Doing the Right Thing

As I wrote last week, Thanksgiving is my favorite American holiday…and precisely because it is rooted in a notion of peaceful coexistence between settlers and natives in this place that, if not quite historical, still means that—even at the very beginning of European settlement in North America—at least some of the settlers had in their hearts the notion of living side by side with the indigenes and together forging a new destiny in what was for some a new place and others, a very old one.

Needless to say, that’s not what happened. Slowly but surely, it became clear that there was not going to be any real partnership with the native peoples of North America. Of this tragic part of our American reality, there are a million examples. But none is as horrific as the forced removal of Indians from lands in Georgia, Florida, and other southeastern states they had tilled and occupied since time immemorial so that white people could settle on that land in those places and make believe they owned the property their own government had basically stolen from its actual owners. It is, to say the least, a depressing, shameful part of our past.

Some of my readers may remember my story, published a few years ago as part of our lead-up to the High Holidays, called “To Speak the Truth.” (That story later became the title story in my collection of short stories called To Speak the Truth: Stories 2011-2021. To buy the book, click here.) It concerned a rabbi, Aaron Klass, who, on one Shabbat afternoon read the letter written by Ralph Waldo Emerson to President Martin Van Buren in response to the administration’s decision forcibly to remove the native peoples of the Southeastern States, most of whom lived in Georgia, from their homes and their lands and to march them on foot to what is now the State of Oklahoma. The numbers were staggering: upwards of 16,000 people from a number of different tribes were uprooted from something like 25 million acres of property, then subsequent forced to march carrying their possessions in their arms across over 1000 miles of mostly hostile terrain to their new “home.” Most were barefoot. Thousands died along the way of malnutrition, exposure to the cold, and disease. Rabbi Klass, seeing the disaster about to befall the native peoples of the Southeast, decides to act and publicly to confront the general sent to organize the expulsion. He does that successfully, then ends up in jail for his efforts and is subsequently put on trial. That trial is the centerpiece of my story and I hope you all enjoyed or will enjoy reading about it.

At the center of the trial, however, is the question of a single treaty, the Treaty of New Echota, signed in New Echota, Georgia, on December 19, 1835, by officials of the federal government and a small group of Cherokees who claimed to represent their entire tribe, which they clearly did not. The treaty was not signed by the Cherokees’ chief, John Ross. It was not approved by the Cherokee National Council. But for the Van Buren administration an Indian was an Indian and the fact that it was signed by a group of actual Cherokees was more than good enough. Chief Ross and the Cherokee National Council implored the Senate not to ratify the treaty, since it had not been negotiated with the legal representatives of the tribe. No one cared and the treaty was ratified in the Senate in March of 1835 by a majority of one single vote. The Cherokees produced a petition signed by more than 16,000, nearly as many Cherokee as lived in the State of Georgia, but Congress was not impressed. And because no one cared about anything except making it “feel” legal to expel these poor people from their land, the forced expulsion of the Cherokees westward along what came to be known as the Trail of Tears began almost immediately. More than 4000 people died on the trail. To say this was not our nation’s finest hour is really to say the very least.

To readers who want to know more about this whole horrific story, I can recommend three books I read as I prepared to write my story: The Cherokee Nation and the Trail of Tears by Theda Perdue and Michael D. Green; The Trail of Tears: The Rise and Fall of the Cherokee Nation by John Ehle; and The Trail of Tears: The Story of the American Indian Removal 1813–1855 by Gloria Jahoda.

For Jewish Americans, this nightmarish story will be resonant in almost too many different ways to count. People dragged from their homes in the middle of the night. Property owned for generations nationalized and seized without being purchased even fraudulently. The rule of law applied only to other people and not to oppressed people the most in need of its protection. Internment in camps thousands of miles away from home with the openly expressed expectation that most of the people sent there would not survive. And, of course, the death marches themselves. I personally knew and know people who were sent on the infamous death marches from Auschwitz west as the Red Army approached the camp in 1945. The terrible irony—if that is the right word—of people who somehow survived in Auschwitz dying on a journey away from the camp just weeks before the war would end is unbearable. And yet the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum estimates that as many as 15,000 prisoners died on those marches. So for me to read about the Trail of Tears and not be fully identified with the misery, the degradation, and the humiliation of the Cherokees would not be possible. Nor should it be for any decent person at all, Jewish or not.

