Kent Nerburn

I have noticed a strange tendency ever since I expressed how upset I was with the false election of George Bush, who, to my mind, has fulfilled my fear of being the worst president in modern times. What I noticed is that the right wing (such an odd notion, that we as a country have a two-dimensional understanding of politics — left and right) attacks the minute it feels wronged, whereas the left grumbles and walks away.

Each side truly believes it is working from a moral base, but only the right seems to feel that it has grounds to attack those who don’t share its definition of morality. I believe there are reasons for this, mostly having to do with the left’s inability to deal with the fact that tolerance is essentially a passive position in a world that demands active, dynamic response. But that is not my concern today.

What I have been championing is a re-envisioning of the American mission, and what I am getting back from the right is an attack on any phrase, any inkling I might give, that there might be something amiss in the way our country is operating today.

The blindness is disconcerting, but the anger is truly frightening. We need to take a step back and look at the foundational principles of this country. And I don’t mean comic book notions of freedom and flag. What I mean are the wise thoughts of men like James Madison in the Federalist papers, the insights of outside commentators like Alexis De Tocqueville and Hector St. Jean de Crevecoeur, the observations of George Washington in his farewell address. Then we need to listen to the voices of those we have wronged, like Sitting Bull, Frederick Douglass, and so many others.

We need to hear criticism and thoughtful insight, then use this knowledge to reshape, rearticulate, and rededicate ourself to a national vision.

This is where someone like Bill Clinton went so tragically wrong — so smart, so charismatic, yet so unwilling to stand strong for a vision. Every one of us knows that our health care system is killing us. We can’t afford it, it doesn’t work, it turns doctors into gatekeepers and paper shufflers, it invites abuses and leaves most of us living in terror that we might lose this desperately necessary element of life.

Like it or not, Hillary had a vision. And she put it forth. Now, I don’t want a million emails from people raging against her ideas. That is not my point. My point is that she had a visionary notion to provide us something we all desperately need — health care — and she got savaged by her opponents while her husband — the most powerful man in the world — checked the polls, smiled and glad handed, and tried to assay the fallout of his wife’s initiative.

Ronald Reagan wouldn’t have done this. After all, he was a man who charged his people with the outrageous notion of building a missile shield over the United States and wouldn’t hear of opposition to the idea, even though it was a Hollywood cartoon.

Clinton had a caring vision placed in his hand, and he didn’t have the moral courage to fight for it.

Carry it forward. Al Gore sees clearly what we are doing to the planet, yet was too weak-willed to stand up for his carefully researched understanding until after he was politically interred. John Kerry was a true war hero, and he let himself be manipulated and bullied by a campaign of lies promulgated by the media machine of an apparent deserter without even raising a hand in opposition.

Again, I beg you to understand that my concern runs far deeper than my politics. My concern is with our nation’s vision of who we might be. New Orleans founders, our people sit at home without health care or jobs, our children are manipulated by an avalanche of media images and vacuous television shows, anger is celebrated as assertion, whether it is embodied in right wing tirades or glowering athletes, and the rich grow richer while the poor grow poorer.

This is not who we are or who we should be.

We need leaders who can rise above the political drek. We need people like Nelson Mandela, Vaclav Havel, maybe even that strange fellow currently trying to reshape Venezuela. We do not need to share their politics, but we need to learn something from their vision of what it means to be a leader.

I think back on the days of Anwar Sadat in Egypt. What kind of man had the courage to go to Israel almost on a dare from the Israeli government, shake hands with the leaders of a people who had been his nation’s sworn enemy, and say, “Come, let us reason together to make a better life for our children”?

Where is that leader for us today? Where is the man or woman who will go to Cuba and say, “Mr. Castro, you are in poor health and not likely to last much longer. We do not agree with what you did to your country, but your people have survived and thrived, and we want to help you and them shape a workable future”?

Where is the leader who can go to France and say, “This ‘freedom fry’ thing is an embarrassment. Your position on Iraq had some virtues, though we didn’t see them at the time and still feel you were a bit too accommodating. But our nations looked to each other as brothers and sisters in search of a common freedom back at the time of our founding, and we see your wonderful gift of the Statue of Liberty every time we look out into New York harbor. Let us get our friendship back on track”?

And on the home front, where is the leader who will say, “We all are afraid to get sick, we all worry about how we will get old, we all want our kids to have a healthy and hopeful childhood and we want their air to be fit to breathe”? And then say, “I am going to get these things for you, or fail trying.”

