we look the more likely we are to realize just how little we know.

I love the line from the musical “Wicked” where the Wizard explains how history is written by the victors, so that with a little messaging a brutal conquest becomes a liberation: “There are precious few at ease with moral ambiguities, so we act as though they don’t exist.”

I suspect there’s a Darwinian root here. Our ancestors who followed strong leaders had the support of the group and were more likely than loners to survive. For their parts, would-be leaders tend to exude moral certainty. Except in ancient Greece, it’s hard to attract a crowd with the Socratic method.

We herd together for survival. For our own good. But what if it’s not for our own good? What if we’re being led astray? How do we know which leaders to follow?

I have a friend who sends me global warming pieces by a writer who is certain that man is not the cause of the problem. I looked up the author. His climate credentials are so thin that I don’t pay any attention to him. Every once in a while I send my friend an article from The New York Times on some subject we are kicking back and forth. The last time I did this, he replied that he feels the same way about the credibility of the Times as I do about that of his climate writer. Fair enough.

But is it?

It makes a difference to whom we listen. We may be drawn to those who are saying what we want to hear, but it is the advice of independent experts that we should prefer. The problem is that people claiming to be experts are a dime a dozen. Some are. Many aren’t. How do we tell the difference?

Sorting out the prophets from the profiteers can be a challenge. When we see a street-corner preacher, we know the source of his conviction. But we may not know that a scientist’s research, which we trust to be objective, is influenced by the industry that financed him. The doctors in the 1950s who were paid by the tobacco industry to reassure us that smoking was perfectly safe betrayed the trust we instinctively place in professionals. Today it might be “climate deniers.” Or “clean coal” advocates. Follow the money, the old saying goes. That’s still a pretty good maxim.

These days, so many are directly or indirectly paid to expound their views that we would do well, I think, to view with skepticism positions that are thrust at us: political ads; talk radio; economic or scientific conclusions at odds with the preponderance of thought in the field.

We need to ask ourselves: Why is this person telling me this? What’s in it for her? If the answer seems to be “nothing,” and if her credentials seem genuine, she’s worth listening too. If not, ask yourself that clichéd question: Would you buy a used car from this person?

Even unbiased experts don’t always agree, of course. Sometimes no one knows the answer for sure. But if we’re lining up with a real authority, someone genuinely seeking the truth on the matter at hand, even if there’s a crowd on the other side, chances are that rather than hurling stones across the divide of our disagreement we are going to slowly come together, as our expert and theirs cast about for new ground on which we all can stand.

The (New) Road to Serfdom

I never thought I’d say this: I miss Congress. I miss lawmaking. I even miss the slop trough. It was smelly, but it fed a lot of pigs and kept them in the pigpen. Now a bunch of them have gone feral. They’ve grown tusks and are running wild. The other pigs are afraid to move.

The farmer has noticed. He doesn’t want to go near the pigpen either. He’s giving more attention to the other animals. The pigs are so busy terrorizing one another, or being terrorized, they don’t seem to notice that the farmer has gotten tight with the cows and horses. Wait, listen… Is that the pork slaughterhouse truck I hear coming?

Michael Lynch, a philosophy professor, wrote in yesterday’s New York Times that the gridlock in Congress is fraying the democratic fibers of our government. As Congress becomes less effective at managing government, the executive branch will fill the void. People may even applaud this at first, seeking action over political chaos and stasis. This is how the military in Egypt justified its recent overthrow of democratically elected President Morsi.

Friedrich Hayek warned that socialism, which concentrates power in the state, initially for the common good, leads to totalitarianism; and ultimately, Hayek maintained, totalitarian governments defend their rights and privileges at the expense of the people.

There are many roads to autocrats: Communism (Stalin and Mao). Military might (Egypt, Syria, much of Africa). Mass bribery of the upper class (Saudi Arabia, the Old-World monarchies). Now perhaps we will offer up a new path: voluntary abandonment of a centuries-old democracy.

By and large I believe government can be a force for good in a society. I have no illusions, however, about the character of humans. For the most part, we are like water: we flow downhill and seek out any crack or crevice. We are equally capable of high ideals and low behavior. Our Constitution enshrines our lofty ideals. It is the job of Congress to protect those ideals (and us) from our baser instincts.

