If you are not doing anything Wednesday at 3 you may find it profitable (in the highest sense) to tune into the webinar SUSTAINING GROUNDS, produced by myself with the help of Boston University student Axel Blumberg.  What does that title mean?  If you are a business, or an institution, a hospital, a school, anything with some land around it, those grounds of your facility need to be sustained.  They need to be protected from peril, first of all, and that’s the first thing we will talk about. Some time ago I had the luck to hear a presentation by the National Fire Protection Association’s urban/wildfire interface expert, Michele Steinberg. It was a great presentation and it had information in it about how to make your facility safer.  It was once true that you only had to worry about this in the arid West. But global warming is causing wildfires to happen in places where they didn’t happen before. 

That’s the peril part.  The promise part is what you do to take care of your grounds. Are you using gasoline-powered equipment?  These often two-stroke engines are the most polluting kind. The workers are often breathing some of that toxic gas.  It is contributing to air pollution.  Its use causes spills and wastes. Once you mix gas and oil there’s no good recycling option for what results.  It is easy for people who don’t like the noise of gas-powered lawn care to pass restrictions on their use, and I am one of those advocates.  But it is not easy for companies to transition to electrical lawn care, or for inhouse grounds care staff.  We should invest in a transition that starts with education, allows time to phase in new practices, and offers help with the change.  One who has figured out how to make it work is George Carrette, who founded Ecoquiet Lawncare, and who is a member of the American Green Zone Alliance.

This is the paradox of each day, full of peril, full of promise.  Maybe we get through ok if we fend off one and embrace the other.
 
Here’s the flyer – the link to register:
https://bostonu.zoom.us/meeting/register/JCxXzwA8TKWYMxinKAsmTQ#/registration

It will be recorded and posted at www.bu.edu/rccp at some point in the near future.

​“THESE are the times that try men’s souls”, is how Thomas Paine began the pamphlets he wrote to fortify the spirits of the new Americans (The American Crisis, 1776).  The threat of destruction by British troops thrust a choice before everyone.

Now, it is the American president who has forced a choice on every American.  It is not a visible challenge like the British troops.  But when he threatened the destruction of the ancient and great Persian civilization, he put a question mark on every American citizen – does this man represent you?  Are his violent promises yours?  Is that the face you want your America to present to the world?

During Paine’s time “we” – the Americans newly made - were standing for the opposite of the idea that those in power should use that power against others. We stood for the idea of what was later called “self-determination”, which is a way of thinking about groups of people that lets them be, which leads to peaceful relations.  He wrote:

…my secret opinion has ever been, and still is, that God Almighty will not give up a people to military destruction, or leave them unsupportedly to perish, who have so earnestly and so repeatedly sought to avoid the calamities of war, by every decent method which wisdom could invent.

Does that America still live and breathe and have a voice?

​Our response to our own leader concerning how we behave towards the rest of the world will determine how we belong to the community of humanity.  The seismic shudder of violent threat sent through the world of minds reoriented the old set point concerning the idea of America, which stood for dignity and respect, at least in principle.  Now it’s somewhere closer to Putin’s horrific dimension and all the others who destroy humans casually or with relish.[i]  How the rest of us react will determine whether it stays knocked there or can come back to something at least trying to be humane.

​Iran is not made up just of the violent leaders who hold it captive with a simulacrum of religion and some kind of massive, vicious confusion about women.   It is also a place where civilization originated and ripened, where people love poetry, have beautiful public gardens and buildings.  (See Rick Steves' visit, for example). Alexander, when he saw how the Persians lived, wanted that for the Greeks.  Cyrus, the one who released the Hebrews from their captivity and sent them back home to Zion, free to worship as they pleased, established governance practices that spread around the world.  Thinking of such things can make an American appalled, aggrieved, angry, ashamed, that the man who supposedly speaks for our country threatened brutal destruction, and of a civilization, no less.  This was surprising even for a man expected to be unpredictable.  

Can a convincing repudiation issue from the throats of enough Americans?  Is there even now a quiet building of pent passion that will not subside?  Will future action release us from this moral stain?  

This voice of frightening tyranny, born out of the sociopathic "we come first" attitude, does not even represent a majority. As adults act to control juvenile delinquency it must be squashed by the rest of us. It is time for the rest of us to speak up.  We can be for everyone.

Paine described the choice before people of his time:

By perseverance and fortitude we have the prospect of a glorious issue; by cowardice and submission, the sad choice of a variety of evils. 

Some of the mighty soul of this country is not lying dead, as Senator Markey and 70 House Democrats called on the removal of our current chief executive; as experts on television urged those in the military not to participate in a civilization-destroying effort, reminding everyone that following orders does not excuse one from accountability for participating in war crimes; and some pointed out that the threat itself was a war crime.  We are not powerless to change the face our leader has shown to the world - to tell it, that is not our face - and to present a different one, the face of a friend you would like to have.

This matter of who we are is not simple.  That’s maybe what drives those who want to cut humanity into a slot, push populations through a filter.  They are impatient, intolerant of complexity.  They are afraid of those who are different. They lack the imagination and perception to see what we all share. 

It is delusional to think there is any other way to treat humans than as individually unique and precious.  It is the infinite variety in the whole of us that is the state of things. Like the soul that is tested, the totality of us is indefinable. Democracy is that.