That is the key notion: to be willing to fail trying. We should be fixing New Orleans or fail trying. We should be fixing our health care system or fail trying. We should be doing a hundred things, and doing them together as a country. And we should not be afraid to fail because our vision was too grand and full of dreams.

Pick your agenda. Pick your challenges. But make them hopeful and growthful, not riven with fear, arrogance, and righteous anger.

We are the nation of Reconstruction, the Marshall Plan, the trans-continental railroad, the knitting together of nationalities and political entities into a common union. We can do what we set out to do, but we need to have a vision. Poll watching, righteous thundering, chasing enemies real and imagined, and being lapdogs to economic and political interests is not the way to find such a vision.

Forget your disagreements or agreements with me. Instead, devote your heart and mind to articulating a vision — for your life, your community, your nation.

I go back to a phrase I used in Letters To My Son fifteen years ago: “Strength based in force is a strength people fear. Strength based in love is a strength people crave.”

Somewhere in the world of politics and governments, there has to be room for love. If there isn’t, we become a heartless nation.

We all hope for and deserve better.

Technorati : Bush, Clinton, Gore, Havel, Letters to My Son, Mandela, New Orleans, Reagan, Sitting Bull

Politics is heating up around here, as I’m sure it is in your neck of the woods, too. Invariably, the claim is made that “we want to run a clean campaign.” But fear sells in America, and a politician who wants to win in America is in the business of selling. So he or she almost inevitably ends up trying to peddle fear about what his or her opponent proposes to do.

Look for people who are visionary. I don’t mean those with good ideas — lots of people have good ideas. And I don’t mean only those with correctives — we all know that there are past mistakes that need to be corrected. I mean those who make you think about the world around you differently.

The key to great political leadership is to make the people see the world in a new way and to believe that this new vision can come to pass. Kennedy had it; Ronald Reagan had it.

I didn’t like Reagan’s vision — it seemed to me to lead to the kind of selfishness that envelops us today. But it was a vision, and it galvanized people. Kennedy’s, though based a great deal on personal charisma, brought the nation into a forward-looking mode that it dearly needed after the long, exhausting emotional recovery from WWII. Clinton had the charisma to do the same, but he squandered his moral capital and lacked a vision of greatness for the country, and, ultimately was taken down by his own stupidity and a cabal of ferrets who used every means at their command to shred him bloody. GW is beneath discussion. In fact, his abject failure and political divisiveness make the need for a national vision ever more crucial.

But it is not simply in national politics that vision is needed. Look to your local races. Who can inspire you to believe that there can be kindness, honesty, clarity, and compassion at the heart of your state or community? Who can take a visionary dream and make it seem like an attainable goal? Who seems to understand you and your needs, as well as those of the people less fortunate than you, and can still shape a vision of a future that will be better for your children?

Just promising to tune up the machine is never enough. No matter what your politics, there will always be opposition to any modifications of existing systems. What is needed is always a re envisioning of the world in which we live, both locally and on larger levels.

Who says to you, “We can be better,” and not just by putting in or removing programs and kicking the current bastards out? Who inspires you with the vision that would reshape the streets and community and world in which you live? Who calls to you with the strength of Sitting Bull’s admonition, “Come, let us put our minds together to see what kind of lives we can create for our children?”

Look for those people. They are the real leaders. They are the ones who can take you to the places where your children can live a life of hopefulness and dreams.

Technorati : Bush, Clinton, Reagan, Sitting Bull

For all of you who may never have been to the Dakotas, I’d like to sing their praises. I’ve just returned from Sioux Falls in South Dakota, and I’ve crisscrossed the state several times this year, stopping in Pine Ridge and Rosebud and visiting Rapid City, Spearfish, Sturgis, and the western Black Hills/Badlands country. As to North Dakota, I visit it frequently because it is a short 120 miles west of my home, and I drive to it and through it constantly for any number of reasons. Both states have a hypnotic power that is intoxicating and addicting.

Folks in the rest of the country tend to make jokes about the Dakotas or else ignore them completely. Mount Rushmore may make a mild blip on the consciousness, and the word “Dakota” may raise a vague thought about Lewis and Clark. But, beyond those, the states blend as one in people’s minds and quickly disappear into a hazy cartoon of endless flatness and utter boredom.

What a pity. These are fascinating places, each very different and each very powerful.

There is no place in the United States. with the possible exception of New Mexico and Arizona, where the Native American presence is such a strong spiritual force as in South Dakota; the South Dakota Badlands are perhaps America’s most lunar landscape; the Black Hills/Paha Sapa rise miraculously, almost spiritually, like an outcropping of small, pine-covered mountains and stone spires; the buffalo grasslands roll and echo with the hoof beats of a former time when our country was young, naive, and a land of conflicts and dreams.

