Takers and Trustees
I grew up in a segregated Northeastern suburb.
There weren’t separate bathrooms or water fountains, or any
of the overt symbols you would have seen in the South in that era, but it was
segregated nonetheless. Segregation was enforced geographically; there places,
even whole towns, where certain people could live, and others where they
couldn’t. In my second grade class there
was an African-American boy (Tommy) who lived on the other side of the
four-foot fence that separated the back of my school yard from a development
populated exclusively by African-Americans.
I was too young to notice anything unusual about that: it was walking
distance from where I lived, and a couple of blocks from my parent’s
pharmacy. The cop who walked the beat
was Irish, and nearby were the German deli that sold Schaller & Weber, the
kosher deli with Hebrew National, the Chinese laundry, the Italian baker who
snuck me sprinkle cookies, and the candy store owned by people with the
decidedly un-trendy tattoos on their arms from the camps.
This was the world I lived in, with a lot of different
looking people. But by third grade,
Tommy was gone, and so was his entire neighborhood. The city fathers had decided to build senior
housing on the other side of that fence, and the white-washed houses with the
green trim and the laundry lines were now a large vacant lot. Like a
palimpsest, they wiped it clean; without conscience, they took those people’s
homes and tossed them in the street.
I have no idea what happened to Tommy or his family. I don’t
even know whether the land was owned or leased.
As an adult, it’s easy to see that his community was moved, en masse,
because it could be. They were
powerless. More than 100 years after Dred Scott, in my town, at least,
African-Americans had "no rights which the white man was bound to
respect."
I was reminded of that story when I read an obituary in The New York Times of Bob Fletcher. In 1942, FDR declared part of West Coast a
war zone, and 120,000 Japanese were rounded up and placed in internment
camps. Mr. Fletcher was, at the time,
working as an agricultural inspector for the State of California. A member of a Japanese farm family from the
town of Florin approached him with an offer: manage the farms of two of
neighbors, pay the bills and take all the profits until they could return.
He accepted. For the
next three years, he ran the Tsukamoto, Okamoto, and the Nitta farms, living in
a bunkhouse for migrant workers on the Tsukamoto farm. When he married, his wife joined him in the
bunkhouse: neither felt it was appropriate to occupy the Tsukamoto’s living
quarters. When the Tsukamotos returned, they found their house cleaned and
money in their bank account; Mr. Fletcher had only kept half the profits.
Many of the Japanese left Florin after the war. Some had lost their homes and farms when they
were unable to pay the taxes while they were interned. Fletcher’s efforts saved the three
farms. He was not especially popular
with his non-Japanese neighbors, before the war, Japanese children had been
required to attend segregated schools, after, many local businesses didn’t want
to serve them. Apparently, he didn’t
care. He felt they were mistreated, and
acted with courage and conviction.
Without the formal title, Bob Fletcher became a Trustee, someone who
holds something for another’s benefit, and acts as a fiduciary, with
integrity.
Representative government is a form of Trusteeship, not so
much in the way Edmund Burke articulated it, but as a form of legal
Trusteeship, to follow the law and act prudently within that context. We elect people to serve our interests. We give them power over our persons and our
property. We expect them to exercise
their best, unbiased judgment for all of us, not unduly benefitting themselves,
or their party, unduly.
We have to be careful in the way we use the T word. Trust can’t be situational; if you always
distrust one of the parties on every single issue, then that is no longer an
issue of integrity, it is one of ideological purity. If you would trust Obama with the NSA
snooping, but not Romney (or vice versa) then you are missing the point. Because the power of the government is
immense, like a stupendous machine, and unless you are comfortable with any
sane person using one of the high-tech gadgets on it, then you should reject
that gadget. I just read polling numbers
that indicated that roughly 80% of Americans support the installation of
cameras in public areas, and facial recognition technologies with those cameras
to root out terrorists. I find that
mind-boggling. Walk outside the confines of your home (or maybe stay in your
home if the curtains aren’t drawn) and it’s OK for Barack or Mitt to say “Pull
up Joe on screen 3, let’s see if he shaved this morning.”
In the end, trust has to be based on two concepts. The first is that whomever is in charge will
abide by the Constitution. If they do
that, then we can’t have a gripe with them in that context. That is the covenant we all entered into 230
years ago. The second is that, while we
know partisan politics means that our elected officials will have their thumb
on the scales, that thumb can’t be too heavy.
In short, they must be Trustees and not simply Takers.
But the temptation to be a Taker is great. Power is intoxicating; a prize that people
ache for, and few want to give up.
Inevitably, despite the best intentions of the best people, it can be
abused. The Barack Obama of 2007 opposed
the massive surveillance by the NSA. The
2013 version, freighted with the responsibilities of keeping the country safe,
now sees the value. The opposite is true
of Republicans, who were more than happy to have it so long as Dick Cheney was
getting the read-outs, but now rush to the microphones for ritual denouncing.
That reflects a troubling trend in this country, an
intensifying situational ethics. You can
see it wherever there is single party (or single person) dominance—the Takers
are carrying the day. Whether it’s Mike
Bloomberg (someone I generally admire) trying to legislate personal behavior,
or Red States such as Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas, Arkansas, and now even North
Carolina, who are rewriting the tax code to benefit their contributors and
re-writing the parts of the Constitution they disagree with, it is the same
principle. Get in charge, do what you
want, ignore the wishes and even the rights of everyone who is not a member of
your club. Take.
That has to be wrong.
It is irrelevant if two-thirds of New Yorkers support gun control laws
that are greater than Heller allows. And it is irrelevant if two-thirds of
Arkansans would ban abortions, in contravention of Roe v. Wade. In the end, it
is no different than the people who took Tommy’s home, or herded the Tsukamoto,
Okamoto, and Nitta families into the camps.
Power is not the equivalent of right.
We cannot be Vandals, sweeping in once elected and taking what we want,
regardless of the law.
Gandhi
once said, "A nation's greatness is measured by how it treats its weakest
members.” He might have added that a
Democracy’s greatness is measured by how it treats those presently out of
power.
Bob Fletcher obviously understood that. And I would imagine his widow, Teresa, does
as well. She was the person who cleaned the Tsukamoto’s house before they
returned.
That, I suppose, at its most elemental level, is what being
a Trustee is all about.
MM
