"Solitude"

I recall past Labor Days that marked the end of summer. Now, our three college-age grandchildren and the one still in high school, have been back on their respective campuses for over a week. It seems to me a sad finish to what in June seemed an endless summer. But they are all happy to be back among friends and the lives they are carving out for themselves.

 

In thinking about this essay on solitude. I wandered past a small pond and came across this lone Painted Turtle pondering its future.

 

Sydney M. Williams

 

More Essays from Essex

“Solitude”

August 30, 2025

 

“In order to understand the world, one has to turn away from it occasionally.”

                                                                Albert Camus (1913-1960)

              The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays, 1942

 

Man is inherently social. He craves company. He thrives on companionship. It is one reason there are an estimated 28,000 social and country clubs in the U.S. It is why solitary confinement is severe punishment. 

 

However, Camus was also right. In solitude, imaginations swell. Possibilities enter one’s mind, to be accepted or discarded. Goethe allegedly once wrote: “One can be instructed in society, one is inspired only in solitude.” In schools and universities, students learn from others – their teachers and fellow students. Yet there is truth in the quote attributed to educational reformer John Dewey: “We do not learn from experience...we learn from reflecting on experience.” Henry David Thoreau was unique in his desire for solitude. In Walden or, Life in the Woods: “I find it wholesome to be alone the greater part of the time. To be in company, even with the best, is soon wearisome and dissipating.”

 

While each of us is different, like most I am a social animal. For almost fifty years I worked on a trading floor, surrounded by salespeople and traders. My customers were in cities across the country and in London. I spoke to them daily and met with them regularly. It was a job I loved, requiring continuous contact. Despite being retired for almost ten years, I still stay in touch with many who became friends. Today, besides having a large family – my wife, Caroline, three children and spouses, ten grandchildren, and five surviving siblings – I belong to three ROMEO (retired old men eating out) lunch groups. I love the friendship and the exchange of ideas. Without that stimulation, I would shrivel up.

 

Like the late American novelist Patricia Highsmith who wrote of how her imagination functions better when she didn’t have to speak to people, I love being alone – to let my fancy take wing. Driving alone with the radio off, lying in bed before sleep arrives, or walking woodland trails, I identify with the Lord Byron’s words from “Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage:” “There is pleasure in the pathless woods/...There is society, where none intrudes...” Treading well-worn paths, I ponder politics; the stock market; world events; friends I have known, especially those who have died; books I have read or am reading; as well as subjects for essays like this – Teddy Bears, eggs, and solitude. I bring a pen and paper, as my memory is not what it was, to jot down words or phrases that come to me. Sitting on a bench that populates these trails – sensibly placed for those my age – I watch a turtle ponder its future (pictured), an ant carry a load back to its nest.

 

But voluntary solitude is not forced loneliness. Social isolation is a health risk for the mentally challenged and the risks they impose to citizens, as we saw last Wednesday in Minneapolis; for the young, as they go through puberty when the desire to be accepted by one’s peers is paramount; and for the elderly when loneliness can lead to a poor quality of life and even premature death. It is why retirement communities, like Essex Meadows where we live, put a premium on social activities. According to the non-profit organization Trust for America’s Health, isolation imposed by restrictions due to COVID resulted in a 20% increase in deaths in 2020 from the effects of alcohol, drugs and suicide.

"Good and Evil"

 Tomorrow is Juneteenth, a federal holiday since 2021, though the name was first used in the 1890s. It celebrates the emancipation of slaves in the U.S., specifically the day slavery ended in Texas in 1865. With the ratification of the 13^th Amendment in December 1865, slavery officially ended in the United States. Delaware and Kentucky were the last two states to officially prohibit the practice.

 

While it is hard for us to understand, slavery was the norm for most of human history. Helen Keller once wrote: “There is no king who has not had a slave among his ancestors, and no slave who has not had a king among his.” When the Union that is now the United States was formed in 1781, slavery was common in the agricultural south but was practiced in all of the original thirteen colonies. Nevertheless, abolitionists were beginning to make their voices heard. On February 24, 1820, John Quincy Adams wrote in his diary: “Slavery is the great and foul stain upon the North American Union…” So, Thursday is the day we celebrate the end of that evil practice.

 

Sydney M. Williams

 

Thought of the Day

“Good and Evil”

June 18, 2025

 

“In each of us, two natures are at war – the good and the evil. All our lives the fight goes on between them,

and one of them must conquer. But in our hands lies the power to choose – what we want to be, we are.”

                                                                                                        Robert Louis Stevenson (1850-1894)

                                                                                                       The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde, 1886

 

In the early spring of 1945, my father, a 34-years-old Harvard educated artist, married and father of four was serving as a private with the 10^th Mountain Division in Italy. They had suffered many casualties, as the Germans were gradually pushed north out of the Apennines. A few years later, my father spoke of his experiences. He mentioned that once a few young, enraged G.I.s had killed a captured German soldier with shovels. Earlier that same day, two German soldiers had approached their lines with arms raised. The G.I.s rose to meet them. In a moment, the Germans fell to the ground, and a machine gunner behind them killed two of the Americans. While war can bring out the best in people, it can also bring out the worst.