Move into North Dakota and you feel an uncanny sense of lonely peace. The winds of the north blow down upon you; you sense the presence of the great Canadian prairies. The forces of nature loom large here, coming from great distances and carrying intimations of power on every cloud and wind and sunset. When those forces bring peace, it is enveloping and amniotic; when they bring intimations of storms or oncoming winter, they close you in upon yourself with a feeling of insignificance and dread. More than any other state in the lower 48, North Dakota turns your mind and heart to the weather. And any time you are called to an awareness of great natural forces, you are turned toward the spiritual.

So these two states reverberate with spiritual forces. Anyone wishing to remove him or herself from the tiny and jangled concerns of urban angles and corners could do far worse than considering a trip into the Dakotas. They do not have the grandeur of Montana or the drama of Wyoming’s space and mountains. But they speak quietly and directly to the spirit, and the echoes of the Lakota, Nakota, and Dakota peoples, as well as the distant whispers of the hardiest of America’s pioneer settlers, are present in every sunrise and rustle of the wind.

I, personally, love the Dakotas. I go there every chance I get. There is a singularity to their experience that focuses the attention, and they have a spiritual complexity born of geography, geology, culture, and history. They are like a quiet, deeply spiritual friend who has a reservoir of depth that no one knows or notices.

I am happy I have gotten to know that friend. I hope you all have the same opportunity someday. It will be a measure of your spiritual acuity and a lesson in learning to listen to the deeper forces of the land.

I’m sitting in my hotel in Sioux Falls at the South Dakota Festival of the Book. There are a fair amount of heavy hitters here, as well as a lot of lesser names and just plain ordinary folks. It is an interesting gathering, made more so by the odd collection of psyches and strange patterns of interaction that such a venue produces.

By and large, writers are people who, if they are comfortable at all, are comfortable in front of groups or one-on-one, but not as social mixers. We were the ones who were hiding in the shadows at high school dances, or who spent most of our time at home alone in our rooms, who read books or ruminated endlessly on the nature of life, and were generally incapable of going up to folks and saying “Hi, how are you?” in social situations.

As adults and professionals, we haven’t changed a whole lot.

So, unless you happen to attach yourself to one of the few outgoing folks, you either find one or two other people with whom you can relate, or you spend a lot of time standing around alone watching other folks standing around alone.

In the last couple days, I’ve done a little bit of both.

What is so fascinating and so poignant is being in this situation of relative social ineptitude, yet knowing that to those non-writers who are attending the conference, you are the stars, the luminaries, the reasons they are there. Yet many of those people standing alone are the very “stars” the readers want to approach, yet are too nervous or hesitant to do so.

I am not a “star” in the general sense. I have my following, but I work on the margins of the great literary center. Readers know me, but I have no literary cachet. I can stand comfortably in the shadows and assume the “watcher” role with which I’ve been most comfortable in social situations since my junior high days.

But occasionally, someone who has read my books will cross the barrier that I, as a person, never have the courage to cross, and will come up to me and ask for an autograph or a few minutes of my time. I’m always happy to oblige. One of those moments came this afternoon, when a man approached with a copy of Simple Truths for me to sign. He was, quite literally, shaking. He held the book open and asked, almost fearfully, and certainly apologetically, if I would be willing to sign it for his wife.

“Of course,” I answered, once again in a position of social dominance. It was easy for me, because he wanted something from me, and it made me feel good to be able to give it. Yet, put me in his situation, and I never would have had the courage to go up and approach a writer I respected. I admired him for crossing that barrier, and did what I could to make him feel valuable and affirmed. It was the least I could do in response to his act of social courage.

What a strange thing social expectations are. Just after the man left me, I drove down the road to a Burger King. I went inside, and the sixteen year old girl waiting on me began bantering and chattering. We passed a few moments talking about her school work and the conference I was at.

“You’re a writer?” she said. “That’s cool. I write, too.”

She gave me my order, took my money, and we parted. To her, I was just another customer.

Yet, this morning, at the hotel restaurant, the woman to whom I had to pay my bill saw my name on the credit card and also on a book I was carrying, and exclaimed, “You’re a writer? That’s so exciting!” As I walked away, I heard her telling her co-worker, “I just talked to a writer! It gave me goosebumps.”

