this is the way prejudice ends (not with a bang but a whisper)

When our son Chris was born, Meg and I went into full nanny-search mode. We were both still practicing law. We needed help. We wanted nothing less than Mary Poppins. We lived in LA, so I don’t have to tell you that what we got was a succession of nannies who acted the part but reverted to narcissism as soon as the director left the set. Among others, there was the proper English nanny who took Chris to her apartment for trysts with her boyfriend and let him cry in his crib while she soaked in our jacuzzi tub. I learned all this from Sonia Aguilar.

Sonia and Chris (with his shoes)

Sonia was our housekeeper. She came in a few days a week and cleaned up and occasionally made dinner for us and left it in the oven. She is from El Salvador, and when we met, she didn’t speak English well (or thought she didn’t), which, coupled with her natural modesty, caused us to be slow to realize that she didn’t always have time to finish her cleaning because she was taking care of Chris while the nanny was doing god knows what. Eventually we figured it out and I asked my secretary, who spoke Spanish, to ask Sonia to be our nanny. Never mind the language barrier, she clearly loved our son. I learned to say “¿Dónde están tus zapatos,” which seemed to be the question she asked Chris the most.

The parents of my daughter-in-law Yvonne were born in Korea. She and Cord met at Penn and have two beautiful children, all the more beautiful because of their diverse parentage. There is something in my children that attracts them to Asians. Even when we lived in Nashville, Chris’s best friend was of Korean ancestry. After we got to Palo Alto, most of his friends, and a big chunk of Nick’s, were Asian: Indian, Chinese, Korean. This must explain why I like Jackie Chan movies.

Our next-door neighbor here was a man named Art Fong. Art was the number six engineer at Hewlett Packard. He and Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard all worked in one room then. When one of them had an engineering question, they called it out to the others. Art told me that in 1945, when he built his house, our street was the “Chinese neighborhood”--meaning Chinese could live there, as opposed to “Old Palo Alto,” where they were not welcome. Art used to come to parties at our house and hold forth on his engineering feats for Nick and his robotics pal Jon Xia. He kept them transfixed. The exclusion he had to deal with as a young man must have seemed to them as if it were from another era, not something that would have to be faced by a man whose patents at one time accounted for twenty-seven percent of HP’s revenue.

We had known some friends in Santa Barbara for five or six years before someone told me they were gay. Even though I have seen them with their partners now, they still don’t talk about it. They come from a time when that was the best approach. Nick has many gay friends from high school and college. No big deal. Meg and I see our writer friends who are gay all the time. The novelty is so long past that now, when I see the anger on the faces in the news of those who believe that homosexuality is a moral abomination, I wonder if I’m not looking back in time.

I think I am. Most of us can’t be around people and not develop empathy for them. Blacks, Hispanics, gays. It’s just a matter of exposure. It’s like getting inoculated against a disease. You have to be exposed to the virus. Maybe you feel a little queasy at first. But when you get over the initial symptoms, you begin to feel fine again. And best of all, after that you don’t get sick again.

Égalité

The law, in its majestic equality, forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread.

-- Anatole France (1844-1924)

The Supreme Court is struggling with Equal Protection again. One faction wants what is being called “formal”--I might say “literal”--equal protection of the laws, which means what it sounds like: no group can be singled out for better or worse treatment than another: black or white, straight or gay. The other faction urges a “dynamic” view of equality, under which in compelling circumstances a disadvantaged group can be given a leg up, even if that means discriminating against those who are not disadvantaged.

Adam Liptak reported in The New York Times on Sunday that the “formal equality” approach would likely produce good news for those seeking marriage equality and bad news for supporters of race-based affirmative action. As to affirmative action, we will have to wait for at least another year to see if that’s true, because the Court ducked today, sending the case before it back to the lower court to apply the review standard mandated by the high court ten years ago. This was a win--or at least not a loss--for fans of affirmative action.

For now, promoting student-body diversity continues to be a Constitutionally acceptable goal for a university. Important though this may be, it is a distant moral cousin to the lofty objective that gave birth to affirmative action generations ago: helping blacks recover from the privations of slavery and Jim Crow. No one even argues that notion to the Court anymore. As David Strauss, a University of Chicago law professor put it, blacks are now viewed by many as “just another interest group.” As a society we seem to be worn out with trying to atone for slavery.