 

………………………………………………………

 

Just like good, evil lurks in all of us. It is our responsibility – to the extent possible – to contain it, to smother it, to let goodness overwhelm it. “Wisdom,” wrote John Cheever in his Journals, “is the knowledge of good and evil…” In The Gulag Archipelago, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn wrote, “If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us…But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart.” This is a subject that has been on my mind, with Israel’s attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities, and as I have been reading Jonathan Horn’s new book, The Fate of the Generals. It is difficult to reconcile the vile treatment of American and Filipino prisoners by the Japanese, with the Japanese I knew in business and socially. Two generations ago, German Nazis were gassing Jews. Today, they are an ally of Israel. In his 1860 novel The Woman in White, Wilkie Collins wrote: “The best men are not consistent in good – why should the worst men be consistent in evil?”

 

Today, evil is manifested in the anti-Semitism that has infested much of the West. Do college students, born sixty years after the genocide of Jews in Europe and who now accuse Israel of practicing genocide on Palestinians, have any knowledge of history? Battles between forces of good and evil, are as old as mankind. The Bible tells us that Jesus, as the son of God, is inherently good, while man is flawed, so must avoid temptations. Most of my generation have read Stephen Vincent Benét’s short story, The Devil and Daniel Webster, of Webster’s defense of Jabez Stone who sold his soul to the devil in return for seven years of good luck. The message: In moments of weakness, good people can make bad decisions.

 

This battle between good and evil is not limited to people. On March 8, 1983, President Reagan correctly referred to the Soviet Union as an “evil empire.” Evil manifests itself in nation’s where authoritarian leaders control their populations. In the past century, one can think of Mussolini, Franco, Hitler, Stalin, and Mao Zedong. Today Ali Hosseini Khamenei Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping, and Kim Jong Un serve that role, as their governments deny citizens their natural rights – “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.” Governments run by and for dictators disallow people the freedom to achieve their dreams. Yet good people can (and do) live in these countries. Nevertheless, the contrast of autocracies to democracies, where power rests with the people and their representatives, is stark. This can be seen today in Israel’s fight with Iran and Ukraine’s war with Russia. In this uncertain world, and because the United States is a ‘good’ nation, the projection of military strength is necessary to help preserve peace. In 1907, President Theodore Roosevelt sent sixteen U.S. Naval battleships (the Great White Fleet) on a 42,000 mile, fourteen-month world tour, making twenty port calls on six continents. On Flag Day 2025, President Trump ordered a parade celebrating the U.S. Army’s 250^thbirthday. “Peace is Our Profession” was the motto of the Strategic Air Command (SAC). 

 

In his 1964 Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech, Martin Luther King said, “I believe that unarmed truth and unconditional love will have the final word in reality. This is why right, temporarily defeated, is stronger than evil triumphant.” I believe what he said is correct for those of us fortunate to live in a democracy, but, sadly, it is not true for those who find themselves subjected to authoritarian governments, which, according to the Economist Intelligence Unit’s (EIU) Democracy Index for 2024, comprises 39.2% of the world’s population. Thus, more than three billion people are held hostage by evil leaders.

 

As a democracy of free-thinking people, we will always have myriad opinions, from religion to education, from culture to social welfare, and on a host of other subjects. Supporters of these differing opinions are not necessarily evil, nor are their opponents. The history of the United States could be written in protests. Among the successful ones: the Abolitionists of the late 18^th and early 19^th Centuries, which lead to the Civil War and the end of slavery; opponents of poor working conditions and low wages during the early years of the Industrial Revolution led to the creation of unions; Suffragettes of late 19^thand early 20^th Centuries led to the adoption of the 19^th Amendment in 1920; the “Bonus Army” of 1932 demanded payment for service in World War I, and helped relieve poverty during the Great Depression; In the late 1930s, Isolationists battled Interventionists, yet all became unified after Pearl Harbor; Civil Rights’ protests in the late 1950s and early 1960s preceded passage of the Civil Rights Acts of 1964 and 1968; anti-war protests, fueled by the Vietnam War in the late 1960s and early 1970s hastened the end of that war.

 

On the other hand, some recent protests are driven  by self-interest, counter-productive, pig-headed, or just plain silly: anti-Semites calling for the end of what they claim is Israel’s genocide of the Palestinians; the destruction of pipelines by those calling for the end of fossil fuels: Defund the Police, the consequences of which are harmful for those most vulnerable in our society; and the short-lived Code Pink: Women for Peace. Democracy, by definition, allows for civil disobedience. But change is best accepted when its progress is gradual. In 1849, Henry David Thoreau wrote Resistance to Civil Government, in which he argued that individuals had a moral obligation to protest unjust laws. Of course, one person’s definition of an unjust law may differ from another’s, but that is why we have courts to resolve such differences.

