The Seventeen Traditions

by Ralph Nader

  In the early 1920s, my father returned to Lebanon. When he came back to Connecticut in 1925, with his nineteen-year-old bride, he found just the kind of place he wanted in the town of Winchester, which includes the town of Winsted. Winchester fit the measurements of the polis, the ideal small city-state outlined by the ancient Greeks. Pop found a building he liked on Main Street in Winsted, a building with upstairs apartments and a storefront on the ground level. He rented out the apartments, and below he opened up the Highland Sweet Shop, which eventually became a full-service restaurant and bakery he called the Highland Arms.

  My mother was a standout student. After graduation she quickly became a teacher, first in her hometown and then in a nearby town—already an adventurous move for those times, when single women were to remain under their family’s roof until they married. At that time village school boards tested a teacher’s knowledge publicly before hiring, an event mother recalled with amusement over how she handled the challenge. Within months influenza struck that community and many of her students were stricken. Against all advice, mother insisted on visiting each of her students at home. She attributed some of her immunity to huge doses of raw garlic and fresh oranges daily. In her adopted country she gave birth to four children in her first nine years of marriage, and assumed the twin role of mother and active community-minded citizen.

  Her first born, Shafeek (which means “the compassionate one” in Arabic), was wise beyond his years as a youngster. He took responsibility as a family duty. He loved exploring Winsted and the surrounding towns, farms, forests, and lakes with map in hand. He was the unusual big brother who took a continual interest in his younger siblings—in our well-being, our education, and our horizons. When he went off to the Navy in World War II, we felt like we were losing our coach—our source of curiosity and adventure, the older brother who taught us to dream about unusual futures.

  Claire was the classic big sister. She filled in when my mother was preoccupied with other family or community matters, making sure I ate my food and did my chores. A selfless child, she regularly tended to the needs of others. During the war we raised chickens for their eggs and meat, and Claire disliked—indeed abhorred—plucking the feathers off a chicken we were preparing to have for dinner. But she found other joys in life, among them playing the piano.

  Laura was an independent, mischievous child. When she was about two years old, she wriggled out of her carriage when no one was looking; my mother found her calmly trying to pet an unusually sociable black garden snake in the backyard. She was a runner, and very independent; she liked going where no one in the family had yet gone. But she also loved her sleep, and her piano lessons, and the banana split sundaes her big brother made for her in the restaurant.

  Together we made a nicely balanced family, a mutually enriching group who enjoyed and benefited from each moment we spent together. Like nature itself, a family has certain built-in purposes: to protect its members, to nurture its children, to propagate itself so that it survives and thrives from generation to generation. Historically, the family is also the channel through which traditions are conveyed. In the distant past, traditions were shaped and enforced by larger groups—tribes, clans, and sects—from the top down, gradually trickling down through the extended family and then the nuclear family. Often this was done through social sanctions, sometimes with an iron fist. Today, except for some extended first-generation immigrant families, the job of passing down traditions is left to the nuclear family, and to many broken two-parent collaborations. Without the support of a strong community, the family is on its own, often forced to handle its regenerative and comforting functions while dealing with everything from economic insecurity and long work hours to the omnipresent commercialization of childhood.

  Family, in short, is a gift. If you tried to put a value on all the functions American families perform, as though they were being purchased in the commercial marketplace, their total cost would compare favorably with the gross national product. Indeed, outsourcing family services to the market is already a formidable industry. And it will become more common unless we take to heart the intangible, noncommercial role that functional families play in the spiritual and material lives of our children. As helpful as many family services are, they can no more substitute for the real thing than the purchase of infant formula can replace the gift of natural mother’s milk.

  In our fast-moving contemporary society, the mounting external pressures felt by most families are eroding their ability to protect and nourish their children—to offer the guidance that helps children to face the world around them. Still, I believe this tide can be turned. The most devastated families in our history—those who survived the serial brutality of slavery—managed in many heroic instances to pass their traditions from one generation to the next, even as their oppressors tried every means they had to stop them. This resilience, under horrendous conditions, is a testament to the primordial, universal human need to invest the raising of our children with meaning, and with a sense of connectedness to the world around them.

  As I look back on my own childhood, I realize how fortunate we were that our parents understood their own familial pasts, and that the traditions they observed in their own families would offer them an important framework as they tried to give their children healthy roots and prepare them for stable, well-directed lives in their new country. And so, in these pages, I have tried to capture some of my family’s traditions as I experienced them in childhood and recall them today. I share them not as recipes or prescriptions, but as stimuli for your own thoughts and recollections—as an occasion to revisit lessons passed on within your own family. Such family traditions challenge the notion that the fads, technologies, how-to manuals, and addictions of modern life have somehow taken the place of the time-tested wisdom fashioned in the crucibles of earlier generations.

  The garb may change, after all, but the wearer does not.

  1.