But the matter of what we are not, or what you don't want to be, that can be simple and clear, as when you are presented with the choice of beauty over ugliness, kindness over cruelty.  Then the soul’s test is sharp and unequivocal.  Evil is evil.

The former colonists had to muster for an unwarranted war, as now.  We need to muster understanding of the concept of democracy that held then and ripened here - that we cooperate and figure things out together instead of fight.   A democratic society has a Department of Defense.  A brutal, primitive one has a Department of War.   Our current president’s signature posture is with his fists in the air.

Perhaps some who mistakenly think he is fighting for them can be helped to see that the way of contest organizes the world with imbalance and conflict built in, and to forsake allegiance to winner-take-all, us v. them thinking.  Who knows?  Maybe they can be helped to see the real road to peace, prosperity, and the pride of dignity, that only healthy democracy reveals.  Then we can resume cooperative interaction, which is what allows synergies to emerge which can expand humanity’s wellbeing. 

I yearn for the world to see the America I know, the one that is Very Beautiful, the one that has the kindness, the public spirit, the honest friendships I have known and witnessed here,  

The New York Times yesterday had a Guest Essay by Dr. Hélène Landemore of Yale University, about the rising use of citizen assemblies.[ii]  A random selection of citizens is brought together to deliberate about public matters. It applies the theory of the jury, that a random collection of enough citizens, to whom experts present facts and opinions, will be a helpful way of reaching good decisions.  They have been tried in some states, European countries, and appear to work wonderfully well, which should not be surprising.  Democracy exists in the world now without our federal government, (see: Roosevelts, UN and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, for pride in their spreading it) but we must not let it remain lonely.  

Many souls have been troubled by the actions of our president, and the meaning it expresses to the rest of the world.  The threat to destroy another civilization has made it necessary that there be some kind of turning in our relationship to the rest of the world.  That depends on our relationships with ourselves, which depends on who we want to be.  King George forced that question, and the world has since been glad to see how the people responded back in Thomas Paine’s day, how when asked who they were, they made something great out of the idea of people being treated with respect.  He wrote then:

The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their country; but he that stands by it now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman. Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered; yet we have this consolation with us, that the harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph. What we obtain too cheap, we esteem too lightly: it is dearness only that gives every thing its value. 


[i] Our Secretary of Defense speaks of mercilessness.  As a priest of Ares would he discards rules of engagement, celebrates maximum lethality, uses suggestive phrases and imagery to turn the conflict into a religious war.  An ancient Achillean rage has hijacked both religion and our military, (See, for contrast, Sylvanus Thayer, West Point, the Nuremburg trials for what are taught as our traditions).  Such expressions could hardly do more to help the recruitment and propaganda efforts of his Islamic enemies.

[ii] Opinion | No Shy Person Left Behind - The New York Times

​With heavy heart I recall the passing of a beloved friend, who made a major contribution to the evolution of a better way of governing ourselves.  I had the luck and privilege to work with George Frantz during the nineties when an effort was taking place at both state and federal levels to improve how we do environmental regulation: to provide assistance, and not just enforcement (and to use that assistance to prevent harm, not just clean up messes after they have happened). 

This evolution of governance is unfortunately not that well grasped by the public, because some administrations used voluntary programs to replace enforcement, but that doesn’t work.  (Also, purveyors of toxics have worked to squelch efforts to reduce their sales).  But there is no question that assistance, and working in partnership with the regulated community, can be extremely effective if you first introduce it as a complement to enforcement.  In time things improve and you can reduce enforcement, but not right away.   

Back when this new movement was just starting, (late '80's, early '90's), the big question was, how do you create friendship between warring camps?  At that time environmental agencies were regarding all businesses as potential polluters and companies were regarding the agencies as a threat to their survival.  How do you bridge that giant gap?

Without people who can, you don’t get out of the starting gate and all your fine ideas live only in your files. You need people who can earn and keep the trust of other people.  George Frantz was a master practitioner of that art and from my lucky seat in this movement, I was a witness to some of the career of this key player, this principal demonstrator of the value of the all-important thing I call relational governance. 

I don’t want George (known as Tock to his family) to be an unsung hero of this forgotten and very rich period in environmental policy.  

First of all, he was a natural with people and the vision, which he adopted instantly. Second, he listened to everyone.  Third, he never failed to look for those sweet spots where everyone is better off, not that easy quick compromise. Fourth, he helped everyone with him enjoy the ride. When he realized that both in government and at the companies we tried to help no one really grasped the dense and confusing air regulations, he bravely dove in.  He helped form an Air Planning Interagency Group, Air PIG, and drew a flying pig, making fun of the skepticism that clarity could be achieved at the same time as this group produced it. 
He kept me from being complacent.  For many years I had a piece of paper prominently displayed over my desk – it was a note from George – replying to my suggestion that we didn’t have to do something right away – it said LATER IS NOW. 

​Whenever George gave me (OTA Assistant Director) and the Director Barbara Kelley something he wanted to publish, we always laughed because there would inevitably be something colorful in it. George was a government official but he had to be folksy.  We would explain that as a new program seeking to build a reputation for objective, authoritative guidance we had to be neutral and not quirky.  In person was one thing, but on paper was different.  This always irritated George and he would always try to get in something to soften that distant, administrative speak that Barbara and I were trying to hard to project.  He may have been right, who knows?