Even the nuttiest members of today’s Congress were elected by their fellow citizens. Congress is the vehicle through which we, as a large and diverse citizenry, shape our government. If we lose that ability, or sit by insensibly while it is abdicated by the men and women we elected to exercise it for us, we will be reduced to turning out for presidential elections every four years to elect our monarch. Of course those presidential elections will be free and fair. Just ask those who voted for Saddam Hussein in his day. Or, for that matter, Vladimir Putin last year.

Surprise, Honey...

I took out the trash. Scrubbed the skillet. Left you a full pot of hot water when I heard you get up and knew you would be coming down to make your coffee.

I courted her with champagne and flowers. She brings me tulips and little forbidden tarts. She gave me a car for my birthday once, but that was years ago. Now she moves the family car when it’s behind my little two-seater and she knows I’m thinking it might be a good night for us to sit in the Rodin Sculpture Garden at Stanford with thermoses that look like they are filled with coffee. I wax her red 1970 convertible. Just because I like the way she looks in it, top down, sunglasses. She gets spontaneous marriage proposals from men in SUVs when she drives it. My wax jobs are my bragging rights.

I was listening to Click and Clack on “Car Talk” the other day. They were talking to a woman whose husband had searched high and low for a 1963 Dodge Dart (pushbutton automatic) and surprised her with it. It brought tears to her eyes. One of the Car Talk guys said that was the best gift ever, one that he assumed won her undying gratitude. The other said he had read in “Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus” (or a book like it) that men think that way---that a big, showy gift is good for many good-dead credits---but that women view each gift as one credit. Take out the trash (which he said brought his wife to tears when he did it), one credit. New car, one credit.

I doubt that, but I do know now that the best gifts are the little, every-day ones. Not best best, but best for keeping love alive. You can’t buy each other new cars every day. Or even flowers and champagne (although I tried that for almost a year before I landed her). But you can put a dish of apple slices or a cup of tea on her desk while she’s working. You can pat the back of his hand while you’re reading together and say, I think you’re wonderful.

Forever Ours

Meg and I have these two friends in Santa Barbara who, just by being their irrepressible selves, got me thinking about stories and history and the past fading like an old photograph. They are old in years and experience, but not in attitude or outlook. We go to breakfast at the beach with them every time we are in town. We always have the same thing to eat.

One of them is an early riser. The other gets up much earlier than he does normally to come to breakfast with us. We’re his eight o’clock class, but it is he who is the professor and we the students.

Our friends are men of the arts. One was a publisher in New York. The other is a writer (books, movies, television) and raconteur. He is Felix to the other’s Oscar. They are both perfect gentlemen. Without fail they ask about us and our children. They remember all our interests and endeavors.

But when the formalities of civility are complete, the sport begins. If there were an Olympic event for competitive storytelling, they would both be multiple gold medalists. They know (or knew, or knew of) everyone in the arts in America and Europe for, as best I can tell, about the last hundred years.

One will be discussing and old film or Broadway show and the other will jump in with “Not many realize that the producer of that show also was the man who wrote Guys and Dolls.” Or, “You know, of course, that actress was from Bulgaria, where she was married to a count who was a perfect beast. When she left him, she took nothing but her suitcase.”

It’s entertaining hearing them one-up one another, but also a little sad. They are the last men I know who know these things. Their knowledge will not be lost to humanity when they die (there are archives and libraries, and Google, of course), but it will be lost to me. The life of it. The spontaneity. The savoir-faire.

We sit at a table on the edge of the sand looking out at the ocean as we eat banana-wheat-germ pancakes made by Francisco, the cook who now owns the beach grill where he started as a busboy thirty years ago, and these men carry on a lively banter that Meg and I enjoy the way one does watching children on the playground, all that joy and laughter. I told them when we were last together that I should be recording their exchanges for posterity. What I think I meant was that I should try to stop time, with the gulls circling over the sand and the beach crowd ambling by on the walkway as our friends tell their stories and make me feel that their time, and mine, will never be old.

Riding Down From Stone Mountain

My mother, who grew up in Decatur, Georgia, used to tell me about seeing the Ku Klux Klan in their white robes and hoods hoisting their fiery torches as they came riding down from Stone Mountain. They terrorized black communities, but it was another kind of fear that kept them going, that gave them their dreadful legitimacy: the fear of Southern whites that their way of life was slipping away. In their road houses, country clubs and political cloakrooms, they put up a good front of bigoted bravado, but deep down they were afraid. The Klan was their avenging angel.

