Opinion
When I was growing up, if anyone broke a glass in our house, my mother would carefully wrap the shards before she put them out for the trash collectors. “I don’t want them to cut their hands,” she would say. If you broke a glass, it was only fair that you made sure the sharp edges didn’t hurt anyone.
When I complained once about a lot of ads on a TV show we were watching, she told me I wasn’t being fair. “Advertisers pay for the show,” she said. “They have a right to be heard.”
Later, when she was living in an apartment building and on crutches, she delivered meals to the men and women working in the building at Christmas. It was only fair, she said, since they couldn’t be with their families.
In the ’90s contretemps that pitted Hillary Clinton against Monica Lewinsky, my mother chose both. She said they were both very smart and pretty and had a lot to offer. That was the fair way to look at it, she said. She also still had a soft spot for Bill.
My father was the same. When our neighbour in a Maryland beach town fell on hard times, my dad went down to the bank and co-signed the man’s mortgage – without saying a word to anyone. It was only fair. The neighbour not only repaid his debt; when my dad died, the man drove to D.C. and waited in a line for an hour in the freezing cold to get into the wake, so he could tell my mother what my dad had secretly done.
When the Ku Klux Klan burnt crosses on the lawn of other beach neighbours, the only Jewish family in town, my dad tracked down the local Klan leader and told him to back off, or else. My dad, a police detective, made sure the Klansman saw his service revolver on his waist.
When Dad was in charge of the US Senate’s security, he judged politicians not only on their ideology but also on how they treated people. Were they nasty to the elevator operators and Capitol Police officers and cafeteria workers? That wasn’t fair.
My parents did not think they behaved in an out-of-the-ordinary way. They considered fairness a very American trait, like their fierce patriotism. (Our clothes, napkins and candles always had to be red, white and blue on July 4.)
Because of my parents, I always thought of fairness as an American trait, as well. My dad was an Irish immigrant and my mother’s parents were Irish immigrants, and they built their working-class dream life here. America was fair to them, and they wanted to be fair to everyone else.
My family believed in government, for all its flaws, as a protector of the people. My first cousin Peggy Dowd was the secretary for Franklin D. Roosevelt’s aide Tommy Corcoran, a primary strategist of the New Deal. After 10 years of working together, they married and started a family. The social safety net created jobs for millions of people and helped pull the country out of the Great Depression. People treated public goods as public goods instead of money-making opportunities for the well-connected few.
For decades, until President Donald Trump, the government was trusted to protect food, water, the climate and the disadvantaged. It wasn’t about which party you were in. President Richard Nixon signed the National Environmental Policy Act and the Endangered Species Act into law. George H.W. Bush shepherded the Americans with Disabilities Act.
Of course, we have, at times, fallen spectacularly short of that ideal in our nation’s history, including the original sin of slavery, the Alien and Sedition Acts, segregation and the internment of Japanese American citizens during World War II. But I always thought that most Americans sought to be fair. The country was founded on that aspirational goal: All men are created equal.
Yet lately, so much seems unfair. The fatal shootings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti in Minneapolis. The Trump family’s kleptocracy and blatant grifting, reported so brilliantly by The New York Times′ Eric Lipton and a team of reporters in a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigation. The racism and antisemitism that have reared up in raw and ugly ways.
Jeff Bezos’ decimation of a legendary newspaper, The Washington Post, aiming to please a thin-skinned president, and David Ellison’s decimation of a legendary news division, at CBS, aiming to please a corrupt Federal Communications Commission chair who’s kissing the ring of a thin-skinned president who yearns to be king.
Trump and his congressional cronies cutting critical safety net programs and handing out big tax breaks to billionaire buddies. The gutting of the landmark Voting Rights Act and the wrongheaded view of the conservative Supreme Court majority that racism is over in America.
The obscene pay of CEOs, growing 20 times as fast as workers’ pay last year, and the obscene wealth in the tech world, with money cascading into the hands of greedy billionaires who lack empathy or even noblesse oblige. “The über-rich,” Rahm Emanuel told me, disgustedly. “I call it the ‘3-2-1.’ They’re going for the third house, the second wife and the first plane. They’re in a hermetically sealed world.”
Trump taking the country to war with Iran, in part at the urging of his pal Bibi — without any sensible plan, debate, sanction from Congress or consideration as to how this might hurt Americans already struggling to make ends meet.
Trump gleefully tearing up large chunks of the White House and my hometown, trying to install a solipsistic arch, an exclusive golf course, a gargantuan ballroom and a garden of heroes — all to his Versailles-on-acid specifications. He desecrated the Kennedy Centre, slapping his name on it and meddling with its artistic content, until a judge ordered his name stripped off. The president is ripping apart the scenes of my happiest childhood memories – the modest but beautiful White House, Jackie Kennedy’s gardens, the golf course at Hains Point where I used to go with my older brother.
The stunning failure of the hacks in government and the lords of the cloud to figure out how to safely regulate artificial intelligence and create a kill switch to save humanity, even as AI leaps forward into superintelligence, and sooner than we may think, consciousness.
I try to infuse my life with my parents’ sense of fairness. And I continue to believe – or hope – that most Americans are fair, despite the unholy din of social media malice and Trump nastiness, and despite all that’s stacked against us. It’s unfair to even have to wonder: are Americans still fair?
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
