Say it ain’t so, Joe. Don’t tell those of us who backed you to the hilt that you are serious about the utterly unqualified Neera Tanden for Director of the OMB — especially when you have an incredibly qualified person-of-color available for the position in Andrew Yang, the best national advocate for Math and Economic Literacy we’ve had since Alexander Hamilton.
Tanden’s views are only in tandem with the dying, discredited Clinton corner of the Democratic Party; Yang, aside from representing a growing Asian American constituency — credited with joining Black voters to help flip Georgia blue for you — opened the floodgates to a whole new generation of Democratic voters with his “Yang Gang.” And, if you look anywhere on social media right now, you’ll see it’s Andrew Yang out there campaigning for Ossoff and the Rev. Warnock to win Georgia’s two US Senate seats.
Just by floating the name of negative Neera (who favored cutting social security, and opposed Bernie Sanders and progressive Dems on many economic initiatives), you’ve already taken attention away from your superb choices of Janet Yellin as Treasury Secretary, and Wally Adeyemo as the first Black man to serve as the Deputy at Treasury. Cut your losses with Neera now, and don’t squander your political goodwill and capital by having her run into a buzz saw of Progressive and GOP opposition in the Senate.
As you have demonstrated thus far, there’s a treasure trove of highly qualified people of color, and women, to select for many important positions within a Biden/Harris Administration. Neera Tanden is not one of them.
One whom I’ve advocated to you before (in fact, I advanced her name as a Vice Presidential possibility) is the incomparable Dr. Helene Gayle, a perfect candidate to head Health & Human Services as COVID continues to crush entire communities and families across this country.
Trained and board-certified in Pediatric Medicine ( MD from University of Pennsylvania Medical School, Masters in Public Health from Johns Hopkins University’s School of Public Health), Dr. Gayle worked at the CDC for 20 years, directing the National Center for HIV, STD and TB Prevention.
Helene’s heroic work in HIV/AIDS was recognized by Bill & Melinda Gates, when they hired her away from the CDC to run their Foundation’s HIV, TB & Reproductive Health Program, which she did for 5 years, expanding her expertise to help those in greatest need globally. There were still ‘mountains beyond mountains’ for Dr. Gayle to climb and in 2005, her talent was tapped by one of the world’s premier international relief and development organizations, CARE, USA, with programs that help more than 80 million people in 93 countries, and over 10,000 employees spread across the globe. CARE is now dedicated to stopping the spread of the global Corona Virus Emergency. (www.care.org).
Dr. Gayle served as President and CEO of CARE, for 10 years, “helping millions of people recover from natural disasters and other acute emergencies, prevent the spread of HIV/AIDS, and gain access to healthcare, nutrition, education, economic opportunity, safe water and improved sanitation.” A member of the Council on Foreign Relations, the American Public Health Association, and the National Academy of Medicine, Helene Gayle was named by Forbes Magazine as one of the most powerful women in the world, and by Foreign Policy as one of the top 100 “Global Thinkers.”
Dr. Gayle chaired President Obama’s Advisory Council on HIV/AIDS, and launched a McKinsey Social Initiative (now, McKinsey.org) that builds public/private partnerships for social impact. You know, Helene, Joe. She is the kind of supremely qualified person you want to have in crucial positions in your administration. Neera Tanden is not in the same league as Helene Gayle, nor as Andrew Yang.
Dr. Gayle was among the very first global public health officials to recognize, early on, that the HIV/AIDS epidemic was taking a heavy toll upon the Black, Latino and poor communities in the United States. Three years ago, she moved to Chicago to head one of nation’s oldest and largest community foundations, the Chicago Community Trust, focusing sharply on closing the racial and ethnic wealth gap in the Chicago area.
Helene Gayle has always been a consummate medical and public health professional, not a politician. She is widely respected among public officials of both parties, dealt with world leaders as an equal, and has run vast national and international non-profit and public service organizations. Dr. Gayle personifies the depth of the towering talent pool of people of color, Joe, with life experiences and professional accomplishments available to be tapped in the service of this nation, by you and Kamala Harris.
