The Seventeen Traditions, by Ralph Nader

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7. The Tradition of Education and Argument



One day, when I was about ten, I came home from grade school. When my father saw me, he asked a simple question: "What did you learn today, Ralph? Did you learn how to believe or did you learn how to think?"

For some reason, that question was like a bolt from the blue. It has stayed with me ever since as a yardstick and a guide. In my adult life, I have thought back on it countless times: Is this new movement or politician trying to make us believe, by using abstractions and slogans or advertising gimmicks, or inviting us to think through the issues, using facts, experience, and judgment? It has helped me to interpret people's styles of persuasion in normal conversation -- whether they are sharing how they think, or merely what they believe. And it has helped me find weak spots in countless arguments I've entertained through the years -- whether in real-time debates on radio or television, or in the more thoughtful forum of the printed word.

This is not to discount the importance of belief, without which, after all, we couldn't hold to the principles and ethics that shape our daily lives. Rather, my father's point was that we should reach our beliefs by thinking them through. In public school we received instruction, which was largely a matter of belief; it was at home that we received our real education, which had more to do with thought. There was nothing wrong with this combination: Both instruction and education were the better for it.

For one thing, our parents did not draw strong boundaries between the two spheres. Over dinner, they often asked us how school had gone that day, challenging what we were learning by posing broad, open-ended questions, rather than quizzing us on matters of fact. Once, my mother and father were in the backyard with my two sisters and me. When Mother asked us how much a dozen eggs cost, or a bushel of apples, a dozen bananas, a head of lettuce, a pound of butter, and so on, we knew the answers -- as children of a restaurateur and former grocer, we had a head start. For my mother, though, that was merely the foreground for her next set of questions: What is the price for the clean air today? she asked. What about the sunshine? The cool breeze? The songs of the birds and the shade of the trees? Each new question was greeted with silence, driving home her lesson -- which was that what is so valuable in nature has no price, and therefore is not for sale. Later we were to learn the importance of ensuring that other elements of a just society -- such as politicians, elections, and even teachers -- should never be for sale either.

Such exchanges, however brief, honed our minds to be more mentally alert, to go beyond the ordinary challenges of our rote learning in school. From time to time, though, my teachers reinforced my parents' lessons. For instance, our parents were always warning us about procrastination, putting off chores that should be done on time. Then one day I walked into my fifth-grade classroom and saw my teacher, Ms. Thompson, writing something on the blackboard in her big, bold chalk letters:

LOST: 60 SECONDS
DON'T BOTHER LOOKING FOR THEM
BECAUSE THEY ARE GONE FOREVER!

Wow! That's about the most memorable episode of my entire fifth-grade education -- and of my sixth-grade education, for that matter. Though I surely lost many sixty-second periods in the years that followed, never to recover them again, those words on the blackboard never left me.

My parents put a premium on our education, both at school and at home. One of the reasons my father moved us to Winsted was that the schools and library were just a few minutes' walk from home. My mother, who'd been a teacher before she married, knew full well that the likelihood of getting in trouble increased with the distance from school and home. She also liked being near our teachers. If they ever complained about our schools, their concerns focused on how much progress we were making and what our teachers thought about our performance. Were we attentive in class or distracted? Helpful or unruly? Our parents were not interested in putting us under undue pressure, or in monitoring us too closely, but they were keen to be kept informed about more than just our grades. As my father once said, "One reason so few educators pay attention to the quality of our children's education is that quality doesn't cost enough." In other words, money alone can't ensure a quality education; only deep care taken by the teachers themselves can make the difference. (Those were the days before constant multiple-choice standardized testing began restricting teachers' judgment, forcing them to "teach to the test.")

The Beardsley and Memorial Library was the perfect complement to the educational encouragement we received at home. We almost devoured that library, with its enticing variety of books, its so-appealing open stacks with their musty smell, and its helpful librarians. We could borrow three books at a time and they were treated with something close to reverence until we finished reading them and returned them for another lot. "Imagine what a bargain books are for readers," father once observed. "The author spends months or years writing a book. You reap the benefit of all that effort in just a few hours." I liked books about the Wild West and the struggles between colonizers (the pioneers, as they were called) and the Indians (whom even our esteemed Declaration of Independence referred to as "savages"). History books, books on geography, on the great inventors (Whitney, Fulton, Bell, Edison) and explorers, ancient plays from Greece and Rome and modern classics by the legendary American muckrakers (Lincoln Steffens, Ida Tarbell, Upton Sinclair, George Seldes, and Ferdinand Lunberg). These books weren't assigned by our teachers; Shaf read them all on his own (at fifteen, Tarbell's book on Standard Oil was tough going), and I followed suit. There was school time and there was library time, and not until high school, when we went to the library to research our papers and work on class projects, did the two come together.

We were not shy about bringing our newfound knowledge home, including the difficulties we had with some authors. Our father had a different take on things. If we ever came home saying we couldn't understand a certain writer or philosopher, he would respond by suggesting that perhaps the authors themselves weren't writing clearly. He was not making excuses for us, he was merely making a perfectly plausible observation that our teachers never mentioned. Excuses were a subject of passionate aversion for my mother, who was always bothered by the sight of parents trying to explain away their children's misbehavior. She always advised her friends not to make excuses for their children, for she felt that making excuses deprived children of the incentive to improve. My father used to say, "Your best teacher is your last mistake." This was a bundle of wisdom we took to heart: Like all children, we made plenty of mistakes, so therefore we had lots of teachers.

We were never able to impress our parents with the number of books we read. They were interested in what we derived from their pages, not just how many pages we turned over. They were too busy to dote on trivial benchmarks or childish academic bragging. When it came to teaching us, Mother preferred indirection to lecturing, but she wasn't above issuing a direct riposte when needed. The moment one of us began showing signs of overconfidence, she was ready with her response: "You better be a genius, because you've clearly decided to stop learning."

Many of our dinner-table arguments concerned matters of social justice at home and abroad. Often these conversations were kindled by our parents, and we were usually eager to take the bait, raising some controversial issue for discussion -- such as, were unions paying as much attention to consumer prices as they did to wages? Some of these points of contention were evergreens, none more so than my father's idiosyncratic proposal for a just society based on what he called the "limitation of wealth."

For many years my father wrestled with the tension in American society between greed and need. To address the problem, he proposed a system of unlimited income with limited wealth. Under his proposal, anyone could make and spend as much money as he or she was able, but whatever money they accumulated in savings, above a threshold of $1 million per person (in 1950 dollars), would be taxed, after a reasonable homestead exemption. To my father, this system was a reasonable way to maintain a prudent balance between economic incentives and economic justice. The very wealthy would become more interested in donating their money to community betterment (after all, how much could they consume?) or spreading the wealth among more people. Together with a progressive sales tax (with exemptions for the poorer classes) to fund governmental services, my father's wealth-limitation plan would have redirected people away from accumulating wealth toward community generosity.

Whatever their actual merits, my father's ideas had one inestimable side benefit: They kept us debating. We children spent years challenging him on its particulars, speculating out loud about how it might be made to work or why it was doomed to fail. Isn't it too idealistic, Dad? we would ask. Couldn't rich people avoid the taxes by taking their wealth abroad? How could such an idea ever get through Congress? What would the limitation of wealth contribute to the resurgence of communities? Would it cause people to have warmer feelings toward one another? There would be fewer spoiled-rotten descendants of wealth, we felt sure. Would this increase private investment? Savings? How much would the surge in private community giving reduce public spending? If it's so logical, why hasn't this idea caught on with some honest politicians? Or national citizen groups? And how do you define wealth, anyway -- sure, it should go beyond cash savings to include land, buildings, stocks and bonds, but what about jewelry, rare collectibles, insurance policies? How would the progressive sales tax work?

