Tribes

May 22, 2025

Do I contradict myself?

Very well then I contradict myself,

(I am large, I contain multitudes.)

I was ten when the high school was integrated, if only for a month or so. It was 1966 when two high schools, Rufus King in Milwaukee (urban, predominantly black) and Kaukauna High School (small town, totally white) collaborated to perform Martin Duberman’s In White America.1 White kids from Kaukauna, Black kids from Milwaukee, staying with each other’s families during the run in each town. My sister Linda was in the play, so Phyllis stayed with us during the run in Kaukauna and Linda stayed with her family when the play moved to Milwaukee. After the conclusion we kept in touch and that summer both families got together for a picnic in our backyard. Was it the first time a Black family and a white family celebrated being together in our little town? Probably so. I knew it was a big deal, I’d seen the local news, the interviews with the people who were outraged, the guy who boldly told the camera, “Sure I’m racist, we don’t want them here.” I felt that excited little shiver from the fear that some of these angry people could get violent. But the young, idealistic teachers who’d devised the exchange held their ground. I was proud to be a part of it, proud that it was my family on the front lines of the promise of America.

I never felt that I had a tribe. I didn’t grow up with some indelible tie to a particular place or people or culture. “Family” was my parents, brother and sisters; my Dad’s sister Gerry and her five kids; my Mom’s sister Pat and her four kids; my mother’s mother, the only grandparent I knew. That was it. I was happy on my island in the middle of the river that ran through my little paper mill town; I’d’ve been happy to stay, but I didn’t feel rooted there. It was just where I started from. My memories are fond, but I don’t feel that the place molded me in some inexplicable but essential way. Perhaps it has, but it doesn’t tug at me, the way I know that place and ancestry tug at so many others and help to give them an identity to lean on.

Sure, it’s easy for me to lay back into memory, resting on the gentle warmth of the summer evenings, murmurations of starlings wheeling mysteriously in the deepening dusk, after mornings alive with the scents of lilac and fresh mown grass competing with the sulfurous gag of the mill. Or the deliciousness of deep winter snow, snowballs and snow forts and snow banks tall enough to leap over. The welcoming warmth of coming back inside after play. From this distance it all feels wonderful, idyllic (though I know it wasn’t), and I’m grateful for it. But it doesn’t snow like that anymore, the old Carnegie library that gave me power over time and space has been developed into apartments, the library itself having been reimagined into a wondrous space in the old paper mill building. Most of the rest of the mill has been torn down, the old post office across from the Carnegie now houses an evangelical ministry, roads have been moved, the downtown grain elevator gone, the house I was raised in demolished, the property swallowed by the electric company. The town has thrived and on the rare occasions that I’ve been back I look at the changes with admiration and scarcely the barest hint of nostalgia. I’m happy for those who stayed and have no regrets about the winds that blew me elsewhere, as if my life were merely one of the maple tree seeds we sent helicoptering over the lawn, or the feathery pappus of the dandelions that we blew on to watch scatter on the breeze. Let the past be past.

My last name, I was told, was Austrian. What I know about the lineage on my father’s side goes back only to his grandfather August, who had a son Constantine, who had a son who was my Dad. But being Austrian had no resonance for me. Is it even really an ethnicity? Was the village that farmer August emigrated from really Austrian? Or was it Polish? Maybe Hungarian? As far as we know, he thought of himself as German. I knew there was Irish and English on my mother’s side and I liked the idea of the Irish part best because of their love of language, the scrappiness of the downtrodden2. Being Irish was much cooler than being German3. But I never thought of myself as Irish-American.

So I grew up with no ancestors to honor, no ethnic heritage to protect. I had the basic advantages of a white male, but as a small town working class kid, making more room for women or for people of color never threatened me. There’s no privilege I held dear enough that it could be threatened by someone else's rise.

I was just an American4. And that meant my allegiance was to a set of ideas.

I was thoroughly indoctrinated.

