Below is a transcript of an article written by Ralph Kennison, I believe from The Kennebec Journal around 1961. “Hum” Reynolds, seen crouching under the table to the left, was my great grandfather.

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Many times our Service Departments are called on to do unusual jobs, but the most unusual to date recently came to the Augusta Service Department—and the boys came through!

Shortly before Christmas the division office received a telephone call from a local doctor who has great faith in the Company. This doctor, a World War II Veteran, had an injury that impaired circulation in his legs. Recently, complications and a diabetic condition stopped circulation to the danger point, and he was in danger of gangrene and the possible loss of a leg.

The conversation brought out the fact that part of the treatment in a Boston hospital consisted of sleeping on an oscillating bed. Oscillating beds, while made commercially, were very high in price, and beyond the possibility of delivery in time. Question—Could we make an oscillating bed?

We said we would try if we knew what was needed, and these were the specifications: A bed spring was to he suspended on a fulcrum in the middle, and was to have a travel of 9 inches above and below the horizontal at both head and foot. No pictures or detailed specifications were available, but it was believed that the commercial beds were operated by a small motor of about one-quarter horsepower. And, and this was the big one, the complete cycle of oscillation was to be once in two minutes. This meant a reduction in speed for an ordinary motor of 3500 to 1, from 1750 rpm to ½ rpm.

No promise was made other than that we would try, and then let him know. We called Ernest Haskell, Service Foreman, told him that our ability to produce had been challenged, and asked him if he wanted to try. His answer was instantaneous:

“Yes. If anybody can make junk parts go together, I think we can.”

Tough Problem

Servicemen Kenneth Willet and Harold Heath were given the assignment. It was even a problem to know where to start. A gear reduction motor reducing the speed to 24 rpm was located in New Jersey, and the manufacturer agreed to ship immediately. Due to the Christmas rush, it did not arrive for five days. In the meantime, the doctor badly needed the bed. How could it be made out of angle iron and old parts, and above all, how was the speed to be further reduced 48 times without big pulleys and countershafts?

About this time “Hum” Reynolds heard about the deal, and thought he could help. “Hum” is one of our appliance salesmen, but lives on and runs a farm, is an all around handy man, and has a junk pile of parts that “might come in handy sometime.” From this pile he produced a worm gear reduction from an old Everybody’s Washer.

From that point on, “Hum” worked all his spare time with the service men, and did all the welding to save the delay of having it done outside. This second gear reduction with proper pulleys and a vee belt did the trick, one revolution in exactly two minutes. The Yankee ingenuity of Willett and Reynolds and the machining of bearings, cranks, shaft extensions and lever arm by Harold Heath produced a bed which the doctor says is better made and better looking than those used by the hospital, and yet it was produced without a picture to go by. The cost, about half the commercial price. The time, one week, far superior to any commercial delivery.

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The work of a democracy devoted to such an idea is to lead a sufficient number of individuals to share a moral vision about power, liberty, justice, security, and opportunity in the hope that people—and peoples—might be in closer harmony with the good. As a multitude of individuals, a nation possesses a collective conscience—one manifested in how that nation chooses, through the means of politics, to view rights and responsibilities.

Jon Meacham, And There Was Light

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Meacham’s excellent biography of Abraham Lincoln has one very clear, overarching theme: the existence, and perseverance, of character and goodness amid(st) many flaws — both the cultural flaws (and evils) of Lincoln’s time, and the personal flaws of Lincoln himself.

W.E.B. Du Bois put it most profoundly:

Abraham Lincoln was perhaps the greatest figure of the nineteenth century. I love him not because he was perfect but because he was not and yet triumphed. The world is full of illegitimate children. The world is full of folk whose taste was educated in the gutter. The world is full of people born hating and despising their fellows. To these I love to say: See this man. He was one of you and yet he became Abraham Lincoln.

Though this quote from Du Bois comes from Meacham’s final chapter, I have to think that he had it ringing in his head from the beginning, if it wasn’t the inspiration for the project itself. For this is the theme throughout the biography: An imperfect man trying very hard to do the right thing.