And now the Treaty of New Echota is back in the news. Who ever heard of it? Who has read it through in the last 180 years? The Cherokees themselves, that’s who! And buried deep in its impenetrable legalese prose (click here to read if you’re curious what I mean) is the detail that that Cherokees, supposing any survived, were henceforth to be entitled “to a delegate in the House of Representatives of the United States whenever Congress shall make provision for same.”  And when exactly did Congress make provision for the fulfillment of that clause of the treaty? Never is when! Assuming correctly that no one would care (or at least that no one who voted in national elections would care), they simply ignored their own freely-undertaken obligation. (Native Indians were not even considered American citizens until the passage of the Indian Citizenship Act of 1924. And even then it was left to individual states to grant Indian citizens the right to vote. Native Americans could only vote in all fifty states as of 1962, when Utah became the last state in the union to enfranchise them.)

And now the Cherokee are back in the news. A major effort has been undertaken to grant Kim Teehee, a Cherokee Nation official, a non-voting seat in the House of Representatives. (The “non-voting” part also rankles. But at least native Americans are represented by the congresspeople and senators who represent the states in which they live.) Lots of people are in favor. But there are also those opposed, mostly on the grounds that seating a Cherokee representative would open the door to other tribes asking for similar treatment because the federal government signed similar treaties with their ancestors. (The Treaty of Dancing Rabbit Creek that the federal government signed with the Choctaw Nation in 1830 would be a good example of a similar treaty featuring a similar promise of representation in the halls of government. And there are others too.)

Refusing to seat Ms. Teehee would be a truly grotesque repudiation of the most basic American values. Our government, eager to exile the Cherokees and trying to dress up their barbarism as “normal” treaty-making, granted the Cherokee the right to send a representative to Congress. We are almost 200 years too late to debate if that was a good idea or not. Nor should it matter if the government made other, similar commitments to other tribes or native nations. At the end of the day, we are either a nation that lives under the law or we are merely acting the part without truly meaning it. In the theater, no one expects the actor playing Hamlet really to think that he’s a Danish prince. But in the real world, we Americans are not supposed to be playing the role of honorable people on the global stage, but actually to be honorable. And just. We’re coming up on two centuries too late to be prompt. But we can still do the right thing. 

Thanksgiving 2022

In the weeks leading up to Thanksgiving, I often encourage people to spend time cultivating in advance a sense of gratitude for all we have. But it suddenly strikes me that I’ve rarely suggested how precisely to go about doing that. Thankfulness is, after all, an emotion that comes naturally to almost no one: we human beings seem more or less hardwired to feel that the good in our lives is constituted of boons that were coming to us all along and that we are therefore more than justified in being fully outraged when things don’t work out precisely as we had hoped they would. There was a time when I thought that the kind of worldview grew out of an unhealthy level of self-absorption. But as I’ve grown older I’ve come to see that kind of thinking as natural to the human condition. We are by nature greedy, selfish things, we human beings. As a result, I’ve come to admire all the more intently those among us who can summon up from deep within a sense of true gratefulness for the good that has somehow devolved upon them without them having earned it in advance with good deeds and noble behavior. Like everybody else in the world, I like to think of myself as a good person. But did I really earn personally the bounty of the world that I plan to enjoy at my Thanksgiving table? Really? And how exactly did I do that?

And that set of dour questions leads me to the question I’d like to write about this week: how can people go about cultivating the sense of gratitude that rests at the heart of everybody’s favorite holiday…or that should rest there? I imagine there could be many different ways to answer that question, but the one that strikes me as the most doable has to do with a different quality entirely, also one mostly in short supply in the world: humility.

If there’s anything we human beings are less naturally than grateful, it would have to be humble. (Can you imagine a politician standing up to say, “I haven’t really earned your trust or your confidence…but vote for me anyway and I’ll do my best”?) And yet humility—the all-too-rare quality of declining ever to overestimate your own virtue—actually can be cultivated. And, once cultivated, it can lead directly to the sense of gratitude that can transform Thanksgiving from a huge party “about” turkey and football into something “about” true moral growth and development.

For better or worse, the path towards humility leads through certain highly unpalatable truths.

We are tiny creatures living on a tiny rock. Yes, the world feels like a vast place most of the time to me too. I heard an interview the other day with a fellow who had managed to visit every single country in the world and then wrote a book about it. He was being celebrated precisely because that really is an impressive achievement to have managed, but the sun is a million times larger than the earth. And the Milky War is about 1.5 trillion times the size of the sun. On the other hand, the largest known galaxy (rather prosaically called IC 1101) is forty times larger than the Milky War and contains roughly 100 trillion stars to the Milky Way’s paltry 400 billion. So, yes, it’s impressive to have visited all 195 countries in the world. Imagine having been to Norway and Nauru and Kyrgyzstan! But the greater truth is that we human beings are minuscule things living on a tiny rock in a sea of uncharted nothingness so vast that even trained mathematicians can hardly fathom its size other than theoretically. Are you feeling humble yet?