It was exciting. There’d never been a country like this. A land that welcomed everybody.5 Not the “melting pot” as the metaphor was presented to the kid, but something more like a stew or cioppino or gumbo. The broth was tolerance and mutual respect.

I believed I had a responsibility to help make the world a better place. At age seven I was a good little liberal Catholic. Altar boy and proud of it. My parents were close to several of the priests at our parish and they’d come over some evenings. I’d sneak down to sit hidden on the stairs and through the cigarette smoke and the clinking of beer bottles and ice in the glasses I'd listen to them discuss and debate the work of Vatican II. How the church was opening up the mysteries, the priest turning to face the congregation, praying in English so that everyone could understand God’s word. This was undeniably a good thing (even if we sometimes missed the grandeur and glorious music of the Latin High Mass).

When John the XXIII died in that summer I was seven, I took it hard. The world needed him! And then, scarcely a week after I turned eight, President Kennedy was assassinated. I understood then that we could not depend on the leaders, no matter how much we revered them. It was up to each of us to do what we could to create that better world. My parents worried, told me I was too young to take on the weight of the world. But the weight was there. I couldn’t avoid it.

I was a very serious kid.

By the time I was entering my teens, Mom had grown disillusioned with the church, pulled me out of Catholic school before the nuns could convince me I had a priestly vocation6. In her view (and so, likewise in mine), the fundamental values hadn’t changed, but the rigidity of Church dogma tied the hands of those most trying to live them.7 We didn’t need the Church anymore. My truths were self-evident.

Never blind to my country’s faults, I decried the brutal footprints we left across the developing world in our paranoid quest to combat and subdue godless Communism. Deplored the poverty and discrimination at home. I was in my early teens when the hippies and yippies were battling the hard-hat construction workers who proclaimed “America, love it or leave it!” But I always knew that was a false dichotomy. Those of us demanding change were the ones staying true to the promise of America.

I never questioned those values. That we all have a responsibility towards others. That the work of government is to help those who’ve been left out. That the “equality” part of the Declaration was an aspiration that we are continually pursuing. And that the greatness of my country was that we were the only nation in history founded on that principle and that we had become rich and powerful because of it. Even as I disparaged my government’s actions, I revered that image of American possibility. I loved what my country could be, even as I rejected so much of what my government did. That the United States was a work in progress, always in a state of becoming, was thrilling. “We hold these truths to be self-evident...” What a phrase.

What has become quite apparent in recent years is that these truths are not so self-evident to millions of my fellow citizens. The problem with self-evident principles is that there isn’t any way to prove them to somebody for whom they are not self-evident.

I lived in Washington DC from 1983 to 1987. The Reagan years. Read the Washington Post every morning.8 In the run-up to the ’84 election there was an article in which a college student proclaimed that he was voting for Reagan because Reagan had “brought back those good old-fashioned American values – getting ahead and making money”. I still feel the shock I felt then. These were now bedrock American values? I knew that for many people, getting ahead and making money were the desires that drove them, but this was the first time I was presented with them as American values that Reagan had thankfully brought us back to. That for some people, the focus on lifting people up, on insuring possibility for all, had been a diversion from the true meaning of America. And this from a college student! What happened to the idealism of the college kids of just a decade earlier?

When I was in my late teens, late high school and early college, I wanted to find an ethics rooted in metaphysics. A clear and decisive line from the very essence of what we are as humans to a clear roadmap for how we ought to behave towards each other. No luck. No Western philosopher has unlocked that trick. I turned to Zen and the Tao, I turned to the Lakota, I turned to painting and music and literature. I nestled my ethics there, in the ineffable. I humbled myself in the face of the inadequacy of reason to justify what we do. And that was sufficient for me to live what I believe was an honorable life. I didn’t reshape the world, but I did more good than harm to the people whose orbits intersected mine.