Dad always took our responses seriously, and we would respond to his answers with new questions. But he always focused on the bigger picture -- that history shows that economies with more equitable distribution of wealth were far more prosperous, with bigger markets. They were more prone to deal with the needs of tomorrow, not just today, like healthful surroundings and a better future for our children and grandchildren. "Either we spread the wealth in a country where millions of humans go without," he would say, "or we spread the misery."

In retrospect, it was like arguing with an ever-resilient law professor. He took great enjoyment from these tangos of minds. Father's limitation-of-wealth idea offered us a constant flow of discourse; like Aladdin's lamp, it needed only to be rubbed to work its educational magic. And it wasn't just at home that he would put forth these ideas, but in the workplace and anywhere he thought there was a possibility for discussion.

You may be wondering: Was there any plain old small talk in our family? Sure, there was plenty. But it was put on hold whenever we got into one of these serious discussions. At home we had the sense that there was a time and place for everything. Somehow we were never bored. When my parents had guests over, we would sit on the rug on the side of the living room and listen; every so often one of the grown-ups might make a passing reference to us, but these adult gatherings never centered on us preteen children, who were usually to be seen and not heard. By the same token, we never expected to perform or preen for the guests; instead, we listened and learned a lot about worldly matters. Looking back on these get-togethers, I marvel at how wide-ranging and informed the conversation always was: My parents and their friends traded political opinions on world and national news events, historical allusions, proverbs, and even poetry.

That was the way our "education" went: Our work at school was supported by what we learned at home, and vice versa. When I got deeply interested in stamp collecting, it was because it helped me remember the names of countries all over the world. And when I got deeply interested in my classes, it was because of a special teacher who valued spontaneous discussion over rote memorization. Many of our teachers were from Vermont, New Hampshire, and Maine, and they took their lifetime work quire seriously. There was no "gifted students" category then that allowed advanced students to take their own courses. All the students were in the same category, which in retrospect only helped our socialization as a group, while still allowing the more energetic students to excel. (On the other hand, our school buildings had no accommodations for students with disabilities, who were thus prevented from attending their area public schools. In some ways, those were years of low institutional expectations.)

Many years later, the prize-winning journalist David Halberstam, who lived in Winsted as a youngster, wrote a feature article about these teachers for the Boston Globe; his piece did not reflect well on contemporary urban schools by comparison. Around the same time, I was rereading John Dewey on moral education. Eureka, I thought: That's what my parents had given us at home. At school, we had learned facts. At home, my parents had taught us "character," which the ancient philosopher Heracleitus called "destiny." For us, they gave new meaning to the word "homework."

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8. The Tradition of Discipline



My siblings and I were raised to have respect for our mother and father -- a respect born of our generations of family tradition, but also earned on a daily basis by their example. Yet of course we got into mischief, as all children do. And when we did, there were consequences.

Mother and Father followed a finely calibrated series of parental reprimands, a system that we learned early and became accustomed to heeding. It started with a sudden stern look -- and often that was enough to change our young minds before things went any further. When the look alone didn't work, they relied on a sequence of three Arabic reprimands. The mildest was skoot or skiti (male or female), the next stage was sidd neeyak or siddi neeyik, and the third level was sakru neekoon. Translated loosely, these meant "hush your mouth" in varying degrees. If that didn't work, we might be told to leave the dinner table and/or go to stand in the corner by the sewing machine. Or we might be assigned a chore, to drive the point home in another way. Our parents rarely spanked us, and when they did, it was no more than a gentle smack on the rear. Then as now, too many children have been picked up and shaken -- as toddlers, even infants -- or beaten by parents losing their self-control and abandoning themselves to rage. My parents were horrified by such behavior.

But they knew the importance of enforcing their commands around the house. As my mother was known to say, "If parents don't discipline, or they're indecisive about it, their children won't respect them." It wasn't enough to issue a reprimand, in other words -- not if the parent merely unravels it a few minutes later by apologizing (even tacitly) and fawning all over the child. Any child who's treated that way is being trained in the ways of manipulative behavior. "Children are clever," Mother said, "they watch their parents and can take advantage where they see weakness."

Instead, my parents chose to show us where we had gone wrong, and they often did so by relying on traditional proverbs. The supply of proverbs at their disposal was countless, and they wielded them effortlessly. These sayings, which came from a rich oral tradition, drew on the imagery of the past to reframe all manner of human behavior for the generations of the present and future. The villagers and peasants of their Lebanese mountain towns would have known hundreds of these proverbs; our Aunt Adma knew more than a thousand. (Think a moment: How many proverbs can you call to mind, beyond Benjamin Franklin's homilies -- ''A penny saved is a penny earned" or ''A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush"?)

My dad, who worked seven days a week at the restaurant, used proverbs constantly. To a child talking silly, he would say (in Arabic), "Jokes are to words as salt is to food" -- that is, don't overdo it. To a child who'd put off his chores too long, the apt and famous proverb was, "Wait, oh mule, until the grass grows up." When generosity was called for, he would say, "Empty hands are dirty hands." Such proverbs were admonishments, to be sure. But they also managed to teach and uplift our horizons at the same time -- far more than the staccato barking of parents who shout, "Stop it! I said stop it!" or "Cut it out, now, or you'll be sorry," and then have to repeat themselves over and over while the child ignores them. Dad was a devotee of the Socratic method; he loved nothing more than to pose a provocative question and then let it hang in the air. Once, when he noticed a bunch of teenagers in his restaurant laughingly pouring pepper in the sugar bowl, he came over to them and quietly asked, "Why are you insulting your parents?" as he took away the sugar bowl. Instead of asking them to leave, he merely walked away, leaving them to ponder over his words.

Both my father and my mother were highly sensitive to the weakening of parent-child relationship in modern society -- to the threat the marketplace posed to the concept of parental authority. Even back in the 1930s and 1940s, my mother noticed that some caring parents were afraid of their children, afraid of how they might react if they were disciplined. She noticed even more fear as she grew older, and often commented that ''Americans are afraid of their children." She believed that children who see that their parents are afraid of them will try to control their parents, who will then begin to lose their parental moorings as a result. We were always astonished to heat a classmate slinging harsh words at his parents. To be sure, we weren't always privy to what provoked such outbursts; we just knew that in our family there were lines you never crossed. (Only later did we realize that such behavior could be symptomatic of child abuse behind closed doors -- though the parents we observed never treated their children brutally, at least in public.)

When we ran afoul of our own parents, did we get a chance to argue our case? Not in trivial, run-of-the-mill situations, but when there was a meaningful disagreement at stake, yes. "When my children would explain [themselves] to me," my mother once said, "I would sometimes find that they were tight, but I also explained my position." Mother believed that a child should understand why he's being told no, or yes. She always valued a good argument on a worthwhile subject. But she also believed that a child shouldn't be allowed to argue for argument's sake.

As we grew into our teenage years, our parents were more willing to engage us in back-and-forth dialogues on our little domestic controversies. But they also had subtle ways of reminding us how much they labored for our well-being, and how many years of knowledge had gone into their positions. We often, if not always, gave them the benefit of the doubt. We respected their authority, never calling them by their first names no matter what our age. But we never became overly dependent on them, either. Their unassuming confidence only enhanced our own self-confidence -- until we began to seem overconfident, in which case they were quick to reply, "So, since you've got all the answers, you don't have any more questions, eh?"