I hear that same tremulous fear when Ted Cruz rails against Obamacare, when Eric Cantor warns of the culture of dependency created by food stamps. They talk about specific programs, but what they are really fighting are the demographic and social changes that are overtaking them. They feel threatened, and they are angry. The Tea Party wears their white robes and carries their torches.

Not everyone in the south wanted burning crosses and lynchings. Many thought the Klan was an abomination. A few stood up, or sat down, until blacks were treated better. But there were many who did not. Some were the timid sympathizers Martin Luther King spoke of ---“In the end we will remember not the words of our enemies but the silence of our friends.”---but many secretly wanted what the Klan wanted: a return to the old ways of blacks who knew their place and whites who, however poor, had someone they could look down on.

There are silent groups like that today. Some want health care and immigration reform and a strong and flexible social safety net. Others just want to be left alone. In the Old South, the lines were racial. Now the struggle is not mostly about black or brown or white, although that is certainly part of it, but more about the haves and the have-nots. Intended or not, the policies of today’s Republicans---less discretionary government spending, less regulation, lower taxes---elevate the halves over the have-nots as plainly and effectively as segregated schools separated blacks from whites.

So who is sitting in at lunch counters today? Who is refusing to give up her seat on the bus? You might think those in the front line fighting the Republican Right would be many of the residents of Owsley County, Kentucky. As Timothy Egan pointed out in a recent column, Owsley County has the lowest household income in the United States. Half its residents live below the poverty line. Half receive federal food aid. Surely they are angry that the Republican controlled House wants to take away what little government support they have. But if they are, they aren’t letting it affect their party allegiance. Owsley County, which is ninety-eight percent white, is eighty-one percent Republican.

The reason for that apparent paradox is (as it always has been) fear of change. This go round it’s not the changes associated with ending discrimination against blacks that the good people of Owsley County are uneasy about, but the threat to their way of life that they believe is posed by godless technocrats who want to tell them they have to have insurance to cover contraception, that abortion is a woman’s choice, or that it’s okay for one man to love another and raise children with him. These attacks on core moral beliefs are more threatening than fiscal conservatism. Besides, they’re still getting their assistance checks. That hasn’t changed. Yet.

But if the Republican Right has its way, change it will. Money for most social programs will dry up. People in need will have nowhere to turn. For them it will be like the Great Depression before the New Deal. Or like being black in the Jim Crow South.

When we get to that point, the pendulum will swing back. Poor and working class citizens, and immigrants pursuing the American Dream, will realize that the far right does not have their economic interests at heart. They will vote for a fair shake, for a level playing field. A new progressive era will begin. It may take another generation, but it will happen. I just wish we could avoid the pain we will have to go through to get there.

Legacies

I didn’t want my tombstone to say “He wrote a good merger agreement.” Someone was always buying someone, and I helped them. So what. Plenty of others could have done it. When I left my law firm it was like, as they say, pulling a finger out of a bucket of water.

I thought perhaps I wanted my epigraph to be “He brought new life to a tired old business and gave its employees new pride.” But it was I who needed new pride after that humbling effort.

More recently I’ve thought I’d like to be discovered a hundred years hence on some dusty bookshelf and taken down and read, perhaps cradled in a wing chair by someone who nods and smiles as she reads. Ah, sweet immortality.

I still hope for that, but in the meantime, and while I’m still alive to enjoy it, I’m seeing take shape a legacy I had not contemplated: the flowering of the children that, like some minor Johnny Appleseed, I planted across the land.

A relationship with adult children (my youngest is a senior in college) is a different thing than being a parent. I’ve gone from standing under them as they scrambled over the monkey bars, from making them waffles for breakfast and helping with the odd bit of homework (at least up until fourth grade, when my expertise ran out), to participating in seminars with them in which as often as not they, not I, are the professors.

In the university of Dad’s continuing education, I’m blessed with a rich and diverse curriculum: the arts, law, economics, technology, business. We talk about everything. They assign me course materials, which I read more carefully now than I did in my own college days, and with greater perspective if not wisdom.

There are things I think I know. Some I’m pretty sure of. But sometimes, when I’m forced to scratch the surface of my belief, I find there is less foundation for it than I assumed. It’s like the feeling of flimsiness I got the first time I broke open a stucco wall. It looked attractive, but there wasn’t much to it.