The term “relational governance” is not one that is bandied about.  People don’t usually talk about how important it is to support the transformation of our government from one that seems interested in finding out what we did wrong to one that helps you do what’s right.  After taking off in the nineties it was damaged as some places adopted the irresponsible road of cutting investment in environmental matters – as if what we’d already done was enough.  That makes it more difficult to expand operations to include new efforts.

Under Bush 2 it seemed assistance replaced enforcement in importance, and was equivalent to going easier on industry. But in the nineties - under Clinton and Gore - that was not the dominant trend, it was more about improving, not weakening the rules. Unfortunately this never was clear to the public or many of the environmental organizations.  If it had been, George would be famous now.

When I met George I had had a few years doing outreach to industry for the Massachusetts Office of Technical Assistance for Toxics Use Reduction, trying to convince businesses to let me and the engineers and scientists in our new government agency come to their factory or shop and help them reduce their use of chemicals, help them reduce waste and dangers to their safety and the neighborhood. It took a long time to overcome resistance, but we were having big successes. I would say to myself then that I had found my life’s challenge and I was meeting it. But with some industry sectors, I was getting nowhere.  One of them was the printers. 

We knew they had lots of problems, and that as DEP wrapped up inspecting the biggies, they could be next.  They had air-polluting fountain solution, inks, solvents to clean the inks, rags that got all full of the inks and the solvents, and there were workers who were exposed and costly messes. We could help with all of that!  But no one would talk to me.  I couldn’t get in the door with the printers. So I reached out to the trade association, and as luck has it, George was there.  The next thing I knew he was introducing me as “good people” to all of the printers. This wasn’t the usual business speak. This was personal. 

This is a very short story. It was that simple.  George’s blessing broke the ice.  Companies trusted him and we started getting invitations.  Before you knew it we were publishing case studies, because the companies were thrilled with what happened and wanted to share the news with others.  We had lots of successes. The Americraft[1] company became a speaker at our conferences after cleaning up their processes, and the story was widely circulated.  The case study in the footnote is on a UK webpage that takes from a national program, the Printers National Environmental Assistance Center (PNEAC), that George helped create and which still exists, which used the Massachusetts OTA case study that helped start the whole thing.  Another visit produced the Fit To Print story, where they switched to UV printing which doesn’t rely on an evaporating toxic solvent to cure, with amazing benefits, clean air in the shop and faster process -  https://www.turi.org/uses/printing/. OTA then spent years helping companies eliminate coatings that cured by evaporation of a toxic solvent carrier, to some form of radiation – electron beam, ultraviolet, that quickly caused the hardening of a solution without any of the air emissions.

You have to picture how I had gone to law school and had had a series of jobs, not too many of them what you would think a lawyer would be doing, and I had finally found something that I loved and was good at. I was launching all these initiatives and they were working and EPA was giving me money to keep trying out new things, and we had this new way of working and it was proving itself, and every now and then I would say to myself that I thought I knew what I was doing, allright.

Not long after meeting George we hired him and for a while I was leading in the work we were doing.

For example, I had the idea for creating a new thing, a Business Environmental Network, and with George to help me (and Cynthia Barakatt) we were able to start something that worked and spread and sparked international interest.  It brought MA and NH programs and companies together and before we lost dominance in electronics, and lost other manufacturers, the BENs were growing and widely celebrated.  I was thinking I really know what I’m doing and started writing about Good Faith – how you can make a lot happen by tapping reservoirs of good will.  I wrote a paper that got published in a prominent legal journal called Good Faith as a Fundamental Principle of Relational Environmental Governance.  I was really thrilled with myself, feeling like I had a real grasp of something important.

But what I remember most about that time was coming into work after our hugely successful kickoff meeting of the Merrimack Business Environmental Network, at which kids' paint company president Gabe Paci said he never thought government would do such a thing, and thanked us, and my plan was to just feel good and have an easy morning, and George is working away at his desk. What are you doing?  Writing thank you notes!  It hadn’t occurred to me. As an expert in relationships, I was a piker.

Then George had the idea for doing the same thing we did with the printers, with the dry cleaners. The dry cleaners were another group susceptible to DEP fines for violations, to many environmental expenses, and harms, including cancer from perchloroethylene, or a costly cleanup.  They needed help. It was George who said how about I call the trade associations?  The next thing we knew he had gained their trust and we had training set up with the co-hosting of the Northeast Fabricare Association and the Korean Dry Cleaners Association. Instead of the usual way of getting an industry sector to do better, to fine them, this kicked off a long period of cooperation. If you go to the website of the Toxics Use Reduction Institute of the University of Massachusetts at Lowell, you will see a great deal of extremely valuable information, including detailed analyses of the cleaner alternatives for dry cleaning.  Think of all the cancers that have been avoided.  Think of George.

In 1996 I was asked to join the Common Sense Initiative, a national program to innovate in policy, to improve regulation, and I said you have to get George! 

There he was able to expand the printers project so that it was national in scope.  He also worked on something called Project XL, which was widely misunderstood as just giving companies breaks, and maybe that happened, but the intent was not that, but to work around stupid things in the regulatory system. They are there, and George was on it.  What you need for those issues is someone who gets both sides.  George listened to everyone.