And yet, tiny and ultimately inconsequential though we may be, we have nonetheless created a world that vaunts creativity and originality, that awards prizes to great authors and artists, and that has created complex systems to foster spiritual growth. In the worst science fiction movies (the only kind I actually like), the aliens are always bullies who have no respect for our puny earthling brains or accomplishments. But the fact that we, in our infinitesimally teensy patch of the universe, have created enduring works of art and literature, and of science. So the idea is to take pride in what we have accomplished on this planet without losing track of the fact that the Solar System alone, our space-neighborhood, is itself a cool 36 billion times larger than Earth. And our Solar System is about one one-hundred-and-sixty millionth the size of our galaxy.

We’re also newcomers. The span of recorded history—starting with the oldest Sumerian texts—is about five thousand years. But those five millennia constitute somewhere between a fortieth and a single sixtieth of the time Homo sapiens have actually been wandering around the planet. But Homo sapiens—ourselves—are only part of the story: the first human beings are thought to have appeared somewhere between two and six million years ago. But that figure too pales in comparison with the age of the planet itself, estimated by most scientists to be a cool 4.5 billion years old. So recorded human history would be one single nine-hundred-thousandth of the history of the planet. (That means that if you divided the history of the planet into nine hundred thousand parts, human recorded history would occupy one single one of them. Are you feeling it yet?)

I’m often asked how I, a rabbi who has devoted his entire professional life, to the exegesis of Scripture and the propagation of a Bible-based religion, can take these kinds of statistics seriously. Don’t I believe that the world is precisely 5783 years old? Doesn’t the Bible teach that the first humanoids were a fully human Adam and Eve? Isn’t that what the Bible says? First of all, that isn’t exactly what the Bible teaches. But that’s not the real point, which is that Scripture is the foundation stone upon which our spiritual lives rest but not the completed edifice in which we dwell. The challenge, therefore, is to build that edifice on truths we can embrace, not to allow our beliefs to usher us into a kind of loony-tunes world in which we feel noble and good about insisting that every sober scientist in the world is wrong and only we are right. Instead, the challenge is much, much greater. And that challenge is to learn from all about the nature of things, and then to build upon the foundations of our ancient faith a temple in which people possessed of true spiritual integrity can worship without embracing falsehood or fantasy. So I have no trouble embracing science and its lessons. And that is particularly true when that specific act leads not to the ruination of faith but to the perfection of the spirit.

The numbers mentioned above humble me. We feel so important, all of us. And, because we move so effortlessly from self-importance to self-aggrandizement to self-absorption, finding in science the road forward towards the kind of humility that can lead to true gratitude to God for the gifts we enjoy in our lives can be precisely the first step on the journey to humility and then, finally, to true gratitude to God for our lives and all that we possess.

At our Thanksgiving table, we always start dinner by asking the assembled to say in just a few words what they are truly thankful for this year. Some answer jokingly. Others amusingly pretend not to have understood what I meant by “a few words.” Still others offer up what they think is the expected answer. But now and then someone speaks truly from the heart and expresses the essential idea of the holiday: that to be truly at peace with and in the world, you have to feel both humble and grateful, the former because you acknowledge God as the source of good in the world and the latter because you truly do know how little of God’s munificence you have personally earned through the actual sweat of your actual brow.

I wish you all a very happy Thanksgiving. We’re having mostly family, some friends…a huge turkey, the usual trimmings. And I plan to spend the day thinking about my physical place in our gigantic universe and the brevity of my days set into the vastness of history…and I hope to come out at the other end possessed of the simplest and most complex of all emotions: gratitude born of humility. We’ll see how well I do!

Anti-Semitism in the World

I suppose I probably shouldn’t admit this, but I hadn’t ever heard of Kyrie Irving until last week when he suddenly became famous even to people who don’t follow basketball by encouraging his 17.5 million Instagram and 4.5 million Twitter followers to take seriously a movie called Hebrews to Negroes: Wake Up Black America that, among other things, promotes the theory that Black people were the original Hebrews, that Jews worship Satan, and that the Holocaust didn’t actually happen. This was not well received by the Nets, Irving’s NBA team, which suspended him for five games to punish him for his bigotry. That didn’t strike me as such a serious punishment, but it was apparently enough to prompt an apology in which Irving acknowledged that the movie he was promoting “contained some false anti-Semitic statements, narrative, and language that were untrue and offensive to the Jewish Race/Religion” and in which he accepted “full accountability and responsibility for his actions.” On the other hand, the movie itself is now a bestseller on amazon.com. (Click here for details.)

