A Call to Service

At my daughter’s high-school graduation a decade ago, one member of her class was singled out for special notice. He would enroll in the United States Naval Academy that fall, and a Captain, in dress whites, had traveled all the way from Annapolis to hand him his diploma and publicly praise him. He was by all accounts a very good guy and is now a Marine officer who has more than earned the Captain’s commendation. So why did singling out a young man committed to serving his country bother me? There are many paths to service, and the graduation ceremony elevated one, that of warrior, above the others. In doing so, the school tacitly acknowledged a troublesome trend in America: the evolution of a separate caste of men and women we send to fight our wars so we won’t have to. We praise their courage and send them again and again into battle while we go about our business. In exchange, we let them board airplanes early and enable politicians to demagogue their gratitude. Last week, for example, only three senators – Republicans Dan Coats and Jeff Flake and Democrat Tom Carper – had the courage to vote against reversing a one-percent reduction in veterans’ cost-of-living raises already approved by the military.

I believe two things: (1) there are many ways to serve this country, and (2) everybody should do so. There is so much to do, not least of which is instilling a sense of community that only universal service can provide.

Beyond Chocolate

“Saint Valentine is a third-century Roman saint associated since the High Middle Ages with a tradition of courtly love.” It wasn’t exactly courtly love that four members of Al Capone’s Italian South Side gang had in mind when they lined up seven members of Bugs Morans’ Irish North Side gang against a garage wall at 2122 North Clark Street and opened fire 85 years ago today. The St. Valentine’s Day massacre, fought to control the bootleg liquor business, is Prohibition’s defining event. It’s an era we tend to glorify, filled with wonderful names (“Machine Gun” McGurn, Antonio “The Scourge” Lombardo, “Hop Toad” Giunta), although it was marked by murder, political corruption and income inequality (Capone made $100 million a year).

Nor did Ayatollah Khomeini seem in a loving mood 25 years ago when he issued his fatwa on Salman Rushdie for blaspheming Mohammed in Satanic Verses. That too led to a massacre, the Sivas Massacre, in which 37 people, primarily artists and writers, were incinerated when zealots set fire to their hotel.

Prohibition was the result of American fundamentalists trying to impose their personal morality on an unwilling people, who defied the law and eventually overturned it. Khomeini’s fatwa took things to a new level by making murder the goal, not a byproduct, of fanaticism. Like his predecessors, from Claudius (who beheaded Valentine for protecting persecuted Christians) to Stalin, he achieved his goal by making most of us afraid to speak out.

The heart is the source of love and courage. Happy St. Valentine’s Day.

The Servant Problem

The difficulty with the help these days is that so often they turn out to be illegal. What was once a “nanny problem” for American office seekers has spread out from the nursery and across the Atlantic, where it recently toppled Mark Harper, who was – and I am not kidding – the immigration minister of Great Britain . . . until he discovered that his house cleaner of six years was an illegal immigrant. He fired her and resigned in “embarrassment” from the cabinet – too tainted to continue as point man for the Conservative government’s “go home” campaign, whose mission to rid the land of undesirables is embedded in its name. If it weren’t for their power to do evil, the lack of self-awareness of so many political leaders would be comical: Louisiana Senator David Vitter, the sponsor of legislation for abstinence-only education, turns up on a hooker’s telephone log; Newt Gingrich carries on an eight-year affair with a staffer while leading the charge to impeach Bill Clinton; Larry Flynt outs the affair of Gingrich’s lieutenant Bob Livingston in Hustler magazine; Idaho Senator Larry Craig calls Clinton “a nasty, bad, naughty boy,” then gets arrested in an airport men’s toilet.

So as Speaker Boehner, under pressure from his Tea Party wing to turn back the “illegal invasion,” again jettisons immigration reform, I encourage our political leaders to carefully check their servants’ papers. For as Mitt Romney could have told Mark Harper, a good yard boy is hard to find.