There’s no excuse to settle for less, and no better way to push Math and Science to the top of your agenda than to appoint the highest calibre people, like Andrew Yang and Dr. Helene Gayle.
Two of New York City’s former Mayors died this week. One committed suicide on national TV, melting before our very eyes. The other, the first and only Black Mayor in NYC’s 350+ year history, died a peaceful death, in the privacy of his own home. Both deaths reflected how the Mayors lived their lives.
Rudy Giuliani, the White Supremacist beaten by David Dinkins for the Mayoralty in 1989, during a period of rising racial unrest in NYC, died by his own tormented tongue and hands, choking on his own words as if they were poison pills, in front of millions of viewers. For many of us who have had a front-row seat to witness Rudy the Racist’s rise and fall over the decades, it reminded us of the way he announced he was divorcing his second wife, Donna Hanover — at an unhinged press conference, alone.
David Dinkins, in compelling contrast, a genuinely kind man of great dignity and grace, went gently into the night at age 93, one month after the death of his beloved partner of 67 years, Joyce Burrows Dinkins. Both were graduates of Howard University, the mecca for Black leadership in this country, with Justice Thurgood Marshall, VP-elect Kamala Harris, former Ambassador Andrew Young, writer Toni Morrison and actor Chadwick Boseman, as just a few examples.
Mayor Dinkins continually reminded us that he stood on the shoulders of giants, in the civil rights movement and beyond, who had sacrificed much for this country, and that he was a reflection of the “gorgeous mosaic” that was the diversity of New York. Conversely, by his every action, Rudy rudely reminded us that he stood on the bodies of people who got in the way of his ruthless ambition. Even after Giuliani defeated Dinkins in their 1993 Mayoral rematch, and Dinkins reached out as an act of reconciliation, following a blatantly racist campaign waged against the City’s first Black Mayor, Rudy refused to meet. Giuliani was already ginning up his shivel-souled, small-minded, mean and ghoulish behavior to become Donald Trump’s lawyer later in life, a high-profile position from which he plunged to his death.
During the tinderboxes of the heat of the summer of 1989 — the Central Park 5 arrests, and the Bensonhurst murder of Yusef Hawkins — it was David Dinkins who kept NYC from exploding as he crusaded for Mayor, calling for peace in a town ready to ignite into flames, with private citizen Trump trumpeting racial hate in full-page newspaper ads, and candidate Giuliani lighting matches from the sidelines.
Less than two weeks before the September Democratic Primary where Dinkins would handily beat Mayor Ed Koch for the right to run against Rudy in November, I accompanied Governor Mario M. Cuomo to the funeral of Yusef Hawkins, the 16-year-young Black man killed because of the color of his skin, while he went shopping for a used car in a heavily white, Italian section of Brooklyn.
We were among a light smattering of white faces in a crowd of thousands jamming the streets in front of the Glover Memorial Church on Dean Street in East New York, not far from where I was born. I stood among a group of mostly white reporters covering the funeral, finding an uneasy comfort in the presence of Louis Farakkhan’s bow-tied Muslim soldiers, who lined the streets in front of the church to keep some semblance of peace.
Mayor Koch emerged from his official City car to pay his respects and was pelted with a barrage of boos and screams so intense, I expected his presence to cause a riot. Dislike for Koch was visceral in East NY’s Black neighborhoods, but even Mario Cuomo, generally admired by Black leaders and communities across the City and State, was heckled as he entered Glover Memorial for the funeral service.
Cuomo had been sharply criticized the day before by Brooklyn-born movie director Spike Lee for not visiting Bensonhurst and “talking some sense out there to the Italians.” Lee’s film Do The Right Thing about racism in NYC came out earlier that summer, presaging the lethal price of prejudice. The street taunts toward Mario Cuomo reflected Lee’s sentiments.