Still, the Irving story has at least a kind of a good ending: a bad statement followed by contrition, apology, and an public acceptance of responsibility. But coming on the heels of a similar incident regarding Kanye West, whom I actually had heard of, the security that I’ve always felt as an American Jewish person suddenly felt just slightly compromised. (Kanye West, now called Ye, has embraced many different loony-tunes theories about the world, including some promoting the notion that Black people are the “real” Jews and the old canard about, and I quote, the “Jewish underground media mafia” that enslaves Black performers. He’s also occasionally spoken positively about Adolph Hitler.) Because of his remarks, his various commercial relationships with huge companies like Adidas, Vogue, and the Gap have been terminated. (An article in Forbes reported that these losses have reduced his personal wealth to a mere $400 million. That poor man!) West—Ye—is a complex, troubled personality, but his reach too is immense: he has 18.1 million followers on Instagram, 31.4 million on Twitter, 1.3 million on TikTok, 8.69 million subscribers to his YouTube channel, and 345,000 followers on Facebook. So to wave him away as a disturbed person with crazy ideas is seriously to underestimate the damage such a person can do. Oh, and he also threatened personally to go “death con 3 on Jewish people,” presumably a way of saying he is preparing actually to start murdering Jews. (Click here to read a deft deconstruction of the phrase “death con 3” by Philissa Cramer and Ron Kampeas that was published last week on the Times of Israel website.)

Suddenly, the topic feels almost ubiquitous. Two different Broadway shows, Tom Stoppard’s play Leopoldstadt, and Alfred Uhry and Jason Robert Brown’s musical, Parade, are both formally and forcefully about anti-Semitism and the violence it breeds. (Leopoldstadt is basically a Shoah story set in Vienna; Parade is about the 1915 lynching of Leo Frank in Marietta, Georgia, a suburb of Atlanta.)  The fourth anniversary of the Pittsburgh massacre last week inspired even more public rumination about the topic, as did also a whole series of on-line stories about the resurgence of anti-Semitism here and abroad, of which the essay on the Algemeiner website published this week entitled, “London Jews Facing Spree of Anti-Semitic Attacks,” was just one among many. (Click here to read it.) As a sign of just how much press coverage these various incidents have generated, former President Obama chose to address the topic head-on in a campaign sweep through Pennsylvania last weekend on behalf of Josh Shapiro (who will now become that state’s governor) and John Fetterman (who also won and will now become one of Pennsylvania’s senators).

For actual Jewish people, the challenge is always to find the precise line between underreacting and overreacting. This is not as easy as it sounds. That there are people who harbor deep-seated bigoted opinions about Jewish people will come as a surprise to no one who lives in the world and least of all to actual Jewish people. Nor have we come to expect the world to isolate or, to use my least favorite word, “cancel” people who express anti-Semitic opinions out loud. (Alice Walker, author of The Color Purple, has openly expressed overtly anti-Semitic opinions for years and has, as far as I can see, suffered no consequences at all. For more on the topic, click here. Nor have they stopped teaching T.S. Eliot’s poetry in American high schools. Or Ezra Pound’s.) As a result, we have learned to tolerate a level of public abuse that other minorities would never accept. But even that principled stoicism is difficult to evaluate: are we merely accepting things as they are and making a conscious choice not to whine about it or are we more accurately mimicking the Jews of Weimar Germany who too felt virtuous ignoring the rising tide of anti-Semitism in their country until that very tide overwhelmed them utterly and beyond tragically? In my heart, I have to say I don’t know which is the right approach: at different moments, I seem to embrace one or the other…but never with the whole heart I wish I could bring to my decision in either direction. I’m basically always of two minds, always at least slightly conflicted, never completely certain in which direction the golden path forward actually lies. Welcome to my Jewish-American world!

