Keeping Carter’s ideals alive
Today’s National Day of Mourning for Jimmy Carter has put me in a reflective mood. Eliza and I just happened to be watching television (Network TV! Unusual for us, which made it feel like a sign) when the news of Carter’s death came in an alert across the ABC screen. I was immediately flashed back to the experience of my mother’s tears when Hubert Humphrey died in the 70s. I absorbed her sorrow, which seemed then, and seems even more so now, to have been as much about an entire way of seeing the world as about a particular person. She was mourning the passing of an idea—that a democratically elected government could and should be called on to address the problems of our time and provide what people need to survive and thrive. Rose colored glasses, for sure—American imperialism, based in two centuries of brutal colonialism, chattel slavery, exploitation of natural resources were of course alive and well in those years, inflicted in the most immediate way not only on Southeast Asia but all of Latin America. But I have the same feeling now as I recall from then—that this death marked a turning point, away from a belief in “liberal” (now “progressive”) ideals, to a national ethos of completely cold-blooded, capitalist self-interest.
This is probably my earliest “political” memory: my 8-year-old eyes taking in the eulogies extolling Humphrey’s passion for civil rights, arms control, a nuclear test ban, and food stamps, and my mother’s tears about his passing. I understood it as a tragedy for what “could have been” in the United States—a government that could put higher ideals at its core, that could move toward what was right and just. My consciousness was really built during Reaganism and the cynical elevation of greed, racism, and consumerism that were the driving spirit of the awful 1980s. But my heart was forged in a more hopeful moment, by my mom. After all, her life’s work, the creation and leadership of our county’s WIC program, a supplemental food program for Women, Infants and Children, was (and is) taxpayer funded, embodying the idea that not only does government have a role to play in caring for the least among us, but that providing these services to this population was an outstanding investment in the future of our country, where the health and well-being of all members of society should be paramount.
Could this moment be similar for my children? The older, a toddler to whom I wrote a letter on the night of the first election of Barack Obama, extolling our collective effort to build a truly multi-racial democracy; the younger, who at two years old, when told we would be in Washington for the second Obama inauguration because of what the election of a Black person to this office represented for the country, stating with steady-eyed pride: “He is Black—and I am Black.” And now, here we are, weeping for the loss of a President who championed human rights, humanitarianism, personal commitment to housing the poor, fighting disease, teaching Sunday school and very personally waging peace—only to be ten days away from seating a would-be dictator who cares only for his own fame and wealth, alongside a party that has lost any shred of integrity that it ever once possessed.
Perhaps seeing these cycles play out should give me some hope—that around the corner of this authoritarian anti-democratic fear-mongering despot is a more idealistic future, where we realize the error of these ways of unregulated capitalism and cult of personality. But we are on the precipice of so many more crises now than then that I fear the corner will disappear before we reach it. I will try to hold on and steady to the ideals of Carter and our forebears. We need them more than ever.
