On Jeremiads and Decency

I sit here on an early Saturday morning with tears streaming down my face for a second time. Like John Lewis’ “good trouble,” these are good tears. The first time was just two nights ago, watching an incredibly courageous young man, just 13 years old, speak before the nation about his disability. I am speaking of course about Brayden Harrington, and if you somehow have not yet seen his most moving two-minute speech, take the time to do it now before you read any further by clicking on his name above.

Why the tears, not once, but again as I re-watched this young man struggle to even say the word “stutter?” Sure, I have always been a sucker for those heart-wrenching stories — the soldier returning after serving in a combat zone for over a year to surprise his young daughter on her birthday; the police officer who gets down on one knee to take up the offer of a young Black child for a free hug; the adult son who travels a thousand miles for the opportunity to touch through a window the hand of his ill and possibly dying father with COVID-19. Heck, just thinking about the little girl in the red coat from Spielberg’s Holocaust movie is enough for me to lose it.

But Brayden touched something in me much deeper. I have never paid that much attention to political conventions before other than to watch a few highlights and some of the keynotes. This year was different. First there was the novelty of the whole thing. For some odd reason I found myself empathizing with politicians used to speaking in front of live audiences, trying to find their voice speaking to a computer screen streaming live to who knows where. Why did that feel so familiar? Then there was that surprisingly enjoyable roll call of the states. Who will forget “comeback calamari?” First time I have ever fancied Rhode Island as a desirable destination!

Never have I recalled so many memorable moments — Michelle Obama’s “It is what it is.” Dr. Jill Biden speaking in the empty Brandywine classroom near my wife’s childhood home. President Obama speaking from the Museum of the American Revolution on the values of democracy. The family of the undocumented immigrant mother who risked everything to save the life of her young, severely disabled daughter. Vice President Biden turning away from the camera to hide his emotions when surprised by the President with the Presidential Medal of Freedom. And I’ll now forever remember Stephen Curry not for his phenomenal skills on the court, but his most adorable family. The whole four nights was a tour de force of American values. I will be most interested to see how the GOP convention fares in comparison.

For all the speechifying and the orchestrated display of party unity building to the climatic moment of the candidate’s closing appeal to the country for their votes, it was still those two minutes of the honest admiration of a 13 year-old teenager that stands out most. Here was this young man turning his greatest weakness into a triumph of courage, pride and human goodness. It was a beauty to behold. And what it stirred in me on that night watching it live and stirs in me still this Saturday morning is the desire for a return to basic human decency which I find so lacking in our leadership today. It is not just that I find the current occupant of the White House so personally abhorrent, spiritually vacuous and morally repugnant, but that so many others are so willing to go along with someone who has the decency of a predator and the ethics of a mafia don.

Joe Biden says he made his decision to run after the display of white supremacy in Charlottesville when President Trump said there were “good people on both sides.” What is surprising is not that someone like Biden, a career politician with a deep belief in the goodness of American democracy, would decide at his age to make one more run for that high office as well as for the values as a religious man that he deeply holds, but that his lead in the polls is not much larger than it is. This is what alarms me most, that so many Americans seem willing to sacrifice basic human decency for political expediency and that so many have traded in their family values for the value of their stocks, their conservatism for Trumpism and their love for democracy for their love of one who borders on fascism.

In his book “The American Jeremiad”, Sacvan Bercovitch wrote in 1978 of the ideals of the “True America” v. the reality of the “Real America.” His basic idea is that there is embedded in American democracy an ideal, the “True America,” of the more perfect union as expressed in the writings of our founders, authors such as Henry David Thoreau and leaders such as Martin Luther King, Jr. The Real America, on the other hand, is always less than the ideal: the America of slavery, Jim Crow, the long fight for universal suffrage, the abuses of capitalism, etc. The contrast between the two and the appeal to the True America to overcome the sins of the Real America, is particularly pronounced in the rhetoric known as the “jeremiad,” so named for the prophet Jeremiah who called upon the ancient Israelites to live up to the ideal of God’s vision for their nation. Jeremiads simultaneously condemn the nation for its failures and call forth the nation to live up to its ideals. King’s famous “I Have a Dream” address is perhaps the best known jeremiad.

Writing for the New York Times, David Blight referred to President Obama’s address this past week as such a jeremiad. The challenge given by our former President as to what is at stake in this historical moment is aptly described in the preface to the 2012 edition of Professor Bercovitch’s book: “The remedy for American abuses was the American promise, and the failure of that promise meant the failure of history itself.” These are stark warnings beyond normal political rhetoric and certainly beyond any I have known in my lifetime.

Blight, as the author of one of the definitive books on the great American orator, Frederick Douglas, who knew how to use the jeremiad better than anyone, knows of what he writes. Comparing Obama to Douglas, he says of his speech from the birthplace of the Declaration of Independence, “he was a somber, deeply worried man, not out to retrieve his presidential legacy from a narcissistic reality-show host unworthy of office, but a citizen orator, looking us in the eye and telling us to wake up, rise up, read the creeds and do everything possible to save the historical demands of equality before the law and at the ballot box before it is too late and the American project is sent into a long Babylonian Captivity.” Somber indeed.

And yet, this jeremiad was not “a mere lamentation, but a cry for hope,” based in the American promise of a more perfect union. Citing all those ancestors who worked in sweatshops without rights or representation; farmers who saw their dreams blown to dust; immigrants from every continent told to go back from where they came from; Jews, Catholics and Muslims made to feel suspect for how they worshipped; Blacks enslaved, spit on for sitting at lunch counters and beaten for trying to vote; the former President then reminded us of what the True America is about:

If anyone had a right to believe that this democracy did not work, and could not work, it was those Americans. Our ancestors. They were on the receiving end of a democracy that had fallen short all their lives. They knew how far the daily reality of America strayed from the myth. And yet, instead of giving up, they joined together and said somehow, some way, we are going to make this work. We are going to bring those words, in our founding documents, to life.

Real America is what it is. True America is what we can yet become, if we will but believe in and act on that ideal of a more perfect union where all are treated as equal, with dignity and respect. It is about human decency, where a mixed-race child of immigrant parents, an abused woman victimized by a predator, a veteran disabled for life in war, a gay teenager taunted by peers and a 13 year-old boy with a stutter, each know that they are just as valued, loved and precious as any of us. For them, and for us, for what is and what can still be, I cry.

Photo: Cilford Community Curch, Monday, Feb. 10, 2020, in Gilford, N.H. Andrew Harnik, AP