Things I Overheard While Talking to Myself (6 page)

Chapter 5

The Talking and the Doing of It

You could hear them falling from the trees and thudding onto the ground or hitting the shoulders of the people listening to the commencement speakers. They were locusts: long, green, swarming grasshoppers. It was 1982, and since we assumed they were seventeen-year locusts, we felt they hadn’t been out in the real world like this since 1965, which might account for their curiosity as they climbed up people’s legs or crawled around on their laps while the talks went on.

It was hard to think of anything but bugs that day. Elie Wiesel was there to receive an honorary doctorate from Kenyon College, as I was. We ran into each other a couple of decades later, and the first thing he said was, “Remember the locusts?” I gave the commencement talk, but all I remember of it now was a sea of faces registering revulsion and disgust.

They were probably reacting to the green things on their legs and not to my talk, but when I look again at the things I said—a litany of troubles that was the state of our world then—it makes me a little sad.

I cataloged things the graduates could do to make the world better, but it was really a list of all the ways we had screwed things up for them. I hadn’t done any special research; I got all my depressing information from the daily newspapers. When I look back now and imagine that sunny day twenty-five years ago when my daughter Elizabeth was graduating from Kenyon College with hope in her heart and a chuckle in her throat, I notice that, in fact, it wasn’t sunny. It was gloomy and gray; the world had been mangled, and on top of that, locusts were falling out of the trees onto our heads. There aren’t any good old days. On that day, though, she did have hope and a chuckle.

It was something she always had. Not long after she was born, the doctor said her feet were turned in a little. It wasn’t serious, he said. Casts for two or three months would straighten them out. At first, we were brought down by the sight of her small legs heavy with the plaster that encased them. But within a few days, we noticed she had invented a game. She knocked the casts together and laughed at the sound they made. She had turned them into a giant pair of castanets. She would grin up at us from her crib and slam the casts together, laughing toothlessly. Her laughter cheered us, as it would time after time from then on.

As she got older, her wit sharpened to a fine point. There was a running joke in the family, promoted usually by Elizabeth, about my nose, which the children regarded as unusually long. Once, on a cold day when she was eight, I announced that the end of my nose was freezing. “Sure,” she said, “the circulation can’t get out that far.” I told my friends how funny she was and offered her twenty-five cents for every funny line she or her sisters submitted to me for a television series I was writing. If I used the line, I would give them a dollar. It wasn’t that I was cheap; I just wanted to help them know the value of money. This led to some frugality on their part, but mostly to a new line of jokes about how cheap I was.

But now something new was happening. The little kid who went to sleep laughing while I sat at her bedside was graduating from college. And I was at the podium, looking for words that could catch this transition just long enough to make sense of it.

It seems hard to believe that you grew from that little baby…into a friend of mine. From my child to my equal.

I don’t know about everyone’s mom and dad today, but I know that for me—as glad as I am for you, as much as I feel this sense of pride and relief and accomplishment—that’s how nervous, anxious, and edgy I am about this whole thing.

I was talking to my daughter from my heart to hers, but I felt I had to make it a public talk, and I headed off on a commencement riff about the state of the world. I should have kept it personal.

What bothers me is not just letting you go. It’s the world you’ll be going into that scares me. What kind of place have we made ready for you? And how will you cope with it? Dirty water, dirty air, racism, sexism, unemployment, inflation, crime in places high and low, war and rumors of war: It’s a real utopia.

We’re leaving you with a government that solves these problems in an oddly creative way. “Why think of them as problems?” they seem to be saying. “Let all the problems be solutions for one another.” A couple of months ago, the president suggested that the unemployment figures would be much lower if we just stopped counting so many women among the unemployed.

You may feel that working on all this will take forever. But, actually, all these problems can be wiped out in five minutes, because we’re also leaving you the nuclear bomb. This is the ultimate problem solver, and Washington has been thinking about it.

They have a department in Washington called the Federal Emergency Management Agency, whose job it is to prepare America for the effects of a nuclear war. The head of this agency has been quoted as saying that after a nuclear war, “whatever the losses in food and manufacturing, they will be balanced by losses in population.” So one problem solves another.

FEMA was only three years old in 1982, and I hadn’t heard much about it. It wasn’t as far removed from reality as it would be after Hurricane Katrina, but they were already operating from another planet.

The agency says it hopes to keep American deaths down to only forty-five million in a nuclear war, and they have stashed away seventy-five thousand pounds of opium in secret locations to ease the suffering of those who survive the firestorm.

By the way, I’m not making any of this up. We’re giving you a world that runs like clockwork. And the clock it runs like is a cuckoo clock.

I couldn’t do much about the bomb. I’m sorry. I started working for a treaty to ban nuclear tests almost twenty years ago, when you were very small. But instead of things getting better, they’ve got worse.

Scientists have calculated that the three hundred million dollars it took to wipe out smallpox in the last decade are equal to five hours of the military budget.

Eighty percent of the world’s illness is caused by contaminated water, yet the cost of a sanitary global water supply is equal to three weeks of the arms race.

I know that today these words sound like the ravings of a naïve Hollywood liberal, but in a way, I can’t help it. I grew up in an age when this kind of woolly thinking was common. Take, for instance, this stinging denunciation of war and the preparations for war by a typical lefty of my youth:

“Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired, signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. This is not a way of life at all in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron.”

These words, which today might seem dangerously close to undermining our national defense, were spoken in 1953 by President Dwight D. Eisenhower.