Of all the public officials in attendance, only David Dinkins was greeted respectfully, foreshadowing his nine-point primary victory over Koch two weeks later. Dinkins, then the Manhattan Borough President, ran as a “healer” of the City’s simmering racial tensions. Two months later, Dinkins narrowly beat Giuliani for Mayor by some 47,000 votes, one of the closest mayoral elections in NYC’s history. Dinkins won with 90 percent of the Black vote citywide and 70 percent of the Latino vote, while Rudy ran away with the White vote, securing some 70 percent. In Bensonhurst, where Yusef Hawkins was murdered, Giuliani defeated Dinkins by a 10–1 margin.
David Dinkins’ calm, conciliatory manner was just what NY needed at that moment in it’s long, boisterous history. The morning after Dinkins election, I wore my “Dinkins for Mayor” button, with writing in Hebrew to pointedly bring people together, as I rode the E-Train down to the World Trade Center to my job. The feeling of joy and brotherhood, though fleeting, was palpable throughout the subway car. A few fellow commuters, several of them Black, exchanged high-fives with me.
David Dinkins’ quiet dignity rescued the City that day and for a short time into the new decade of the 1990’s. He didn’t have Mario Cuomo’s charisma, nor Giuliani’s ghoulishness, but, in his careful, considerate way, Dinkins showed us what the promise of the future could look like.
Rest in the very peace you sought all of your days, David. You deserve it.
The names come at you in torrents, but it’s the photos and the short, simple biographies that torment, and tear me apart.
. . .Kious Kelly, 48, NYC ER Nurse; April Dunn, 33, Baton Rouge, Advocate for Disabled; Kenneth Sauders III, 43, Decatur, GA, Civic Leader; Abraham Vega, 48, Dallas, County Sheriff; Willie Levi, 73, Waterloo, Iowa, Turkey Processing Plant worker; Robbie Walters, 84, Sacramento, Police Officer/Legislator; Elvia Ramirez, 17, Fargo, ND, high school senior; Anthony M. Hopkins, 70, Elizabethtown, KY, Vietnam War Veteran/Purple Heart Recipient & Postal Worker. . .
Reading through the New York Times latest “Portraits of Grief” — modeled after the more than 2400 brief obituaries of those we lost in the 9/11 terrorist attacks — is a profoundly sad experience. Entitled, “Those We’ve Lost,” the COVID portraits of grief number 100 times as many as those the Times meticulously assembled 19 years ago. That’s as of today — nearly 100 times as many human lives lost — from COVID 19, as were lost when the Two World Trade Center towers came tumbling down. By the time of next year’s 20th Anniversary of 9/11, COVID-related deaths in the United States could approach the unimaginable total of 500,000, or nearly 200 times the number of those who perished on 9/11. Let that sink in.
The numbing effect of such numbers — more than all of the American combat deaths in World Wars I & II combined, and approaching the 650,000 Americans who perished 100 years ago during the 2-year Great Influenza Pandemic — is bad enough. To read about each individual life lost, each family upended by what the Trump Administration privately knew was a “deadly” virus while publically denying its deadliness, is to dive back and forth between depression and rage and the depths of sadness. So much unnecessary death; so many lives which could have been saved; so much devastating human loss.
That’s what makes Donald Trumps petulant pouting over his election defeat so unconscionable. He never mourned with the family of Albert Petrocelli, the 73-year old Fire Chief from NYC who, as the Times wrote, “answered the call on 9/11,” nor with the young family of 22-year old Israel Sauz of Broken Arrow, Oklahoma, who just became a “new father.” None of these incalculable losses, nor thousands more deaths of people of all races and ages, received any expression sympathy or a call of condolence from the President of the United States. Gone, and forgotten — except for how he imagined their deaths hurt him.
Trump saved his tears for himself, crying over the unfairness of COVID coming during the last year of his term in office, and “causing” him to lose re-election. Woe is me, more than you. Forget the deaths which continue to destroy so many families; forget the unfettered spread of the virus overwhelming hospitals and healthcare workers across the country. Trump lost, and more attention has been paid to how he’s coping with his election loss, than how thousands of families are struggling to survive in the aftermath of the loss of the precious lives of the people they loved.
I have no patience for coddling criminal crybaby Trump, nor worrying about his mental state from suffering such a “big defeat.” His failure to face reality, eagerness to deny the truth — even though he knew it, as he admitted on tape to Bob Woodward — and to consciously reject the medical science and public health practices needed to save human lives — make him directly responsible for many of the COVID deaths he still ignores, and that we still mourn.