It’s so easy to overlook the simplicity of that statement, but trying very hard to do the right thing (especially for any extended period of time, let alone for one’s whole life) is a vastly neglected gift of consciousness, not its natural fruit. Lincoln has always stood out for this effort-that-is-character — because it is so very rare. But he should stand out even more so because that character which history knows him for persisted no less for the flaws alongside it.

“Imperfect” is, of course, a soft word for some of Lincoln’s flaws. (By almost any standard today, Lincoln would be, at least at times, quite guilty of bigotry and even racism.) This is not a hidden attribute in the book, but a feature. “Viewed from the genuine abolition ground, Mr. Lincoln seemed tardy, cold, dull, and indifferent,” Frederick Douglass said. But, he added, “measuring him by the sentiment of his country, a sentiment he was bound as a statesmen to consult, he was swift, zealous, radical, and determined.”

The embarrassing fact is, most of us could probably congratulate ourselves, rightly congratulate ourselves, for holding better ideas of racial equality than Lincoln did, and yet still not come comparatively close to his depth of character.

Perhaps the biggest explanation for this type of thing is plain and simple humility. Whatever views Lincoln held, he held them with deep, patient concern and at least potential uncertainty. He was always ready to stand his ground, but he was also ready to learn a better way. As Horace Greeley put it, “Mr. Lincoln was essentially a growing man.”

Here is how Lincoln himself put it to Maine’s Republican Senator Lot M. Morrill:

I don’t know but that God has created some one man great enough to comprehend the whole of this stupendous crisis and transaction from end to end, and endowed him with sufficient wisdom to manage and direct it. I confess that I do not fully understand and foresee it all. But I am placed here where I am obliged, to the best of my poor ability, to deal with it. And that being the case, I can only go just as fast as I can see how to go.

Again, going back to Du Bois, the profundity lies in the way that such praiseworthy character and humility can (and must) not only “emerge from the gutter” but coexist within it.

I’m going to be thinking a lot about this over the next year, about what it means to recognize character within the flaws — in leaders especially, but also in the everyday anyone. Of course, that will mean asking many muddy questions. What constitutes only a flaw and what constitutes corrupt character? What sort of flaws are “forgivable” and for what degree of character are they forgivable? And when do we make the call to sacrifice “practicality” in order to keep our integrity, and vice versa?

Again, Lincoln is a perfect case study here, because he absolutely did both of these things. Many times he conceded to practical considerations, but he also often stayed the course, come what may.

But I am specifically encouraged to look for character, for moral strength, in the places where I am not predisposed to find it. Real moral strength is such a funny and difficult thing to pin down. Sometimes the people I like the most fail to show it. And quite often the people I like the least show more of it than anyone else. So it goes and so it has always gone — and we all do well, we all gain, to admit it.

It follows and ought to be true that the exact same humility and depth of character which history rightly continues to praise in Abraham Lincoln, despite his flaws, can also be found in others today, despite their flaws.

As Lincoln said after winning reelection,

What has occurred in this case, must ever occur in similar cases. Human-nature will not change. In any future great national trial, compared with the men of this, we shall have as weak, and as strong; as silly and as wise; as bad and good. Let us, therefore, study the incidents of this, as philosophy to learn wisdom from, and none of them as wrongs to be avenged.

It’s not an easy philosophy to learn wisdom from, involving a lot of hard work and uncertainty. But as long as we are so fortunate as to be, as Meacham put it, “buffeted by the demands of democracy,” we are also duty-bound to seek and to find, not what is evil or inevitable, but what is good and what is possible.

And no one knows what effect anyone might have. All of the things that history knows Lincoln for, all the things that we know his era for, and especially the good things — they were not inevitable. They were surprises. Surprises that came about because someone, somewhere, however imperfectly, was trying with their “whole soul” to do the right thing.

For Lincoln . . . [t]he task of history was to secure advances in a universe that tends to disappoint. Goodness would not always be rewarded. The innocent would suffer. Violence would at times defeat virtue. Such was the way of things, but to Lincoln the duty of the leader and of the citizen was neither to despair nor to seek solace and security with the merely strong, but to discern and to pursue the right.