 

We are living through a period of political extremism, of assassinations and protests, not always peaceful and sometimes led by professional agitators. In our secular age, with its ‘smart’ phones, social media and artificial intelligence (AI), moral values have splintered. Evil is  more ubiquitous when society is spiritually hollow and human connection absent. Wisdom, today, is in short supply; nevertheless, “the function of wisdom,” according to Cicero, “is to discriminate between good and evil.” Thus, while we should be unafraid to express our opinions, we should do so respectfully. We should avoid falling into the trap of hatred – of letting evil bury the good that is within us.

"Desperate Democrats"

 Everyone wants us to vote early. Resist the urge if possible, unless external factors make that your only choice. While there are only eight days to go, much can happen. Besides, there is a sense of community in going to the Polls on election day. Voting is a privilege limited to democracies and a responsibility of all eligible citizens.

 

Sydney M. Williams

www.swtotd.blogspot.com

 

Thought of the Day

“Desperate Democrats”

October 28, 2024

 

“When a man has reached a condition in which he believes that a thing must happen because he does

not wish it, and that what he wishes to happen never will be, this is really the state called desperation.”

                                                                                           Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860)

                                                                                           Studies in Pessimism

                                                                                           Translated by Thomas Bailey Saunders, 1913

 

Polls tell us the election is too close to call, and I am not going to argue with those who make their living predicting what people will do. Nevertheless, Democrats act desperate; they act as though they expect to lose. They know they have played badly the hand they were dealt. That President Biden had been in mental decline was known by all who have watched his appearances over the past few years. Yet Democrats played Sergeant Schultz – “I know nothing” – and re-nominated him anyway. It was only after his disastrous debate with former President Trump on June 27, when his decline could no longer be denied, that he was unceremoniously dumped.

 

That gave Democrats less than two months to consider candidates who would appeal to a majority of delegates at an open convention to be held in Chicago from August 19 to the 24^th. Instead they chose to coronate Vice President Kamala Harris who had only once visited the border for which Mr. Biden had given her responsibility – about her only real responsibility. Previously, she spent four years in the U.S. Senate, where The Hill, based on roll-call votes, placed her as the second most liberal Democratic senator to serve in the U.S. Senate in the 21^st century, second behind Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts. Prior to the Senate, she had served thirteen years as an Attorney General, first of San Francisco and then of California. 

 

A few weeks of “joy” accompanied her selection, but with her refusal to hold a news conference, to submit to other than “friendly” interviews, or to explain her change of opinions on policies, the bloom of excitement over her selection wilted. 

 

Her campaign has struggled to focus. She has been the Vice President for almost four years, but she cannot defend an economy, which brought the highest inflation since the 1970s. We have had unprecedented border crossings, which brought fentanyl and crime into the country, and that changed the composition of towns across the land. The Biden-Harris foreign policy has given us a revanchist Russia; a destabilizing, militaristic China; a North Korea sending troops to Russia; and an Iran intent on securing a nuclear bomb, while using proxies to eradicate Israel. As well, anti-Semitism has been on the rise on college campuses by students whose loans Mr. Biden would like to forgive – in other words, to have taxpayers assume the burden of repayment. Unsurprisingly, public trust in government is half what it was twenty years ago. Ms. Harris no longer talks about climate change, wind power or EVs, as they are associated with elites, those whom she claims to disdain. The abortion issue (her only issue) has been tempered with reasonable responses from both Trump and Vance. She has been left with bashing Trump as a would-be dictator, a Fascist, even though she does not seem to know the word’s socialist origins. As the Wall Street Journal editorialized last Friday: “But the climb up the rhetorical dictator chain in the final stages of this election looks like a last-ditch Democratic strategy to save Ms. Harris from defeat.” In comparing Mr. Trump to Hitler, her handlers are insulting fifty million or so Trump supporters. And, as Daniel Henninger pointed out in his recent Wall Street Journalop-ed, at the same time moderate Democrat Senators Baldwin, Casey, Slotkin, Tester – all up for re-election – have adopted Trump-like positions on energy, tariffs, and U.S. manufacturing. Leaders of the Democratic Party are looking desperate as they attempt to preserve a progressive, out-of-touch candidate, but many of their down-ballot candidates are acting pragmatically.   

 

It is not just the choice of a bad candidate, or the fact that Biden’s mental decline was kept hidden. Over the past several years, Democrats have abandoned their middle-class roots, as they adopted a bar-bell approach toward the electorate. On the one hand, the sanctimonious, cultural and economic elites who believe their self-proclaimed moral superiority justifies calling political opponents low-IQ “deplorables” – misogynist, racist, homophobic and xenophobic. On the other end of Democrat supporters are those who feed off government largesse – “green” companies, government employees, university administrators and professors who feed off the government teat, union leaders (but not all union members), indebted students, and illegal immigrants. Independent voters, however, do not vote in blocs. They are individuals. Contrary to President Obama’s harangue, Black men who do not support Ms. Harris are not misogynists. They simply believe her policies are not in their best interests. Progressive Democrats, who control the Party, have no tolerance for those who question why biological men should be able to compete against women in sports. They have little forbearance for those who live by Christian values, or those who support legal immigration but not its illegal cousin. “Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me,” is a 500-year-old proverb that is applicable to millions of American voters.  