One of my children gave me Galbraith, and as soon as I was nodding “yes, yes” to Galbraith’s vision of socialist utopia, he gave me Hayek. Another taught me about machine learning and confirmation bias. A third about Commedia dell’arte. Another is patiently guiding me through the benefits of tax reform, not just to him, he swears, but to the economy as a whole. The fifth articulated so well this morning the uncertainty he feels over Syria and his disappointment that the president he so admires seems to have gone Rambo.

Despite my best efforts, my children do not agree with me on everything. And that is my good fortune. They are teaching me, as I tried to teach them when they were young, that I still have a lot to learn. What impresses me most is that they listen to me and to each other. They don’t just give due regard to other points of view, they seek them out. Their minds are never completely made up. They are in a long process of considering.

And so this is what I’d like on that granite slab o’er my bones: “His children gave him something to think about.”

A Parent’s Dilemma, A Nation’s Conscience

You know that moment as a parent when you steel yourself and say you’re going to let them make their own choices? You’re not going to interfere. When is that? When they’re eighteen? Twenty one? For most of us it’s a gradual process. Raising the training wheels a little bit at a time before finally taking them off.

Watching the Middle East now, especially Egypt, I have some of the same feeling I used to have when one of my children flexed his or her independence to do something I was sure was a bad idea. At first I would panic: “Don’t do that, please don’t do that.” Eventually I had to look away. Not turn away--I’d always be there if they asked for help--but look away.

Iraq and Afghanistan are orphans we adopted as political adolescents, after they had bounced around between foster homes and the streets. Whatever our selfish motivations for taking them on, we had this feeling deep down that the ordinary people of those hard lands would in the end be grateful to us. It hasn’t turned out that way, and we’re having a hard time accepting that they hate us, or at least don’t want us telling them what to do anymore. Exhausted and frustrated, we want nothing more than to look away.

Egypt is a little different. Egypt made peace with Israel forty years ago. We brokered that peace. Egypt gives our military free access to its airspace and to the Suez Canal, both of which are strategically important to us. If Iraq and Afghanistan are rebellious youngsters, Egypt is a middle-aged child whose quirks and foibles we have learned to accept. When it overthrew its dictator and held free elections, it was like watching an older child who has been struggling with an identity crisis declare his commitment to a newfound sense of virtuous purpose. We were both high on hope.

But Egypt’s democracy has been sidetracked again. The good and bad angels perched on its broad shoulders are screaming in its ears. We can’t choose which they should heed. I doubt we even fully understand what the choice means to them. What is worse, if you are Egyptian: dictatorship or Sharia law?

So what should we do?

What you do when your adult children hit a rough patch: let them know you are there for them, that you are willing to help them keep body and soul together to the extent you can. What we shouldn’t do is give them money to finance self-destructive behavior.

Nations are not children, of course, and we are no other country’s parent. Analysts call regimes we assist in our own self-interest “client states.” I think that term is too businesslike, though. Our relationship with those leaders and their people is more personal, with all the strong emotion, irrationality, mistrust and conniving that exists between two people who are locked together by love or circumstance and can’t agree on how one or the other should behave.

After a while parents learn that with some children the best thing they can do is stay out of it. I think this is what it has come to in Egypt, indeed in most of the Middle East. The people there need to work out their futures for themselves.

There is, however, one aspect of our relationship with struggling nations that is unlike that of parent and child. If an adult child hurts others, what to do about it is out of the parents’ hands. The law takes over to protect innocent people. What a parent wants, or can do, becomes irrelevant.

Just as with grown children, when countries go on killing sprees, our effectiveness as an encouraging parent diminishes to zero. In those circumstances, called upon conscience and by others in the global community, we have to decide whether to step in as something like a world policeman or to look away. It is hard to intervene when a ruthless despot is murdering his citizens. It is hard not to.

How do we decide when to get involved? What spurs us to rush in in some cases and not others? Why the Balkans and not Rwanda? We have to ask ourselves how much suffering of others we can ignore, how much risk of war in foreign lands we can accept. These are the questions we are asking this morning as evidence mounts that Bashar al-Assad used chemical weapons to kill hundreds of innocent civilians, the latest of tens of thousands who have died in the last two years of Syrian civil war.

However we make that judgment--in Syria and other countries, perhaps even Egypt one day--if we do intervene we must remember why we are doing it. We must resist the temptation to play political missionary. That, at a minimum, is the lesson of Iraq and Afghanistan.