Now here I am, an old guy, consigned to a wheelchair when I go to join the march, watching the country tear itself apart because we don’t have shared values. No shared understanding of civic responsibility. I’m still struggling to see how the values that are self-evident to me can be true in some fundamental way that makes them true for everybody. But it may be that you need God for that. And there is no self-evident God for me. I head downstairs for lunch, heat up some leftover wings and tater tots, turn to Montaigne, picking up where I left off the day before. I’m not surprised that he expresses exactly the thought that I just left in my study:

Now, if we, for our part, could receive anything without changing it, if our human grasp were firm and capable of seizing hold of truth by our own means, then truth could be passed on from hand to hand, from person to person, since those means are common to all men. Among so many concepts we could find at least one which all would believe with universal assent. But the fact that there is no single proposition which is not subject to debate or controversy among us, or which cannot be so, proves that our natural judgement does not grasp very clearly even what it does grasp, since my judgement cannot bring a fellow-man’s judgement to accept it, which is a sure sign that I did not reach it by means of a natural power common to myself and to all men.9

Montaigne resolves this by recourse to God’s grace, solace which remains unavailable to me. There’s nothing for it then, but to act as if those values I cling to are indeed universally true, while acknowledging that I might be wrong and that it is thus incumbent on me to maintain at least some small measure of humility when confronting those who disagree, despite how wrong they must be.

Wrong, those who cheer on the destruction of all that Franklin Roosevelt and Lyndon Johnson built, who revel in the non-stop lies that Trump spouts with every hyperbolic sentence, who are willing to excuse all of his ethical transgressions because they believe he’ll bring security and wealth to a country that’s never been secure for most and has never equably shared its wealth, who live in fear of people whose views on sexuality and religion and culture differ from their own, who are willing to follow Trump’s lead as he assumes an imperial presidency, who chant about their devotion to a Constitution that few of them have ever read. Deeply wrong on the facts and deeply wrong about what they should value.

Ironically, it’s Reagan (or at least his speechwriters10) who articulated most clearly an image of my country that resonates with my deepest beliefs. His last speech was a presentation of the Medal of Freedom to Mike Mansfield and George Shultz.

And since this is the last speech that I will give as President, I think it's fitting to leave one final thought, an observation about a country which I love. It was stated best in a letter I received not long ago. A man wrote me and said: “You can go to live in France, but you cannot become a Frenchman. You can go to live in Germany or Turkey or Japan, but you cannot become a German, a Turk, or a Japanese. But anyone, from any corner of the Earth, can come to live in America and become an American.”

And

Other countries may seek to compete with us; but in one vital area, as a beacon of freedom and opportunity that draws the people of the world, no country on Earth comes close.
This, I believe, is one of the most important sources of America's greatness. We lead the world because, unique among nations, we draw our people -- our strength -- from every country and every corner of the world. And by doing so we continuously renew and enrich our nation. While other countries cling to the stale past, here in America we breathe life into dreams. We create the future, and the world follows us into tomorrow. Thanks to each wave of new arrivals to this land of opportunity, we're a nation forever young, forever bursting with energy and new ideas, and always on the cutting edge, always leading the world to the next frontier. This quality is vital to our future as a nation. If we ever closed the door to new Americans, our leadership in the world would soon be lost.11

Anyone can become an American. Even now, the phrase thrills me. But there’s too many people so quick to leap in, scolding, “But only if you learn our language and adopt our ways and abandon your strange religions and ceremonies! (We might co-opt your cuisine, though).”

“No, no, no!” I want to scream. “You’ve got it backwards! It’s we who should learn at least as much from them. New ways to understand and appreciate the world and its mysteries, new ways to express friendship and the love of families.” Yes, immigrants need English to function in our society, but isn’t it better to know how to navigate life with two languages (or three or four or more) than just one? What happened to “forever bursting with energy and new ideas”?