 

Most Americans are not happy with our choices for President. Most of us believe that the first five Presidents – Washington, Adams, Jefferson, Madison, and Monroe, men who helped found this nation – would be appalled that we must choose between Kamala Harris or Donald Trump. But now, Democrats feel that desperate times call for desperate measures. But whether name-calling will work is anyone’s guess. The polls have the race too close to call. But I wonder. Thirty-seven years ago, Random House published Donald Trump’s book, The Art of the Deal. It reached number one on The New York Times best sellers list and stayed there for thirteen weeks. In it he wrote: “The worst thing you can possibly do in a deal is seem desperate to make it. That makes the other guy smell blood, and then you’re dead.” Will his words prove prophetic? In Walden, Henry David Thoreau offered sensible advice: “It is a characteristic of wisdom not to do desperate things.” In The Art of the Deal, Trump was writing of business deals; nevertheless, his words are applicable in today’s rancorous political environment: Caveat candidatus!

"Forest Walking," Peter Wohlleben

 My wife and I feel fortunate to live where we do, where the woods are accessible with paths that make it easy on aging legs – a place and a time to escape. 

 

There are other books that carry this theme, like Thoreau’s Walden and Bill Bryson’s more recent, humorous Walk in the Woods, a story of his hiking the Appalachian Trail. Forest Walking belongs on the same shelf.

 

Sydney M. Williams

30 Bokum Road – Apartment 314

Essex, CT 06426

 

Burrowing into Books

Forest Walking, Peter Wohlleben

June 10, 2023

 

“Come to the woods, for here is rest. There is no repose like that of the green deep woods.”

                                                                                          John Muir (1838-1914)

                                                                                          John of the Woods: The Unpublished Journals of John Muir

                                                                                           Edited by Linnie Marsh Wolfe, 1938

 

Most people look at a tree as a source of shade, or something to tap in the spring if a Sugar Maple, a risk to power lines in winter, or a wonder of beauty if a White Oak, Copper Beech, or Giant Sequoia. Like Thoreau, Peter Wohlleben looks deeper. In the introduction, he writes: “When I talk of the forest, I’m talking about a community. In a forest left to its own devices, trees of different ages and different species grow in the places they choose and that suit them best.” The pleasure from reading Mr. Wohlleben’s book justifies the sacrifice some conifer had to make to provide the paper on which the book is printed. 

 

Peter Wohlleben, author of The Hidden Life of Trees (reviewed January 14, 2017), has been criticized for anthropomorphizing trees, which he delightfully does. In an interview, a few years ago, at the Yale School of Forestry, he said: “Trees have just as much character as humans do.”  It is his passion for individual trees, his love for the forests he manages, and his joy in the woodlands he walks through, which suffuse his writing and causes readers to smile. To him, trees are generational: “In an intact ancient forest, huge trees shade the ground, using nearly all the sunlight that falls on their canopies to generate food to fuel their growth, while the younger trees wait patiently in the shadows below.”

 

With Jane Billinghurst, editor, publisher, and translator of his earlier books, Peter Wohlleben embarked on a series of hikes through several national parks in Canada and the United States: Lake Livingston State Park in Texas, Florida’s Highlands Hammock State Park, Letchworth State Park in New York, South Carolina’s Sumter National Forest, Algonquin Provincial Park in Ontario, and others. We are told how we can identify trees by their bark, how dead trees (“snags’) are “apartment buildings for the forest’s maintenance crews,” and the advantages of winter hiking when the woods are quiet, the hikers few, and the mosquitoes and midges “peacefully slumbering.”

 

Mr. Wohlleben is a lively, informative companion, as one walks through the forest. We are told that the largest fungus found so far is a honey fungus in Oregon’s Malheur National Forest, spread “over three and a half square miles,” that “trees get fatter at night,” and that on “a hot day, a mature tree sucks up to 130 gallons of water from the ground.” He writes of the symbioses of nature, of predator and prey. But he adds: “To keep the forest healthy, we need to look beyond partnerships to what biologists are now calling guilds – arrangements of give-and-take that involve different winners and losers depending on the day or season but together keep the whole system running smoothly.” 

 

This is a book of advice, with chapters titled: “Forest Activities with Children,” “Seasonal Walks,” “Comfort in the Forest,” and “Choosing Your Wardrobe.” It is a book that proves the adage: ‘learning can be fun.’ And that is why you will enjoy a stroll through the woods with Peter Wohlleben.

"Walking"

 

This is the week of Passover; today is Good Friday and Sunday is Easter – a time to celebrate and to be thankful for the greatness of God. As for those of us who do not always get our religion packaged, a walk through the woods, to commune with nature, provides a sense of reverence – for a Being or a Spirit that is greater than anyone of us.