Lords of the Lash

Last Friday evening, finding myself in want of entertainment, I decided to go to the movies. I went to see Twelve Years a Slave – and entertaining is not the word I would use to describe the most unflinchingly brutal film I have ever seen. Scene after scene of beatings, whippings, lynching and rape build on each other without respite and with no counterpoint of goodness. Almost more unbearable to watch than the vicious beatings and lacerated backs of hopeless slaves is the degradation that comes to almost everyone involved. The movie depicts a system of complete dehumanization, whose point, Stanley Fish wrote, is “to withhold from the audience an outlet for either its hope or its sympathy.” This is Schindler’s List without Schindler. Some want to see in the film an allegory of modern life, whose aim is to make viewers recognize parallels between the ante-bellum South and 21^st-century America. But history is not a morality play; it is the ever-unfolding autobiography of a culture, a complex effort to make sense of the complicated, many-sided and evolving portrait of who we are and how we came be so. Twelve Years a Slave is painful to watch and yet needs to be seen. We forced Germany and Japan to confront their pasts, but here, in “the land of the free”, we still gloss over our own two genocides. For our self-image to transcend hypocrisy, for our country to live her ideals, we must take ownership of our past.

The Arc of a Career

We turn from the Super Bowl to other sports, such as the Sochi Olympics, which open today amid terrorism threats, euthanizing stray dogs and construction delays: “OK, so my hotel doesn’t have a lobby yet,” tweeted Mark MacKinnon of Toronto’s Globe and Mail. Next week pitchers and catchers report to spring training – and speaking of catchers, it turns out that Chris Christie, who aspired to become the heftiest president since William Howard Taft until a bothersome traffic jam in Fort Lee snarled his plans, played one in high school. Christie’s athleticism initially surfaced as the New Jersey governor was  distancing himself from his old friend, David Wildstein, whom he’d appointed to the Port Authority: “We didn’t travel in the same circles in high school. You know, I was the class president and an athlete. I don’t know what David was doing during that period of time.”

There is a touching backstory to Christie’s baseball career. Just before his senior year a better catcher transferred to his school. The Christie family considered suing to prevent him from playing, but ultimately decided not to, and Chris, a captain, buried his disappointment and cheered his team to the state championship from the bench.

My Republican friends insist that Christie manned up after Bridgegate, taking responsibility for the incident and firing those responsible. I read a different tale – of the aphrodisiac of power transforming a boy trying to throw out runners at second base into an ambitious politician throwing his friends under the bus.

The End of the Road

The trouble with kicking the can down the road is that someday the road will come to an end. The biggest can now on the political highway is the Keystone XL Pipeline, and the State Department’s final environmental analysis that construction will not significantly affect overall carbon emissions (primarily because Canada will develop the Tar Sands anyway) makes it hard to evade much longer. The pipeline is the defining issue of the Obama presidency. It lays bare the conflicting philosophies of the two major wings of the Democratic Party: economic growth and environmental protection. And when your (and your opponent’s) entire 2012 election campaign can be reduced to a single word – jobs – you’ve kind of painted yourself into a corner. Bridging this divide – which dwarfs the Republicans’ Wall Street/Tea Party split that obsesses the media – is the most important issue of our time. The pressure to accept the pro-growth arguments is enormous – it will create jobs, produce North American energy, spur the economy; and “if we don’t do it, someone else will.”

Politically, this is a lose-lose issue for Obama: the party’s progressive wing has a long tradition of defining economic growth as the pathway to social justice (and also to campaign contributions); while environmentalists, who insist that such a position is obsolete and ultimately ruinous, have dug in their heels on Keystone. But I also believe it is the president’s greatest opportunity, a chance to lead a national conversation on how we will live together on this earth without destroying the things that make life possible.

Note: This post did not go out yesterday because an amazing sleet storm took down limbs, trees and my power line. I’m not suggesting it was manmade. I’m just saying it was some storm.

e pluribus unum

Buried in a blur of ads in last night’s forgettable Super Bowl was an astounding one-minute spot by Coca Cola that featured the music of “America the Beautiful,” sung in eight languages as the camera panned across rugged rural scenery and gritty urban life in a patriotic paean to America. Even though I knew the ad was meant to increase the sales of an ubiquitous brand of sugared water which is very bad for you, I was captivated. This is not the first time Coke has celebrated diverse peoples: “I’d Like to Teach the World to Sing (in Perfect Harmony)” transcended mere product marketing and became a huge hit for The Seekers in 1971. It is perhaps a measure of the difference between 1971 and 2014 that last night’s ad, for all its seemingly saccharine patriotism, had a message with an edge: “America is beautiful. And it is getting more beautiful every day,” illustrated by scenes and people from across the country's physical and cultural landscape, asserts that diversity is not an add-on to white America; it is the core of the identity of an ever-changing nation. So naturally, the ad was greeted with outrage on Twitter from those who were offended by foreign-looking children singing “America the Beautiful” in languages that were not English – although it’s worth mentioning that the girl who sang in Spanish is Puerto Rican, not an immigrant, and the girl who sang in Tagalog is Filipino, whose country was an American possession for 48 years.