EPA hired him, because at that time it knew what it was doing. 

The great products of that “reinvention” era are not recognized.  The next administration either let them wilt or corrupted them, I regret to say.  George’s achievements in that realm were very substantial, if you take a “consequentialist” point of view – looking at what they led to.

He also worked in the tribal program, and when I did briefly as well, it was his introduction that got me off on a good foot there, as it had with the printers. He had clearly once again gained that kind of trust that enables you to effectively endorse. 

I have a story that really illustrates this.  DEP was mightily impressed with our printer case studies, and they said can you help us do a big project with them?  DEP did appreciate that the rules were dense and hard to know or follow for medium and small companies.  We said my yes that’s a wonderful response (keeping to ourselves that it took years) and George called up his successor at the printing trade association and got them and many printing company heads to come hear what DEP had in mind.

We are in a big room with lots of people and things are going really well and then a high DEP official says you know in order to show EPA we are actually increasing compliance with this project (they will need to see that), we have to have a baseline to measure from, so first we’re going to do 88 inspections. 

​There was an outcry – I remember it as a kind of shriek – “WHAT!!??”

Immediately every single printer stood up and walked out. The government people were all sitting there stunned, but George, me, and environmental consultant Roy Crystal ran after them to talk them into coming back.  I remember thinking this is never going to work, but George made it happen. They listened to him.  All the printers came back into the room and the DEP gave up the 88 inspections idea.

The rest is history.  The Printers’ Project was the pilot for what became the Environmental Results Project, which then involved several small industry sectors and became the model for how small and medium-sized business sectors can be governed with tailored requirements they can actually understand and follow.  ERP is famous.  But the sine qua non – the “without which not” – was that without the trust the printers had in George, it wouldn’t have happened.  At a few events I witnessed celebrating the birth of the ERP, this story about how it really started was not told, as it was not known to those who developed the program after it had been made possible.  

In law we have a concept about causation. It’s called “but for”.  Would something have happened but for something?   The reduction in poisoning of workers in print and dry cleaning shops, the demonstration of a new, sensible model of governing, the creating of viable and fruitful partnerships instead of enmity, between the population – the people who make up businesses – and their government – the demonstrations that I have seen in my life that have convinced me that progress is possible – some of the most powerful of them would not have happened but for George.

We always find out too late how we wrongly think someone of importance to us will always be there.  I deeply regret not making more time to be with this rare person whom I loved, but that’s just a story about how much he meant to me.  I feel a duty to tell a much larger story – about what he meant to everyone, whether they know it or not.  The world will be a better place when we learn that governance of ourselves is best done by means of a relationship – a positive, constructive relationship – between agencies and the people they regulate.  It isn’t going to work if we go back to when agencies only played gotcha and the business communities were hiding out from them.  In life, only some people are reluctant to do what’s right, to follow rules. We must not treat everyone as if they are criminals waiting to be caught, that creates a certain kind of society.

We should want to live in the world that George was creating.  We should understand what his example can mean.
 
 


[1] https://files01.core.ac.uk/download/pdf/226759853.pdf

During this season of constant assault I took some refuge in Zaakir Tameez’s Charles Sumner, Conscience of a Nation,[i] which reminded me that although nature produces people who create and perpetuate toxicity it also produces those who face it head on and do not surrender to it, and thereby open a society to the evolution of a better future, by not suppressing that inner voice that whispers about what’s right and wrong.

In the face of extreme ugliness in his country Sumner continued to see its beauty.  The Constitution his abolitionist friends denounced as a pact with the Devil he saw as a promise of a better world, and his work to make that happen enabled Lincoln and Congress to bring us the “rebirth of freedom” of the constitutional amendments remaking the nation from a caste to a democratic society, after the Civil War.  (On the remaking of the U.S. as a caste society, see current news about this Administration’s actions, plans, attitude).
​
Bob Dylan had a big effect of sparking conscience when he first hit the scene - the whole uproar about his turning to electric rock seemed to be the resentment of those who wanted him to be their leader, but he was not Sumner, he was and is something else we can only call Bob Dylan, and the good side of that is that we have to figure things out for ourselves (giving us the chance to realize our potentials as individual thinkers instead of being unthinking followers).  The intellectual ferment over injustice, which has caused such panic on the right, is something that each individual must figure out for themselves, but we all look to other people around us – which can cause confusion in relationships. An ethical standard on the way to universalization exists in many forms of manifestation, including the reflection of it in the backlash against it that we are experiencing now. 

My students today see a future blighted in many ways, yet out of more than sixty this past Fall semester to a person none seemed frozen, too overwhelmed to pick up the puzzles of how we fix the world. Each one demonstrated a kind of positive energy in response to the world’s hollowing out. Our theme has been that environmental, public health, public interest work is more important than ever.  These students are by no means a representative sample. Only a certain type of person takes a class entitled “Developing Sustainable Environmental Responsibility (DSER)”, or “Law for Sustainability”.  But they are a powerful indication that there are reasons to hope for the continuing powerful resonance of conscience, for facing problems with practical optimism seems to give them more energy. I hope more teachers will explicitly call for moral fulfillment and not just skills training.  They will find what comes forth comforting and helpful.