Peggy Noonan:

Speaking generally, if you are middle-aged or older, chances are good you feel sympathy for and old loyalty toward Israel. The young are more prone to antipathy toward Israel, sometimes accompanied by rage, sometimes by almost violent accusations against the colonialist oppressor state. At the bottom of today’s progressive politics there is blood lust. They speak of justice and equity but that’s not what they want, they want dominance. It’s all about the will to power. Progressive students have absorbed the idea it’s good to be militant in your views, it shows you’re authentic. No, it shows you got the talking points.

Two years ago, Azmat Khan published a breathtaking report of civilian airstrike casualties in Iraq and Syria between 2014 and 2018. To anyone actually willing to hear it, I’m sure the conclusion will come as an entirely sarcastic shock: We kill far more civilians than we ever admit — and we do it unapologetically. When Khan published the first half of her report, I put up a series of quotes which basically says everything I ever hope to say on the topic. One of those quotes, you will notice, is not like the others. Instead, it shows how the official (whitewashed) narrative which we are sold (by every single administration) and which we quickly buy (from every single administration) is simply a means of excusing ourselves for murder. (Or, as Günther Anders would have called it, it is “war by tele-murder.”)

Given the horrific recent events in Israel, and what will surely be a horrific response, it’s not surprising I found myself revisiting Khan’s work.

Here are a few quotes from the second half of Khan’s report:

It was a system that seemed to function almost by design to not only mask the true toll of American airstrikes but also legitimize their expanded use. […]

But they also have come to understand that on occasion, and with no warning, a bomb might pierce the sky, inexplicably targeting their homes, killing their families and neighbors in a terrifying instant.

And they knew that if this were to happen, it was unlikely anyone would ever tell them why. […]

This was not an error. According to U.S. rules of engagement, military planners can knowingly kill civilians, including children, if the anticipated casualty rate is not excessive in relation to the anticipated military advantage of destroying the strike target. […]

“I am on fire now,” she said, her voice robbed of all its signature warmth. “Why did you kill them? They were innocent. They didn’t do anything.” Now she was weeping. “They were turned into just flesh. […]

“But they didn’t gain any advantage,” she said. “The only thing they did is they killed the children.”

Imagine for a minute that you leave your home on an errand and while you are gone a missile strikes your home, killing your entire family. Picture this happening exactly where you now live. You return from your errand to find that your house is now rubble and your family — your baby, your spouse, your siblings, your parents — are buried and burned inside it. And if that is not bad enough, try to imagine that you are never told who fired that missile or why they did it. You are never even told that anyone is sorry they did it. Maybe, just maybe, you will be told that someone did it because (they believed) your neighbors were involved in terrorist activities. Again, just pause, take a minute, and imagine this happening exactly where you live right now.

There is not one American that I have ever met, not one I have heard of or could dream of, who can even pretend to imagine putting up with that situation. It would be unfathomable. And yet we have systematically inflicted that fate on countless other innocent people around the globe.

And when I say “countless” I mean both in astonishingly high numbers and I also mean it quite literally: we have no idea how many because we are explicitly not counting them. That is the point behind Khan’s investigations. As she put it in her first report, “Not only was there no record of disciplinary action, or full investigations in roughly 9 of every 10 cases, but only a quarter included any further review, recommendations or lessons learned.” She adds, “Of the 1,311 assessments [obtained] from the Pentagon, in only one did investigators visit the site of a strike. In only two did they interview witnesses or survivors.”

Floating around the universe is a perfectly good adage about putting ourselves in other people’s shoes. It might simultaneously be the most needed and the most neglected. And for the absolute simplicity of its message, that neglect carries an immensity of destruction.

If you have not read Khan’s reports, you should do so. This is not one of those things that is “worth your time.” This is something that is, as an American citizen, absolutely morally reprehensible to remain unaware of.