Some believe that if schools want to help those in need they should focus on a more objective indicator of disadvantage: low income. Economic affirmative action, if you will, would indeed lift up many. Some would be black, some would be white. What troubles me is that I fear that many opponents of affirmative action don’t want it on any basis. They view it as just another government handout to people who are undeserving. In the case of college admissions, the kids are undeserving because they don’t have as good an academic record as those whose slots they are taking. If you apply that same logic to government assistance programs, the poor don’t deserve welfare because they are poor.

We are a proud and independent people. We like to stand on our own two feet. We think everyone should. I think it’s just hard for us to realize that not everyone can, that no matter how great their will, no matter how sterling their character, some people just don’t have the opportunity to achieve what others do. We are likely to help a stranger change a tire. We have empathy for his predicament. Abstract empathy is something of an oxymoron. Think of the politicians who have changed their minds on gay rights because a child has come out. Suddenly they understood. Suddenly they felt empathy. Not too many politicians have kids who are destitute, though.

I believe in self-reliance, but I don’t like to see us turn our backs on the poor. I don’t like to see Mitch McConnell oppose tax hikes to fund President Obama’s plan to provide high-quality preschool for poor children. I don’t like to see Sam Brownback, the governor of Kansas, work to scrap the state income tax and replace it with a sales tax, which by its nature hits the poor harder than the rich. And I really don’t like to see the governors of twenty five states, mostly Republican, refuse to expand Medicaid in the their states under the Affordable Care Act even though doing so would both save them money and provide health care for their poorest citizens.

Our hardened--or hard-hearted--self-styled fiscal conservatives have lost empathy. Cloistered in marble corridors and offices, they can no longer imagine the desperation and hopelessness of endemic poverty. I suppose it doesn’t help for me to use demeaning labels, any more than Mitt Romney’s “Entitled 47%” helped his cause. In this case, motives don’t matter. Without our help, the poor will remain poor. Their kids will be poor. The cycle will continue, and over the long term we will all bear the burden, moral and economic, of uneducated and unproductive citizens.

Hustlers

For many years I was a general contractor. Technically I was a corporate finance lawyer, but really I had more in common with the guy who does your home remodel than I did with Thurgood Marshall or David Boies. I met with businessmen who wanted to construct pleasure domes of commerce and convinced them that our law firm should be their builder, or, if that’s too grand a description of our role, at least their electrical contractor. I sent in a crew of young lawyers to do the work, and if the client got what they wanted--the legal equivalent of a seaside estate--in their moment of euphoria and gratitude I convinced them that our exorbitant fee was worth it.

There are hustlers everywhere. Everyone is suspicious of lawyers, but what about doctors? Not long ago most colonoscopies and other minor procedures were performed in doctors’ offices. Now many such procedures are performed in surgery centers at twice the cost to the patient. Surgery centers charge facilities fees that reap huge profits for their investors, which are often the doctors themselves. These doctors are hustling, leveraging their medical expertise and position as medical gatekeepers.

Hustlers are the heartbeat of capitalism. There would be no economic competition without them. Are they worth it? Is capitalism worth it? I think we’ve answered that last question with a resounding “yes” (see Berlin Wall, fall), so we’re stuck with, or depending on your perspective, blessed by, hustlers.

The guys selling snake oil from the back of a horse-drawn wagon were pulling the wool over our eyes. We’re smarter now. Mostly we know snake oil for what it is now. Still we get bamboozled. Bernie Madoff ran a huge con for decade. Greed still gets in the way of skepticism.

The key to keeping hustlers honest, and to keeping the hustler’s premium to a reasonable commission for organizing work, is what it has always been: information. The more we know about what is being done and who can do it, the better our choices will be. Unlike government regulation, information enhances competition rather than stifling it. Information lets other hustlers see where there are diseconomies in the marketplace that can be taken take advantage of. The result is usually good for the consumer: better products or services at lower prices.

Amazon is democratizing commerce. Legalforce wants to do the same for much common legal work. Wevorce for divorce. Angie’s List and Yelp are arming consumers with expert reviews of service providers of all kinds. Hustlers are now making a business out reengineering the delivery of heretofore exotic services, like trademark filings and divorces, and of educating consumers about which plumber or electrician to choose.

Then there are Google and Facebook. Can you think of two companies that have had a greater impact on our ability to get and propagate information? With Google you can find out anything. With Facebook you can tell the world about it. You can start revolutions. And yet those amazing services are free. Really, if you step back and think about it, it’s mind-boggling. Something so valuable--unlimited information and communication--for free.

