The Seventeen Traditions

by Ralph Nader

  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.

  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.

  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 enga
ge 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 it’s 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.

  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 bu
ild 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.