 

Sydney M. Williams

 

More Essays from Essex

April 7, 2023

“Walking”

 

“I have two doctors, my left leg and my right. When body and mind are out of

gear…I know that I shall only have to call in my doctors, and I shall be well again.”

                                                                                                                George M. Trevelyan (1876-1962)

                                                                                                                Clio, A Muse and Other Essays, 1913

 

6,198 steps. That is what my iPhone tells me I have done so far today, at 3:00pm on April 4. But that is more than most days; I averaged 4,911 steps in March. Of course, the weather was worse then, and today is beautiful. Nevertheless, I am a piker compared to my wife. She just returned with the news that her Fitbit has her at 14,883 steps. Walking is healthy for the body and the mind. In Twilight of the Idols, Friedrich Nietzsche wrote: “All truly great thoughts are conceived while walking.” 

 

Bertrand Russell reviewed George Trevelyan’s essay in the December 4, 1913 issue of The Cambridge Review. In it he wondered whether Providence had placed Oxford and Cambridge “at exactly the right distance from London for a comfortable day’s walk.” The philosopher Russell, who died in 1970 at the age of 97, must have had a strong constitution and long legs, as each city is about 60 miles from London’s center – 15 hours at four miles per hour! Even an Olympian, walking at a record pace, could not make the trek in under eight hours.

 

Shortly after he died in May 1862, Henry David Thoreau’s essay “Walking” was published in The Atlantic Monthly. His preference was to saunter, a word, he mused, that might be derived from idle people in the Middle Ages who, looking for handouts, claimed they going to the Holy Land, la Sainte Terre; thus, they became known as the “Sainte Terrers.” He added, however, others believed the word comes from sans terre, meaning without land, but in a good sense: “having no home, but equally at home everywhere.” “My vicinity,” Thoreau wrote, “affords many good walks; and though for so many years I have walked almost every day…I have not yet exhausted them.” The same could be said for where I live – a hundred acres of trails, abutting a thousand acre preserve.

 

In her 2000 book Wanderlust: A History of Walking, Rebecca Solnit wrote that Jane Austen’s Elizabeth Bennett’s “solitary walks express the independence that literally takes the heroine out of the social atmosphere of the houses and their inhabitants, into a larger, lonelier world where she is free to think…” Seventy-eight years ago, following two and a half months of combat, my father had similar thoughts. Then with the 10^th Mountain Division and camped along Italy’s Lago di Garda’s eastern shore and having covered 250 miles on foot, he wrote my mother on May 3, 1945: “I was able to go for a little walk today and enjoyed myself. I discovered that when you walk without a pack or rifle you practically feel as if you were floating through the air.” 

 

Today, I enjoy woodland walks, with their seasonal marvels. In Forest Walking, Peter Wohlleben wrote of trees in springtime: “As they transition from a restful winter to being more active in spring, they are pushing more water than usual up their trunks.” Without pack or rifle, I have leisure to think. Often I bring pen and paper and jot down random thoughts, most of which get discarded, but every now and then one germinates and blossoms into an essay, like this one.

"Do Ends Justify Means?"

The attached I expect to be my last TOTD of 2022. It is my 34^th of the year (along with 12 More Essays from Essex and 11 book reviews). Keeping busy, for a retiree, is like aging for cheese and wine; it brings out the best…or so I hope, at least in my essays.

 

As I grow older, my mind wanders back, unsurprising for an octogenarian, as the past is far larger than the future. However, with ten grandchildren I care deeply about the kind of world they will inherit, not that there is much I can do about it. At heart. I am an optimist, but as a realist as well, I know we will never achieve perfection and that events beyond our control can overwhelm. I sometimes think of those born around 1890 who faced the trenches of World War I and then, twenty years later, sent their sons into the jaws of World War II. What a time to have been born! I think of Gandalf’s advice to Frodo: “All we have to decide is what to do with the time given us.” (J.R.R. Tolkien was born in 1892.)

 

I believe that freedom is the natural state of mankind – free to think, speak, write, and pray as one chooses. But I also believe in community, especially of the family, but also that, individually, we are but one cog in the machinery that comprises our towns, cities, states, and nation – that we should all get along, obedient to our laws, diligent in our work, respectful of our differences, and joyful in our similarities.

 

May the year ahead bring peace to all people.

 

Sydney M. Williams

www.swtotd.blogspot.com

 

Thought of the Day

“Do Ends Justify Means?”

December 12, 2022

 

“The principle that the end justifies the means is in individual ethics regarded as the

denial of all morals. In collectivist ethics it becomes necessarily the supreme rule.”

