Tied in a Single Garment of Destiny

As a retired Army officer, the 6th of June has deep meaning for me on many levels as the anniversary of Operation Overlord, the D-Day Invasion when nearly 160,000 Allied troops – our Greatest Generation – stormed the beaches of Normandy. It was the beginning of the end of the tyranny of the Nazi regime, in which millions of Jews, like me, and other oppressed minorities were brutally and systematically exterminated.

In late 2018, during a visit to Jerusalem, I got to visit Yad Vashem, the World Holocaust Remembrance Center as well as see my Aunt Rena, a Holocaust survivor, whose entire family in Poland was murdered by the Nazis. The visit impressed upon me the imperative of both never forgetting and never remaining silent in the face of injustice and evil.

In that context, it’s worth noting the words of another Holocaust survivor, Eli Wiesel, who said: “We must take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented. Sometimes we must interfere. When human lives are endangered, when human dignity is in jeopardy, national borders and sensitivities become irrelevant. Where men and women are persecuted because of their race, religion, or political views, that place must – at that moment – become the center of the universe.”

Those words remain as painfully relevant today as when Wiesel first penned them. Indeed, injustice, racism, discrimination is an age-old problem, one that necessitates that we take sides.

The 6th of June was also the day that Bobby Kennedy was assassinated in Los Angeles. That was 1968. The year I was born. Family lore holds that my mother had a difficult time pulling my father away from Kennedy’s funeral, televised two days later from St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York City, to get him to take her to the maternity ward. To state the obvious, it all turned out fine, and my father can be forgiven for attempting to delay the trip to the hospital for my birth to listen to Ted Kennedy’s eulogy for his brother, remembered as one of the great speeches of the 20th century. It ended with Bobby’s own words, “Some men see things as they are and say why. I dream things that never were and say why not,” words that have inspired me throughout my lifetime.

Equally if not more inspiring, however, was the impromptu eulogy that Bobby Kennedy gave just two months earlier in Indianapolis for civil rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr, who was assassinated on the 4th of April in Memphis. During brief remarks, he spoke of Dr. King’s dedication of his life to love and to justice between fellow human beings, and his death in the cause of that effort. Kennedy noted, that “What we need in the United States is not division; what we need in the United States is not hatred; what we need in the United States is not violence and lawlessness, but is love, and wisdom, and compassion toward one another, and a feeling of justice toward those who still suffer within our country, whether they be White or whether they be Black.” And he quoted from Aeschylus some of my favorite lines of poetry:

Even in our sleep, pain which cannot forget

falls drop by drop upon the heart,

until, in our own despair,

against our will,

comes wisdom

through the awful grace of God.

That pain, the injustice, the systemic racism and discrimination is sadly just as real today as it was the year I was born. Indeed, just as real as it was when in 1963 Dr. King wrote his famous “Letter from Birmingham Jail” to eight Alabama clergymen, considered by some to be the most important written document of the civil rights era. “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere,” King wrote. “We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly affects all indirectly. Never again can we afford to live with the narrow, provincial ‘outside agitator’ idea. Anyone who lives inside the United States can never be considered an outsider anywhere in this country.”

1968: In civil society, the year we lost Martin Luther King, Jr. and Bobby Kennedy to assassination. In sports, the year that two Black athletes, medalists Tommie Smith and John Carlos, staged a silent demonstration at the Mexico City Olympics against racial discrimination in the United States by defiantly raising their fists during the National Anthem, an act that ultimately got them expelled from Team USA. In entertainment, the year of American television’s first kiss between a White man and a Black woman: William Shatner’s Captain James T. Kirk and Lt Nyota Uhura, played by Nichelle Nichols. And in public health, the year when another pandemic – the Hong Kong Flu – caused 1,000,000 deaths around the world, and some 100,000 here in the United States. Interestingly, my parents have no recollection of that pandemic, despite the similar number of fatalities to COVID-19...which in itself makes you stop and think.

As noted to me by one of my teammates, the current Coronavirus pandemic, where so many find themselves working from home may in some ways have helped to mobilize so many of us to leave the isolation of our houses and take to the streets to protest the senseless and brutal murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and Ahmaud Arbery, and the systemic injustice that makes Black Americans fearful of going out for a run, or a walk, or a drive, or simply for a quiet morning of birdwatching in the park. And more heartbreakingly, fearful for their children leaving the house. Everyday.

It honestly brings tears to my eyes that a nation, which I do believe to be the greatest on the face of the earth, a nation whose Constitution I dedicated the majority of my adult life to support and defend, still suffers so blatantly from widespread, institutionalized and systemic racism. One could argue perhaps that it’s not so surprising since while we are a nation founded on the noble proposition that all men are created equal, our Founders were referring to white men; indeed for purposes of representation in Congress, enslaved Blacks in a state would be counted as three-fifths of the number of white inhabitants of that state.

But that view would be rejecting out of hand the progress made over the past 244 years since this nation was born as we've strived to continually form a "more perfect union"-- to include the 13th, 14th, 15th and 19th Amendments to that same Constitution and the Civil Rights Acts of 1964 and 1968 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 -- as well as the millions across our nation of all race, creed, and color who struggled and sacrificed, lived and died, to secure such progress.

But still, so clearly, so much more to do. And we know there has always been so much more to do.

But this moment, this moment – at the collision of global pandemic and national injustice – feels different.

It feels like a moment where we can collectively commit to sustained change, a moment for education, a moment for empathy, a moment for compassion, a moment for listening, a moment for understanding, but above all, a moment – now at the center of the universe – to take sides; to take sides in the hope that, in the spirit of Wiesel, Kennedy, and King, picking a side, taking a stand will ultimately heal the divisions across our nation, and bind us as one people into that single garment of destiny.