I cry for those we have lost to COVID — for Ethel Jacobson Hamburger from our own family whose uplifting voice we can no longer hear on the phone. I cry for the loss of the young fathers and mothers, and nurses, police officers, grocery store workers, grandparents, and dancers and singers who will never again be hugged or kissed or touched.
I do not cry, nor have a single shred of sympathy left for a heartless, hollow man, without a soul, whose only sense of loss is how it diminishes himself.
I cry for all of “Those We’ve Lost,” for all their grace, dignity and love, which enriched our lives. Their work on earth, their miraculous gifts to us, must now become part of our own. That’s how we can honor them, and make their memories live forever.
I’ve been phone banking and politicking for political candidates and causes for over 50 years.
From RFK in his US Senate & Presidential campaigns in New York State in 1964 & 1968; to my history teacher Mike Andrew’s try for State Legislature in 1970; to my own run for public office two years later; to Mario Cuomo’s gubernatorial campaigns in 1982,1986, 1990 and 1994; to the Presidential crusades of Jimmy Carter in 1976, Mondale/Ferraro in 1984, John Kerry in 2004, Barack Obama in 2008 and 2012, and Hillary Clinton in 2016, I’ve done just about every level of political task — big and small — to advance the people and policies in which I believe.
I’ve always preferred face-to-face contact, public speaking and message framing, and hated doing phone calling to prospective voters who didn’t want to be bothered. My dislike for cold-calling was baked into me since childhood when I witnessed my mother’s soul-withering experience of dialing-for-dollars, and customers, for the old Gimbels Department Store. She was paid $5 per “sales lead.”
Growing up, I could recite her practiced phone spiel to earn money from home, selling upholstery: “Hello. I’m Estelle Taradash (my mother’s non-Italian sounding phone name), and I’m calling to offer you a special this month on Gimbel’s re-upholstery of your most beloved furniture.” More often than not, I’d hear my mother slam-down the old style phone receiver and mutter, “You miserable son-of-a-bitch.” It was the tip off that another “prospect” had been rude to her. I could feel her fury at being dissed, and internalized her disgust with the indignity of struggling to make a living by dialing up strangers.
Years later, I did the same thing — not for dollars, but for votes. In the early days of phone-banking, political calls were far more fulfilling, with people actually picking up their phones, and engaging in conversation. Answering machines, took some of that away, but forced us to sharpen our skills at leaving precise messages to voters. Cell phones almost killed that campaign staple entirely, since people could delete any phone numbers they didn’t know.
Advancing technology forced campaigns to improve call-lists and the messages used to reach voters. Some campaigns did better than others, and early on-line computer calling — which I first did with the Obama campaign — actually made the process seem like a video game, where you could easily measure your progress. Even that grew old fast.
Politicking by phone would never fulfill me the way forming a human contact with prospective voters did. I loved going door-to-door. As the call lists grew more “corporate” and impersonal — and campaigns focusing more on quantity of calls made, instead of quality of contact — the entire process became tedious, impersonal and unsatisfying. The phone-banking efforts for Hillary Clinton in 2016 in North Carolina, an open-carry state where I did Voter Protection, were abominable, empty and ineffective.
I vowed I would never phone bank again, until the COVID Pandemic made that an empty threat. Since I didn’t want to expose myself to too many people during the continuing COVID health-crisis, phone banking, letter writing, drafting speeches, or publishing timely and persuasive articles, were among the best avenues of civic and political involvement left for me. Sending money to dozens of Democratic candidates around the country — including hundreds of dollars to the Biden/Harris campaign — was simply not enough. I needed to do something more.
So, at the recommendation of two friends from Berkeley who have done extraordinarily targeted campaigning and pinpoint contributing to key political candidates over the past few election cycles, I joined a non-partisan effort to pull out the vote in the City of Philadelphia, called Fairmount Votes, or PhillyVotes.com.
