06/02/2024
Today's "Thinking About..." Tim Snyder's Substack page:
The kindergarten teacher was retiring after four decades. At the reception in her honor, the school played clips of her students, now in the upper grades of the elementary school. What had they learned from her?
"Kindness" and "math" came up a lot, and I thought to myself: kindness can get you into good situations, and math can protect you from bad ones.
As the praise continued, I started to notice the backdrop. The kids had been recorded in the gym, right where we were gathered now to celebrate the teacher. The students in the films stood before a mat, one of those pads mounted on the wall to keep kids from hurting themselves as they run around. Taped to the mat were a couple of signs.
The day before this little ceremony took place, about sixty miles away, a Queens man was convicted of thirty-four felonies by a jury of his peers. The Queens man was an ex-president who had been in office most of the time these older students had been in the school.
Perhaps that's why my eye was drawn, as I watched the clips, to the signs on the mats in the gym: one read "lose without blaming," and the other "respect the equipment."
That's what takes, I found myself thinking, to keep a democracy going. There is a magic in voting that we can take for granted. In each and every election someone is going to lose, and that someone is not going to hold office. Losing without blaming means that the country goes on. Our government continues. And society does not tear itself apart.
The equipment of peaceful daily life is the law. The Constitution governs how a president leaves office, so that we don't have to improvise and fight about it each time. In New York and everywhere else, laws govern how businesses can be run.
brown wooden parquet floor with white wall
Photo by Kurt Liebhaeuser on Unsplash
We won't always like how elections or trials turn out. But it's a mistake to break the equipment, especially when you are meant to be its custodian.
The Speaker of the House of Representatives is supposed to make the laws, the equipment. Our Speaker, sadly, helped the Queens man blame others after his loss in a presidential election. After the trial verdict, the Speaker disrespected the equipment again. He treated the court that did not deliver the result he wanted as political. And then he said that Supreme Court justices were his friends and would overturn the lower court.
The trial of the Queens man was not complicated. The law was clear, as were the facts. Jurors reached an unsurprising conclusion. To say that the trial must be political because it convicted a certain person is to say, falsely, that all trials are political. And to express confidence that friends on the Supreme Court will rule in a certain way is to do the thing you claim to be condemning. You are destroying the equipment.
To "lose without blaming" and to "respect the equipment" means thinking of others. No contest is just about the individual. It is about keeping something going, something that we can make better. If the equipment is just there for me, then I might think I have every right to destroy. But the equipment is only there because others assembled it for me. So it is my job to leave it in better shape than I found it.
Every so often there will be a person, like the Queens man, who likes to trash the equipment. This person might be charismatic, or talented, or attractive in any number of ways. He might have followers, be a bully, seem intimidating. There will always be weak and unprincipled people, like the Speaker, who will treat the loser as a winner, bringing us all down.
Some people never learned the lessons they should have learned in kindergarten. Yet there are more of us, I think, who heed the signs. You can "respect the equipment" by using it the right way. And the rule "lose without blaming" does not mean "lose." You can win while respecting the rules.
And sometimes you must.
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