The diary title is a question I do not propose to answer in this posting. I am far more effective as a teacher when I pose open-ended questions, questions which cannot be answered with simple affirmation or negation, but which requires the responder to think, to offer some rationale for the response.
And I am doing this precisely because I am a teacher, because it is what my students heard today. Let me explain as best I can. And then perhaps you can answer the question.
I require my students to do a final project. The assignment is fairly simple, with few specific requirements. You most do at least 4 hours of work, you cannot do an essay or a research paper, and show me that you learned something. I get all kinds of things: mobiles, games, collages, poems, songs, . . . This year there was one project that stood out beyond all the others.
The student put together a presentation, using the music of Pink's Dear Mr. President and combining it with a set of visual images she had scoured from around the internet. Each image was appropriate to the text with which it appeared - images ofthe devastation in New Orleans, or of the combat boots from the Eyes Wide Open display, or of flag-=draped coffins on a plane. . just to name a few. It was powerful, moving, and I showed it to all my classes.
But today is also the anniversary of D-Day, and the Washington Post has an editorial entitled A Note on D-Day: Words to carry in a wallet. Those words to carry were the text Eisenhower had written in case the invasion failed, and were
"Our landings in the Cherbourg-Havre area have failed to gain a satisfactory foothold and I have withdrawn the troops. My decision to attack at this time and place was based on the best information available. The troops, the air and the Navy did all that bravery and devotion to duty could do. If any blame or fault attaches to the attempt it is mine alone."
The class was wide ranging, covering the idea of loss in battle, comparing the perhaps 6,000 on D-DAy to 9-11, and also to the losses suffered by the Soviet Union in places like Stalingrad and Kursk. I will not recapitulate the entire class, but it was sufficient to force the students to think, to consider uncomfortable thoughts.
I tell my students that my job is not to tell them how to think, but to demand that they do think, beyond the surface. I complimented the project because it demonstrated a student learning how to powerfully communicate a point of view about which she cares passionately. I then pointed out other ways of doing so, in other projects, in other actions some of my students have taken on this year.
I noted that my generation has left the world not as well off as we received it - in that I pointed out that I share a birth year with each of the two most recent presidents. The students still have an opportunity to rfix what we got wrong, but only if they can learn how to work with others wherever possible. Certainly no one is required to abandon a core belief, but if everyone insists on every issue being a matter of life and death, it will be, with the emphasis on the latter. It will, if we cannot compromises as individuals or as nations, become as Hobbes warned us, the war of every man against every other man,
And the lfie of man: solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.
My challenge to my students is to examine carefully what is not negotiable, and where negotiation and compromise are possible, accomplish far m ore than insistence upon getting our own way, upon "winning."
I cannot determine for my students what meets the threshold of being non-negotiable. I can only challenge them on their thiniing, offer points of view they might not have considered, exp;ose them to different ways of thinking, different value systems that have an integrity but which lead to different decisions.
This is a political blog. Politics is the art of the possible. Many things are possible if each actor does not insist on receiving the credit for success and avoiding the blame for failure. It is part of responsibility, and the message Eisenhower carried in his wallet is an illustration of one good way of approaching it. Eisenhower considered the possibility that his best judgment might be wrong. I here offer the conclusion of the Post's editorial, putting into BOLD some very key words:
But Eisenhower knew what a burden the five stars on his shoulders were -- that it was he who was in charge of planning the operation, he who was entrusted with it and he who was sending thousands of men to fight and die. He knew that it was to them that he was ultimately accountable and to them and their families that his loyalty -- today a word casually and often carelessly used -- was owed.
We were pleased to see, from the Internet, that Eisenhower's brief note of June 1944 is now part of lesson plans offered for many students. It would be a good lesson for their elders as well, some of whom might even want to put it in their wallets.
I think those words apply to all of us who have the capability and responsibility of directing the actions of others. We need to mindful of what we ask. In the lesson today I referred to some words from Paul Reickhoff that I wrote about in a diary entitled It's the killing, not the dying:
I mentioned a young soldier I had interviewed in 2005 who worried that because he had killed three insurgents during a battle in Iraq he might not be "allowed into heaven." The soldier wondered whether he had "done the right thing."
Mr. Rieckhoff nodded. "Asking somebody to die for their country might not be the biggest thing you can ask," he said. "Asking my guys to kill, on my orders — as an officer, that’s difficult. I’m telling that kid to squeeze that round off and take a man’s life. And then he’s got that baggage for the rest of his life. That’s what you have to live with."
For me the question is not that for which I would be willing to die. There are many things, many persons, for whom making that sacrifice would not be especially difficult. But Paul's words point me at something else. s Quaker I am opposed to violence, even as I know there are circumstances which might demand of me that I violate my conscience and my own principles for something I view as carrying greater weight. Thus I would use deadly force to defend the students entrusted to my care. Similarly were I in a position of authority where I had affirmed a responsibility to uphold the Constitution I would of necessity have to do so even if it meant violating something in which I personally believed - that, or else resign my position so as not to violate either my affirmation or my conscience.
So now the question of this diary comes into play. What really matters? For what am I willing to violate my own conscience, and why? What remains non-negotiable, and why?
Please note, I have no final answers to either of these questions. I think that is the point - I cannot anticipate the totality of that which I might encounter, because I lack anything approaching total knowledge or complete foresight. It seems to me the principles espoused in isolation of the messy reality of life, in the "pristine" circumstances of our own study or our minds, cannot be arbitrarily imposed in every situation. After all, dilemmas exist because two "goods" seem in contrast, or - and we explored this as well today - the choices before us both contain wrong, or if you will, evil, and we must attempt to balance the good to be gained with the evil that we must do.
So now I admit - my question is asked under somewhat misleading pretenses. It is not that I seek an answer engraved in stone. That is, I do not want a statement that is closed. Rather, I hope to initiate a process - that the answer that ensues shows the process of cogitation, of reflection.
I do not believe that a moral system exists in isolation from the messy reality of human society. Nor do I believe in the purity of political worldview: there are always the unexpected, the demands for which our worldview has not prepared us. And thus the import of my question is not WHAT your answer is, but rather HOW you approach attempting to answer it. And even that should be subject to change, as each of us learns more - about our own thinking, about the worlds around us, about the increibly varieies of human interactions.
So criticize me now if you feel I have misled you. Or offer some response if you think I do not go far enough.
For me? The Quaker expression is that I must answr that of God in each person I encounter. How? I don't know, I only know that I must seek it. What really matters is that I continue to make that attempt, and remain open to where that may lead me.
How about you?