There was one respect in which Mother and Father showed absolutely critical self-discipline, and that was in their interactions with each other. As children, we were aware of occasional friction between our parents. We could sense the mood changing when that occurred. But the conflict never spilled out in our presence, for our parents believed that any such display would have reduced our respect for them. They were able to keep their differences very private from us and from their friends, in part because the differences between them were mostly ordinary tensions that worked themselves out in the course of daily life. For them, the well-being of their children, which took priority over petty disagreements, served as a kind of universal solvent, dissipating any lingering tensions.

This mutual self-respect came home to us whenever we were at our friends' homes and witnessed sharp exchanges and vitriol between their parents. Sometimes, just walking the residential streets, we would hear shouting from one home or another. Once, as I was walking downtown to do an errand for my mother, I saw a door fly open, and a husband rushed out shouting curses, with his wife right behind him throwing miscellaneous pots and utensils at him along with a stream of invective. There was nothing like that kind of spectacle to help a boy appreciate his parents' efforts to preserve their emotional self-control.

As my mother often said: "If you make something bigger, it becomes bigger; if you make it smaller, it becomes smaller."

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9. The Tradition of Simple Enjoyments



Ask yourself, when do you laugh the hardest and the longest? When you're watching a situation comedy, a reality show, or a comic on late-night TV -- or when you find yourself in hilarious situations with friends or family? No contest. Those bellyaching laughs come faster, and last longer, when you're with friends or family. The television shows are part of the market-driven manufacturing of laughter. Friends and family are a gift, and those personal relationships engender deeper, more truthful mirth.

We grew up in an environment of simple enjoyments, a world largely separate from market entertainment and almost wholly diverted by family entertainment. The ways we enjoyed ourselves might appear impossibly quaint to today's youth, who've grown used to nonstop commercial entertainment so fast-paced that anything slower is greeted as BO-RING. Theirs is a video-audio, sensualized, commodified world that has displaced simple homemade pleasures, driving them down the rungs of attraction so that only the youngest children are expected to embrace them.

In our town there was one movie theater, the Strand. It had Saturday matinees for children, and we were allowed to go to the movies about twice a year. More often we headed to the Soldiers' Monument grounds, where we ate delicious sandwiches while feeling the coolness of the stone seats on our legs during a hot summer day. On Sunday afternoons we took our bikes on exhilarating rides down the tree-lined road to the nearby village of Colebrook. I can still feel the thrill of the breeze as we cruised down the long hill on our way home. Roller-skating on a neighborhood sidewalk was perfect for sunny days, but the rain didn't stop us: We just headed downstairs and skated in our basement. I even shot basketballs in that cool basement, into a bottomless apple basket hung on the staircase.

Our daily lives were full of these simple pleasures, no matter how old we were or what time of year it was. Running up to the garden to pick tomatoes or squash or beans, then back into the house to help prepare them for dinner, made us little ones feel we were part of a big act. Climbing up the venerable apple tree was a blast, and plucking the insect-scarred apples left us with small but very juicy bites. (Nobody had to tell us the apples were "organic"!) Just the thought of eating Mother's homemade pastries, whose aroma wafted from the oven to the kitchen table, made our mouths water.

Winter brought the crunch of a white Christmas, even as we walked to midnight service, at the Episcopal Church. Mother would take us outdoors and teach us the alphabet by carving letters in the snow. As we grew older, we sledded to school on snowy mornings. Then, come Easter time, my mother would hard-boil dozens of eggs with onion skins, staining them dark red. After they were all hidden, we would go running around finding them -- and then compete to see which egg would survive what we called the "cracking competition." Each of us would make a wish, and then crack our egg up against one of our siblings' eggs. We looked forward to the cracking competition for weeks.

Summers were an exciting time; we all looked forward to a change of pace. When we were little children, Dad would take us up to Highland Lake, where we'd go driving over the spillways between the lake and the spill of water down the valley into the Mad River, cruising through half a foot of moving water. "Wheee!" we'd cry. "Turn around and do it again, Dad!" Then he would take us up to Crystal Lake, the bucolic town reservoir, where we would look out over the water with a kind of reverence. Coming from the Middle East, where water is scarce and deserts plentiful, our parents taught us to view abundant clean water with gratitude.

We spent our summer vacations with our Aunt Adele, my mother's older sister, and her six children. She and her husband, Selim, lived in Toronto, Canada, and we alternated summers with her family, spending one summer in Connecticut, the next in Canada. Our age-matched cousins were like another set of brothers and sisters, and our aunt and uncle stepped in as surrogate parents. Our families were not only extended but amplified by the sheer variety of personality and experience our cousins brought to the mix. Their lives were different from ours in a hundred small ways: They wore school uniforms and we did not, followed hockey where we followed baseball, pronounced English words differently -- and such differences made for endless hours of fun and argument.

Though our parents had ten children crammed into our relatively medium-sized house during those summers, I never remember hearing the mothers complaining about the extra work, or even saying they felt especially tired. The older children helped them with the cooking and cleaning chores. And having two sets of parents certainly helped preserve order: When it came to being disciplined or taking instructions, we listened to and obeyed our aunt and uncle as surely as we did our own parents.

Our house had a screened-in porch upstairs, with room for three or four beds in summer, another memorable setting in our childhood landscape. Even the children of the next generation, beginning with my sister Laura's children, always relished the chance to sleep on the exalted porch. It was seen as a first-class treat. At night we could hear the crickets, see the stars and the moon and the clouds, tell stories, engage in horseplay, laugh, while my mother and her sister were visiting downstairs, entertaining each other with their own stories of childhood, and news from home. They would tease each other, and the gales of laughter would come wafting through the windows. Now and then, when it sounded as though we were getting too boisterous up on the porch, one of the sisters downstairs would say, "That's enough, children. Go to sleep." That would usually quiet us down -- but not always. Then they had to come up to the porch to enforce this point.

Our mother and aunt each felt free to compliment or admonish any of us as they saw fit, and this had the effect of reinforcing many of our family's traditions. Whenever we came to them to settle a conflict that cropped up among us, they were both equally likely to offer up one of the sayings they learned together in childhood: "It doesn't hurt to be generous," or "Don't judge until you know the whole story," or "If someone does you harm, do him some good" -- advice we'd all find useful throughout life, and all passed along in a way that was memorable, short, and sweet.

When it was our turn to travel to Canada, we usually joined Aunt Adele's family in a cottage on Lake Simcoe or Lake Couchiching. The routine would be less varied than when we were together in town. But those weeks we spent together were more attuned to nature. They were shaped by our closeness to the water, by afternoons spent swimming on a beachfront just down from the cottage, by boating, fishing, hiking, picking berries, games of hide and seek in the woods. My mother and her sister knew how to delegate responsibility to the older children, trusting our older cousins to keep an eye on us when we went to amusement parks in Toronto.

As we grew up and went to college, these joint summer vacations became less frequent. But we all remember them fondly, and in the 1980s Shaf organized several summers with our cousins and their families at Georgian Bay, so that a new generation of children could get to know each other in the setting that had meant so much to us when we were youngsters.