The positive force of morally impassioned young people feeds my life-long faith in democracy, even as it is challenged now.  It may be that because the pursuit of power over others plays itself out in such ugliness that the human potential for creating a better world ends up winning, because it is constantly fed by hope, and when it prevails, it brings beauty, peace, prosperity, rather than continuous struggle and damage.

In one of my classes students do one project all semester. You can see the variety this has produced from just one of my courses, “Research for Environmental Agencies and Organizations”, www.bu.edu/rccp, where scrolling down you are in a fresh green forest of good ideas that would give us sustainable supply systems, cleaner air and water, safer and quieter communities, environmental health and safety.  We held a conference to present what we did this Fall, (the recording is posted there), which included some of the experts students talked to.

This Fall students:
​

• wrote companies torturing their neighbors with noisy operations, to tell them how they could, instead of being indifferent, investigate options for reducing their impact;
• envisioned a circular economic system of international trade in which electronic products are taken apart and their materials used again, so that we can stop destroying the planet by mining that instead of the earth, and can help heal the digital divide;
• created art (and shirts and stickers) and events that can reduce plastic waste and spread ideas about things we can do to further sustainability;
• analyzed Federal Aviation Administration data to prove that a low-income minority community has indeed had a huge sudden increase in overflights imposed upon it (this involved analyzing a complex data set the community obtained from the FAA through the Freedom of Information Act);
• developed a proposal for using climate credits to help small and medium size farms afford to implement available technology for methane capture;
• crafted legislation to ensure rental properties are truly habitable and not harming people with lead or other toxics;
• wrote, in conjunction with Watershed Council staff, educational pamphlets on reducing invasive plant problems (and their relationship to combined sewage overflows), and on urban heat.

 
In Developing Sustainable Environmental Responsibility, students helped create a new initiative, to bring nongovernmental professionals working on pollution prevention (P2) into a workgroup of the National Pollution Prevention Roundtable (NPPR, an organization of mostly state government P2 officials).  The idea is that although the national P2 commitment has waned, there are many doing it in private facilities, and they can come together and share information and help it to spread, so that much more unnecessary waste and toxicity can be avoided. They introduced the idea at an NPPR meeting composed mostly of Board members, and it was received with enthusiasm. We are committed to producing a national meeting of the workgroup this Spring.

With that refreshing thought that there are people willing to pick up the torch and carry it for a bit, let us retreat again from the world of today long enough to recover something troubling and helpful at the same time from the past.

Charles Sumner’s idea of equality before the law was one that literally meant everyone.  But in 1850 Massachusetts Chief Justice Lemuel Shaw did not see it that way.  He ruled that the court was not going to do anything about how young Sarah Roberts, who walked by a good school every day, was not to be allowed to attend it, it having chosen to be exclusive to black people.  He told us people were equal before the law but if the laws adapted to their respective relations and conditions didn’t respect those rights, then somehow although people were equal before the law the law was not going to do anything about the denial of their rights.  To us today his opinion reads as a real brain twister.  It raises the question of what good is law divorced from rights?  He wrote: 

The great principle…is, that by the constitution and laws of Massachusetts, all persons without distinction of age or sex, birth or color, origin or condition, are equal before the law. This, as a broad general principle,…is perfectly sound; it is not only expressed in terms, but pervades and animates the whole spirit of our constitution of free government. But, when this great principle comes to be applied to the actual and various conditions of persons in society, it will not warrant the assertion, that men and women are legally clothed with the same civil and political powers, and that children and adults are legally to have the same functions and be subject to the same treatment; but only that the rights of all, as they are settled and regulated by law, are equally entitled to the…consideration and protection of the law, for their maintenance and security. What those rights are, to which individuals…must depend on laws adapted to their respective relations and conditions.
Roberts v. City of Boston 59 Mass. 198, Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts, 1850.

We have a caste society, he is saying, without saying.

Charles Sumner had argued that black people were entitled to the same privileges in public life as whites and that segregation was wrong.  The court had to resort to the bizarre logic above – in which social preferences are the real law and that other one made of principles, that disappears - to shoot him down.  Standing beside Sumner and working with him was a black lawyer, William Morris. By doing just this, working alongside a black man in his time, Sumner demonstrated the absurdity of the fact that no other white lawyer would do that. Though he lost his case, he won public opinion.  The Massachusetts legislature ended public school desegregation five years later.    

Tameez’s biography tells us that Sumner’s dad was not acknowledged by his own father, and that Sumner himself grew up on the cold, northern side of Beacon Hill with the poorer folk, including the Black population. He had some knowledge of the injustice of social disrespect for individuals. He also spent some time in France where he saw Black and White treated the same in public places, doing all kinds of things without the segregation he saw at home. He did not see his own country the way many or perhaps most whites seemed to, that segregation was natural. He correctly saw it as unnatural and utterly wrongful.

Abolitionists at the time would publicly burn the Constitution because it was a “pact with the Devil Slavery”. But Sumner said it contains the sacred original idea of the founders of universal individual equality and liberty. He pointed to the Declaration of Independence. 