These are true encounters — or, in some cases, true lacks of encounter. And such illusions they are. I only wish I could that I could find that shaking man and the waitress at the restaurant and say, “Come on, let’s go out for a burger.” Yet, in some ways, it would take the luster off. I would be the approachable person they want me to be, but they would find out I’m just the ordinary person they don’t want me to be. The reality would not be large enough to fit the image and the fantasy and the expectation.

Tomorrow I will give another session. I will be on stage with another author, Mary Rose O’Reilley, who I met for the first time yesterday. She, too, is far from a social butterfly, but because we were set at a table together we got to know each other a bit. In just the few minutes of contact, I could see that she has a wonderfully humble sense of self and a deeply poetic relationship to the outside world.

We will sit up there and the good people in the audience will look upon us as omniscient purveyors of wisdom who live magical lives, when in fact we are nothing more than two people for whom illuminating ordinary moments in life is our stock in trade. When the session is done, we will go back to our ordinary lives — hers, teaching at a college in Minneapolis and dreaming of buying some farmland in Wisconsin; mine, sitting in a messy cabin with a confused Labrador, drinking too much coffee, and trying to squeeze out a bit of meaningful prose. And all the audience members will go off to respective lives, some exalted, some tawdry, but mostly all ordinary, just like ours.

We will have spent some time doing an awkward dance whose steps were defined by our social fears and expectations. And we will all leave, wishing we had been more graceful and more confident, and better able to cross those social spaces that we were too timid to navigate.

Perhaps I’ll stop at the Burger King on the way out of town. Perhaps the man with his trembling hands, or the waitress at the hotel restaurant, or one of the other writers from the conference will be there.

I hope they are. Because without our social expectations and constraints, we will probably sit down and have a cup of coffee. It would be good to get to know each other as ordinary people. On the other side of the imaginary lines that we drew, everyone seemed like such good folks.

Several years ago I was in Nuremberg, Germany — the city most Americans know as the site of the Nuremberg trials. And it is that. But it is something more. It is a city that was reduced to rubble by Allied bombing, then rebuilt, brick by brick, after the war, from photographs, civic documents, and every visual and documentary source possible.

While the old character and feel of the city was kept in the rebuilding, its aging infrastructure and utilities were made state of the art. Nuremberg stands, today, as a testimony to the legacy of old Germany and a showcase of the new.

It is a truly wonderful place — pedestrian-friendly, vibrant, environmentally innovative, and forward-looking. It does not shrink from its Nazi past, but neither does it dwell on it. But that is a subject for another time. What is important here is that the absolute devastation of the city — and Nuremberg was truly devastated by the Allied carpet-bombing — was not seen as a death sentence, but as an opportunity to re-imagine the city in a way that did honor to the past while incorporating all the best of modern technology and vision.

We have such a chance before us in the city of New Orleans. What occurred there is a tragedy that beggars the imagination. But it should also fire the imagination. Here is one of America’s great cities — perhaps America’s most unique city — and we have a chance to rebuild it in a way that does homage to its past and points the way for an America of the future.

This is a unique moment in time. We pray that other devastations by war or disaster will not befall us. But this one already has, and it will be the measure of our heart and American spirit how we respond to the challenge.

Consider — a Black city, full of an energy and creativity that is unlike any other in our country. A city that is surrounded by water, able to support a system of canals and waterways that not only would alleviate some of the flood peril, but would create a Venice or Amsterdam-like urban experience here on our shores. A chance to try out new technologies of waste treatment, water systems, utility delivery, construction techniques. A chance to do new town planning. An opportunity to provide jobs in reconstruction to people who are desperately underemployed in the best of times, and love their city with a passion that would make them the worthiest and proudest workers possible.

It could be a new grand experiment in everything from urban planning to race relations. It could be a laboratory of dreams.

Yet, where are the voices calling us to embrace this opportunity? Where are the visionaries, the dreamers, the people who truly want to see a nation of hope and possibility?

I do not understand how we can be so blind to this moment in time.

From the vision of the City on the Hill to the building of a trans-continental railroad, we were once a nation that saw ourselves as a beacon of possibility. And though history has taught us that our success as a nation came at the price of the destruction and enslavement of other people, we now are aware of those tragedies and could strive hard not to repeat them if we sought to move forward toward a future worthy of our dreams.

Is there not one national leader who will stand up and call us to seize the moment? Is there none who would see that saving that city and the areas around it is a national opportunity as well as a national obligation?

Are most of the displaced poor? Yes. Are most of them Black? Yes.

But does this not make the opportunity all the more exciting? If we believe in helping people to help themselves, let us, as a nation, call to those people of New Orleans and the Gulf Coast, put the hammers in their hands, bring the best and brightest minds in urban planning, transportation, and city design to help them. Enlist the historians, enlist the educators. Enlist anyone who can engage in the great discourse that would be required to turn this disaster into a testament to American ingenuity and dreams.

