by Ralph Nader
“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.”
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.
17.
The Tradition of Civics
My parents’ philosophy was rooted in what might be described as the “civic golden rule”—that neighbors should treat neighbors as they themselves would like to be treated. A deep personal sense of civic duty isn’t usually the result of enduring didactic lectures, much less of studying bloodless civics books. True civic awareness is a flowing river with many sources—some as small as rivulets and brooks, some as large as tributaries. In our case, the flow began at a young age, as we accompanied Mother and Father to the local town meetings where the community made its decisions.
At these meetings, our parents—and anyone else who lived in the town and cared to participate—had the chance to talk with the town’s elected “selectmen,” as the local representatives were called. A holdover from early New England history, the town meeting was a more pristine form of local democracy that has had no equal to this day. The public business of the town was put on display, and those townspeople who showed up regularly had few inhibitions about airing their opinions. When there was disagreement, nothing was sacred. An interested party would hardly think twice before calling out his opponent in purely personal terms: “Your father, Greg, would turn over in his grave if he could see what you’re doing here.”
Even as a boy, I noticed that these gatherings were often dominated by the same few voters, who took to the floor meeting after meeting and always seemed unusually well prepared for the occasion. By the time I was a teenager, helping out in the restaurant, I realized that these leading citizen activists were widely viewed as mavericks, and that some considered them oddballs or even deviants. The day after a tumultuous town meeting, people would point out Mr. Franz, a particularly motivated older resident, walking down Main Street. It was as if he were one of a trio—the town drunk, the town fool, and the town citizen. Who is more foolish, I wondered—the core group of committed voters and taxpayers who engage in the process, or the much larger number who habitually abstain from town affairs, leaving their interests to be decided by others? Later I was delighted, and not a little vindicated, when I discovered that the ancient Greek word “idiot” referred to civic apathy, not intelligence.
On the other side of the ethical tradition was the Golden Rule, and a host of similar pronouncements in the Bible that enhanced that simple call to help and get along with one another. For Dad, that was enough as a frame of reference. In the daily soapbox that was his restaurant, he was happy to discuss anything under the sun with his patrons, whether local or out-of-town. From local tradespeople to campaigning politicians, few survived a visit to the Highland Arms without having a vibrant conversation with my father. Those politicians were his special target; his counter, with its long row of seats, was an irresistibly efficient way to shake hands with a captive audience of voters. Dad always lay in wait down by the end of the counter, near the large coffee urns. And when his and the politician’s hands clasped, he wouldn’t let go until he had his say and got some response.
There’s little doubt that, in the nearly fifty years he ran the restaurant, my father educated, motivated, and inspired tens of thousands of people to think more deeply about the issues that affected them as citizens—right there in Winsted, and around the country and the world. To this day, I still meet people from near and far who recall their conversations with him. He covered much ground in these encounters—from colonialism and the suppression of self-determination to government waste, from the shortcomings of the press to the improper relationships between government agencies and big business that favored them over small businesses, from the constant problem of inadequate parking on Main Street to the unnecessary demolition of buildings such as the classic railroad terminal at Winsted. He was constantly struck by the human capacity for greed. Dad was frequently dismayed by the performance of our presidents, the cowardly behavior of the major political parties, the willingness of Congress to vote itself large pay raises, and the exclusion of independent voters like himself from parts of the electoral process. He had a special reserve of contempt for chain stores and their migrant managers, who always came with excuses from central headquarters in New York or Chicago concerning why they couldn’t contribute to local charities. The list goes on and on.
Father’s zest for public debate was equaled only by his appetite for problem solving. He was a demanding citizen. In his daily round of civic conversations, he did more than just toss around the questions of the day. He helped orient and mobilize many local residents into taking action, whether through voting or protesting excesses such as Congress’s large, ill-timed pay raises for itself. In 1978, at the age of eighty-six, his protest march attracted national media attention. When critical town services were being proposed, such as building a new hospital wing or a modern sewage system, he got into the debate on the ground floor, and stayed involved through completion.
He also made people think about aspects of civic engagement to which they might otherwise have given little consideration. He was fond of reexamining the conventional meaning of words—pressing his customers to think of “wealth,” for example, in terms of not just money or possessions, but also charity, health, happiness, and justice in a community. He felt sorry for the very rich (even as he trounced them), pointing out that they lived in what he called a “gold cage.” He never prejudged any customer to be
beyond his interest, or beyond the reach of his arguments. The firmer they appeared to be in their views, the better he liked it. He was not into convincing the convinced.
My mother’s civic life covered a very broad range of involvements, from the usual charities like the Red Cross to the larger subjects that are faced by every community—issues involving health, children, public works, and the like. From the time she moved to Winsted, she was struck by how insular people could be, especially when it came to international affairs. So she joined the local Women’s Club, and helped to start an international committee that brought well-known speakers to address the club and its guests. When my older brother was stationed in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, during World War II, Mother attended Spanish classes. And she became the first volunteer teacher of Arabic in the state’s adult education program, which earned her a statewide television interview before any of her children had achieved any public attention.
As my mother well knew, the ethical fiber of a community is nourished by every small instance in which its citizens stand up for what is right. She encouraged her neighbors to write letters to the editor of the local newspaper, the Winsted Evening Citizen, but never hesitated to bypass that process and call the editor herself if she thought it would get quicker action. Mother really knew how to work the phones, in conversations that were short and to the point. Once, when the librarians at the Beardsley and Memorial Library were having trouble getting young people to return books, the local McDonald’s offered to give a free hamburger to children who returned their borrowed books. Mother thought this was wrongheaded: Children should be taught to return books to the library on time because it was their responsibility, not because of some commercial (and caloric) incentive. She complained, and she prevailed.