Today’s conservatives can be very literal. They say the noble language in the Declaration (or the Preamble) doesn’t spell out how you enforce the principles we can clearly hear them articulating, and without that, well, you can’t enforce them.  The 9th Amendment – written to preserve rights that aren’t spelled out – has been termed an “ink blot” we cannot interpret. The Constitution Center explains: “During his failed confirmation hearing to become a Supreme Court justice in 1987, Robert Bork analogized the Amendment to an ‘inkblot,’ which hid the constitutional text that was under it. Just as judges should not guess what was under an inkblot, he argued, so too they should not guess at the Ninth Amendment’s meaning. Bork’s very public denial that any meaning of the Amendment could be discovered fueled intense academic interest in the original meaning of the text.”  (https://constitutioncenter.org/the-constitution/amendments/amendment-ix/interpretations/131).
This strikes me as a lot like Lemuel Shaw – looking at the world, squinting, show me where those principles are really required, spelled out! Just seeing the surface of things, injustice appears to be ordained reality.

But the original intent of the founders was not limited to their current conditions, a government that did not work for them.  Some seemed to do their best to consider the future, to build in some foundation of shared values.  They all joined in the general task of basing government on the natural recognition of mutual existence, institutionalizing something to counter the ages of cruel competition.  If Right did not then replace Might (or the Civil War would not have happened), it took its place in the driver’s seat with ordinary power playing, giving citizens a chance to uphold it.

When asked to write a constitution for Massachusetts John Adams said let the people come together in convention – expand the right to vote and get the people to make their own rules. Then he wrote one that they passed.  This process and much of the content was then the model for how the national Constitution came about. 

To read the Massachusetts Constitution is like taking a refreshing, cold drink on a hot, dry, thirsty day. 

The end of the institution, maintenance, and administration of government, is to secure the existence of the body politic, to protect it, and to furnish the individuals who compose it with the power of enjoying in safety and tranquility their natural rights, and the blessings of life: and whenever these great objects are not obtained, the people have a right to alter the government, and to take measures necessary for their safety, prosperity and happiness.

The body politic is formed by a voluntary association of individuals: it is a social compact, by which the whole people covenants with each citizen, and each citizen with the whole people, that all shall be governed by certain laws for the common good. It is the duty of the people, therefore, in framing a constitution of government, to provide for an equitable mode of making laws, as well as for an impartial interpretation, and a faithful execution of them; that every man may, at all times, find his security in them.

We, therefore, the people of Massachusetts, acknowledging, with grateful hearts, the goodness of the great Legislator of the universe, in affording us, in the course of His providence, an opportunity, deliberately and peaceably, without fraud, violence or surprise, of entering into an original, explicit, and solemn compact with each other; and of forming a new constitution of civil government, for ourselves and posterity; and devoutly imploring His direction in so interesting a design, do agree upon, ordain and establish the following Declaration of Rights, and Frame of Government, as the Constitution of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts.

A Declaration of Rights precedes everything else, serving as the foundation from which all else flows.[ii]

There was a solidarity passed down by the Federalists primarily that Sumner absorbed. He got to know the Adamses, old John Quincy himself, who made sure Sumner was given a ring of his, and he was friends with Joseph Story, and even got to know old John Marshall, the second and first great Supreme Court Justices. They and others impressed on him the meaning of the original Constitution, and that it resonated with and was generated by the principles of the Declaration of Independence. When you hear someone diminishing the meaning of the grand aspirations it is like someone tapping on the horn of a tuba instead of blowing it to make it sound.  It only means we have not succeeded in embodying in our established processes the means for making manifest the principles we say we observe. It is like Judge Shaw saying the grandness of the law is over there somewhere, not to impact here where we actually live.  This may serve the tendencies that be for now but it is a mistake to think that this eliminates or even diminishes the meaning of the principle, which retains the potential to guide humanity to a safer position than it is in without it.

When Ben Franklin suggested that the Declaration’s assertions were “self-evident”, he marked the liberation of thought from dogma and its location back where it belongs, where it starts: in each individual mind.  The same thing happened when Thomas Jefferson and others worked for religious freedom, and Madison made sure that and other aspects of freedom of conscience were recognized as sacred by the First Amendment.

As Ronald Dworkin later explained, “relying on Immanuel Kant’s thesis that no one respects his own humanity who does not respect humanity in other people, (…) we can define what we owe to other people as part of what we owe to ourselves. The key is the idea of dignity: it belongs to our own dignity to respect the dignity of other people.[iii] (Emphasis added).

Lemuel Shaw was more the type to work with the world as it was, rather than to imagine the world as it should be, based on this original idea of the importance – the dignity – of each individual.  Some suggest he was Herman Melville’s model for the severe Captain Vere who executes the innocent Billy Budd.  Thus it is understandable that he would reason in 1850 that Black people were simply not part of social society – that though they could have “civil” rights, the chance to go to court, get married, for example, the state played no role in social organization and if Whites wanted to exclude them, that was that, maybe too bad.  Social rights were not the business of the state.  He washed his hands, like Pilate, turned to the mass of people, and let their unwashed opinions call for the death of what is possible for everyone to love (universal equality, individual dignity).  In the same way the Supreme Court recently looked to practices of the past to determine whether women today have the right to control what happens to their own bodies, disrespecting human dignity, diminishing the law to the point of obvious universal principles disappearing from view. They washed their hands of the injustice done to all women who assume they deserve the right to control what happens to their own bodies.

