If I may . . .

If I may. . .

This great phrase to break in to a talker was used by our new Canadian Prime Minister to set the record straight when the US president started his now familiar suggestion that Canada should become the 51st state. “If I may” is a polite way to get a word in edgewise and correct someone who won’t stop talking nonsense.

At least that suggestion is one that can be quickly dismissed. “Never say never” from one got a visible sotto voce “Never!” from the other. But a more recent suggestion was so wacky that it stayed in my mind.  That’s an example of how the constant flow of news blurs anything important and makes all information equally questionable. If everything is suspect, who cares?  It is rightly moving toward what author Timothy Snyder calls the politics of eternity.

The wacky one was a response to the fact that all those new tariffs might produce hardships and the American people would have to lower their expectations.  Girls would have to make do with three dolls, not thirty They would have to settle for five pencils instead of two hundred and fifty.

The president’s household growing up must have been an unusual one at Christmas if these were typical seasonal gifts at either end of the scale. But we adults can settle for the five pencils. If I were back in the USA now, where I lived happily in New York City in the early sixties, this is how I might use them to talk to myself and to others.

Pencil #1. Write to my congressman/woman and ask each to vote against proposed tax cuts for the wealthy. American oligarchs are doing just fine already.

Pencil #2. Write to the law firms that oppose the presidential attempts to suppress their rightful role of defending the law and congratulate them.

Pencil #3, Write down five ways that I am going to lessen the influence of social media; These might include

Insist on knowing the source of the information. Look to the right and avoid Google AI on any screen,

Leave social media with more ads than posts from people I know.

Stop “liking” anything if I am still on social media. Watch how this confuses the algorithms and they start complaining and making suggestions.

Go outside.

Talk to a real person and make eye contact.

Pencil #4.  Fill out a request at the library for some real history books and share the suggestions with others. Look to authors like Margaret MacMillan on world wars or this article from The Atlantic. Here is her snippet of warning in a recent article,

“As a historian, I study those moments in the past when an old order decays beyond the point of return and a new one emerges, but I never expected to live through one. I should have. Today’s world is lurching toward great-power rivalry, suspicion, and fear—an international order where the strong do what they will, as Thucydides wrote, and “the weak suffer what they must.”

You could also try many of the books of Jill LePore or Timothy Snyder.

Pencil #5.  Sit down for 30-60 minutes and write down what five key values matter most for you. If you can’t structure some possibilities, go to Google or Pinterest. Here is an outline somebody made into a quilt.

 It’s rather good today that the book on the top of the non-fiction best seller list here in Canada is written by the new Prime Minister, Mark Carney.  It is called Value(s).  Its argument in a nutshell is that financial value has to include social values and morality. He gives himself a challenge by including the last chapter with the title, Humility. If we are going to live in a free society, we have to take responsibility both individually and collectively. It’s a choice.