Stumble of the Week

• Republican Women. In 1970, Senator Roman Hruska (R, Neb) spoke in defense of G. Harrold Carswell, Richard Nixon’s cynical and mercifully unsuccessful appointment to the Supreme Court: "Even if he were mediocre, there are a lot of mediocre judges and people and lawyers. They are entitled to a little representation, aren't they, and a little chance? We can't have all Brandeises, Frankfurters and Cardozos.” His words came to mind Tuesday evening as Cathy McMorris Rodgers’ stunningly retrograde response to the State of the Union transported me back to the 1950s, when women’s roles in the [H]ouse were more clearly defined, and they appeared on TV to support their husbands and sell soap suds and refrigerators. The pollsters must know more than I do, but if Rodgers’ cliché-ridden, substance-free chat represents the Republican ideal of female leadership, the party really is in trouble. • Land of Opportunity. Both parties seek to embrace the issue of income inequality, which is greater now than any time since 1929. Republicans blame government for stifling opportunities for the ambitious; Democrats blame corporate greed, obscene bonuses and repressive taxation. But recent studies question whether economic mobility was ever more than an anecdotal reality in modern America, and a report this week by 24/7 Wall Street ranked America 19^th in providing opportunities for our children. Those providing the most were countries in what Donald Rumsfeld dismissively labeled “the old Europe” – those places, our history books insist, from which people fled in search of a better life in America.

The One-Eyed Soldier

In his 1938 novel, Johnny Got His Gun, Dalton Trumbo communicates the horrible realities of war through the mind of a young soldier who wakes up in a hospital, his body literally obliterated by an artillery shell. In “And the Band Played Waltzing Matilda,” Eric Bogle sings of a young Australian who returns legless from Gallipoli, as a searing criticism of those who glorify war. In his State of the Union address, President Obama used Sergeant First Class Cory Remsburg for the longest – and almost the only – bipartisan applause line of the evening. My heart goes out to SFC Remsburg, an Army Ranger who was blown to pieces by a roadside bomb in Afghanistan and who continues his long, courageous and painful struggle to recover. We should all stand for him. But we should also ask, what exactly is it we were applauding? Remsburg was wounded during his 10^th mission to Iraq and Afghanistan, which tells you all you need to know about our nation’s shared sacrifice in the war on terror. (Not to be outdone, Republican Representative Cathy McMorris Rodgers’s response melded “the boundless opportunity that lies ahead” with the recent death of Sgt. Joseph Hess of Spokane.)

Trumbo’s hero wanted to tour America in a glass box to make people see what really happens in war. It is not enough that we give SFC Remsburg a two-minute standing ovation and then go home to bed, reinvigorated in our patriotism. We should walk in his shoes.

Cut Off From the World

Yesterday morning, with the sun still low in the southeast and the temperature barely into the teens, two inches of fresh snow stretched beneath a cloudless blue sky. There was no hint of wind, and the smooth white surface was broken only by solitary animal tracks and the long, intricate shadows of the trees. There were no sounds but the intermittent chirping of birds, singing not with the exuberance of spring, but quietly, as if in awe of the day and grateful for life itself. A yellow wheelbarrow lay on its side, at rest from its seasonal labors. The world seemed totally still. At a wedding last summer, my son Daniel met one of Jose Padilla’s lawyers, who described to him a living man who no longer existed. Padilla, you may remember, was convicted of aiding overseas terrorists after being held for three-and-a-half years as an “enemy combatant” and subjected to a menu of “sensory deprivation” techniques that cut him off completely from the world in which he had once lived. Confined to a 9’x7’ cell without natural light, denied sleep, bombarded with loud noise and bright lights, he lost all sense of time and place and self. Whenever he was moved, he wore earphones and a blindfold. “I looked into his eyes,” the attorney told Daniel, “and there was nothing there. I was looking into a shell.”