In exchange for the gifts of the Internet, we are giving up some privacy. There may come a time when the cost of that will be considered too high. For now, though, from my point of view we seem to have entered a kind of capitalist paradise in which the hustlers may save us from the hustlers.

General Dad (Ret.)

It starts innocently, virtuously. “Don’t go near the street, sweetie.” Then, later, from where you watch beneath a big magnolia tree, “Don’t put your weight on the small branches. They won’t hold you.” I suppose from the way that one grinned down at me when I said that--Sorry, old boy, I don’t think you can reach me up here--I should have known my days of being in charge were numbered.

Still, I tried to keep up. I was protector-in-chief. It was a full time job. I wasn’t comfortable outsourcing it, especially to my charges. As they got older and more aggressively resisted my sage counsel, I became more insistent. One of Grant’s friends called me “The General.” I took it as a compliment.

At some point, I may have lost sight of the strategic objective and focused too obsessively on tactical victories. You can’t keep children safe, after all, if they don’t do what you tell them to (or do what you tell them not to). Obedience becomes the key. Generals must be obeyed. Everyone knows that.

Now they are all off at foreign postings: jobs, marriages, a last year in college. I don’t get to tell them what to do. When I try, they stop calling. The funny thing is—and this surprises me about myself—I’ve stopped (almost) wanting to. Maybe this is because I am so proud of the wisdom they have gained, of the smart choices I see them making. There is some of that, certainly. But something more is at play here, something I don’t quite understand.

My uncle used to tell the story about coming home drunk one night and, as he slipped in the front door, being greeted by his father’s fist. He said the next thing he knew he was looking up from floor at his father’s bathrobe fluttering down the hall. Later, when I was bumping along in my early twenties, I used to try to get advice from that same man, my grandfather. I could hardly pry it out of him. He was one of the smartest men I knew. He would have had great advice. He gave me twenty bucks for no reason now and then. I guess he figured that was what he had that I might actually find useful.

Maybe my grandfather felt guilty about decking his son. Maybe he was just tired of young men not listening to him. Maybe that’s what’s happened to me. I do feel guilty about all the too-harsh things I ever did to my children. It does get frustrating when they do something I think will be bad for them. But I don’t push them much anymore. It’s a nice change, one that is good for me and—although it's hard to believe that anyone could be better off without my advice—them.

My children are my friends now. I don’t tell my friends what to do. I listen to them. If they ask what I think, I tell them, but cautiously, guardedly. It’s almost like I’ve become afraid to influence them. They have to live with their choices, so they have to make them. What might be good for me, might not be best for them.

I wonder what that boyhood friend of Grant’s would think of me now. I imagine he would shake his head at my new-found reticence and pat me on the head they way one does an old dog with no teeth. He and Grant might sit out on the porch talking about old times while I nap in the sun, whimpering and kicking my legs as I dream of children I have chased.

The Outsider

There is a village beside a river. The people came on the river and settled near where it emptied into the sea, where its delta made the soil rich. They were hearty, independent people who had families and farmed the fertile land. They shared a way of looking at life and their place in it. They worshiped the same god. They stayed to themselves, mostly, but if they saw someone on the road who needed help, they stopped and helped him. Their farms prospered and grew too large for the families to farm alone. Word spread that there was work in the fields and people came from other places and built shacks on the outskirts of town and hired on to plow and plant and bring in the harvest.

No one could remember a drought like the one that came. The river dried up to a trickle. The crops died. Families hunkered down and did the best they could. They planted small vegetable gardens and hunted game. Some moved away, but most had never known anywhere but the village. They stayed and prayed. The hired hands who lived on the edge of town had no work. The landowners would see the workers’ children outside their shanties, dirty and malnourished, and they felt bad for them. They wanted to help, and some did, but most weren’t sure they had enough for their own families. They avoided the shantytown and tried not to think about the suffering of the people they felt powerless to help.

One day a man from far away came to the village. He offered to help the poor families in the shanties. He could give them enough to keep them from dying. He offered little to the other villagers because they were not the ones with the greatest need, and he had no more to give. They would be okay, he said. The rains would return one day. He asked the people who were not starving to set up places where the poor could be helped. He said he would pay for almost all the cost of the places. He said the people who had been helping the poor for free would not have to do that anymore, so there would be that benefit to those of the village who were better off.

The leaders of the village did not like the man. They did not trust him. They thought he was there to influence the way they did things. They thought he would try to replace them as leaders. They told him they did not want his help. They told the people they should not trust him. They said he would undermine their way of life. They said he would take their money and give it to people who were too lazy to work.