There’s also good news. Not only former President Obama, but countless others have spoken out in the last few weeks against anti-Semitism—and that list includes movie stars, famous musicians, politicians, athletes, and Christian theologians. So that’s heartening. But the elimination—the principled anathematization—of anti-Semitism is going to require a lot more than expressions of the encouraging sentiments by celebrities. To free our nation from anti-Jewish prejudice will require something else entirely, something along the lines of the paradigm shift the Civil Rights movement brought about in the middle of the last century with respect to Black people. Society does grow forward, after all. But it does so in fits and starts by altering the way people see the world and think about the world one by one. Looking away from slurs or, worse, attempting to re-interpret them as humorous jabs surely meant to amuse rather than seriously to insult is not at all helpful. Being afraid to ruffle feathers when a public personality says something negative about Jews, also not. Strengthening our American Jewish community from within by raising the level of culture, education, and familiarity with the classics of Jewish literature and the giants of Jewish thought, on the other hand, would be a very useful set of steps forward, one that would make it clear that Jewishness exists today, as always, as a bulwark of culture and civilization against the tides of incivility, barbarism, prejudice, ignorance, and discrimination that seem constantly to threaten to engulf the world. But this cannot solely be an in-house operation. If anti-Semitism is to become as wholly unacceptable in the American square as anti-Black racism now is, the shift I have in mind is going to have to originate, at least to a great extent, in the non-Jewish world.

There is no real point to any attempt to stifle honest debate in the public square. If someone of stature claims in public (falsely but convincingly) that Jews dominated the slave trade that brought African slaves to America, that person has to be forced publicly either to produce proof of that allegation or to apologize for spreading lies about Jews. If someone with scores of millions of social media followers spreads the perfidious lie that the Holocaust didn’t actually occur, the correct response is not to deny that person his or her right to speak in public, but to force that person to demonstrate the truth of those allegations in a convincing way…or else to admit to having spread falsehoods to millions of willing listeners and then accept the consequences of having spread that lie. There was a time when it was considered entirely normal for people to speak disparagingly in public about all sorts of minority groups, mostly definitely including people of color, gay people, and even (although not precisely a minority) women. Those days are long past us. But expressing anti-Semitic opinions is not an act of professional or reputational suicide in America the way expressing racist views has long since become.

Or is it? Have we finally arrived the point at which even important celebrities are being called up for vulgar, anti-Semitic comments made intentionally and malevolently? The whole brouhaha in the course of these last weeks about Kyrie Irving and Kanye West is encouraging in the extreme in that regard. The challenge is specifically not to allow the momentum to die down as we yet again become “used” to slander. What the future will bring, who can say? But we can make a serious effort to create a society in which anti-Semitic tropes never pass for humor, in which unproven calumnies cannot simply be bandied about and then retracted under pressure, and in which anti-Jewish invective is treated as seriously as hate speech. The Kanye West and Kyrie Irving incidents are encouraging! But where we go from here, of course, remains to be seen. 

All Quiet on the Western Front

All sorts of unsettling days and dates are coming up as November begins: a mid-term election on which the President says that democracy itself will be on the ballot, the 84^th anniversary of Kristallnacht, the 104^th anniversary of the ceasefire that ended the First World War, and the 59^th anniversary of President Kennedy’s assassination. I was having trouble organizing my feelings about all those dates at once, but then I saw a movie the other night that actually helped me do just that.

The made-for-Netflix movie, All Quiet on the Western Front,  is a German-language film made by Edward Berger based on the 1929 novel of the same name by Erich Maria Remarque. I remember reading the book when I was still in college and the nation was in the throes of unrest relating to the Vietnam War—and finding the book both terrifying and satisfying at the same time. Remarque was a, well, remarkable author whose anti-war message comes through as loud and clear as it does precisely because he doesn’t preach his sermon at all and merely allows you to see the picture of war he draws with devastating clarity and precision. The anti-war message, in fact, was so profound that the Nazis damned him as a pacifist when they came to power and banished him from Germany, labelling him as a Jewish author despite the fact that he wasn’t Jewish at all—and then sensationally “discovering” that the German spelling of his last name, Remark, was merely the backwards spelling of his secret Jewish last name, Kramer. All that was fully bogus, yet the Nazis had good reason to fear him and his book: they, the Nazis, stood for a kind of bellicose barbarism that the world hadn’t ever seen before and Remarque’s book was an unflinching indictment of warfare as the most horrific of all man-made evils. Not at all a good fit!