The brilliance of this non-partisan campaign was its emphasis on Voter Education during Pennsylvania’s first-ever experience with Mail-In Balloting. For those of us who were Biden/Harris partisans, we knew that the greater the number of votes coming out of Philadelphia — the pivotal state’s largest population center where Democrats far outnumbered Republicans — the greater were Biden’s chances of winning Pennsylvania’s 20 electoral votes.
The campaign organizers — many in their 20’s and 30’s — were unpaid volunteers, and focused on the quality of the information we were giving voters, not the quantity of calls we made. Every voter we helped correctly cast their ballot, under this new voting set-up, was all that mattered. On one day of calling, for example, 250 of us mostly-Boomer volunteers, reached 15,000 registered voters in the City of Philadelphia. Astounding. We were, as Mario Cuomo was fond of saying, “all part of something bigger than ourselves.”
What made the entire effort even more excellent, was the seamless cooperation between diverse groups and generations — from across the country — who believed in making pure Democracy work. Tech-savvy Millenials and Gen X’ers exhibited extraordinary empathy toward chat rooms bursting with bumbling Boomers, walking us through the nuances of this computer driven system. We were a team of equals, regardless of age, income or lifetime achievements, and egos were left off-line. It was exhilarating.
The eye-opening experience rescued me from the dizzying world of TV’s talking-heads, bloviators, and polling junkies, and pointed clearly toward why those of us willing to fighttogether — differences be damned — for the soul of this Democracy, would rebuild and save our communities, and this nation.
We rocked it, accomplishing more together than we could have ever achieved alone. The selfless, soulful effort underscored my belief that Biden/Harris would win Pennsylvania, as well as Wisconsin, Michigan, Texas, Arizona, Iowa, Georgia & North Carolina, in an overwhelming national Electoral College victory, that would also sweep in a Democratic Senate. And, although we might not know who won Pennsylvania for days, we would know who our new President is on Election night.
Our COVID-tempered, tectonic, home-bound movement for civic and social justice, and the resolute, but quiet, roar to restore a sense of decency to this Democracy, will prove to be an extraordinarily powerful earthquake, just waiting to explode
40 years ago, the first and only United States Presidential Commission on Hunger delivered a scorching report on global hunger, with specific recommendation on how to reduce food insecurity among tens of millions of people in the U.S., and around the world. Singer/Songwriter Harry Chapin and his “one person think tank” Sandy Chapin, were among the driving forces behind the creation of this unique Commission, which saw it’s practical recommendations and visionary goals suffocated with the election of Ronald Reagan, and the rise of the Far Right in the United States in 1980.
Now, some 39 years after his death, Harry Chapin’s work against hunger and food insecurity matters more than ever before, as the COVID pandemic has dramatically deepened hunger and food insecurity in communities across this country and around the world. This week, “Harry Chapin: When In Doubt, Do Something,” the first documentary about Harry Chapin’s brief, but impactful, life was released nationwide to coincide with World Food Day. On October 30, the film will be available for streaming on Apple, Amazon, and through TV VOD at www.harrychapinmovie.com. You can see the two-minute trailer to the Chapin documentary right here:
To Harry Chapin, as to his idol Pete Seeger — both of whom had similar family backgrounds steeped in left-wing idealism and fathers who were gifted musicians — commitment to a cause and to family, was what truly made life worthwhile. Bruce Springsteen, who has picked up the mantle of leadership in his work with WHYHunger and the fight against poverty and income inequality, reinforced how rough a road it is to making lasting social change.
In his comments at the December 7, 1987, Carnegie Hall Tribute where Harry Chapin was posthumously awarded a Special Congressional Gold Medal for his Humanitarian work — only the fourth musician in US history to ever be so honored, along with Irving Berlin and George & Ira Gershwin — Springsteen talked about the legacy of an activist artist like Chapin, and how “ Harry instinctively knew it would also take more than love to survive; it was going to take hard work, with a good, clear-eye on the dirty ways of the world.”