To be severed from the beauty of a world that comes through our five senses seems the most unconscionable torture of all.

Stumble of the Week

Civil Discourse: Yesterday, I pulled up behind a bumper sticker that read: “Don’t Hate Me Just Because You’re A Douchebag.” I thought, what kind of a douchebag would have a bumper sticker like that? I like funny bumper stickers, but it saddens me how such verbal preemptive strikes (“First, I’m going to retaliate”), which increasingly pass for humor, simply degrade the public conversation. Privacy Invasion: Also yesterday, the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board declared the NSA’s bulk collection of Americans’ phone records to be illegal, invasive and ineffective, noting also that the secretive Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court issued eight years of orders before ruling on the program’s legality. Other than that, insisted President Obama, the program works fine.

Our Grandchildren: Faced with continuing economic woes, Europe has backed off its commitment to combat climate change. This is tragic because Europe has led the world in such efforts, even as the U.S. has dragged its feet. It is also ironic because big business is finally getting the message: “We believe that climate change, caused by man-made greenhouse gas emissions, is the greatest threat to our planet,” says Coca Cola’s website.

Nuclear Security: The report that Air Force nuclear missile-launch officers were caught in a drug sting on two continents reminded me of my mother’s flabbergasting stories from her AA meetings of an airline mechanic (anonymous, of course) who arrived on the job so smashed that he gave a whole new dimension to the home-repair expression, “lefty loosy, righty tighty.”

The Sanctity of Life

Today is the 40^th March for Life, the massive annual protest on the anniversary of Roe v. Wade. It is also the winter meeting of the Republican National Committee. This is not a coincidence. The GOP has long manipulated the abortion issue, and this year it is downplaying the sectarian stridency that offended many women and is instead emphasizing public-funding issues and (here’s a surprise) tying it to Obamacare. I believe that all life is sacred, but that is not a simple matter in a world where life depends on – and arises from – death. I have yet to meet a woman whose abortion was a callous choice rather than a wrenching decision, and it seems a cruel irony that those who scorn the role of government in our lives demand it regulate the most personal of all decisions. This is not new. When I ran for Congress in Pennsylvania in 1996, abortion was rarely discussed even though everyone knew it would determine the election. In Lancaster County, a teenage boy followed me screaming, “baby killer” (for the record: not true), and on the Sunday before Election Day, ministers across the district commanded their congregations to “do your duty” on Tuesday.

Meanwhile, “stand-your-ground” and “open-carry” laws find increasing favor in the pro-life party; and Texas, where husbands could once kill adulterous wives and lovers, “provided the killing takes place before the parties to the adultery have separated,” will today execute its 509^th person since 1976, although his arrest violated international law

The Mantle of Reasonableness

Pennsylvania’s Commonwealth Court last week overturned the state’s 2012 Voter ID law. It seemed a reasonable law, intended only to prevent people who were not eligible to vote from voting. Who could be against that? Unfortunately the state has yet to find a single instance of anyone – a dead person, say, or an “illegal immigrant” – showing up to vote. The law, Judge Bernard McGinley wrote, did nothing “to assure a free and fair election.” On the other hand, there is now evidence that, in its short lifetime, the law inhibited plenty of other people from voting – students and the elderly, poor people and people of color. This was precisely what the law, which passed the legislature without a single Democratic vote, was intended to do. This law, announced the House majority leader after its passage, “is gonna allow Governor Romney to win the state of Pennsylvania.”

Beware of extremism clothed in reasonableness, particularly when the evidence is slim. Who, for example, could be opposed to applying hospital building codes to abortion facilities, especially in light of “all” those butcher shops we keep reading about? In a nation where the vast majority believes in God, why not teach intelligent design as a possible explanation of the origins of life? Isn’t education a competition of ideas? Who could disagree that the market allocates resources – including health care – more efficiently than government bureaucrats?

We like our extremists to be wild-eyed and ranting, but they’re way too smart for that.

• Some of you have not been getting the blog regularly because of a glitch, for which I apologize and which I believe is fixed. You can find all the excitement you missed at www.jamesgblaine.com

So Much Heat. So Little Light

There is an important discussion to be had about global warming. But we aren’t having it. A friend’s response to my last blog got me thinking about why the debate over climate change is so overheated and so unenlightening. The reason, I think, is simple: We have confused two different conversations – one scientific, the other political; one over, the other barely begun.