  The Tradition of Listening

  One day, when she was in her mid-eighties, my mother and I were flying to California. Seated behind us was a young man. He started speaking with his seatmates before the doors to the airplane closed; kept talking as the plane took off; and was heard chatting over the Alleghenies, the Great Plains, the Rocky Mountains, the fertile California valleys, and into San Francisco. He never stopped talking, except to gulp down a meal and visit the restroom. When we landed, Mother turned to me.

  “He didn’t learn much in the past five hours, did he?” she said.

  Listen more than you speak, and think before you speak my mother told us from the time we were old enough to do either, and over time we heard her until it was no longer necessary. To our parents, other children seemed to talk too much, and much of it was sheer nonsense and mischief that went well beyond the normal exuberance of youth. That wasn’t going to happen with their offspring. My mother was determined to make sure all her children knew how to listen—not because she wanted to discipline us, or because she put a premium on peace and quiet, but because she wanted us to learn.

  Learning how to listen was a core, if subtle, part of our early education. Mother gave us endless opportunities to listen, as she poured history, insight, advice, neighborhood events, and family stories from her ancestors into our absorbing minds. She also reenacted in installments celebrated sagas such as the story of Joan of Arc, and drew on her memories of dramatic historical events and their meaning for the present.

  Both my mother and my father grew up in the folk culture of Lebanon, before the era of radio and television, before even electricity had arrived in their midst. There were no distant voices channeled into their living rooms or headphones. Instead their listening came from two sources: other human beings and nature itself, all of it obviously nearby. For example, one ever-present sound in their lives was the braying of donkeys, found trudging everywhere, carrying their masters and all kinds of loads. An entire folklore embracing donkey stories and jokes—often featuring a peasant foil na
med Jeha, along with the classic fables of Bidpai—was part of the storytelling inheritance they absorbed daily. If you didn’t listen, how could you remember these jokes to share with your friends? It wasn’t as if there were donkey joke websites to refresh their memories. The ear sharpens the memory, and my parents’ generation had a trained capacity for listening during the interactions of daily life, if only because they had no alternatives.

  Our father’s emphasis on listening came from another direction—from his interest in politics and justice. He knew the importance of seeing things counterintuitively, of skeptical observation, and he taught us to follow his example by subjecting us to Socratic questioning in any given setting. Even his passing conversation made us want to listen; his remarks were so interesting. He was especially piquant on matters of money and charity. “Far more people know how to make big money than know how to spend it in useful ways,” he once told us. “After they pile it up, they hardly know what to do with it, except spoil their descendants.” Learning how to listen became a form of discipline that was rewarding in itself. It was not inhibiting; we still talked quite a bit. Our parents still listened quite a bit. But we four children never overwhelmed the conversation.

  We learned to listen when guests were in the living room conversing with our parents. We learned to listen in school, which helped us avoid the restlessness of our schoolmates and enabled us to be more contemplative. We learned to listen to the evening radio network news, which sometimes had real relevance to our family—most memorably with the Pearl Harbor attacks of December 7, 1941, since my brother Shaf was nearing draft age. And we learned to listen to the spirited debates at the local town meetings and other public gatherings, instead of fidgeting and distracting our parents from their focus on the matters at hand.

  My inclination for listening was a boon during the tens of thousands of miles I covered while hitchhiking. Half a century ago, hitchhiking was far more common—and safer—than it is today, and plenty of cars and trucks stopped to pick me up as I thumbed my way around the country. After a few introductory words, their drivers probably expected me to doze off for the balance of the trip. Instead, I saw every driver as an expert on some subject in his own right—whether he was a bricklayer, teacher, tree surgeon, factory worker, waiter, salesman, or a rug cleaner—and after asking an opening question or two, I just sat back, listened closely, and got a dose of enlightenment about each driver’s life’s skill or passion. My only regret is that I didn’t carry a diary to write down some of the things I heard on these trips; still, what I did learn added up to a free extracurricular education—one that helped me interact with and understand a far broader selection of people than I would ordinarily have encountered as a high school, college, or law student.

  Listening didn’t always mean remaining silent. I learned early that good listening meant asking leading questions, and inserting verbal nudges that would tease out what you were really interested in learning. That early training helped me develop both my interviewing skills, which helped me throughout my career, and my patience in the long, often contentious, question-and-answer periods following my lectures and speeches. After sitting through one of these sessions, some reporters have written about what they call my “remarkable endurance.” To me it has never been a matter of endurance, but rather the fruit of my family’s tradition of listening in an effort to understand where other people were coming from.

  As we grew older, we learned to listen and respond to the arguments of others who disagreed with us. Especially when we were young, Mother and Father made it clear that incessant talking obstructed the mind from receiving new information and improving itself. She encouraged us, in the fullest sense of the phrase, to keep an open mind. “The more you talk, the less you’ll have to say,” she would remind us. “The more you listen, the more sensible will be what you say.”

  2.