                                                                                                                                The Road to Serfdom, 1944

                                                                                                                                Friedrich von Hayek (1899-1992)

 

 

In a 1928 dissenting opinion, in Olmstead v. the United States, Justice Louis D. Brandeis wrote: “Our government is the potent, the omnipresent teacher. For good or for ill, it teaches the whole people by example. Crime is contagious. If the government becomes a lawbreaker, it breeds contempt for law; it invites everyman to become a law unto himself; it invites anarchy. To declare that in the administration of the criminal law the end justifies the means – to declare that the government may commit crimes in order to secure the conviction of a private criminal – would bring terrible retributions.”

 

In 1928, Roy Olmstead was a suspected bootlegger. Without judicial approval, federal agents wiretapped his home. He was convicted based on those wiretaps. In 2016, Donald Trump was a successful real estate investor and entertainer. Politically, he was a novice. He was disruptive to establishment politicians, and to federal bureaucrats whose careers depend upon an ever-expanding government. Following his election, but before his inauguration, Senator Chuck Schumer spoke about Mr. Trump’s taunting the intelligence agencies: “He’s being really dumb…Let me tell you, you take on the intelligence community and they have six ways from Sunday at getting back at you.” A truth Mr. Trump was to discover. Those who used unlawful means to marginalize Mr. Trump did so because they felt that the end – the destruction of his political career – justified any means employed. However, as Theodore Roosevelt said in a speech in Chicago on April 10, 1899: “No man is justified in doing evil on the grounds of expediency.” 

 

Over six years have elapsed since Mr. Trump won the Presidency. And we now know that senior executives in the FBI and the Justice Department were culpable in the “Russian collusion” story, as well as four years later being responsible for suppressing the authenticity of what was found on Hunter Biden’s laptop. Ten years ago, Lois Lerner, then IRS Director, Exempt Organizations, singled out conservative organizations. These federal bureaucrats used illicit means to achieve a preferred political end. What they did was despicable. Will they be punished? Probably not, as long as mainstream media sees their role as propagandizers, rather than seekers of truth and disseminators of news.

 

It is true that in times of crises, our government adopted undemocratic means toward what it felt was a noble and necessary end: During the Civil War, Lincoln suspended the writ of habeas corpus, to silence dissenters and rebels. The Sedition Act of 1918 curtailed free speech during World War I. Franklin Roosevelt interned Japanese Americans in camps. Were any of those actions justifiable? I suspect not.

 

One consequence of this illiberal behavior has been a decline in the public’s confidence in government. A Pew Research Center survey reported on June 6, 2022: “Only two-in-ten Americans say they trust the government in Washington to do what is right ‘just about always’ (2%), or ‘most of the time’ (19%). In 1958, three-quarters of the American public trusted government to do what was right, always or most of the time. The decline has been steady, except for a bump during the Reagan years and in the immediate aftermath of 9/11. There are many factors that have led to this decline, including the quality of candidates, political corruption, and an abundance of politicians and bureaucrats interested in using public office as a stepping-stone to private wealth. 

 

Are there times when an end justifies any means? Yes. Henry David Thoreau wrote of civil disobedience – the disruption of custom and law for an honorable cause. Martin Luther King, in advocating for civil rights, violated existing, though unjust, laws. He was assassinated for his beliefs. Anti-war protestors in the late 1960s were jailed, but their efforts helped bring an end to the Vietnam War.  In all cases, individuals were willing to suffer the consequences of doing what they thought was right. Those who fought for freedom in late 1760s and early 1770s Boston used means that were illegal under British rule. A few Germans, with the goal of ending Nazi rule, engaged in activities in the 1930s that were forbidden by the Third Reich. In both cases – the eventual success of the American Revolution and the ultimate defeat of the Nazis – the perpetrators put themselves at personal risk. Had the United States failed in its bid for independence, its leaders would have been hung as traitors. Most of those who tried to sabotage Hitler’s Nazis were tortured and shot. On the other hand, government bureaucrats who worked to derail Mr. Trump’s Presidential campaign (unsuccessively in 2016 and successively in 2020) did not take personal risk. Most operated anonymously. Many of those exposed have left government service and have, for the most part, retired with full pension benefits, paid for by taxpayers.

 

This is not written in support of Donald Trump, whose well-publicized character flaws have magnified since he left office. While I voted for him twice, I could not vote for him now. This is written because of my fear of non-elected bureaucrats, convinced of their superior knowledge, who assume extralegal powers. They are not, as one would expect in a democracy, kept in check by the media. The powers of the state are awesome and must be thwarted. History tells of democracies degrading into autocracies. Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel, in an interview with German novelist Georg Klein on December 10, 2004, compared Nazism to Communism, that in both their philosophies “the end justifies the means.” That cannot happen to us.

 

As many have written, from both sides of the political divide, democracy is fragile. The French author Georges Bernanos (1888-1948) is quoted in his posthumous book Why Freedom?: “The first sign of corruption, in a society that is still alive, is that the end justifies the means.” Once shredded, democracy is not easily repaired. The means government uses to accomplish its goals must be forthright; they must reflect respect for the individual and the standards of civil behavior. Regardless of one’s political leanings, I trust the issue of accountability and integrity in government is something about which we all remain vigilant.

 

……………………………………………………………………..