“He’s not like us,” they said. “He does not worship our god. He wants us to be dependent on him. And when we are, he will take away our freedoms. It is better to let those in the shantytown die than to become his vassals. We did not ask them to come here. They can go back to where they came from. They are not our responsibility. Their deaths will not be on our heads. We must not give up our way of life for them.”

It rained a few days ago, but the river is still very low. The people are afraid it may never be the same again. They have come to blame the outsider for what is happening to them. They have told him he is not welcome in the village, and the children in the shantytown are dying.

Self Defense

Every time the happiness or safety of one of my children was threatened, I felt a rush of adrenaline that drove me to protect them. I kept an eye on the suspicious-looking guy at the toddler playground. “Excuse me, mister, what are you doing here?”

Identifying threats is critical to survival. The quicker the better. In the wild, a split second can make the difference between living and dying. Our need to assess threats and react to them is deep in our base brains. It’s as much an instinct as the urge for food and sex. We act without thinking.

When we feel threatened and can’t identify the source of the threat, we become agitated. We feel defenseless, vulnerable. The resulting anxiety, which sometimes seems intolerable, can be ameliorated only by identifying the threat so we can plan our defense. No serious threat exists for long without our finding, or imagining, the source of it.

After the Boston bombing some rushed to the judgment that the bombers were Chechen Muslim terrorists. Even a few U.S. Senators, ostensible defenders of our Constitution, recommended that the surviving bomber, a nineteen-year-old U.S. citizen, be held as an enemy combatant and tried by the military rather than the courts.

The breathless panic of those Senators was not that surprising. We need to know this about ourselves. We need to know that we are afraid. We need to know that being afraid makes us lash out to try to protect ourselves. We need to know that sometimes, because of other instincts that are also deep within us, we lash out at the wrong people.

When we lived in tribes, the tribe next door was frequently a threat. So we learned to fear the other, the foreigner. Xenophobia sounds like an irrational psychological state, but it is deep in our psyches. We are programmed to fear foreigners. We need to know that about ourselves too.

I’m not saying we should be naïve. I don’t recommend we whistle while walking down dark alleys late at night. I’m not suggesting there are not plenty of people in the world who would hurt us if they could. What I am suggesting is that we aren’t helping ourselves by generalizing from isolated examples of legitimate threats. Not all black men in hoodies mean you harm. Nor all women in hijabs.

The world is chaotic. Many of us are confused. Some of us are unbalanced. A Christian zealot who murders an abortion doctor may say, may even believe, he is acting out of religious conviction, but is he? Or is he just crazy? I ask the same question about the Taliban. How sane are you if you are willing to strap on a suicide vest? We can blame zealotry on religion or nationalism, but perhaps the blame lies within us.

Perhaps it lies within our need to blame others for our misfortune. I’m not sure of evolutionary roots of that particular trait--it may be simply another form of identifying threat--but it has produced many a martyr willing to die for the sins visited upon his people by the godless abortionist or the imperialist aggressor. The storm grows as blame begets blame.

Perhaps, instead of responding defensively, we should try to understand why others want to harm us, why they blame us for their troubles. “They hate our freedoms,” a Fox talking head said after the Boston bombings. “They hate our way of life.”

Somehow I doubt that. They may be jealous, but if they hate us it is probably because of something they think we are doing to them, or about to do to them, as opposed to the way we are living among ourselves. Nations have been exporting their cultures for millennia. The most common method of export has been conquest. No wonder we are suspicious of each other’s motives and pieties.

Religion plays into this suspicion, of course. Heretics and infidels are to be despised. How else can the clerics retain control over their flocks? I would be fine with doing away with all religion, but I don’t think that’s going to happen any time soon. There is no doubt yet another evolutionary imperative behind its longevity. If we can’t get rid of it, perhaps we should try harder to understand it, or at least just to agree to disagree, peacefully, and see how we all end up in the end.

One reason it is hard to ignore some religions, to just let them alone to be however they want to be, is because they are abusive, especially to women. Westerners are justifiably sanctimonious about how enlightened they are on this front compared to the teachings of, say, Sharia law. No one with a developed intellect and conscience thinks women should be treated differently than men, but they always have been. Parts of the world are just farther along the cultural evolutionary curve than others.

