By Michael Ellis
After 44 years, the photograph still tears at our hearts. A 9-year-old girl, naked and screaming, runs down the road with other children after being struck by napalm in Vietnam.
My hands don’t tremble and my mind still works, so maybe it’s permissible in my 75th year to write a letter to millennials.
In my time, many of us were there when it counted. We stood against the war in Vietnam. We joined the fight against segregation. We supported the struggle of Cesar Chavez.
But our strength is fading, and our options are limited when we hear Donald Trump say:
“When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending the best…. They’re sending people that have lots of problems, and they’re bringing those problems to us. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people….”
Or when he refers this way to the Gold Star mother who appeared on stage with her husband at the Democratic National Convention after their son, a Muslim, was killed in Iraq:
“If you look at his wife, she was standing there. She had nothing to say. She probably, maybe she wasn’t allowed to have anything to say. You tell me, but plenty of people have written that. She was extremely quiet, and it looked like she had nothing to say.”
Do we want our next president to be someone who said this about John McCain (whose sacrifice is recognized even by those who opposed the Vietnam War)?
“He’s not a war hero. He is a war hero because he was captured. I like people who weren’t captured."
There are other questions, but the answers are always the same.
It helps, I think, to compare some of our country’s prouder moments with the vision of Donald Trump, a vision many describe as a harvest of hate, sown with the seeds of despair.
In 1893, a woman named Katharine Lee Bates, a 33-year-old English professor at Wellesley College in Massachusetts, was traveling to Colorado Springs to teach a summer course. Ms. Bates would see many sights that moved her, and when she looked down from Pike’s Peak she would begin to write ”America the Beautiful," which includes these words:
”O beautiful for spacious skies
For amber waves of grain
For purple mountain majesties
Above the fruited plain
America, America
God shed his grace on thee
And crown thy good with brotherhood
From sea to shining sea.”
It was 10 years earlier, in 1883, when another woman, Emma Lazarus, was struck by the great experiment that is America. She would write a poem called ”The New Colossus," and part of that poem, which is on display at the Statue of Liberty, says this:
”Give me your tired, your poor
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me
I lift my lamp beside the golden door.”
Is it worth recalling, in 2016, that some 100 Jews and Muslims joined in a Passover celebration at the Islamic Society of Mid Manhattan earlier this year? In answering that question, maybe we should ask, “Why were we put on Earth if not to join hands across time? To build on the foundations of the last generation? To say we answered the call when we heard the summons?”
Should we remember that President Obama’s predecessor, George W. Bush, joined hands with Michelle Obama — a white hand and a black hand joined in unity — as they mourned the deaths of five police officers in Dallas?
The answer is, we should remember because the fundamental question in this election is not economics, not foreign policy, and not even immigration. It is whether decency still has a place in our country.
Should we then recall these words from William Butler Yeats' poem, "The Second Coming?"
”turning and turning in the widening gyre
the falcon cannot hear the falconer;
things fall apart; the center cannot hold …
while the worst are full of passionate intensity.”
This election may come down to the vote of millennials, and I don’t know of any more persuasive words than those of New York Times columnist Charles M. Blow:
”A vote isn’t just about the past — although comparing these two candidates on their pasts still leaves one as the clear choice — but about the present and the future.
”There is a simple truth here: Either Clinton or Trump will be the next president of the United States. Not Jill Stein. Not Gary Johnson. Clinton or Trump.”
Millennials want a world in which women’s rights are respected, and they’re paid as much as men. They care about health coverage and the cost of higher education, as well as protecting the environment and making the rich pay their share of taxes. Who is more likely to share those concerns, Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump? You will decide your own path, but I would suggest your happiness is part of a larger picture, making the world a better place.
Before my time, a now-forgotten song, written by Florence Reece and sung by Pete Seeger, ”Which Side Are You On," reminded listeners of the power of unions and the hope for decent wages. For my generation, it was another song, Bob Dylan’s ”Blowin’ in the Wind," that changed our lives.
But they aren't the only songs that turn us toward the chambers of the heart. Despite its differences, ”Will the Circle Be Unbroken" is another river that runs to the same sea. Why? Because these songs honor the past and build on the future.
Will you help to end global warming or ignore it as opponents continue to deny its existence? Will you remember the words of Eleanor Roosevelt (and perhaps Confucius), who said, “It is better to light a candle than to curse the darkness?”
You are part of a chain going back thousands of years. But you are also part of a chain going forward.
It’s in your hands now. Don’t fail us.