On Nov. 9, 2016, the morning after our last presidential election, my column began by recalling words from an immigrant, my friend Lesley Goldwasser, who came to America from Zimbabwe in the 1980s. Surveying our political scene a few years earlier, Lesley had remarked to me: “You Americans kick around your country like it’s a football. But it’s not a football. It’s a Fabergé egg. You can break it.” I then added: “With Donald Trump now elected president, I have more fear than I’ve ever had in my 63 years that we could do just that – break our country, that we could become so irreparably divided that our national government will not function.”
Well, I am now 66, and my fears have all come true – and worse. I am not at all certain we will be able to conduct a free and fair election in November or have a peaceful transition of presidential power in January. We are edging toward a cultural civil war, only this time we are not lucky: Abraham Lincoln is not the president.
Lincoln, in our darkest, most divisive hour, was able to dig deep into his soul and find the words “with malice toward none, with charity for all … let us strive on to finish the work we are in” and establish “a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.”
Instead, we have Donald Trump, a man whose first instinct, when the country is being ripped apart, was to have peaceful protesters tear-gassed and shoved aside so that he could walk to a nearby church to hold a photo op outside holding a Bible. He did not open that Bible to read a healing passage. He did not enter the church to host a healing dialogue. He posed for a photo op to drive up his support among white evangelicals.
What to do? Where can we find the leadership needed to calm this situation, deal with its underlying causes and at least get us through the 2020 election?
Three years ago, I might have hoped that Senate Republicans would step in and restrain Trump. But now we all know better. The Senate Republican caucus today is nothing but a political brothel. Mitch McConnell is the madame. And McConnell and his caucus rent themselves out by the night to whomever will energize the Republican base to keep them in power and secure the economic benefits for their wealthiest donors.
Those energizers have been Sarah Palin, the Tea Party, coal companies, industrial polluters and now Trump’s most rabid supporters. It doesn’t matter who.
How about the social media barons? Will they save us from the toxic waste they now circulate? Certainly not Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, who is clearly the Rupert Murdoch of his generation. He’s always justifying his cowardly choices with vacuous bromides about “free speech,” but he’s obviously just in it for the money – no matter how much his platform is used to destroy our democracy.
So where to look? It is not hopeless. I hope America’s principled business leaders, and there are many, can find a way to come together to lead a healing discussion, maybe through the Business Roundtable, in the absence of a president willing and able to do so.
I am from Minneapolis. I was born in the Northside, a few miles from the street where George Floyd was killed. No one there is doing more today to make sure that disadvantaged families in that neighborhood have the tools to succeed than my friend Sondra Samuels, the CEO and president of the Northside Achievement Zone. NAZ is working with parents, students and local partners to drive a culture shift in predominantly black North Minneapolis to end multigenerational poverty through education and building family stability.
Sondra told me the right response to the killing of Floyd has to be “both/and” not “either/or.” We need both an immediate end to the looting, burning and infiltration of white supremacist groups that is destroying the homes and businesses of good people in cities all over the country and we need deeper civil rights, voting rights, education, environmental and policing reforms for this generation.
NAZ and its 30 nonprofit partners and schools will tell you that it is a struggle, often two steps forward and one step back, but they have been making a quantifiable difference in getting kids the tools to succeed and get to college, and at the same time providing parents the support they need to stabilize their homes, increase their parenting skills and ensure upward mobility.
NAZ has also significantly increased access to quality early-learning opportunities for the 1,000 families it works with and helped provide measurable improvements in reading proficiency and other learning metrics critical for life success.
Finally, I think remarkable leadership is coming from some local politicians – so many great mayors of all colors and political stripes. Every time I hear Atlanta Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms speak – whether about dealing with the coronavirus, injustice or the rioting in her town – I want to ask Joe Biden: “Are you interviewing her for vice president?”
Help is not on the way from this White House or this GOP, but the country is full of problem-solvers. We need to ignore Trump as much as possible; he’s made himself part of the problem. But we can connect, elevate, amplify and empower the business leaders, social entrepreneurs and local leaders who are rising and ready to be the solution.
The New York Times