But for MAGA, fear of others is rocket fuel. Trump’s been hammering away about the rapists and murderers flooding into our country for over a decade. He and the people around him know that if you keep repeating a lie, no matter how outrageous, you eventually convince enough people that the lie is the truth, that we’ve been invaded, that the Venezuelan government is using the vicious and violent gangs to do terrible, horrible, unspeakable things, things like the world has never seen before. Trump’s hyperbole is tinder for the match of fear and millions of Americans are ready to beg him to do whatever it takes to rid us of these monsters, despite the corrupt judges who hate our country and are trying to destroy it. It's a miasma that begs for a strongman to come and save us.

In every age people are convinced there’s never been a time like the one they’re in. Since most people are largely ignorant of history beyond a superficial veneer, that’s an easy belief. Those with a little more learning are quick to point out the many crises the nation has endured and weathered in the past. The Civil War is the easy one to point to. Hundreds of thousands killed, the country split. Surely that was worse. Or the treatment of the Japanese in America during WWII. Surely that was worse than Trump’s deportation efforts. We made it through Reconstruction, made it through segregation. All true, and all worth keeping in mind as we try to apply a measure to the current crisis. But we’ve never had a President so determined to rule by fiat, so determined to rip up the bureaucracy that is necessary for the government to function, so foolish in his grandstanding about his ability to reshape our foreign policy around the illusion of his expertise in “making deals”. We’ve never had a President who, when asked if he needs to abide by the Constitution’s clear insistence on due process, thoughtfully answers, “I don’t know...” He’s got the best lawyers working on it.

As she brings her magnificent history of the United States to a close in These Truths, Jill Lepore says this:

The American experiment has not ended. A nation born in revolution will forever struggle against chaos. A nation founded on universal rights will wrestle against the forces of particularism. A nation that toppled a hierarchy of birth only to erect a hierarchy of wealth will never know tranquility. A nation of immigrants cannot close its borders. And a nation born in contradiction, liberty in a land of slavery, sovereignty in a land of conquest, will fight, forever, over the meaning of its history.

Governments are always full of fools, demagogues and opportunists. Like rats gnawing their way into the pantry, they’re irresistibly drawn by the potential rewards of office. They crave the adulation, the power, the potential for great wealth. They’ve always been there to gum up the works, rendering government so less effective than it might be. But the promise of America has never been assaulted by its elected leaders the way it is now. On my most optimistic days I imagine that this crisis could surface a reawakened devotion to those self-evident principles that gave birth to this truly unique experiment in self-government, that those who believe in that possibility of America will be roused from the comfort of believing this progress is inevitable and takes care of itself. Lepore is right, the fight is never-ending – there will always be those who fear the loss of the privileges their status depends on.

I’m an American. I’ll make no allegiance to any place or polity or ethnicity or culture that excludes others. I want my culture, my American culture, to be expansive, open, shifted and molded and changed and refreshed by the energy and passion of those newly arrived mingling with the welcoming curiosity and open hearts and hands of those who’ve been here for generations. Here are the elders I honor: The founders, flawed men, yes, but brave, who risked everything to form a new nation based in the consent of the governed and a belief in the equality of all men. Despite the fact that they would be astonished, and some quite appalled, at the roles now occupied by Black people and women, they set in motion something far more powerful than they could have imagined and they deserve a measure of gratitude for it. They set the stage for so many others. Look at any decade of our history through the lens of America’s promise and the names fall into our laps, too numerous to count. Douglass, Truth, Tubman, DuBois, Jane Addams, Susan B. Anthony, Frances Perkins, FDR, MLK, LBJ, the Reverend Fred Shuttlesworth, Viola Gregg Liuzzo, Cesar Chavez... Flawed men and women, all of them. Heroes all the same.12 Names famous and scarcely known. People in poverty and people coming from immense privilege. People inspired and exhilarated by the promise of America, unwilling to let our country’s flaws and demons diminish their determination to take us step by awkward contentious step closer to fulfilling that promise. Freedom riders, indeed. There’s my Heritage. That’s my Tribe.

T Scott

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