American Greatness

 Trump Orders Smithsonian Institution to Promote ‘American Greatness’  Headline in New York Times, March 28, 2025

America's true greatness has always lain in its ability to acknowledge and then mend its own defects.  The ideals we prize - liberty, equality, justice for all - have always been aspirational, more prescriptive than descriptive.  Facing the dark chapters of our history is what enables us to overcome our own shortcomings and do better.

To end the robber capitalism of the Gilded Age,  for instance, it took muck racking journalists to expose the horrors of the sweatshops and slaughterhouses where immigrant workers, many of them youngsters, toiled long hours at starvation wages.  Read The Jungle by Upton Sinclair.  It's not a flattering picture of life in the Chicago slums.  But by exposing the grim reality of American urban life at the turn of the twentieth century, a movement arose to end child labor, to create a minimum wage, to insure the cleanliness and safety of factories that had previously churned out tainted meat and disease-ridden food.

America has always improved when it's been willing to see its ugly underbelly.

In the town of Tulsa, Oklahoma, where I grew up, there are now memorials and museums and cultural centers dedicated to telling the story of the Greenwood Massacre, the worst race riot in U.S. history.  In 1921, over three hundred residents of the prosperous section of the north end known as "Black Wall Street" were murdered by white vigilantes, while law enforcement collaborated or, at best, did nothing.  Shops and churches and homes were torched.  Yet for decades, this atrocity was concealed by town fathers, considered unmentionable, censored from textbooks that I read in high school.  Only seventy-five years after the fact did a Truth and Reconciliation commission finally emerge to interview living witnesses and consider the question of reparations.

When I returned to my home town not long ago for a fiftieth high school reunion, it seemed to me that Tulsa was a much healthier city than the one I remembered from adolescence.  Segregation was gone.  Soon after my visit, Tulsa elected its first black mayor. No monetary reparations were ever made.  But the city had moved forward - not by cloaking its past, as had once been the case, but by confronting its history head on.

Through his executive orders, Mr, Trump would like our museums and historical monuments "to focus on the greatness of the achievements and progress of the American people," rather than dwelling on the painful episodes of the past.  Similarly, our national parks should showcase "the beauty, abundance, and grandeur of the American landscape.” (Never mind that his other executive orders slash funding for these parks and open protected public lands to mining, logging and drilling.)

Owning up to our society's failures is essential to our common progress.  In prayerful words written by Katherine Lee Bates over a century ago, "America, America, God mend thine every flaw."  In that work of repair and mending,  God needs our help, and we need an honest reckoning of how far we've come, and how far we have yet to go.  

The Real Danger of AI

 The real danger of AI?  It will turn us into pets!

Think how thousands of years ago, ancestors of today’s canines gathered round human campfires, hoping to scavenge a bone from these bipedal apes.  A symbiotic relationship eventually emerged.  As pets, dogs began to worship the Master species, following people around and more or less willingly doing their bidding.  Why?  Dogs no longer had to hunt.  People met their animal needs and, in return, canines gladly became subservient.

Now imagine a not too distant future when people begin to worship their devices: smart phones and large language models that are so clever they can think for us!  They solve our problems, do the hard work of hunting for answers.  Like dogs who trot at the heel of their owners, people will begin to carry their phones and laptops everywhere they go.  (In fact, this could already be happening!)  The devices entertain us. They make us feel empowered.  They feed our hungers for affirmation and attention, even a kind of intimacy.  In return, the machines ask so little of us: just endless kilowatts, plus our slavish devotion.  

Yes, artificial intelligence poses other dangers too, like battlefield munitions that fire without human operators, perhaps ready to morph into Terminators. But my guess is that the human race will succumb to seduction–the dominating spell of the gadgets–without a shot being fired.  Like dogs (another highly social creature), people will happily subordinate themselves to the pack leader, the Alpha of AI.

Only some folks may remain feral, like those canines of the last Ice Age who chose to stay wolves rather than change into Great Danes or chihuahuas.  These wild ones will continue to read newspapers and to write poems without ChatGPT.  They will solve important problems–like Einstein did–with tools no more complicated than a pencil and paper.  They will frequent religious assemblies that ask questions where algorithms fail and they will ponder Gods that cannot be carried in a side pocket.  And they will have real friends, even though they are not on Facebook.

The dogs will look down on these unplugged souls as benighted, uncivilized and anti-progress.  And the wolves will regard the dogs as what they are: unfree, less than and degenerate.

Is this prophecy, prediction or just crazy talk?  Who can say?   But if your first impulse is to ask Google, you already know the answer, just like you know how to shake hands, lie down and stay.  

Good Boy.  

Old, Older, Oldest

Barzillai the Gileadite also came down from Rogelim to cross the Jordan with the king and to send him on his way from there. Now Barzillai was very old, eighty years.

2 Samuel 19:31-32

How old is very old?  If you asked the Bible, the psalms would answer that the span of a man's life is threescore or, by reason of strength, fourscore.  Most folks run out of steam when they hit eighty, in other words.

Eighty seems to be one of those developmental pivot points, where a profound change occurs.  Life swings on a hinge, rather as it does in early adolescence.

When our daughter was in middle school, my wife and I tried to prepare ourselves by reading a book titled How To Talk So Teenagers Listen and Listen So Teenagers Talk.  The author hedged that there is no magic moment when kids become teens.  But for most girls, he explained, the transformation from playing with dolls to thinking about getting a tattoo arrives in the second semester of seventh grade.  For our family, that was right on the button.  And it was helpful to pinpoint the precise age of the transition. What a difference a semester, or a birthday, can make.

In my experience as a parish minister, caring for an aging congregation, I saw eighty as another threshold, not the passage from childhood to adolescence but the portal from old to very old   For many seniors it's the age when the option of moving to an independent living community is out of the picture, because one can no longer pass the required physical.  For elders who may have heard that retirement consists of three phases, go go, go slow, and no go, eighty marks the last stage, when your giddy-up has got up and went.

In the go go years that I volunteered as an emergency responder with the fire department (when I was in my sixties), we were frequently summoned to help when someone had fallen in their home. After eighty, many people who take a tumble won't be able to get back up without assistance.

Now that I am seventy and retired from the force, it's hard for me to imagine answering the pager for midnight calls any longer and harder still to imagine a man a decade older serving as President of the United States. It's past the demarcation line.  And perhaps the fourscore mark sheds light on the difference between Biden and Trump.  There is only four years difference between the two but during that interval from seventy-seven to eighty-one something shifts, physically and mentally.  It explains why one man, although a narcissist and a bully, appears energetic (even frenzied at times), while the other, although fundamentally decent, seems geriatric.

 

How old is too old?  Washington was 57 when he was inaugurated, while Lincoln was 52.  FDR was 51 when he ascended to the presidency and Teddy Roosevelt just 42 when he was sworn in. An argument can be made that our greatest leaders have tended to take office in mid-life.

So yes, Biden should withdraw from the race and so should Donald Trump.  Both political parties should nominate younger women and men now and in the future.  And yes, there should be mandatory retirement ages for Supreme Court Justices, just as there are for career officers in the U.S. military.

How old is too old?  I could hedge and qualify my answer but the next man who puts his hand on the Bible to take the oath of office shouldn't be any older than Barzillai the Gileadite. Eighty.