Sumner called out the racists, in a Senate with many slave-owners, who spat tobacco on the rug and were often drunk.  They had their own sense of dignity that they called honor, which meant no one disses them and gets away with it. Like today’s thug honor, it meant a showing of respect to them, not to something shared, as in real honor.  Preston Brooks beat Sumner nearly to death at his Senate desk with his cane, (a part of the image of a Southern gentleman) becoming a hero to many in the South.  It must be supposed that he and those who cheered him felt, as many using violence to do politics must, today, that foolish people of conscience must be shown that their precious sentiments mean nothing next to the will to be violent.  Their delight in winning this simple as mud tactic may be short-lived, but the question is always how long must we endure this supposed lesson before it is obvious to everyone what poverty of mind produces it.

Bob Dylan sang in 1963 in the Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll how William Zanzinger killed poor Hattie Carroll
With a cane that he twirled around his diamond ring finger
At a Baltimore hotel, society gath'rin'
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FmbwU3J-2kk

The song is based on a real incident.[iv]

I imagine Charles Sumner, sitting in his metal throne in the center of the traffic of Harvard Square, noticed perhaps by few, as the song ends.

In the courtroom of honor, the judge pounded his gavel
To show that all's equal and that the courts are on the level
And that the strings in the books ain't pulled and persuaded
And that even the nobles get properly handled
Once that the cops have chased after and caught 'em
And that the ladder of law has no top and no bottom
Stared at the person who killed for no reason
Who just happened to be feelin' that way without warnin'
And he spoke through his cloak, most deep and distinguished
And handed out strongly for penalty and repentance
William Zanzinger with a six-month sentence
Oh, but you who philosophize, disgrace and criticize all fears
Bury the rag deep in your face for now's the time for your tears.
 
Sumner kept alive the original dream of a nation strong through justice – he was the friend holding Lincoln’s hand when the great Emancipator died – and we too can look at the Constitution and see what he saw.

Sumner didn’t keep quiet.  He was like John Quincy Adams, who after being President went to Congress and raised the issue ending slavery so many times they issued a gag order to shut him up. If you find yourself in Harvard Square someday, visit the Sumner statue.  If you get a chance, read the biography.  It may help empower the upholding of the light of universal values. We can have faith in those ideals, because his faith came to some fruition.

But it needs to keep happening.  We need to go back to the sacred ideals of the founders, not the history of social practices, and give them the meaning they need today. 

Bob Dylan told us Times Were A-Changing but without advancing the truth of conscience that change can be a degradation of principles instead of their adoption.

Then, if your thinking has become oriented by this reading or these considerations, check out Howard French’s The Second Emancipation – about the decolonization of Africa, (mostly Kwame Nkrumah and Ghana, the first to liberate itself).  This book, revealing a whole history many may not know, of small nations asking for help from the US and not receiving it, breaks your heart at lost opportunities, but the lessons can still be learned.  In the lives of people who raised their voices, and the desires of so many young people today, we see that the chances for a truly humane and flourishing world remain before us. We are reminded that we can learn to relate to each and the planet, and destruction can cease.  What we know about the Golden Age of Sustainability and Justice that we are hoping for is not that it is unattainable.  All we know is that it isn’t here yet. 

I keep asking people, what is the Third Emancipation?[v]



[i] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Yky2U0txgk
Youtube presentation by Zaakir Tameez on Charles Sumner to the US Capitol Historical Society.
[ii] The opposite of our national constitution, where the Bill of Rights is an add-on a couple of years later. 

[iii] https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2013/11/07/law-inside-out/

[iv] February 9th, 2023. https://folklife.si.edu/magazine/hattie-carroll.  Ian Nagoski.

[v] You should come up with your own answer and if you do, write me at rreibste@bu.edu.  I think maybe from Nationalism, or from Toxic Group Identifications or from Unsatisfiable Wealth Maximization – they would all be good.

​Tomorrow I meet the students in my class Developing Sustainable Environmental Responsibility (a responsibility you can sustain and which is enough to get us to sustainability).  I try to imagine how they see the world. When they were young and first understood the concepts of the United States and the Presidency, it was Obama who they saw exemplifying what this meant.  The United States was a force for reason - even if faulty, even if the things it did sometimes made little sense, it seemed like we were trying to help.  We had environmental laws.  We ;had international allies.  We honored agreements, and we honored diversity, believed in equity, and wanted everyone to feel and be included.  These young people, I tell myself, must feel as if we are all falling down a high mountain.

I feel that way but I also remember when this nation began that climb up that mountain in earnest, and how it was fueled by disgust and anger and a fierce loyalty to the truth and what’s right.  I remember when the country got up on its hind legs and barked and kept barking until even Richard Nixon had to move.  We can do it, and we can do it again.

It helps to read in the New York Times (print, Op-Ed) today that pollster Kristen Soltis Anderson has found that “few Americans live at the extremes…only 13 percent of Americans hold views that could be categorized as “strong liberal” and only 11 percent as “strong conservative”.  Years of looking at polling data has convinced her that “People in the American center are likely to be heterodox in their viewpoints.”  They take some ideas from the right and some from the left, and in her view it is “paired with a belief that as broken as things are now, there is hope things can get better in the future.” It helps me to think of people as more complicated because that makes it harder for evil leaders to divide us. It makes me think that arguments are important, as this indicates that most people are in the center, and most people are choosing what to think rather than choosing which herd to be corralled with.