If, like some Old West sheriff, we take our gun down from over the mantel and step into the street to face a band of lawless killers, when the job is done, we need to put away our badge go back to acting like a worried parent: watching and hoping, but knowing that the internal affairs of other countries, like the lives of our grown children, are not ours to decide.

Helping Hands

My life of crime began when I was twelve. I was roaming around my suburban neighborhood with a BB gun when a police car passed by and then stopped, paused, and started backing up. I ditched my air gun in the weeds and did my best impression of a nonchalant walk. No sale. Dad had to come to the police station to retrieve my Daisy Red Ryder, and me. He’d delivered the baby of one of the policemen, so I dodged a BB, so to speak.

That was the first time he saved my bacon, but certainly not the last. I feared his interminable lectures, but nothing else. It was like being under the protection of the mob: there was a cost in terms of personal dignity, but no one outside the family could hurt me.

We weren’t rich. We were solidly middle class. Maybe upper middle class. Middle class had levels in those days. We had enough that Dad often delivered babies for country hams. He told those proud families who were down on their luck that he liked country ham better than money anyway.

I didn’t think our family was special. I thought anyone could be like us if he worked hard enough. I was a punk, but I worked hard. I had a newspaper route when I was eleven. My friend up the street had two. He was upwardly mobile.

Today, upward mobility has gone the way of my friend’s ducktail haircut. The middle class is, as President Obama puts it, being hollowed out. According to an Associated Press report last month, four out of five Americans live in danger of falling into poverty or joblessness. Four out of five! That’s not just bad for people who, no matter how hard they try, have little prospect of getting ahead, it’s bad for our nation’s long-term prosperity. The middle class buys the most stuff, and consumption is two-thirds of our economy.

My father died in 1974. I miss him, but by the time I lost him he’d picked me up and dusted me off often enough that I’d learned to stand on my own two feet. Looking back at that time, the early seventies, and the decades since, it seems to me that something besides my father died then too: the notion that the government could help us the way a parent does. The Great Society had been shelved. We’d come home from Vietnam with a national case of PTSD. Nixon’s secret tapes destroyed whatever remaining trust we had in government.

For a boy and for a nation, growing up is tough. When I think of all the twists and turns that led to the me I am now, all the one-on-one support I had, I realize how easily I could have failed. I see now that that my father’s steady belief in me, even at times when I did not believe in myself, was likely the most important gift of my birth.

But what about the millions among us who don’t have that support? Maybe they’re from broken homes, or from families in which both parents have to work all the time just to scrape by. Maybe they’re on the streets when they are eleven, but not to deliver newspapers. It’s unlikely that their father or mother delivered the child of the patrolman who busts them for doing what adolescents have been doing forever: testing the limits.

I had ups and downs, but I was shooting a BB gun, not a Glock; I was high on adrenaline, not crack; I had a paper route, not a drug route. If you’re in the wrong environment, not only is it easy to slip off track, it’s a long way down when you do.

We can’t bring back the post WW II manufacturing boom that created the middle class of my youth. We’re moving toward becoming principally a service economy. Instead of Detroit’s assembly lines and Pittsburgh’s steel mills, workers are needed now in the information economy, in health care, in technology, in distribution, in services for the aging population.

Government can’t be our parent, but it can help us in many of the same ways a good parent does. It can extend a hand to aid rather than punish. It can give kids a better start in life with good preschool and elementary and high school education. It can, as Attorney General Holder recommends, stop filling our prisons with minor offenders. It can retrain workers and give them the public transportation systems they need to get to their new jobs. It can give second chances.

We risk becoming a nation of two classes: those who are born into families that can support them, and those who are not. We don’t get to choose to whom we are born, but if we did is there any question which class you would want to be in? If you are one of the lucky ones, is the privilege and opportunity that comes with your accident of birth just your good luck, or does it carry with it some obligation to seek a way to help those who weren’t so lucky?

Many engage in private charity. They deserve our admiration and respect. But they are too few. Only through collective action, administered by local, state and federal governments--by our democratically elected representatives--can we extend our hands to the millions in need. We need to quit bitching about government and try to make it better. We need to quit talking about drowning it a bathtub and focus on making it a more responsive and efficient servant for our needs. Like a biological parent, government can be loutish, vain and wasteful, but for many, it’s the only dad they have.