In his own autobiography Born to Run: Bruce Springsteen (Simon & Schuster Paperbacks, NY, 2016, by Bruce Springsteen) Springsteen writes about his own “clear-eyed look at the dirty ways of the world,” after beginning his work with food banks and anti-poverty groups around the country in the mid-1980’s:
“I never had the frontline courage of many of my more committed musical brethren. If anything, over the years, too much has been made of whatever service we’ve provided. But I did look to develop a consistent approach. Something I could follow year in and year out, and find a way to assist the folks who’d been hit hardest by systematic neglect and injustice. These were the families who’d built America and yet whose dreams and children were, generation after generation, considered expendable. Our travels and position would allow us to support, at the grassroots level, activists who dealt, day to day, with the citizens who’d been shuffled to the margins of American life.” (P. 328).
At the Carnegie Hall Chapin Tribute concert in 1987, Springsteen acknowledged that Harry was one of those with such relentless “front-line courage.” In fact, Harry was living the line he wrote in his own story song “The Parade’s Still Passing By” about Phil Ochs, the Civil Rights activist and anti-war folk singer who rivaled Bob Dylan for a time in the 1960’s, and killed himself in 1976, at the age of 35: “your greatest gift and the curse you lived with was that you could always care.”
Ochs had traveled to Hazard, Kentucky, to perform for the families of striking coal miners in 1963; to Mississippi in 1964 as part of the Caravan of Music to support the Freedom Fighters throughout the South; to Chicago, in the summer of 1968, to participate in demonstrations against the War in Vietnam at the Democratic National Convention; and to Chile, in 1971, following the election of Democratic Socialist President Salvador Allende to perform with the great Chilean political activist and folksinger, Victor Jara.
Och’s motivating mantra (There But For Fortune: The Life of Phil Ochs, by Michael Schumacher, University of Minnesota Press edition, Minneapolis, MN, 2018) could have been written by Harry Chapin, especially since both devoted significant portions of their careers, and fortunes, to fighting poverty:
“ I have come to believe that this is, in essence, the role of the folksinger…I feel that the singer almost has a responsibility with political and social involvement. You can’t look at folk music as simply an element of show business, because it’s much deeper and more important than that.” (p. 74)
Harry’s cauldron of creativity and his own curse — similar to, but far more lasting that Phil Ochs’ — was the degree to which he cared about others, how much he desperately drove himself, and how determined he was to make his time on earth matter, on the “frontlines,” and well beyond.
So when Tom Chapin, the younger brother closest in age to Harry, got a call on that July day in 1981, from the Nassau County, Long Island, cop who recovered Harry’s charred body near the Jericho exit of the busy Interstate 495, he knew something wasn’t right.
“What’s your relation to the deceased?” the police office asked.
Tom was taken aback. “ Deceased?”
Someone had died in a terrible car accident on the L.I.E. and his wallet was incinerated, destroying all of the victim’s ID.
“We have a body here, and the only way we can identify it is by this pocket watch we found on him with a name inscribed on it,” the Nassau County Cop said.
“What does it say, “ Tom asked, fearful that he already knew.
“It says: “From the Flint Voice. To a great American, Harry Chapin,” the cop said.
Tom Chapin felt as if he had been punched in the stomach, and that the world stopped. He knew that Harry always carried a cherished pocket watch given to him by Michael Moore, the documentary filmmaker, before Moore made any films or was known beyond Flint, Michigan. As a pushy 22-year old, Moore had thrust himself into Harry’s face backstage at intermission of a 1976 Grand Rapids, Michigan concert, begging Chapin to do a benefit for his fledgling, muckraking publication, the Flint Voice.
“He said, ‘sure,’ I’ll do it,” Moore told a crowd at the Huntington, N.Y., Book Review bookstore in October, 2011, some 30 years after Chapin’s death, “and two months later he came to Flint to do a benefit concert for us. Harry came for five years, every year — even when Flint was down and out — sometimes doing two to five concerts a year. When Harry died it sent shock waves through the people of Flint because we kind of adopted him.”
What Moore didn’t learn, until years later, was that it was the inscribed pocket watch he gave to Harry Chapin out of gratitude for his generosity, that enabled his brother Tom to identify the body. Chapin’s simple act of human connection, of wanting to improve life for the people of Flint, Michigan; his great act of love for a cause championed by another idealistic organizer, and his spirit of making the world a bit better, had survived the fire, even though his body had not. It was a metaphor for how Harry’s social justice work lived on, longer than his 38 years on earth.