I often think about a challenge from Neil Postman where he tells his reader to “ask yourself a series of questions”:

What steps do you plan to take to reduce the conflict in the Middle East? Or the rates of inflation, crime and unemployment? What are your plans for preserving the environment or reducing the risk of nuclear war? What do you plan to do about NATO, OPEC, the CIA, affirmative action, and the monstrous treatment of the Baha’is in Iran? I shall take the liberty of answering for you: You plan to do nothing about them.

Postman was nothing in if not blunt about this subject. Here he is primarily concerned with what advances in communication technology, starting with telegraphy, did to change (and trivialize) the information we receive. This matters for a number of reasons, but one of the most critical is that long ago we reached a point where every single day, for 24 hours a day, we are “sent information which . . . [does] not permit the right of reply.”

Am I permitted the right of reply? That seems like a question we should all start asking ourselves more often. When politicians and pundits and “know-nothings” (to steal a category from Abraham Lincoln) start raving about wiping foreign enemies off the face of the earth, or about leveling entire regions filled with civilians, you can be sure they have not earned the right of reply.

Some have recently advised caution for Israel insofar as they might learn from the mistakes the United States made after 9/11. But I haven’t read any that go far enough with that caution. I’m not capable of categorically answering ‘yes’ or ‘no’ to everything the U.S. has done in the name of the “war on terror” in the last 20 years. But what I would at least ask of any American is to consider the possibility that, even after 9/11, we still did not have the right of reply that we gave. Did we have the right to defend ourselves? Absolutely. But the right to send troops to the other side of the globe and kill thousands of civilians in the name of that “self-defense”? Like it or not, that is what happened. And it’s what continues to happen, and what continues to be encouraged.

Put differently, it should not be a mental or moral stretch to ask, as Anne Applebaum asked (though for different reasons), “Could it be that the planes that hit New York and Washington did less damage to the nation than the cascade of bad decisions that followed?” I sometimes think that history could practically be defined as the record of people who have refused to learn this lesson, studied by the people who also refuse to learn it — and, of course, the cascade of suffering that follows. (I think often of this wonderful interview with Alice Herz-Sommer. “It goes up and down and up and down and up an down. In the whole, people don’t learn. People don’t learn.”)

This does not mean that Israel should not defend itself or that it should not attack Hamas. It does mean that they should not be excused for killing civilians, killing children, in the process. And we should not be excused for encouraging it, no matter how unknowingly we do so.

The title of the post I referenced above is “not for me.” The sentiment behind it — don’t kill children for my safety or my benefit — comes from the quote I used from Wendell Berry, in an essay titled “The Failure of War,” the end of which is worth quoting again:

Here is the other question that I have been leading toward, one that the predicament of modern warfare forces upon us: How many deaths of other people’s children by bombing or starvation are we willing to accept in order that we may be free, affluent, and (supposedly) at peace? To that question I answer: None. Please, no children. Don’t kill any children for my benefit.

If that is your answer too, then you must know that we have not come to rest, far from it. For surely we must feel ourselves swarmed about with more questions that are urgent, personal, and intimidating. But perhaps also we feel ourselves beginning to be free, facing at last in our own selves the greatest challenge ever laid before us, the most comprehensive vision of human progress, the best advice, and the least obeyed:

“Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you and persecute you; That ye may be the children of your Father which is in heaven: for he maketh his sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sendeth rain on the just and on the unjust.”

That is a right of reply that everyone has. It may ultimately be the only one we have.

Senator Lindsay Graham:

We’re in a religious war, here. I am with Israel. Do whatever the hell you have to do to defend yourself. Level the place.

Not that Senator Graham has any credibility or integrity left to offer, but a statement like this could only be meaningful — meaningful in any way, which is to say nothing about it being ethical — if it was uttered so emphatically from inside Gaza.

As it stands, not only are statements like this entirely meaningless, they are meaninglessly destructive and violent. Graham, who preceded this remark by referring to Nazi Germany, proves himself incapable of thought. He is, along with anyone who echoes the same sentiment, capable only of missing the point. The Nazi Party was not evil because they committed genocide against the Jews, but because they committed genocide. Even more simply, they were evil because they murdered civilian men, women, and children.