The movie focuses on the experiences of a single German soldier, a young man named Paul Bäumer, and several of his school-friends as they enlist to fight in the First World War and are then sent to the trenches in France. I won’t give the plot away other than to say that the main action is set in the few weeks before the final armistice on November 11, 1918, and that the senseless brutality of a war fought over nothing at all—and that ended with neither side really accomplishing anything or gaining anything—comes through as loudly and clearly as I have ever experienced it. There are scenes in the movie that depict military camaraderie in a positive light too. But, for the large most part, the movie is about the struggle within the soul of this specific soldier, Paul, between the bestial and the human, between the savage and the civilized. It’s more than awful—and riveting—enough to see this play out in the soul of one specific soldier. But there were millions of soldiers in those trenches, each his own version of Paul. I can’t say I enjoyed the movie. (That would really be too much.) But I was very moved by it and I recommend it to you all very highly as a real pinnacle of movie making. I once thought no wartime movie scene could equal the opening of Saving Private Ryan, Steven Spielberg’s depiction of the storming of Omaha Beach on D-Day, and I’m still not sure any movie ever will. But All Quiet on the Western Front comes as close as any movie I’ve seen since Saving Private Ryan came out almost twenty-five years ago in terms of suggesting just what it means to volunteer to fight for all the right, patriotic reasons…and then to end up descending to a level of barbarism you would never have considered yourself capable even of imagining, let alone actually attaining. The movie does not have a happy ending.

The thing about the First World War was that everybody acted correctly. Nations supported their allies. Commitments were honored. Promises were kept. There were no rogue states promoting military adventurism or crazy-pants dictators bent on world domination. It was far more subtle than any of that. Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the throne of Austria-Hungary, was assassinated in Sarajevo on June 28, 1914. Within a few days, Austria-Hungary declared war on Serbia. Russia then declared war on the Austro-Hungarians. One by one the nations of Europe chose to honor their alliances and commitments, and so within just a few months Germany, the Ottoman Empire, and Austria-Hungary were at war with France, Great Britain, Russia, and Serbia. The next spring, Italy joined the allies. Eventually, the United States was drawn into the war, which brought about its end in 1918. By the end of the fighting, almost ten million soldiers were dead as were also almost eight million civilians. Nothing at all was accomplished, other than by the final Treaty of Versailles imposed on Germany—which treaty paved the way for the rise of Nazism a decade later. It would be challenging to answer the question of what all those young people died for other than with shrugged shoulders and a quietly mouthed “nothing.”

To prevent World War One, someone—someone of stature who was  respected by all—someone needed to stand up and, looking at the larger picture, say out loud that this was madness, that this descent into violence may have felt  reasonable and rational at first but was actually a ramped-up flight into true lunacy, a paroxysm of barbarism that led to thirty-one million individuals either being killed, wounded, or missing in action. There were voices for peace. But, in the end, the fear of being thought an unreliable ally—and the fear of dishonor such an accusation would inevitably bring in its wake—brought nation after nation into the war until the situation was so fraught with un-unravelable political entanglement and mutual military obligation that there simply was no way to avoid the conflict that then ensued for four long years and which cost the world tens of millions of lives.

I fear our nation is a few feet back from a similar crossroads now. If Moscow chooses to deploy tactical nuclear weapons against Ukraine and if NATO responds by declaring war on Russia, we will inevitably be part of that conflict. It will feel right to stand by our allies and it is right to remain loyal to commitments freely undertaken. But watching that one movie reminded me that it was precisely that same sense of allegiance to commitment that led to carnage on a level that the world at that point hadn’t ever seen. Will we—we the American people, we citizens of the world, we human beings—will we be able to produce leaders who can actually lead the world away from the brink of true disaster? Or will we sink into a pit of quasi-patriotic rhetoric that ends up making it impossible for anyone to see the horizon at all, let alone what lies just beyond it?

The First World War was unbelievable until it actually happened. So was Kristallnacht—even after all that anti-Semitic legislation the thought that a nation-wide pogrom could be launched against German Jewry without the world lifting a finger to respond other than with toothless condemnatory press statements would have been unimaginable until it actually happened. Lots of history consists of things no one saw coming, of events no one imagined even could occur, let alone would occur. That Camelot could close down in a hail of bullets on a beautiful fall day was also unthinkable up until the minute it actually happened. Is Vladimir Putin capable of plunging the world into nuclear war? I’d certainly like to think not. But many of the people in the corridors of power in such an eventuality are going to be the individuals elected to office next week. All citizens’ choices at the ballot box should be framed by that thought. More than ever, we need to be led by statesmen and women possessed of vision and courage, not by political hacks whose only true allegiance is to their own careers. Do I sound uncharacteristically shrill? Watch that movie, then let’s talk.