“Yes,” Tom said to the cop after he finished reading the inscription on the pocket watch. “I’m Harry Chapin’s brother.”
“Then you may want to come down to the Nassau County Medical Center and identify the body,” the cop said.
The shock of Harry’s death spread slowly, stubbornly, with each call Tom Chapin made, as if, not even the truth could believe itself. Family and friends flocked to the Chapin home in Huntington Bay, to be with Sandy Chapin and her children — the youngest of whom, Jason, Jen and Josh, were 17, 10 and 8 ½ years old. Fans flooded the band shell at Eisenhower Park in East Meadow for a benefit concert to fight hunger that Harry Chapin was scheduled to give that same night, refusing to leave for hours, refusing to believe that the news they heard was real. The day after Harry’s death, thousands of people spontaneously showed up in downtown Flint, Michigan, to pay their respects to someone who’s “greatest gift and the curse he lived with was that he always cared,” about them, and people like them.
The profound and prolonged reaction to Harry Chapin’s sudden death, and the work of WHYHunger and Harry Chapin Food Banks around the country over the next four decades to pull people out of poverty and make millions of families less food insecure, was, and continues to be, a reminder of why Harry’s life mattered, well beyond his music, and still does.
Yet, performing artists like Billy Joel, considered a consummate musician and songwriter who has received every conceivable musical honor, along with selection into the Rock & Roll and the Songwriters’ Halls of Fame, had the highest praise for Harry’s artistry, as well as his activism.
“He wrote the best story songs,” said the singer/songwriter from Hicksville, Long Island, who wrote some pretty good songs himself. “ A lot of people said to me, ‘you wrote Piano Man?’ I thought it was a Harry Chapin song.”
A slight grin brightened Billy Joel’s face, in the sunny front section of his motorcycle shop in a town known as Oyster Bay, Long Island. “No I wrote that, I would say. Harry’s songs were about human beings, humanity. Whether his career was big enough, that’s not important. It was his impact. And he had an impact upon other songwriters that was all positive, all to the good.”
So, the story of Harry Chapin’s life is a love story, actually; a love story as big and boisterous and unbounded as Harry was ; a love story for his family, for his fellow human beings, and for life itself.
Mario Cuomo’s Notre Dame Speech Points the Way for Democrats Today.
The Senate Judiciary Committee Hearings underway to consider the nomination of Judge Amy Coney Barrett to the United States Supreme Court are shaping up to be a visceral battle over the direction of justice in this country for decades to come.
Democrats, in addition to protesting a sham process occurring while a record number of 9 million Americans have already voted in a presidential election year, are focusing on Judge Barrett’s extremist writings on the Affordable Care Act, Roe v. Wade, same sex marriage and the rights of felons to own guns.
Republicans are accusing Democrats of being anti-Catholic, despite the fact that the Democratic nominee Joe Biden, a devout Catholic, would be, if elected, only the second Catholic to become President. JFK was the first in 1960, despite virulent opposition from conservative, non-Catholic Christians — the same bigoted voices, led by the KKK in the 1920’s, which vilified another Catholic candidate, Governor Al Smith of New York.
Yet, another Catholic Governor from New York has given Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee, as well as Joe Biden, a well-reasoned, deeply religious and constitutional blueprint for rebutting the nomination of a religious extremist, threatening to impose her narrow, out-of-the-mainstream beliefs on Americans of all faiths — including a majority of Catholics.
In fact, the latest Pew Research Center’s study on Catholic Attitudes in U.S. Politics, released one month ago, found that while registered Catholic voters are evenly divided between Republicans (48%) and Democrats (47%), 59% of Republican Catholics support Same-Sex Marriage, while 76% of Democratic Catholics do so. Even where political differences do emerge among Catholics on the issue of abortion, 77% of Democratic Catholics support Roe v. Wade, and are joined by 37% of registered Republican Catholics on the issue — a combined total that is a clear majority of mainstream Catholics, regardless of political affiliation.