Amid all this, though, I must confess that there was one commercial enjoyment I never tired of -- one that lasted well into my teen years. That was taking an early morning train from Winsted down the Naugatuck Valley into Grand Central Station, and then transferring onto the subway to Yankee Stadium to watch my favorite team clobber the opposition, especially the Boston Red Sox. You see, our town was divided right down the middle, half being Yankee fans and the other half being patient Red Sox fans. My boyhood hero Lou Gehrig, the "Iron Man," had recently retired from the Bronx Bombers, but he was still fresh in everyone's memory, particularly after his tragic illness. Returning from a ball game at Yankee Stadium meant hours of banter, joshing, and tireless arguments with the misguided Red Sox fans in the neighborhood.

Of course, all these and innumerable other simple pleasures are available to many youngsters today. But the screens and earphones are taking over -- the video games and iPods and television and all kinds of salacious websites. The only electric distraction we had was the radio, and that was offered to us as a reward, not surrendered to our control as a daily routine. Instead we contented ourselves playing kick-the-can in the backyard, or hitting fungo balls to each other on the sandlot baseball field, playing marbles, or hiking along streams in the woods. It was certainly cheaper than the ceaseless parade of gadgets parents are obliged to purchase today, and you could play the same game again and again without being bored or demanding an upgrade.

There was something about playing with the same building blocks that invited encore after encore. What was that something? My guess is that it was the fact that we were interacting with other human beings, not with machines. We were tapping into the infinite richness of human senses and emotions, challenging our imagination and human competitiveness, rather than the staccato rhythms and predictable rewards of preprogrammed games. This blend of the familiar and the surprising gave us all the joyful feeling that we were making our own pleasure -- not relying on structured "playdates," but having our own fun.

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10. The Tradition of Reciprocity



Out of the confluence of these previous traditions grew a subtler, deeper tradition, a second-generation tradition that ensouled our family to the present day. It was more than mutual respect. It was more than mutual aid. I think of it as the tradition of reciprocity.

Underlying the help and comfort we extended to each other, as needed, was the fact that we all cared deeply for one another. I felt this caring in a variety of unexpected ways. One day, when I was five years old, my father took me by the hand and walked me down to the Fourth School, the local elementary school. My father knew that I'd already moved beyond the kindergarten level, and he convinced the school that I should skip kindergarten and enroll as the youngest pupil in Miss Root's first-grade class. I overheard the case he made, and when I realized how much he believed in me, I became utterly determined not to let my father down in front of other people. Within days I was Miss Root's assistant, helping some of the students with their lessons. (Decades later, when she was in her eighties, Miss Root recounted this story to a television magazine show.) In class after class, through high school, I would look back at the class following ours and be so grateful that my parents had cared enough to move me forward. Whenever the work grew challenging, that awareness would inspire me to work even harder.

My parents always saw their relationships with their children as mutually rewarding. They raised children who could teach their parents in turn, sharing their own experiences and insights. As young adult immigrants (both came over at the age of nineteen), my mother and father knew that learning shouldn't end with childhood; they spent years absorbing a culture, a host of new technologies, and systems of private businesses and public institutions -- all in a foreign language. This has never been an easy process for newcomers to our land -- even after finding work, they often don't have it easy. So-called generation gaps are especially common among immigrant families; these gaps can produce anxious and unpleasant tensions, and sometimes lead to nasty ruptures or chronic conflicts. Many children of immigrants feel embarrassed at their parents' "old ways," their accents, their native language being spoken in their friends' presence. They have little patience with parents who don't keep up with teenage fads, rejecting the elements of their traditional lifestyle in favor of the easy social bonding of commercial culture. The parents, in turn, sometimes feel rejected, isolated, and worried. Some grow so disconsolate that they return to their home countries.

My parents, on the other hand, were quite practical. They sensed that their children were becoming a part of this new world, and set about following their example. Who better to teach them about America, they reasoned, than their children, who had never known anything else? My older brother, Shaf, was my parents' most conscious interpreter. He always had a bent for anthropology and cross-cultural awareness, even during his teen years, and when it came to American culture the child became the teacher and the parents became the students (until it was time to say "yes" or "no" or "be careful," that is). Sometimes the teaching went both ways, with surprising results for both sides: When my sister Claire tried showing my mother how to dance the Charleston, Mother responded by singing a song about the Charleston in Arabic and English that was popular in Lebanon in the 1920s.

From time to time Shaf ran into resistance, as when he tried to persuade my mother that some new movie at the Strand would be all right for his younger siblings to see. Like many parents today, Mother was wary of Hollywood and its sexy movies embarrassing her early teenage children. (She never for a moment worried that they could actually corrupt us, only that we'd be made uncomfortable.) To her, sexy and violent movies were demeaning and wasteful, and she wanted to spare us from enduring them if she could. Obviously, there were times when we disagreed, thought her too protective of us, but we never did anything that showed disrespect toward her final say on the subject. Some time ago I was pleased to learn that this feeling had moved to the next generation, when her grandson Tarek told me that he'd decided in college never to do anything he would later regret.

My father even extended such reciprocal relations to his customers. The one day Dad's restaurant was supposed to be closed was Christmas Day. But my siblings and I soon noticed that every Christmas morning he would go down there at eleven o'clock and spend three hours serving a few longtime customers -- elderly renters who lived by themselves and relied on him for their daily lunch.

That was the example both our parents set for us, and in their final years their kindnesses were returned in their moments of need. My mother had always been one of the most self-reliant and independent people I'd ever known, but by the time she was nearing her one hundredth birthday, she finally needed help to get around. My sister Claire was there to care for her, and she treated the responsibility as if it were a privilege to extend her hands to embrace our mother's needs. Claire rejected the bureaucratic term "caregiver." To her it was a much simpler matter: "She is my mother," she would say, "and I am her daughter and we respond to each others' needs."

As the weeks passed, and mother needed more assistance, not once did Rose Nader ever suggest that she was a burden on her children. She had cared for us all during our infancy, childhood, and adulthood. Of course, we would be there for her at the very end of her life. She viewed her life as a state of oneness with her children and grandchildren. And oneness cannot be a burden on itself.

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11. The Tradition of Independent Thinking



"Turn your back on the pack," I remember my mother telling me more than once during early childhood. Simple words, but they carried a few meanings in a very concise way. If we wanted to be leaders, we were taught -- if we wanted to think boldly, and to excel at what we did -- that we would have to be willing to be different. My mother took a continual interest in who my friends and acquaintances were from year to year. She encouraged us to bring our friends home, and when we did, she would engage them in conversation about school, their families, or the aspects of their lives that mattered to them. Even in those relatively quiet, unfrenzied, drug-free small-town days, she was keenly aware that peer groups were her competition in rearing her children. A child's peer group could be very influential, and the wrong group could dash years' worth of attentive child rearing and proper behavior. Peer pressure could be nerve-wracking for children, especially when it involved coercion, as it often did when there were age differences in "the pack." My mother's saying I believe its you! always comes back to me in this context: She taught us early that we couldn't pass off on others responsibility for our own behavior. "Respect yourself," she taught us, "and others will respect you."

Well, as children will, we understood our parents' words, but still listened to our classmates' taunts, and we weren't immune to them. I was eight years old before I finally confronted my mother about the fact that she still had me wearing short pants to school every day. She believed I was too young to wear long pants, unlike the other boys who wore them. The boys in my class thought short pants were babyish, and I agreed. So one day I brought my odd-boy-out lament home to my mother. After trying out all kinds of practical arguments to shuck the shorts and wear the longs -- such as protecting my knees from scraping falls or being warmer in the cold winters -- I realized I was getting nowhere. So I brought out what I perceived as my trump card. "Mother," I entreated, "their mothers let them wear long pants!" To which mother replied: "Well, they have their mothers and you have yours. Besides, why are you worried about being a little different?"