I wanted to speak to Elizabeth’s hope and cheerfulness, but there were a string of mournful events fresh in my mind that day, and I couldn’t keep away from them. I had just spent almost ten years campaigning for the Equal Rights Amendment. Scenes from those years still flashed in my mind. Eleanor Smeal and I pulling up to a church in Oklahoma, running in, and speaking to a crowd that surged and swayed with energy. Working with dignified, graceful Betty Ford, announcing a countdown campaign in the last year we had to get it ratified. Standing with Arlene and our daughters in Lafayette Park outside the White House, urging a crowd of a thousand people to not give up. But here was a time limit on ratification. Time had almost run out in 1979 when Congress voted for an extension. Now, in May 1982, if the amendment wasn’t ratified by three more states within a few weeks, it would not become part of the Constitution, and there was no chance for that to happen.

I wanted to give you a world that respected you as a woman as much as it did me as a man. I wanted the pledge of that respect engraved in our Constitution. But, unless a miracle happens within the next thirty-seven days, you’re not going to get it. You’ll pay the same taxes as a man, Congress can send you to war, just like a man, but you won’t be guaranteed equality of rights under the law. Not this year, and not next year, and maybe not for the rest of this century.

While we were campaigning for the amendment, I heard three fears expressed by opponents with surprising frequency. One was that under the ERA men and women would have to share the same bathrooms. This seems ludicrous now, but people actually expressed this concern on the floor in a number of state assemblies. Another was the worry that women would be forced to fight in the military alongside men, and the third was that states would be forced to allow same-sex marriages. Legal scholars said repeatedly that whether or not these outcomes were desirable, none of them would be mandated by the amendment. But the fears won the day, and the amendment wasn’t ratified.

Our culture changed anyway. Without the amendment, we now have men and women using the same bathrooms (sometimes, in college dorms, the same showers), we have women fighting and dying alongside men in combat zones, and in some states, there are same-sex marriages. But women and men still aren’t guaranteed equality under the Constitution.

There always had been plenty wrong with the world, of course, and there probably always would be. The hope for my daughter was that she would be strong enough to survive in it.

If there’s one urgent thought I want to leave in your ear in this parting hug—it’s that I want you to be strong. I don’t mean hard and brittle. The tree that won’t bend with the storm will snap in two. I hope you’ll flex and give and then stand straight again with your roots where they ought to be.

And being strong doesn’t mean having all the answers. Even when you’re in charge of something, don’t be afraid not to know exactly what you’re doing. Ask questions. Some people may look at you funny, worried at your hesitation. They’re only showing their own frailty. I’ve known some strong people, and they weren’t afraid to hold their uncertain ground while they searched for a solution.

It takes courage to be creative. And we’re going to need your creativity or we’re done for. And I hope you’ll give other people a chance to be uncertainly creative, too. Someone else may be able to contribute one idea that will solve one of the insurmountable problems we’re handing you, even though that person may be totally wrong about everything else.

Steer clear of ideology. Like jargon, it can be a substitute for thought. The lure of the simple solution can lead to handing over your life to people who make the trains run on time—but who take away your freedom to go where you want on those trains.

Be open to change, and take risks—that’s the adventure and the art of life. Find the bridge between constancy and experiment. Be flexible, but principled. Be a dissenter, but patriotic. Be disciplined, but improvise.

Freud said, “Health is the ability to work and to love.” Add a third: Be able to play. Be playful about the most serious things in your life; you’ll enjoy them more and have them longer. Playfulness is a sudden shift of vision—a kind of affectionate dissent. It brings you closer to what you love.

Be flexible about your dreams. Say hello to change. I had an economics teacher in college, Mr. Partlan, who said, “Don’t be afraid to change your mind about your career. You can keep changing till you’re forty.” I know people who are changing in their sixties. Be supple. Be loose. Life is one surprise after another.

College has been like climbing a mountain. You had to persevere, stretch your reach, endure the loneliness of the midnight book. And now you’re at the summit—and what do you see in front of you? More mountains. The only thing you can be sure of is that there will always be more mountains.

But I know you’ll be okay. Your laughter, your honesty, your youthful energy and optimism—that makes me know that life is possible.

Because you can wrap your brain around a tough idea, because you can learn an art—tell a joke, play the piano—because you can laugh with a lusty abandon: Because of simple things like these, I know that nature will survive.

I wish I had a better world to give you. But maybe we can work on one together now.

So long, my child. Hello, my friend.

Elizabeth graduated, and we took off on a trip together. Arlene had come up with an antidote for the time I had been away from our daughters while I worked in California. As soon as she graduated, each daughter could choose a trip anywhere in the world, and she and I would go there together. Eve chose Greece, Beatrice chose China, and Elizabeth decided on a trip on the
Orient Express
from Paris to Venice, then Salzburg and Vienna.

It didn’t start out as the trip of our dreams—or, at least, not mine. We waited at the train station in Paris, with our bags splayed out on the floor, listening for the announcement to board the train. Nothing came over the speakers. We waited an hour and still nothing. Finally, with a half hour to go, I left Elizabeth to watch the bags while I went to see the stationmaster.

“
Non,
” he said, “
le train est parti.
”

I had spent my junior year of college in Paris, and unfortunately, I had no trouble understanding him.

“The train couldn’t have left,” I told him in impeccably accented hysteria. “My daughter and I have tickets for that train.”

“No, no,” he said, using two
no
’s where one would have been superfluous, if not offensive. “They left three hours early. They notified all their customers.”

“They didn’t notify me.”

“Possibly you bought your ticket in America.”

“I did.”

“Perhaps it’s that.” This was followed by a shrug described either as Gallic or sadistic, depending on how much you’re willing to forgive the French in exchange for Château Lafite.