 

In the meantime, I thank you for your patience with my rantings over the past year; I wish for all the happiest of holidays and the healthiest of New Years. 

"Generations"

 Dear Reader,

 

Your expressions of concern have been appreciated, even when I have not responded. Typing is still difficult, though I can now use (awkwardly) both hands. The attached essay was begun before my fall, thus easier to complete. 

 

I recognize there are software products that allow dictation, but not being one who speaks, let alone writes, in complete sentences, they are less helpful to me. I constantly revise what I have written, even to the extent of moving around sentences and paragraphs, often to the delete file. And I don’t want to confuse Siri. 

 

While my shoulder is improving and its range of motion is better than it was, it will be at least another week or two before my next TOTD is finished. The working title is “Conformity – The Death Knell for Freedom.”

 

Thanks for your patience and understanding. I hope you enjoy this essay.

 

Best regards,

 

Sydney

 

Sydney M. Williams

 

Essay from Essex

“Generations”

March 26, 2022

 

“Every generation laughs at the old fashions but follows religiously the new.”

                                                                                                                Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862)

                                                                                                                Walden, 1854

 

If we are lucky, we know five generations: grandparents, parents, ours, our children and grandchildren. Together, those lives cover over 200 years. I knew all my grandparents. My maternal grandfather died at age 68 in 1947. I remember him but not well. The first born of my grandparents, my paternal grandfather, was born in 1873 and died just shy of his 90^th birthday in 1963. The youngest, my maternal grandmother, was born in 1888, but succumbed to cancer in 1961 at age 72. My paternal grandmother, born in 1875, lived the longest. She met two of our three children and lived to see Neil Armstrong walk on the moon in July 1969, dying two months later. Some of my ten grandchildren, all born in the first decade of the 21^st Century, may live to see the 22^nd.

 

As children, we heard stories of the past and dreamt of what lay ahead; now, as grandparents, we dwell on what was and pray the future will be good for our children and grandchildren. It is parents who provide stability, as Kahlil Gibran wrote in The Prophet: “You are the bows from which your children as living arrows are sent forth.”  It is in children that opportunity flourishes: “The young do not know enough to be prudent, and therefore they attempt the impossible – and achieve it, generation after generation,” wrote Pearl Buck in The Goddess Abides.

 

My paternal grandfather was born 149 years ago, twenty years before the first gasoline-powered car was road tested by the Duryea brothers of Springfield, Massachusetts. The first subway in the U.S. was opened in Boston (where he lived) in 1897, three years after he had graduated from Harvard College. Politically, his life spanned the Presidencies of Ulysses Grant to John F. Kennedy. Militarily, his life witnessed the Battle of the Little Bighorn, Wounded Knee, the Spanish American War, World War I, World War II, Korea, and he saw the first Marines sent to South Vietnam. He was nine when Thomas Edison formed the Edison Electric Illuminating Company in New York but was 52 before half the homes in the United States had electricity. He was 30 when Orville and Wilbur Wright flew the Kitty Hawk Flyer in Kitty Hawk, North Carolina. He was 78 when the British De Havilland Comet made the first commercial jet flight from London to Johannesburg. During his lifetime, the nation went from horse and carriage to automobiles, from Jim Crow to Civil Rights, from twice daily newspapers to network television news. His wife, my grandmother, was refused a degree from M.I.T. because she was a woman, despite six years of study during the late 1890s and early 1900s. She was forty-five before the 19^th Amendment was ratified, giving her the right to vote. Yet her granddaughters all graduated from college and were eligible to vote on their 21^st birthdays. There is much accomplishment in a person’s life.

 

While my grandparents, early on, lived 19^th Century lives, a period about which we read, our grandchildren will live lives unimaginable to us on their final lap. Generations allow us to personalize history – to read of an era in which our parents and grandparents lived, knowing they were then as alive as we are now: They read newspapers and books, discussed world events, played sports, visited friends, loved their spouses and families and experienced all the emotions we now feel – love, hurt, want, envy, passion, desire, joy, drive, trust and distrust. Each generation has its time to be alive, to laugh and cry, to work and to play, and to rest and recover. We should remember that our grandparents were grandchildren to those born in the early years of the Republic. George Washington, Harriet Tubman, Susan B. Anthony and Abraham Lincoln are not just names in history books, but were once living, breathing souls.

 

The view in the rearview mirror is clearer than the fog that envelopes the road ahead. With grandchildren, one wonders, what lies ahead? Will telecommuting become common and cities lose populations? Will knowledge of one’s genetic profile permit personalized medicine? Will self-driving cars obviate the need to learn to drive? Will genetically engineered plants lower food costs? Will a sharing economy replace the concept of private property? Will we be subject to the whims of someone or some agency that determines what we consume? As the amount of knowledge in the world increases, will the forest be lost for the trees?