Word gets around quickly in a small town. Before meeting these youngsters, Mother would inquire about their parents and their older siblings. She had a short list of children who were absolutely off-limits, but generally she let her opinions be known, and we followed her lead. Other mothers did the same for their children -- and sometimes to our detriment. One mother disapproved of her blond son walking to school with me because of my "darker complexion." Winsted, like many New England factory towns, was by then a multiethnic community; the nineteenth-century influx of Irish and Italian immigrants was followed by Eastern European, Greek, and Levantine families. In the town's restaurants and bars, ethnic jokes were common currency; such mutual ribbing probably helped to reduce some tensions, inasmuch as they teased each other face to face. But there were some prejudices manifested in terms of social distance and less occupational mobility for the newer families. The Yankees still held the economic power in Winsted, but Irish Americans and Italian Americans were beginning to play a part in local politics, where there was a strong perceived division between Protestant and Catholic families.

The smaller ethnic groups felt the most discomfort. Our family could have been in that category. I say "could have been" because our parents were predisposed to ignore such pressures, joking about them while shoring up our identity and self-confidence by condemning prejudice itself. Having the largest restaurant in our small town didn't hurt, either: Food can be a great leveler, and the easy interactions in a bustling eatery -- which served American food, by the way, not ethnic fare -- made for a forum where politics and sports were all debated on an even playing field.

My father had come to realize this years earlier, during his time in the melting pots of places like Newark, New Jersey; Detroit, Michigan; Lawrence, Massachusetts; and Danbury, Connecticut. "What is the true value of ethnic identity?" I remember him observing once. "Culture, humor, variety and a common sociability for facing life. And, of course, the pleasure of having one's own cuisine. When it comes to politics, though, a broader humanity should replace ethnicity."

So how did this play out on the children? Ethnic slurs bounced off us because we knew who we were, where we came from, and generally where we wanted to go. From time to time, we heard someone use a phrase like "camel-driver" -- as some anti-Arab voices still do in America today. But such language only singed us when it was associated with rejectionist behavior or tied to social distance. Fortunately, such moments were infrequent. Our teachers were quite even-handed, and we played sports and did odd jobs around the neighborhood with no complaint. The simple fact that we spoke and understood Arabic did, of course, make us different. But our parents' accented English only gave us something in common with the numerous Italian, Polish, European, Jewish, and the few immigrant Lebanese families in town.

Given all this, our parents were remarkably easy in the saddle. They never became overwrought about perceived peer-group pressure or bigotry, and even seemed to understand the old-time families' sensitivities toward the unfamiliar newer immigrants and their customs. The public schools and especially the churches helped newer families like ours assimilate into the community; our family had been embraced by the Methodist Church, even though we came from the Eastern Orthodox division of Christianity. Ultimately, as my father understood, our ethnic differences tended to shore up our defenses against prejudice and temptations. We knew the value of our history, and relished the elements that came with it -- the food and humor especially.

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12. The Tradition of Charity



Every major religion, and many minor ones, level charitable injunctions on their followers. For centuries, the concepts of tithing and good works have been central to Christianity. Beyond charitable giving, the scriptures are filled with homilies, exemplary narratives, and other stories enshrine the duty to act generously and compassionately toward one's fellow human beings. Though we did attend Sunday School at the local Methodist church, our real education in the meaning of charity came from the largely secular tradition of our parents and grandparents -- one that dated back at least as far as my maternal grandmother, a leading doer of good works in Zahle, whose prompting had led to the construction of a hospital in the town.

This tradition crossed the ocean and took two distinct pathways. One can be called "point of need" charity, in the form of things like the free food and hot coffee my father gave readily to the poor when they came to the restaurant. Especially during the Great Depression, hungry people would go door-to-door begging for food. When they knocked on our door, Mother happily directed them to our restaurant, with the assurance that a hot meal would await them. The expression of gratitude on their faces made a deep impression on our conscience.

Father considered it his responsibility as a businessman to extend such help to those in need, which is why we children always treasured the following exchange he had in the late 1940s with a local doctor, a friend he bantered with often at the lunch counter:

DOCTOR. Why are the auto workers' wages so high?

FATHER. So they can afford to pay your bills! Why do you charge so much?

DOCTOR. Because we often treat poor people free.

FATHER (Smiling) Well, in that case, since we give free coffee to poor people, your coffee [then 10 cents] today is $1.00. Thank you.

Dad did not think of his charitable activities as something to be pawned off onto the backs of his other customers.

Another example of his charitable impulse occurred during World War II. His office tenant above the restaurant, Dr. Henry Garbus, a dentist, was called to military service. Dad held his office free of charge, pending his return, and refused to rent it to someone else -- even in what was then a high-demand market. He told Dr. Garbus that when he came back to his family after the war, he would find his dental office just as he left it. All he would have to ask for were the keys before restarting his practice. Nearly three years later, that is what Dr. Garbus did. When it came to the war effort, Dad believed he had to do his part again and again on the home front for those who were in the armed forces.

The second path had to do with systemic charity -- in the form of building or expanding facilities and institutions that benefited the community. For example, in the mid-1950s, although the restaurant business was not doing all that well, my parents gave what was for them a major donation to a charitable fund being raised to build a large new wing to the local hospital. Mother took a special interest in the project, joining other Winsted donors to go and watch the new construction. She also talked up the fund-raising drive in the community, going door to door, as she did often for the Red Cross. Later I heard her comment in passing that "we built the hospital," and there was quiet pride in her voice. "You should care" was a mantra in our household, a conviction that found expression in myriad ways. Once, when an elderly neighbor fell on the ice and broke her arm, Mother sent my sister Laura, who was about eleven years old, to help her dress. She cried and didn't want to go but she went anyway. Sometimes you have to do things in life whether you want to or not.

Even with their obligations at home, my parents still found a way to extend their charitable giving back to their homeland. When my father's home village in Lebanon needed a new sewer system built, he sent his own money for the project, and collected donations from other Lebanese immigrants in the area. He followed up that project by helping to persuade Winsted town officials to build a modern sewage treatment system that would help the town kick the habit of dumping the sewage in the Mad River, which ran through the center of town!

One bright summer afternoon, Dad took me for a ride around town. I suspected there was a purpose to this trip beyond catching the breezes by the lake or watching the teenagers playing sandlot baseball near the high school, and I was right.

First, we drove past the Beardsley and Memorial Library. Ellen Rockwell Beardsley had started this institution in 1901, he told me, with a donation of ten thousand dollars -- a princely sum at that time. He then drove up Spencer Street until we got to the Litchfield County Hospital -- the first such institution in the county in 1902, when it was built, and also a product of private charity. Down a few more roads to the other end of town, and we were at the Gilbert School, a high school that for years was regarded as among the best in the nation. The Gilbert School was launched by a local industrialist, William Gilbert, who built the world-renowned Gilbert Clock Company in Winsted. His original gift established Gilbert as a private secondary school, the Gilbert School, but it gradually became more public over the years as more tax dollars were used to supplement a declining endowment.