That the Holocaust was primarily committed against the Jewish people is certainly, absolutely historically important. But that is not what made it evil. Hatred and mass murder made it evil. Any nation or people group which reflects that kind of hatred, who wages war irrespective of civilian casualties, who regularly kills kids along with their enemies, is guilty of that same evil.

To preach anything other than caution and care for the lives of civilians in Gaza is mindless, death-dealing bullshit.

Anne Applebaum

But like the equally outdated Pax Americana that accompanied the rules-based world order—the expectation that the U.S. plays some role in the resolution of every conflict—we might miss the Geneva Conventions when they are gone. Open brutality has again become celebrated in international conflicts, and a long time may pass before anything else replaces it.

Reading Billy Collins’s “The Trouble With Poetry” and thinking about how, as cliché as it sounds, the world is a realm of infinite possibilities. Not a place where “anything can happen,” but a place where both old and new things never stop happening.

Each one of us has an unnumbered and unnumberable amount of potential experiences — experiences both to have and to offer in the world. And those myriad experiences multiply exponentially with each encounter with another — exponential multiplicities which again and again multiply exponentially with each friendship. (And how much more so if we make those friendships with others who are not like us, who think and act and pray differently?)

This is what happens with one and then with two. And there are 8 billion of us, all bouncing our disparate and duplicate experiences off each other.

And how will it ever end?
unless the day finally arrives
when we have compared everything in the world
to everything in the world

and there is nothing left to do
but quitely close our notebooks
and sit with our hands folded on our desks.

The delightful sarcasm of Collins is always thick in substance and light in expression!

Peggy Noonan:

Yet the whole thing is so . . . below the country. It’s so without heightened meaning. It’s as if Julius Caesar were stabbed to death in the Forum by the Marx Brothers.

The killers weren’t serious people, they don’t have a serious purpose, they have no plan or platform. They are led by a great doofus, a cartoon villain with Elvis hair, a political nepo baby whose father was president of the Florida Senate, a guy whose way was paved. Tearing things down is his business model. At least the Marx Brothers made you laugh. […]

They have verve, they raise money, they know how to use social media and tickle the party’s id. But they can’t lead institutions because they don’t respect institutions because they’re not in the least conservative. They’re a bunch of crazy narcissists, and narcissists can’t create and sustain coalitions because that means other people exist.

Seamus Heaney:

[Poetry] does not intervene in the actual but by offering consciousness a chance to recognize its predicaments, foreknow its capacities and rehearse its comebacks in all kinds of venturesome ways, it does constitute a beneficent event, for poet and audience alike. It offers a response to reality which has a liberating and verifying effect upon the individual spirit, and yet I can see how such a function would be deemed insufficient by a political activist. For the activist, there is going to be no point in envisaging an order which is comprehensive of events but not in itself productive of new events. Engaged parties are not going to be grateful for a mere image — no matter how inventive or original — of the field of force of which they are a part. They will always want the redress of poetry to be an exercise of leverage on behalf of their point of view; they will require the entire weight of the thing to come down on their side of the scales.

So, if you are an English poet at the Front during World War I, the pressure will be on you to contribute to the war effort, preferably by dehumanizing the face of the enemy. If you are an Irish poet in the wake of the 1916 executions, the pressure will be to revile the tyranny of the executing power. If you are an American poet at the height of the Vietnam War, the official expectation will be for you to wave the flag rhetorically. In these cases, to see the German soldier as a friend and secret sharer, to see the British government as a body who might keep faith, to see the South-East Asian expedition as an imperial betrayal, to do any of these things is to add a complication where the general desire is for a simplification.

[…]

And in the activity of poetry too, there is a tendency to place a counter-reality in the scales — a reality which may be only imagined but which nevertheless has weight because it is imagined within the gravitational pull of the actual and can therefore hold its own and balance out against the historical situation. The redressing effect of poetry comes from its being a glimpsed alternative, a revelation of potential that is denied or constantly threatened by circumstances.