 

Now in my 80s, I look back to find answers, knowing that human character doesn’t change – that good and evil always exist. I think of personal lessons learned, which lend credence to the observation that wisdom is gained through experience, not instruction: Of being admonished by my maternal grandmother to remember my grandfather who had recently died – for when you do, she said, he will live on in your memory. I think of the hurt inflicted on a young woman, when in the 8^th grade I refused her invitation at a Sadie Hawkins dance, because she was not deemed pretty. Or the unprompted advice from a stranger, when at a gas station in my 1947 Ford, in the mid 1950s: don’t drive so fast along New Hampshire’s back roads! I recall a lesson from my boss Doug Wilmott in the summer of 1960. Growing homesick while working with a prospecting crew in Canada’s Northwest Territories, I told him I wanted to go home. He quietly assured me of the value of persistence in building self-confidence. 

 

Mankind’s situation has improved over generations. A November 30, 1895 diary entry of a then eighty-five-year-old great-great grandfather reads: “It is difficult, even now, for us of the present generation to fully realize that so short a time ago, comparatively speaking, the very spot where we now reside, enjoying all the luxuries of a refined generation, was the home of ignorant savages. How much more surprising and interesting will this fact be to our children and descendants one of these days, if they can have such reliable accounts to refer to as it is here proposed to give them.” (His reference was to a proposed biography of his late wife’s great grandfather, Samuel Welles, who had purchased Indian lands in Natick and West Newton, Massachusetts in 1763.) Knowledge of the past, mixed with inherited values, leads to understanding.

 

I believe the reason we are here is to lead a happy, constructive and purposeful life. Along the way, we can familiarize our descendants with their antecedents, as each of us is a cog in a continuum of generations that bind us to the past even as we are projected into the future. My grandchildren have dreams – the future is theirs, even though they cannot control it. As Gandalf says to Frodo in The Fellowship of the Ring, “All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.” Above all, I hope they find happiness, with someone to love and to love them back, as they, in turn, become parents and grandparents. I pray their lives will be happy, motivated and peaceful. We should cherish the generations.

"Friendships - Old and New"

                                                                     Sydney M. Williams

Essay from Essex

“Friendships – Old and New”

December 18, 2021

 

“’Friendship,’ said Christopher Robin, ‘is a very comforting thing to have.’”

                                                                                                                                Winnie the Pooh, 1926

             A.A. Milne (1882-1956)

 

An unexpected benefit of writing essays has been old friends retained and new friends made. With an e-mail list that approaches two thousand, included are friends who go back to boarding school days, a few from college, and from my first job on Wall Street with Merrill Lynch in 1967, to my last at Monness, Crespi, Hardt & Co., from which I retired in 2015. While not everyone agrees with my political opinions, they tolerate my right to express them. Some on the list are friends of friends and even friends of those friends. Many I have never met but hearing from them is pleasurable, as they are provocative and energizing. In a letter to Lidian Jackson Emerson, wife of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau wrote: “Nothing makes the earth seem so spacious as to have friends at a distance; they make the latitudes and the longitudes.” In my case, I don’t think of latitudes and longitudes; what I do think is that friends make the world smaller and more intimate – a happier and better place.

 

Some of my more personal Essays from Essex are based on nostalgia – that time cleanses memory of past unpleasantness. Quoting studies by Professor Clay Routledge, a psychologist at North Dakota State University, Elizabeth Bernstein wrote in the November 17, 2021 issue of The Wall Street Journal: “Nostalgia increases positive mood, self-esteem and self-confidence…It makes us feel more socially connected and optimistic. It helps us feel that life has more meaning.” Recently, I attended a lunch with a few alumni from Williston Academy, three of whom were 1959 classmates. While our genetic determinants are decided at conception, our character is molded over time, especially in our early years, from families, friends and school. So, it is unsurprising that we prize returning to those days when our identity was being formed. Each of us is unique, but we share certain of life’s experiences, like teachers, coaches, bosses and even drill sergeants. A shared past allows us to recollect, companionably, of former times. 

 

Friendship is a non-obligatory, reciprocated relationship between two people who share common interests. Most of us have friends, orbiting different spheres. For example, I have school friends, work friends, friends with whom I skied, friends my wife and I see in Florida, or on the New Jersey shore where we go in August. My wife and I have friends at Essex Meadows, where we now live. I have friends with whom I enjoy ROMEO (retired old men eating out) lunches, and friends from volunteering at local organizations. Friendships outlast separation. In his collection of essays Autocrat at the Breakfast Table, Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote: “I was going to say, when I was interrupted…” The interruption to which he referred had occurred twenty-five years earlier. That quote would come to mind during my first evening in Vail with skiing friends, when the conversation would pick up just where it had left off a year earlier. 

 

“To be without friends is a serious form of poverty,” speaks Victor Moore as Aloysius T. McKeever in Roy Del Ruth’s 1947 comedy, It Happened on Fifth Avenue. He is right, and I am fortunate to have all of you as friends, as well as a wife who is my best friend – and has been for almost sixty years.

 

Thank you for your friendship, and I wish you the best for the Holidays and for all of the New Year.