Turning left, my father drove up a hill to Highland Lake. Nearby there was a small inviting park with some seats and tables for having outdoor lunches -- a park established by another local philanthropist. Then we made a 180-degree turn and drove down toward the long Main Street -- passing the Winchester Historical Society, founded and nurtured with charitable contributions. He drove past some other charities, including the imposing Gilbert Home for orphans and other needy children, and arrived at the beautiful Soldiers' Monument, so central to my childhood imagination. The town had paid a dear price in casualties during the Civil War, and after the war ended a volunteer veteran and local philanthropist promoted the idea of such a memorial; it was finally dedicated in 1890. With several donated acres of hilltop land, the structure and its grounds soon became a haven for the townspeople, who still conduct summer theater there, and whose children frolic on its grounds or run around the perimeter.

When we'd finished our tour of the area, my father pulled up to our house and turned the ignition off. "See all those fine establishments in out little town?" he said to me. "Think about how important they are to our community. Then ask yourself this question: Since 1900, there were and are at least a hundred townspeople as wealthy as those philanthropists were. What kind of town would this be if those people put some of their wealth back into the community the same way?" We sat there together in silence, a light wind breezing through the open windows. While I've since traveled many miles to many places, I've never forgotten the lesson I learned on that one trip.

On another, much later trip, I remember hearing a speaker quote Jean Monnet, a post-World War II advocate for the European Union. "Without people, nothing is possible," Monnet had said. "Without institutions, nothing is lasting."

Today, even though community-building philanthropy is tax-deductible, there are relatively fewer large-scale donations to create new institutions such as libraries, performance halls, museums, health care centers, and recreational facilities. Reliance on the government as the first source of funding for these kinds of projects, it seems to me, weakens the expectation that wealthy people will extend the legacies of their enlightened forebears, which so enriched people's lives. Our communities are diminished as a result.

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13. The Tradition of Work



We learned about work at an early age. Every one of the children was expected to pitch in and contribute daily to the smooth functioning of the household. The boys mostly worked around the house, shoveling snow, cutting the grass, raking the leaves, taking care of the chickens in and about their coop, and collecting the eggs. The girls worked mostly inside, cleaning rooms, ironing clothing, washing the dishes, and performing weekly chores such as polishing the dining room set. Girls and boys alike helped their parents with the vegetable garden, weeding, watering, and harvesting. When we became teenagers, our responsibilities grew: Shaf began working part time in Dad's restaurant after school, and I had a paper route for a while. Claire and Laura augmented their household work with serious piano lessons ($1.50 a lesson) from a wonderful piano teacher, Miss Ann Breshnan, who lived two blocks away on Main Street.

The task of ensuring quality control fell to our mother, who monitored our efforts for what she called "the finishing touch." Mother's efforts sometimes produced mirth, sometimes grumbling, as she sent us back to do the job all over again, or at least finish what we'd started -- as with cutting the grass and raking it thoroughly together for compost. She viewed these tasks as strong fibers within the daily fabric of our family, something we came to understand when a heavy rainstorm or a blizzard came along to pose us a challenge. There's nothing like nature to bring about a swing-to-the-emergency camaraderie, even among easily distracted youngsters.

We were never given an allowance, for our chores or for any other reason. Our parents saw allowances as inducing divisiveness, inviting nagging (for increases), and likely to produce reckless spending. It was far better, they believed, to preserve the household as a place of shared responsibility, instead of making it a place of monetary transactions and having them pay for our work. And they believed that giving routine allowances would dull us to the meaning of money. Instead, we were obliged to ask our parents to buy things that caught our eye, forcing us to make a good argument as to why they should say yes -- something an allowance would have circumvented.

They did, also, want us to learn how to save. So when we earned some money outside the home, or were given money by relatives for birthdays or Christmas, they arranged for a savings account -- at first in a symbolic piggy bank, later in the local savings bank -- where we could deposit the proceeds. The little bank book in our name was a source of pride, for us and the other local children who were encouraged to save. The head of the Winsted Savings Bank even walked the kindergarten class to the bank to deposit their dimes and quarters.

Now, I'm not saying we always did our chores cheerily, or punctually. I know I sometimes grumbled when the call came to get going on cutting the grass or some other task. I would have preferred to keep reading or keep listening to the Yankees and their marvelous announcer, Mel Allen, on New York's WINS. So after the first call I would temporize. The second and third calls became more audible and insistent. Only when I heard my mother's footsteps heading into the living room did I suddenly decide I could skip the next inning or put a marker in my book. It always amazed me how fast the grass grew, the leaves fell, the chickens had bowel movements. But down deep I knew we all had to pull our weight for the greater good of the family, and that thought got me past these faltering moments. We children didn't know it at the time, but this was our education in the work ethic: Our parents were giving us far more than they themselves had back in the old country, but they were just as determined not to spoil us in the process. We had to earn it, to taste some of the exertion required for that better life.

Of course, not all the work was unpleasant. An afternoon spent baking in the kitchen was hardly a chore. My sisters were more attracted to learning the baking arts from my prolific mother than I was, and as a result they not only learned to make celestial Arabic pastries and bread, but also absorbed all the lore surrounding the celebratory baking events that preceded religious days and festivals in old Lebanon. They also got first dibs on every new item that emerged fresh from the oven. (I did manage to bake twenty-one bran muffins for my sister Claire's twenty-first birthday, which my parents delivered to her at Smith College, where she was a student.) And of course Shaf knew how to do everything, in and out of the kitchen.

For me, it was watching my Dad work his long hours in the restaurant -- solving every kind of problem you can imagine, from a failing boiler to a no-show cook to a sudden surge of impatient customers -- that showed me what hard work was like, and the patience and ingenuity it takes to run a small business.

I was astonished at how many things there are to worry about when you're running a restaurant/bar. Supplies coming on time, the food kept fresh, equipment kept in good running order, all kinds of services kept up -- my father carried these and other concerns on his back. He was on his feet so much every day and night that, over the years, his tired legs bulged with varicose veins, the painfully visible evidence of his intense commitment to support his family and save for his children's college and graduate school education. But the workplace was also a joy because he could engage his customers from far and wide in talk about community and public affairs.

When it came time for me to start working, I knew I wasn't cut out for the restaurant business. Thankfully, my mother and father agreed. It was while I was working my paper route for the Winsted Evening Citizen that I got my first feeling for the obligations of daily work -- and a taste of the excitement of small-town journalism. The papers were still warm as I piled them into my large satchel. Then it was off on my door-to-door delivery rounds, warding off dogs, braving inclement weather, chatting with family members eagerly coming to the door for their paper, collecting the weekly billings and getting glimpses of how people were making it through the day, sometimes pleasant and sometimes unpleasant. How could anyone not develop an ease with people under such circumstances! When it came to meeting regular people, it was the next best thing to being a postman.

Nothing speaks to my parents' view of work better than a story my sister Claire recalled. One day, when she was quite young, she was walking home with Dad when they passed a street cleaner. ''I'm glad I'll never have to do such dirty work," she cried out. Dad stopped and looked at his little girl. "Then you should always respect street cleaners," he said, "if only because they're doing work that you don't want to do, but that you very much want to have done. This is the same reason they should be paid well. Claire, as you grow up, you'll see all kinds of work being done. Don't look down on people for the work they do -- and don't be in awe of anyone, either." Laura had similar conversations with Dad.

Though it would be years before my sisters shared these stories with me, I'd long since absorbed those lessons. Without the labor of millions of low-paid, unrecognized workers, I realized, the economy -- along with the activities of the wealthy -- would come to a halt.

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14. The Tradition of Business



On August 19, 1955, after several days of steady rains, the cumulative effect of Hurricane Diane struck Winsted, pouring water into the Mad River. True to its name, the river swelled up quickly, overflowing its banks and destroying the businesses along Main Street. The nearby Still River joined in, rushing over its banks and severely damaging the North Main Street part of town.