The scientific debate is over. There is no longer any doubt that global warming is real and that humans play a significant role in exacerbating it. Contrary assertions by corporate interests and right-wing zealots are self-serving hot air that diverts attention from the discussion we should be having, which is what to do about climate change. This is a question of politics, and everyone’s voice should be heard – even those who say we should do nothing. For there is a difference between doing nothing after debating the consequences and just sticking our heads in the sand. Perhaps, like the dinosaurs, our dominion over the earth is a transitory niche rather than evidence of our immortality, and there isn’t much we can do. Certainly, environmentalists’ admonitions that we live for the seventh generation must sound callous to those whose children are starving. Perhaps new technology will save us, or creative entrepreneurs. Perhaps we will change our lifestyles or our values. Perhaps we will simply adjust.

Just because the Flat Earth Society still exists doesn’t mean it should be part of the geography curriculum. We need to get real about climate change.

January Morning

Like many other places across America, the coast of Maine has had some freaky weather of late. Last week’s frigid temperatures, which turned waterfalls here into ice sculptures, made global warming doubters positively giddy (although I was heartened to read that the Obama administration is, however quietly, pushing climate initiatives behind the scenes). Then came the pouring rains and yesterday morning’s welcome sunrise, which brought with it a soft blue sky and warmed my aging body as only sunshine can. A southwest breeze carried the resonant sound of waves breaking on the rocks, and the few birds still here woke up singing. It was a day to be outside. The water that had been pent up in ice was suddenly released into mountain streams, and its exuberance brought the mountain itself to life. Even for simpletons like me (are those prints of a deer heading north or a rabbit going south?), there is so much to learn here, things that the computer-simulated models  favored in science classes cannot teach. None is more important than that we are part of something astounding, a world we seek to manipulate but do not fully understand.

I remember at times like these the words of my friend Charity, who has lived most of her life in Detroit’s ravaged neighborhoods, and who was asked why she cared about saving Alaska's Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, which she would probably never see. “My work,” she said, “is in the city, but my heart is in the wild.”

The Christie Boys

It was quite week for the Christie boys. Chris, the tubby one, was up to his jowls in self-mortification (“humiliated”, “heartbroken”) and personal blamelessness (“blindsided”, “stages of grief”) over what Gail Collins has dubbed Bridgegate: the closing of two lanes onto the George Washington Bridge and snarling traffic for four days in Fort Lee, N.J. as an act of political revenge. Doug, the tall one with the reality show wife, was part of Dennis Rodman’s team of basketball players celebrating Kim Jong Un’s 30-somethingth birthday 7,000 miles away in Pyongyang. The Americans, whose average age is 48, lost the competitive half of the game – which enabled the Korean team to avoid ruining the birthday party of the Great One, a man believed to be even more vindictive than the governor of New Jersey. It’s a strange world in which Americans lose a basketball game to a country where the average height is 5’5” and The New York Times devotes three op-ed pieces to smarmy politics in New Jersey. Isn’t this fodder for supermarket tabloids, rather than the last citadels of responsible journalism? Perhaps. But think what we learn about the current state of our political system in which people at the highest levels of power gleefully inconvenience – and even endanger – the lives of thousands as an act of petty vengeance. And what an image we get of North Korea, watching Dennis Rodman sing Happy Birthday to a man who has summoned his entire government to watch a pick-up basketball game.

We’ve Got Shale!

Heavy metals pollute millions of acres of China’s farmland. Less than half the country’s water is safe to drink. Its air kills more than 500,000 people every year. This is the price of progress. Eight thousand miles away, Governor Tom Corbett wants Pennsylvania to be “the Texas of the natural gas boom.” He’s getting his wish. “The amount of clean-burning natural gas being safely produced is nothing short of staggering,” the Marcellus Shale Coalition recently announced. Natural gas, “non-profit” industry shills like the Coalition keep telling us, is wonderful: cleaner than coal and safer than nuclear, it is the energy equivalent of a wonder drug that cures our ailments without demanding changes in our lifestyles.

Except it isn’t. A growing body of research shows natural gas extraction to be anything but benign – most recently, Stroud Water Research Center scientists found that even low levels of fracking’s wastewater were highly toxic to stream organisms.