That encourages me to have hopes for engaging when there is any opportunity, and attempting to use reason. I will try to frame it that way for my students, so that they can then spend their own time, as I have spent so many hours in mine, imagining things worth saying to people who really ought to hear them.

Reasoning together sounds so pale, so damp, so ineffective. But when it is done well, there’s nothing better.  No one can see how to settle the question of which woman is the mother of the baby until Solomon proposes cutting it in half and sees by their reaction who it is.  Truth always exists behind and under the falsehoods covering it - it is always there to bring forth if we can find a way.  We should not, I believe, limit ourselves to the academic forum style argumentation, or the lawyerly or manipulative styles. Reasoning is the exchange of thought and it can take many forms – it can be poetic, lyrical, evocative, allusive, casual, humorous – but it at best has an unshakeable loyalty to reality and the community of thought – which stems from and fosters respect for others.  The attempt to share honest and pure perception of the world is a noble goal.  By putting our minds together to have a conjoined power of perception we achieve what looks to me more like a better effort for human intelligence than making some machine to do thinking for us. To those of us who believe in reason, it can seem so magnificent that we cannot understand those who seem to sneeze at it, ignore it, and prefer unsubstantiated ideas over facts.  They seem unreasoning, unwilling to alter their view of the world or even consider it. But we must remember the limits of our own reasoning powers, and that we may be blind to their reasons.  In any case, to fail to engage because one assumes that an exchange cannot change minds is to belie the faith in reason we may think we have, which argues for trying.

​When the reason to be out there engaging in reasoning with others is that you are filled with grief or anger about the violence being done to our personal and social health and wealth, not to mention the emotional quality of life and mental stability, and/or by the memory that there is something better and the wish to assert the dignity of the living individual, reasoning can be invested with even stronger force. It can be the path, the bridge, the lifting of the veil, that allows the connecting with others who feel the same way, when anger or grief alone cannot. The faith in connecting with others through reasoning together can channel the negative energy of disappointment into something helpful. When people are emotionally open to what makes sense, to utter it can cause the sudden collapse of noxious myth and the rapid return of the desire for the stability that comes from a closer adherence to reality. When people find a reason to agree, they can find a relief from the tension of conflict. They may have started out looking for that relief by ignoring or winning over you, but there is always the hope that it can be presented to them in a form that makes sense for everyone, and that they may accept it, even though everyone seems primed for an unavoidable conflict.
​
After I make this little speech, arguing for faith in the effort to convince Americans to restore democracy, decency, DEI, and the effort to stop the poisoning of ourselves and our planet, I will ask the students to write about what is worrying them: the environmental, public health issues, the unsustainable practices, that most bother them. They will do that in silence for just a few minutes, and then I will ask them to write down a few questions they have about those issues, and then, still without any group conversation, to make an attempt at solving some or all of the problems they identified.

I tell them that for a group to work well thinking together, to reach its full potential, every member has to think for themselves, and bring what they can bring to the group effort.  Groups composed of members who come to follow others, to soak up conventionally received ideas, don't tap into everyone's unique experience, expertise and imagination.  Those groups are more fun and more productive. Then we put our ideas on the board and see what it looks like as a set of problems, and we consider the questions we have, and we enter what I unashamedly call the Solution Space.  I don’t think it’s too silly to call it that, but if it is, the students have been kind over the years not to mention it.  (They do seem to like it). 

Each student has now been sitting there – in these new days of AI we have to make them put down the electronics and use pen and paper (how ironic that the advances have brought us back to this) – sitting in their own thoughts. They have come to the class to discuss environmental issues, and now they are going to sit with them and solve them.  I tell them that when you think about environmental issues on your own, and try to solve them on your own, it’s overwhelming. But if you can form groups and work well together, pooling your ideas and energies, there’s no limit to what can be achieved, as the cultural anthropologist Margaret Mead said.  I like to say it’s the kind of synergistic energy that, if tapped, can turn things around. 

At some point we realize that all the things we say we can do to solve the problems are not enough, and we can’t see how we will ever do the big things – get millions to do them – get companies to stop pulling toxic things out of the earth and instead get them to stop producing waste, to reuse all the wastes already produced, clean up the contamination and compensate the victims.  Get nations to stop making war.  Change the economic system so enterprise profits are equitably shared, people make durable products for need and substitute clean for toxic production. These are some big things and it seems overwhelming when you are alone and you contemplate such matters.  But 24 students have signed up for the class. That’s more than enough to make one feel as if one is not alone.  Reason alone tells us, if we use it, that we are all in this together. But when we really are all in the same room then you can feel it, and that’s the kind of feeling we need to generate the motivation to climb back up that hill and restore and then improve the laws and programs that make sense, that are protective and not psychotically extractive. 

The restoration of sanity and hope seems a good step towards restoring what was helping to keep the world safe, and expanding and evolving them as is our duty, and having others in the room who want to see this world saved is one of the paths back to sanity and it certainly generates a sense of hope. I feel lucky and hope that anyone reading this with expertise to share will go out and find a way to teach the young people who need to hear what you know, about how to preserve and protect and help this world to flourish, to see its verdant vitality grow and spread, and not be neglected or crushed by the uncaring passage of something blind to what we have.