Most of the damage occurred in a terrifying twenty-minute surge of raging waters. Cars were tossed around like ten pins. Several people lost their lives. Along the mile-long west side of Main Street, the stores, apartment buildings, and factories were either washed away or crumbled from the force of the rushing waters. On the east side, which included my parents' restaurant, there was serious damage: the first floors of the buildings collapsed, and the carefully designed window displays and interior spaces were swamped by six feet of mud.

The next day the sun came out. The merchants up and down the street viewed the devastation in stunned silence. Years of their labors and millions of dollars of their investment had gone down a river that turned into a Moloch.

At the time I was in California, having finished a summer job in Yosemite National Park right after graduation from Princeton University. I was about to head home when I walked into a store in Bakersfield, California, looked at the front page of the newspaper-- and saw a large picture of my father's ravaged Highland Arms Restaurant, done in by Hurricane Diane. I made it home in time to help dig the mass of mud out of the premises.

Shaf and Laura, who were there at the time of this Great Flood, told me later how my father had reacted to the devastation. Coming down the hill that morning, after just barely escaping the flood water the evening before, he surveyed the flood damage. He turned to Laura and quietly said, "It is a good thing I put my money in the children's education." Then, speaking with a few other forlorn retailers he'd known for years, he said, "Well, we'd better get to work. There is much cleanup and rebuilding to do. We can use the opportunity to beautify Main Street."

Think of it: At age sixty-two, having already endured one giant flood in his lifetime -- the storm of 1938, which destroyed his restaurant -- my father hardly wasted a moment looking back. He just looked ahead, to a future that was unknown or at least uncertain. He did his part to get the storekeepers in a heads-up frame of mind.

There was no flood insurance in 1955. Only the Small Business Administration came in to help with low-interest loans. By then, my siblings and I were all in our twenties. But the way our father reacted in those desolate days after the flood taught us much about reacting to adversity. He was cool, practical, and immediately focused on recovery.

Growing up in a small-business family was a significant factor in our daily lives. The Highland Arms was far more than a simple restaurant. It offered three dining areas, counter service, a cocktail lounge/bar, a delicatessen, and a bakery. Over the years, tens of thousands of customers dropped by to assuage their hunger and slake their thirst -- many of them from around the country and around the world, but the majority from within the community. Suppliers came by regularly to deliver the raw materials for the kitchen and bakery. Plumbers, electricians, and carpenters came to keep the place in repair. Jurors from the county courthouse down the street were brought there on their lunch break. Factory whistles at noon brought workers there for a sandwich and coffee. Lawyers, doctors, policemen, accountants, insurance agents, bankers, teachers and school principals, summer camp managers and their campers, children and parents, poor tenants on Main Street, storekeepers -- they all coursed through the Highland Arms.

The Highland Arms could fit two hundred patrons comfortably, which is quite large for a town of ten thousand. The premises became a community gathering place, in part because it was spacious enough that no one felt rushed to give up their tables for new customers. Moreover, Nathra Nader was the embodiment of vigorous free speech, and in the atmosphere he created there, free speech was contagious, combined with a wry sense of humor. Want to express your opinions without getting a cold stare in return? Go to Nader's. And they did, from 1925 to 1969, when Dad retired and closed the business.

When you grow up in a family business that is open seven days a week, you can bet it becomes a tradition in your life -- especially when the business is so inherently personal, so constantly conversational, so insistently pressurized with daily deadlines. We grew up with long-time employees who became part of our education, wittingly or unwittingly. Our customers loved them, and for us they were a kind of extended family. There was Benny Barton, the chef who was forever talking about returning to his home in Damariscotta, Maine. It took him more than twenty-five years to do so, and in the meantime he gave his customers quality food with great reliability. There was Paul Randazzo, funny and a little flamboyant, who cooked away in the kitchen except when he suddenly disappeared for one of his unexplained absences. And so many others: Homer, the superb dining room waiter, collecting dime tips faster than a slot machine could spit them out while he shared stories about his French Canadian days; Jake Stankiewicz, the nighttime baker, who was so steady, kind, and proud of his daily creations.

Though I never longed to take over the restaurant, I did try my hand at the many skills involved, from dishwashing to short-order cooking to waiting tables. I soon grew comfortable behind the counter, talking, arguing, and joshing back and forth with all kinds of people from all kinds of backgrounds in every kind of mood. I developed an ability to read people, catching their expressions, learning about their troubles, and sharing in their spirits. I wish I knew how each of these countless interactions contributed to shaping my personality, but I'm certain that, in one way or another, most of them did. I do know that the experience helped me enormously in my career as an advocate, teaching me to communicate with sources in our investigations, as well as with the political and media people we had to deal with regularly. Those random exchanges with friends, neighbors, and strangers in the restaurant made the work of my adult life far easier to handle. I couldn't help feeling bad for my friends and classmates, who were missing out on this vital part of their education -- on this immersion course in the thoughts and feelings of working people from all over the mosaic of America.

Watching my father in business also gave me an education in the meaning of character. He had the most wonderful relationships with his longtime builder-carpenter, Bob Morgan; his longtime plumber, Ed Hutton; and others he called on for help in maintaining his restaurant and repairing it after the floods, fires, and other periodic damage. These were relationships built on trust, and an easygoing mutual respect. (Mr. Hutton even enrolled McNader into his Scottish clan!) Nothing was ever set down in writing. Their word was their bond.

The floods and fires often left Dad with business debts that took years to pay off, and his meticulous drive to do so -- assisted by his Ben Franklin-worthy frugality -- became a minor legend in town. Even so, his frugality never conflicted with his charitable giving. Rather, it only gave him more leeway for charity. Less waste, more giving.

As the owner of a nearby shoe store once said, at Nader's a nickel bought you a cup of coffee and ten minutes of political talk. Lots of social issues were tossed around, catching the attention of the customers and helping the local residents get both informed and stirred up. That was one contribution Dad's business made to our small town -- along with many others, including a community college that was inspired by Shaf's wide-ranging conversations at the Highland Arms. To my father, the business and the community were one and the same.

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15. The Tradition of Patriotism



Father was an incessant critic of power -- business and governmental, local and national -- and one who was never afraid to propose a solution. He spoke his mind daily at the restaurant. "Nathra, how do you expect to make a profit if you keep speaking out that way?" his longtime customers and friends sometimes cautioned him.

"When I sailed past the Statue of Liberty, I took it seriously," he replied.

My parents prized the freedoms they found in America, and were always alert to anyone who might try to degrade them. My father used to say, "If you do not use your rights, you will lose your rights." And use their rights they did -- by speaking up at lively town meetings, by visiting town hall officials and newspaper editors to promote their opinions, by exhorting people to be informed and to vote. Their subjects of concern were mostly local, covering the gamut of typical municipal issues: services that were needed or wasteful, schools and hospitals that needed upgrading, roads and parking facilities that needed improvement, flood-control measures that needed updating, factory dumping that needed to be policed -- everything you might expect, from unleashed dogs to unreasonable budgets.

As Americans by choice, my parents never let the haughtier descendants of earlier immigrants make them feel defensive. They treasured the ideals of democracy, but they never felt compelled to accept its imperfections in practice, or to genuflect before anthems or flags. They saw right through politicians who tried to cover their sins with the Star-Spangled Banner. They cared only about how their elected officials fulfilled their duties, whether they actually engaged with the citizens or just shook hands with them in passing. As Dad often reminded the flag-wavers, our flag stands for the principles embodied in the last words of the Pledge of Allegiance -- "with liberty and justice for all."