The industrial age is over. It brought great benefits, but the earth and its inhabitants can no longer sustain its human and environmental costs. It arose in response to new ways of understanding the world – and the entrenched powers, both church and state, resisted it with all their might. But what seemed to them the end of the world was but the start of an exciting new age. Today, the entrenched powers, both government and corporate, resist any alternative to the old order of “more is better”. The Inquisition didn’t stop the last paradigm shift. It must not stop this one.

Virtual Disaster

I have long wondered if people who ask you to “friend” them on Facebook or another other social media site have hurt feelings when you don’t respond. I now know the answer. They do not. Let me back up.

When Facebook appeared a decade ago, my children informed me that I was never to sign up. That was fine with me. I do not care what Justine Timberlake ate for breakfast and I only read graffiti on urban walls.

Last week a friend asked me to connect on LinkedIn. One of my children, who shall remain nameless, told me that membership had “no downside” and could even expand the reach of my blog. So I accepted – and I got this sinking feeling when hundreds of emails instantly went out to God knows whom.

Soon I was hearing from people I hadn’t heard from in years. “I don’t want you to take it personally,” wrote one, declining my “offer”. “Is this really from you,” wrote another? Citing an article on the NSA, a cousin wrote, “I wouldn’t put my contacts on LinkedIn for the world.” “It’s really just an avenue for people to spam you,” wrote a fourth. Others I apparently invited included the Harvard Extension School, American Embassy in Bogota and TripCase.

Writing letters of explanation actually did connect me with old friends, although the sense of not being in control was unsettling. Still, with all the real disasters around the world, I think I’ll survive this virtual embarrassment.

Odds and Ends

• Taking a page from Bibi Netanyahu’s playbook, wherein the prime minister calls recognizing Israel as a Jewish state “an essential condition” for peace, the Tea Party is demanding recognition of America as “the nation-state of the Christian people.” “It’s the only way to win the war on Christmas,” said an unidentified spokesperson, who added that the Party is considering burying the hatchet with John Boehner over immigration reform. “Instead of calling those 14 million Mexicans ‘illegal immigrants’, let’s think of them as Catholics. And minorities? Most of them have lighter skin than Boehner. So no more ‘Happy Holidays’. No more Muslim presidents. And a pathway to the presidency for Ted Cruz.”

• Meanwhile, Dennis Rodman prepares to return to North Korea for his basketball game between American professionals and North Koreans. The game is scheduled for Jan. 8^th, the 31^st birthday of brutal-dictator-cum-basketball-fanatic, Kim Jong Un, although Rodman is having trouble signing up players. This isn’t surprising, since the last American to visit, 85-year-old Merrill Newman, spent a month in jail, and Kim more recently called his favorite uncle “despicable human scum” and had him shot for, among other things, “half-heartedly clapping.”

It’s an odd relationship between the 6’7” Rodman, who wore a wedding dress to promote his autobiography, Bad As I Wanna Be, and tiny Kim, who rules a country dominated by horrendous human suffering and an atomic bomb. But there have been stranger envoys in history, and, who knows, maybe basketball will prove better diplomacy than isolation.

New Year Story

When it didn’t disintegrate harmlessly in the air, the two women in the car realized that what had just blown off the truck’s roof was not snow. Seconds later a block of ice the size of a shoebox slammed into the windshield on the passenger’s side, shattering the glass and the morning calm. My wife, Joanie, managed to steer the car to the shoulder and then to a small gas station near the town of Brewer, Maine, while our daughter, Annie, picked fragments of glass from her face. Somehow, no one was hurt. Inside the tiny market, its shelves crammed with soup cans and potato sticks, Sharon, the proprietor, swung into action, finding a tow company and doling out sympathy. She refused Joanie’s money for coffee (“It’s an hour old. I should have made a new pot”), all the while keeping up a kindly banter with the rough-hewn customers who came in to buy beer, cigarettes and lottery tickets, asking about their Christmas, their families, a grandson’s hockey game. And they, looking at the car outside the window, asked what had happened, responding with a mix of awe and compassion that made us feel we were not strangers. Here in a small market in rural Maine, where people come in to buy hope and ease disappointment, and where we had washed up by frightening chance, we had become, if only for a moment, part of a community, enveloped in its kindness and its humor, watching hope arise from the wreckage.