We could do it. We should do it. But we won’t do it until a voice, Republican or Democrat, is raised, saying that this should be our national vision.

It saddens me that the Republicans are so lacking in compassion and the Democrats so lacking in vision that no one from either party is standing up and calling us to embrace this great national opportunity. It, alone, is a vision worthy of who we wish to be as a people.

Right now, we are a house divided and wildly out of balance.

Katrina gave us a chance to heal that division and restore our balance; she gives us a chance, still. It may well be that history will judge us as a nation by our response to her, not by our response to some vague and shapeless threat of terror.

As of this moment, that judgment will be harsh.

Bittersweet peace. That, for me, is what autumn always brings. Winter begins to whisper in the distant corners of the mind, but the magical stillness and rich indolence of these sun-blessed days overwhelm those whispers with their peace.

The lake outside our home turns to glass; the placid waters magnify the brilliance of the sunsets. Of all the seasons, this is the one I would not give up.

This has been a good summer. My son, Nik, has been home and we were able to share a precious time out on Pine Ridge among the kind and generous Lakota people. We were able to do a sweat together; he was able to be part of a reservation Fourth of July; we drove, we talked, we built that bridge of memories that will be ours forever. Now he is back at school, several hundred miles from here, and it is only Louise and me and two cats and a new dog named Lucie. Life will soon settle into the quietude and rhythm of a house with no children.

It is such a change to have a childless house. The energy changes; the chaos of intermixing lives takes on a new and distant air. Nik is still in our lives, as are our other children — Louise’s two daughters, Stephanie and Alex, and her son, Creighton. They are children of a previous marriage, but I count them as mine as well. But they are even older than Nik, and each has moved on to an adult life that is only ours to enter as they see fit to invite us in.

All of them are taking wing in their own ways. We offer counsel and sanctuary and money when we can. But we are not central to their lives any more, nor should we be.

It is a strange balance. None of us wishes to fetter our children, either psychologically or physically. Yet we want to remain a part of their lives and want them to remain a part of ours. It is no easy task to find this balance — how much do they want us to be present; how much do they want to be free of our influence. Sometimes, perhaps, we intrude too much. Sometimes, perhaps, we are too distant when we should be alive to their needs and desires. Yet we do our best, as they do theirs. Together, we move forward in that endlessly creative, constantly changing mystery of being a family.

As parents, we must hope that we have done our jobs well; that we have raised honest and honorable children; that they see themselves as part of a larger whole for which they bear some responsibility; that they avoid violence in their lives, both by and against them; that the snares of alcohol or debilitating drugs do not entrap them; that they choose their partners and professions well; that they find a way to make a meaningful place for themselves in this increasingly complex and difficult world.

How will they buy homes? What will they confront as they try to raise children? How will this tinderbox of religious ideologies that is gripping the earth affect the lives they live? Will our cultural shortsightedness and pursuit of individual benefit give way to a longer view of responsibility to the seventh generation? Will our penchant for branding and commodifying everything kill our spirits?

These are the dark fears, from the practical to the abstract.

But, then, there is hope as well. Excesses, whether physical, psychological, or political, call forth their own correctives. At some point, the people of good heart will say, “enough,” and a balance will be reasserted. What and how is difficult to say. But it is a law of nature, and nature does not negotiate. Our children will be part of this rebalancing, because it is into this world out of balance that they are growing. They will find a world of mystery, frustration, and possibility that is different, but no less challenging than the world into which we, their parents, were born. And, somehow, they will make their peace with it and contribute to its growth and unfolding. Then they, too, will pass it on.

So I sit on my porch, watching the lake, petting the dog and cats, and thinking of this turning of the seasons. Yes, there are changes coming, for all of us, in all of our lives. Autumn, I find, is a good time to reflect on these changes in my life, and to do what I can to make them wholesome and helpful.

So, as the kids go back to school, the colors on the edges of the leaves change, the smell and feel of the air shifts, and the light takes a more muted cast, take a little time to give some thought to how you, in your own life, can cause this shift in seasons to be a shift of the heart.

Savor your friends, give love to your children, offer help and hope to those with whom you share a touch. It doesn’t take much, only mindful attentiveness to the everyday moments of life.

Then, perhaps, we can all be mirrors to the goodness around us Then, perhaps, we can reflect the beauty of this changing season in our lives, just as the lake outside my window is reflecting the autumn beauty of this haunted, northern land.