“Dear President Carter, Thank You”
by Gaius Publius
I’ve taken President Carter to task from time to time — as “proto-neoliberal” for his embrace of deregulation; for his policies regarding East Timor — but there’s no questioning the good he’s done as well, and continues to do.
I’ve read no more moving tribute to President Carter than this one, by film-maker Angela Combs. Part of its strength is in the writing itself, part in the ways her early struggles were influenced by Carter’s example, and part by the reminders of what Carter himself did — and had not Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush and William Casey sabotaged their own government — what he would have continued to do as president in 1981.
Consider — Would we still be drowning in oil, and burning because of it, if Carter’s re-election had not been sabotaged by Reagan and his team?
“There is something I want to tell you,” [PLO leader Yasser] Arafat said, addressing [President] Carter at a meeting in Arafat’s bunker in Gaza City in the presence of historian Douglas Brinkley. “You should know that in 1980 the Republicans approached me with an arms deal [for the PLO] if I could arrange to keep the hostages in Iran until after the [U.S. presidential] election.”
But that was then, and this is about Carter, and not about the second Republican president in a row to knee-cap the country to gain his office.
Angela Combs, writing at Huffington Post, begins her tribute like this:
A few years ago, a dear friend left us too soon after succumbing to cancer. I resisted articulating my love and admiration to her as I witnessed an unseemly parade of tearful remembrances at her bedside. I know now that it was a mistake not to have found a way to convey to her how her art and being had influenced and inspired me. Recent news of your diagnosis, Mr. President, has reminded me of those regrets, so now I want to send my good wishes for your health, and tell you how much you have inspired and guided me. I cannot possibly convey the entire story in a thousand words, but here is one tiny thread.
A young girl whose family had fled post-war Vietnam was placed in my class in middle school. We called her “Grace” and she did not speak any English at first and kept to herself. For years I had seen the pictures of war and bloodshed behind the glass windows of newspaper vending machines on my walk to school, and my teachers discussed the conflict with us in class. I had a vague intellectual sense of war but I was living in my own desperate circumstances with my parents divorcing and struggling for employment. Stress and violence were routine in my home and we survived on food stamps; but meeting Grace at my local public school put the war into perspective.
The horrors she must have seen I did not know or understand, until one day she smiled at me and I discovered that the flashes of dark gray in her mouth were not the braces I had assumed, but in fact were her teeth, rotted black. I soon learned of Grace’s family, who for most of her life had hidden, run and starved before attempting their escape on a raft by sea. She later told me that they all believed their raft would carry them to a watery grave, and yet they gladly climbed aboard, so desperate were they for peace. When your policies made it possible for the émigrés of that bloody war to seek refuge on our soil, I understood.
Combs too remembers the call to use less oil:
When you asked Americans to do uncomfortable things in sacrifice for future generations, I listened. You weren’t talking about bravery of the kind that Grace’s family had exhibited; your call was to sacrifice comfort by consuming less oil. You said that we could move forward by preserving rather than destroying. … You said the answer to our socio-economic and humanitarian woes was not in plundering the earth, but in protecting it. You made us brothers and sisters in the same uncertain boat of humanity.
“… not in plundering the earth, but in protecting it.” Ronald Reagan, of course, stood for just the opposite, for the gospel of the new, anti-hippie era. He has much to answer for, Mr. Reagan, this burning world for one.
It should not be underestimated how one life touches another. This is where Combs’ personal story intersects with Carter’s call to value others. A part of that intersection:
I returned to college in 1993, as a newly divorced single mother, raising my children in Los Angeles after being accepted to UCLA. I went to school on loans and grants and had no choice but to ignore the naysayers with their xenophobic whisperings against the dangers of sending my children to Los Angeles Public Schools. I was told the schools were undesirable and that I could fudge my address to get my kids into a “better” district. But I knew full well that what LAUSD offered could not be taught in a history book and that my children would have the privilege of developing friendships with people of all colors and creeds, and learning from the inspired teachers who made it their life’s work to serve the most underserved. …
My oldest son is a progressive organizer who works for the AFT, because he believes that public school is the only place where our nation’s children can come together in such diversity and empathy under the educational leadership of dedicated professionals (who would suffer the abuse and scorn of an ungrateful nation). My daughter, an artist and arts educator, recently said to me “I can no longer participate in the slave labor clothing market” and vowed that she would only buy clothing that was produced humanely. This is a sacrifice for her (a college educated young woman who makes barely more than minimum wage) to pay much higher prices for the sake of others. My youngest son studied sociology at American University and once called me, lamenting the political mucking of the word “feminist” because he could not understand how equity could be a controversial notion.
The close, which begins this way, summarizes the intersection perfectly:
When I had no safety at home, when food was scarce and my life seemed impossibly violent and out of control, you became President. You instilled a belief in me that moral leadership will win. …
Please do read the rest. It’s just a thousand words, and one of the best tributes I’ve seen to the good one person can do.
GP
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