Does that give us a right to feel superior, to condemn the heathens? In a way, yes. But in another way, most of us cannot claim to have been the authors of our better mores. It is not just scientists like Newton but whole societies that stand on the shoulders of those who came before. Are we, by virtue of time and place of birth, innately more virtuous that those born in societies that have not so advanced? Are they to be ridiculed? Subdued? Conquered? They are nothing more than a look back at ourselves. The answer to how we should treat them lies in how we, in their shoes, would want to be treated ourselves.

A hand reached out in understanding might be bitten. It might be blown off. But it might be taken. And another hand taken. There’s a nice version of the song “None of Us Are Free” that has an improvised line that puts it well: “The only chain a man can stand is the chain of hand on hand.”

Old Friends, Young Me

Frank is still the same: charming, witty, self-effacing. Roger is dead. What a shock that was. Roger was the folk-guitar player with blond good looks who got all the girls (especially the ones I wanted). I hope it won’t sound too insensitive, especially since I have been looking for him for twenty years to catch up, to say how disappointed I am that I will not now be able to see if Roger had gotten fat and bald.

Joe is still the same too. But then I knew that. I’ve kept up with Joe over the years. He’s a mirror of me, or maybe I should say a mirror to me. It’s the ones I haven’t seen since I was eighteen or twenty who fascinate me. What would they think of me now? What would I think of them?

I’m not sure I want to know the answers to those questions. I have a big high-school class reunion coming up. I’m not going. I have a conflict, and it’s a long way to travel. Even if I could go, though, I’m not sure I would.

My reluctance is something of a mystery to me. I’m dying to know about my classmates. I really did look for Roger on and off for twenty years. No one knew where he was. Live fast, love hard, disappear young; that’s how legends are made. I’d been looking for Frank too, in the same casual way our relationship blossomed when we went off to college together and wandered down similar dark corridors from which it took each of us a while to find our way back.

I had better luck finding Frank than Roger. Frank and I have been trading emails for the last two days, long chatty missives, onions peeling. It’s hard to say how much joy those emails have brought me. I wanted to know about his life. He told me. I told him what I was doing. But for me it wasn’t really about the facts, it was about the subtext: I miss you, man. I miss those days. I miss us.

We knew each other when we were uncertain and full of hope. We watched each other form, like glittering crystals in a clear liquid that the moment before could have flowed in any direction. We could see that crystallization in each other better than we could see it in ourselves. We could see the beauty in each other before we could see it in ourselves.

In one of his emails, Frank reminded me that he was a strong young man. He knows this because late one night he hoisted me over his shoulder and carried me up three flights of stairs in our freshman dorm. I don’t remember the specific circumstances that called forth that heroic feat, but I can imagine them. Frank taught me that A-1 sauce tastes great on French fries.

If I went back to our class reunion, Frank might be there. Other friends would certainly be there. It would be nice to see them, to have a drink with them, clap each other on the back, kid around, but somehow I think it would not be as nice as those emails.

In his written words I can hear the Frank who went off to college with me. I can see him sitting across a plate of soggy French fries, bobbing his head the way he used to do, regaling me, as he would put it, with some hilarious story or another, usually at his own expense. And on the other side of that table, I can feel myself sitting there. I can feel my anticipation as he speaks. I can feel my own conversational gears whirring. It is dim in that room over that plate of fries, but we are bright with the life in us. Our futures are before us. We know that, even if we don’t know precisely what that means.

I love that illusion. I’m not sure I want to give it up for ten minutes at a cocktail party where everyone is trying to cram their longing into the same tiny space. If Frank and I can’t be in each other’s lives---and we live too far apart for that---I want to be who we were. Besides, I’m sure he couldn’t carry me up three flights of stairs anymore.

We are not who we were when we were eighteen, but the ways in which we shaped one another live on in each of us. That’s something like immortality.

The Long March

Continuing my practice of being the last in the land to see certain movies, I’ve just watched “Lincoln.” I put off seeing it because I thought it would be depressing—millions of dead boys, one dead president. It wasn’t what I expected.

For me, perhaps because I am trained as a lawyer and still love legal analysis, it was a lawyer's movie, a forceful argument for how the law moves forward, for how civil society (which depends on the rule of law) progresses. The process is messy, corrupt, virtuous, agonizing and, in the case of the Thirteenth Amendment, triumphal.