Instead, our parents found allies in the town's more active older citizens, whose experience they eagerly absorbed. These neighbors helped acquaint them with the steps of small-town governance, explaining how long each step in the process was likely to take. Their common sense of injustice quickly overcame any prevailing ethnic or class differences. These were the people who knew that democracy and its benefits take work.

Father relished having a voice and being heard, especially when he believed that his opinions could be the basis for legal changes. For example, he once filed suit in federal court to change the Connecticut primary system so that all voters could participate in any primary -- not just party members, who were members of what he considered private organizations. So long as these party primaries were being paid for by our tax dollars, he reasoned, all voters should be able to vote in any primary. The judge who heard his case found no constitutional right being violated and decided against him, though other states have such crossover primary laws.

On another occasion, knowing that consumers could buy into group life and auto insurance, my father fought an anticompetitive state law, lobbied by the insurance industry, that prohibited group homeowners insurance. He wrote the Connecticut Insurance Department asking them to urge the legislature to repeal the law, which had been pushed by the insurance companies, and pave the way for neighbors to pool their resources and save on premiums by purchasing as a group. The Insurance Department rejected his request.

Did losing faze him? No, it merely made him more steadfast against any restrictions of rights or corruptions of government. It is as if he was saying, "You are not going to take away what I came to this country to breathe."

On occasion, his nonconformist viewpoints led even his regular lunch-counter customers to question his patriotism. "Love it or leave it," they would say -- but such taunts were his cup of delicious tea. He loved turning the tables on his challengers.

"Do you love your country?" he would ask with a quizzical smile.

"You're damn right I do."

"Well, why don't you spend time improving it?" he would respond.

Mother put us children through a similar drill "Ralph, do you love your country?" she asked me when I was about eight.

"Yes, mother," I said, wondering where she was going with this.

"Well, I hope when you grow up, you'll work hard to make it more lovable."

This, in our eyes, was the real definition of patriotism -- as expressed by the people themselves, not by their manipulative rulers and plutocrats. When you come from an authoritarian country or worse, you tend to be much more sensitive to symbols of la patria being used to repress people and their participation in power. You measure your new country according to its own self-professed high standards.

A nation, our parents believed, should be judged in much the same way as an individual: by deeds, not words. Politicians and the government show their regard for our society, our community, and our fellow human beings by what they do -- by their efforts to stop trouble before it starts, and to restore order or repair damage when it's over. Mother and Dad were aware that songs, symbols, and pledges, however sincerely meant, were often used as shortcuts, as substitutes for the hard work of democracy, the sweat it takes to pursue justice. And they would not be intimidated from pointing this evasion out again and again, in part because they knew that inaction plays into the hands of the barons of power and money. They intuited what Marcus Cicero said over two thousand years ago in ancient Rome: "Freedom is participation in power."

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16. The Tradition of Solitude



For a time, my father worked from ten o' clock in the morning to two in the afternoon. Then, after an afternoon nap, he would return to the restaurant at five o'clock in the evening, and work until one in the morning. During those naps, we children had to find ways to amuse ourselves without making much noise. And yet we never had any trouble finding things to do. We were used to being left alone, to read or play quietly with our toys, to build projects or knit things, to climb trees, to walk in the nearby woods, or just to daydream. Compared with today's overscheduled children, we were used to a certain amount of solitude. And we enjoyed it.

The diversions we had in our hours alone were simple and rewarding. There were always new books to read, of course. There were chores to do, tasks that became more time-consuming as we grew older. And there was the radio -- one radio -- on which we listened occasionally to Jack Benny, The Lone Ranger, The Shadow, Fibber McGee and Molly, Lowell Thomas and Edward R. Murrow for the news, and on Sunday evening One Man's Family. We also had time to play outside, and time to think and muse. The philosopher James Harvey Robinson pointed out that the minds of children can reap lots of future benefits when they are permitted time for reverie. As I noted earlier, Shaf urged me to read Robinson's book when I was only thirteen, and the author's words about reverie made me feel good; until then I'd been convinced I was merely wasting time.

One reason that my parents put such emphasis on solitude was they valued their own solitude, their own time spent by themselves or with other adults. Their love for us was immense, their caring demonstrable, but they thought it was wise not to become totally absorbed by their children. As a result, we never threatened to dominate the proceedings when my parents entertained at home. We were accustomed to spending time by ourselves, and we felt little need to show off, for their sake or for ours. After a dinner with guests, we excused ourselves and went off to play with the guests' children or on our own.

Needless to say, things have changed. Some years ago, we invited a family with two small children over for Thanksgiving dinner. The four-year-old boy spent the whole day running wild, jumping off the table, knocking over glasses of water, screeching at the top of his lungs, and generally making every effort possible to ruin the conversation and the meal. Today, most parents might ask: Was he suffering from attention deficit disorder? No, the parents were suffering -- from an unwillingness to control their son's unprovoked behavior and lay down some markers. It's a symptom of today's sprawled economy that many children spend less time with adults, including their parents, than any previous generation in history. When they do have a few precious moments with adults, they often act out as if they're desperately trying to make up for the prolonged inattention.

"I believe that children should have some time to themselves," my mother once said. "This is what I intended when I told my daughter Claire she could not sing in the choir, with a group, until she first learned how to sing alone. I wanted the children to be able to exercise their minds and understand the importance of solitude, to be self-reliant, to think independently. The children were encouraged to be themselves, to know how to define themselves." Ralph Waldo Emerson would have approved.

Of course, our ideas of solitude today can be deeply flawed. Many parents plant their children in front of TV, video games, the Internet, or other electronic child-seducers for hours and hours every week. Solitude originally meant "a state of being alone," not a state of passive symbiosis with these frenetic and often lurid temptations. True solitude can involve an infinite variety of experience: being alone with one's imagination, one's thoughts, dreams, one's puzzles and books, one's knitting or hobbies, from carving wood blocks, to building little radios or model airplanes or collecting colorful stamps from all over the world. Being alone can mean following the flight of a butterfly or a hummingbird or an industrious pollinating bee. It can mean gazing at the nighttime sky, full of those familiar constellations, and trying to identify them all.

Being alone was easier in those days. The telephone didn't ring incessantly; compared with today, it hardly rang at all. We certainly weren't besieged by salespeople calling to interrupt at dinner time. Silence was common, a phenomenon that might have flummoxed many of today's fidgeting, electronically conditioned children. Children today suffer from shortened attention spans and reduced person-to-person interactions, and the results are wreaking havoc with their ability to think, converse, conduct themselves in family life, and educate themselves. Some of these youngsters are beginning to recognize such deficits in their lives. Maybe they are looking for what Alice Walker has called "quiet space."

Contemplating what "quiet space" did for me is an educated guess, another source of wonder. Yet I know that even in childhood I treasured and relished my solitude, not as an escape or expression of alienation, but as a time for exploration and self-reflection, a time to get to know myself better. Solitude was my engine of renewal, the steward for my self- reliance and the clarifier of my thoughts. And, perhaps most important, time alone allowed me to commune with my favorite authors -- the American muckrakers of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, who demonstrated the importance of challenging powerful interests, and the authors of adventure fiction, who inspired me to explore uncharted terrain and expand my vocabulary of words and ideas. Although I can't say I thought in these terms as a child, it's clear to me now that my mind was always led back to things that involved making a better life for the community. I was fascinated by people who broke new ground, and wanted to do the same.