Rather than avoiding the issue of Judge Barrett’s religious beliefs being so far outside even the Catholic mainstream, the arguments against just such extremism were clearly spelled out by former New York State Governor Mario Cuomo, in his speech at the University of Notre Dame, in September, 1984 — the last time another pro-choice woman — a practicing Catholic — was running for Vice-President.
Cuomo’s speech, entitled “Religious Belief and Public Morality: A Catholic Governor’s Perspective” is even more pertinent to today’s debate, then it was 36 years ago. He fearlessly tackles the issue of religious freedom head on:
“I protect my right to be a Catholic by preserving your right to believe as a Jew, a Protestant, or nonbeliever, or as anything else you choose. We know that the price of seeking to force our beliefs on others is that they might someday force theirs on us. That freedom is the fundamental strength of our unique experiment in government.”
“. . . a good part of this nation understands — if only instinctively — that anything which seems to suggest that God favors a political party or the establishment of a state church is wrong and dangerous.”
“Way down deep the American people are afraid of an entangling relationship between formal religions — or whole bodies of religious belief — and government. Apart from constitutional law and religious doctrine, there is a sense that tells us it’s wrong to presume to speak for God or to claim God’s sanction of our particular legislation or his rejection of all other positions. Most of us are offended when we see religion being trivialized by its appearance in political throwaway pamphlets.”
(Had Mario Cuomo been alive today, he might have added, “or seeing religion trivialized by a politician holding up a bible in front of a church for a photo op.”)
Cuomo’s Notre Dame speech continued:
“The American people need no course in philosophy or political science or church history to know that God should not be made into a celestial party chairman. To most of us, the manipulative invoking of religion to advance a politician or a party is frightening or divisive…the American people are leery about large religious organizations, powerful churches, or synagogue groups engaging in such activities — again, not as a matter of law or doctrine, but because our innate wisdom and democratic instinct teaches us these things are dangerous.”
“When should I argue to make my religious value your morality? My rule of conduct your limitation?….I believe I have a salvific mission as a Catholic. Does that mean I am in conscience required to do everything I can as Governor to translate all my religious values into the laws and regulations of the State of New York or the United States? Or be branded a hypocrite if I don’t?. . .Must I, having heard the Pope renew the church’s ban on birth control devices, veto the funding of contraceptive programs for non-Catholics or dissenting Catholics in my state? I accept the church’s teaching on abortion. Must I insist you do? By law? By denying you Medicaid funding?”
Cuomo continued:
“. . . Catholic public officials take an oath to preserve the Constitution. . . and they do so gladly. Not because they love what others do with their freedom, but because they realize that in guaranteeing freedom for all, they guarantee our right to be Catholic; our right to pray…
“. . . there are those who say there is a simple answer to all these questions; they say that by history and practice of our people we were intended to be — and should be — a Christian country in law. But where would that leave the nonbelievers? And whose Christianity would be law, yours or mine? The “Christian nation” argument should concern –even frighten — two groups: non-Christians and thinking Christians.”
“. . . agnostics who joined the civil rights struggle were not deterred because that crusade’s values had been nurtured and sustained in Black Christianchurches. Those on the political left are not perturbed today by the religious basis of the clergy and lay people who join them in the protest against the arms race and hunger and exploitation.”
In his brilliant summation, Mario Cuomo issued a clarion call for a complete redefinition of the “Right to Life,” emphasizing it after birth, especially in the areas of healthcare, hunger-relief, housing and education:
“Approval or rejection of legal restrictions on abortion should not be the exclusive litmus test of Catholic loyalty. We should understand that whether abortion is outlawed or not, our work has barely begun; the work of creating a society where the right to life doesn’t end at the moment of birth, where an infant isn’t helped into a world that doesn’t care it it’s fed properly, housed decently, educated adequately, where the blind or retarded child isn’t condemned to exist rather than empowered to live.”
Mario Cuomo words, and actions, empower Democrats to stand up for religious freedom, and for a real-world “Right-to-Life” that begins at birth.