  The Tradition of the Family Table

  The Wall Street Journal once devoted an entire editorial to the subject of my mother. After another paper ran a story noting that she sometimes sent us off to school with a handful of chickpeas—instead of candy, presumably—and scraped the sugary frosting off of birthday cakes, the Journal took my mother to task for her “puritanical” ways. We did not take exception to my mother’s attitudes toward food; in fact, the cake-scraping eventually became a family joke. For some bizarre reason, though, she evidently got under the skin of the hidebound reactionaries at the Journal. (Maybe they’d just run out of complaints against me.)

  My mother was highly amused by the screed. She was so far ahead of them and their adherents regarding what food is all about. And what it’s all about is not just food. For Mother, the family table was a mosaic of sights, scents, and tastes, of talking and teaching, of health, culture, beauty, history, stimulation, and delight. For Dad, it was a time to pepper us with questions, never thinking for a moment that they might have been over our heads. So what about the leader theory of history? he would ask. Do leaders make changes, or do they largely reflect dynamic pressures on the ground? Or: How did the Treaty of Versailles affect the economic conditions facing a devastated Germany after World War I? Much of our upbringing happened in our compact kitchen—tucked between two pantries in our Winsted home—and at our family table.

  Mother invented a wide variety of recipes, using her own intuition and judgment, the way her forebears did. Our diet was heavy with different kinds of fresh beans, vegetables, fruits, grains, lamb, and fish. Among my favorite dishes was Shaykh il Mihshee (“the king of stuffed food”), a baked eggplant stuffed with minced lamb, pine nuts, and onions, garnished with tomatoes and served on long-grain rice with a tossed salad. Mother did not like fatty foods. She never fed us hot dogs, not because she knew they were bad, but because she just didn’t know what was in them. She believed in serving a healthful variety of simple foods, and didn’t like to fuss over food. She cooked quickly, washing her utensils as she went along, preparing food from scratch—no canned foods or processed meats and grains. And she held to the rule—everything in moderation—even our morning cod liver oil (yikes!).

  In the Arabic language, words of endearment are derived from the world of food. “How delicious you are,” parents tell their children, or “How tasty,” or “How tender.” Sounds funny in English, but in Arabic such comments are ancient, routine, and heartfelt. As much as she loved us, though, my mother never asked her young children what we wanted to eat. Why? Because “young children don’t know what is good for them,” she observed after we were grown. “They don’t have to like what they eat; they just have to eat it.” We were expected to eat everything on our plates. “If children find out that not eating will bring lots of attention, then they will frustrate their parents by making a scene again and again at the kitchen table,” she said. “Parents must not lose control here, or else they will have a scene often at dinnertime.” But she knew that children also have an acute sense of fair play. “Parents should eat the same food as their children,” she believed. “No double standard.”

  I think of those words of hers whenever I’m in an airplane or a restaurant and I hear parents ask their young children what they want to eat or drink. We’ve all heard the worst possible responses to these questions: “I don’t want soup,” or “No, I hate carrots!” or, far worse, “How many times do I have to tell you, I want a Coke for breakfast! Or a cupcake! Or donuts!” Many parents seem unable to put an end to such officious rejections, and all too often surrender to their children’s demands. The kiddie-food marketers have taken control of these children, and there seems to be no level of reasoning capable of breaking their hold.

  Even those moms and dads mindful enough to mouth a few nutrition-is-good-for-your-body platitudes are easily defeated by a few choruses of Why? from their kids. The intensity of contemporary mass merchandising, aimed directly at children, has dampened their respect for the adults around them, weakening their sense of parental authority. Our family table wasn’t without the occasional b
out of resistance, of course; after all, kids are kids. But my mother always had a response at the ready. She knew how much we were interested in history, for instance, so if we balked at a dish that was rich in vitamin C, she would tell the story of how the sailors of olden days grew sick from scurvy until someone discovered that sucking lemons on board ship brought salvation from the disease. Or how desert Bedouins could survive for a long time on a diet made up largely of dates or figs. Most of the time, though, she would lean over us intently, looking into our eyes, and answer our Whys with a firm “Because it is good for you.” The underlying message, of course, was: I’m your nurturer and I want the best for you.

  And when that didn’t work, Mother was capable of cutting right to the point: “What does your tongue have against your heart, lungs, liver, and kidneys?”

  The family table was an ideal place to teach us manners and respect, a task for which my mother drew on her endless supply of food-related proverbs and sayings. Some of them were simple rhymes, easy to remember: As the ship goes out to sea, I shovel my food away from me. Others were Arabic proverbs that applied to more than table manners, like He who takes too big a mouthful shall find it difficult to swallow (it sounds much more melodic in the original). She preferred not to reprimand us directly, which would have been humiliating. Sometimes a lift of her eyebrows conveyed her message eloquently. But we also knew that if we ignored her signals, she would make herself clear. We learned not to take food before the guests were served, and to respect our elders by behaving ourselves at the dinner table.