We don’t suppose that politics today is as rough and tumble as when Lincoln used his war powers to confiscate Southern slaves and free them and then bought the last few votes needed in the House of Representatives to codify their freedom before, as he feared might happen, the war ended and the judicial branch set aside his Emancipation Proclamation. We don’t suppose Congressmen today want other men to remain in bondage. We take for granted two things many of them (perhaps most of them) feared: suffrage for blacks and women. We are more civilized now.

Perhaps.

We are not at war, literally, among ourselves. There is that. But the hostility and contempt endure. We are godless socialists to our political rivals or, from the other point of view, sanctimonious plutocrats. Congress is as contentious and corrupt as ever. The Tea Party wants everyone’s head. There hasn’t been an actual political duel in a while, but I’m sure Mitch McConnell would pull out a flintlock pistol if he could; he probably has one in a trophy case at home. Rand Paul would be happy for everyone in government to just go home.

I get discouraged by the state of politics today. Apparently I need not. If we can survive what Lincoln went through, what he died for, we can survive the current siege of hypocritical filibusters. We can survive the current Court’s interpretation of the Second Amendment. We can survive the fiscal imprudence of our big-hearted attempt to give the least among us the dignity of subsistence income, health care and education.

We are not all created equal. Some are born rich, others poor, some healthy, others disabled. Don’t even get me started on athletic ability and musical talent. What we mean, I think, by that wishful sentiment, is that it must not be the place of government to prefer some of us over others, to give advantage to some and impediment to others.

We have not yet achieved the lofty goal of equality, but we get closer with every generation. Like Lincoln’s push for the Thirteenth Amendment, our progress wends its tedious and frightful way around sinkholes of corruption and over barricades of privilege. We press on. We cannot see what lies ahead, as Lincoln reminded us, but we must go forward as best we can. We must gain what ground we may today, remembering who we are and what others before us have sacrificed so that we may have our chance to do better for one another.

Backs to the Wall

I’m in Cambridge, MA, sitting in a coffee shop at table near a window. I’m facing the window, with my back to the crowd, because the bench on the other side of the table is too low for typing. Almost involuntarily, my chair is migrating, inching around the table until, at last, I am on one side of the table, with my side to the crowd. From there, I can see everyone in my peripheral vision. That’s good enough. I stop fidgeting, mentally and physically, enough to write this piece.

For as long as I can remember, in any room, in any situation, if at all possible I sit with my back to the wall. I don’t like to hang out where I can’t see who might be coming at me. It’s as reflexive as smiling at cute children or avoiding groups of loitering men on dark nights.

At lunch yesterday, a good friend of Meg’s, Jenn DuChene, who runs a preschool in New Hampshire for four and five year olds, told stories about her children that reminded me that I’ve probably always had these instincts. She said that with the boys every stick on the playground is a weapon (for play). The boys can be kind and nurturing, too, she said, but competition is their default mode.

Jenn’s boys make me think of Kim Jong Un of North Korea, who is, in many ways, still a boy himself. He’s got his rocket stick and he’s waving it around. It doesn’t seem like he is playing. Darwin is whispering to him, and no one has taught him to control his atavistic instincts. He needs a little time in Jenn’s class to learn to play well with others.

He’s not going to get that, at least not from his sycophantic countrymen. I don’t know if the U.S., or even China, can give him a time out to make him think twice about his bullying. We’ll see.

Personally, I’ve been thinking lately, as Kim ratchets up his bellicose rhetoric and positions his missiles, that we ought to just whack the idiot. Why wait around for him to carry out his insane threats? I guess we don’t want to be the ones to start a nuclear war on the Korean peninsula. But still, it does make me wonder how much threat a civilized world ought to have to accept before it acts preemptively. Look where appeasement got us with Hitler. Bullies seem to need to test limits, to see just how weak others are, how much lunch money or land they can take before they are punished.

Is Kim just acting out un-socialized instincts? Is he a sad little man who needs a hug? Maybe. But when he’s wielding bombs, hugs are hard to give. What do we do now?

Jenn probably knows the answer. Or Debbie Roth (the female Mr. Rogers who was Chris’s and Nick’s kindergarten teacher). Or my sister, Elizabeth Page, who ran a preschool for poor children in D.C. for many years. They spend their days helping boys learn to manage their aggressiveness. Our prisons are full of young men who didn’t have their gentle emotional shaping. Nations are rocked by the violence of men who never had their guidance.

I don’t know what to do about Kim Jong Un, but I do know this: we need more Jenns and Debbies and Elizabeths in our children’s lives. Without them, we would all be spending a lot more time with our backs to the wall.