Charles Dickens’ nineteenth century classic A Christmas Carol remains an admonition to stay alert to the plight of fellow travelers on the road of life.  It is ever useful because then as now, we tend to wear social blinders or get stuck in our lanes.  Depending on our neighborhood or profession, those in need may be nearly invisible to us.  We may see right through them – or past them.  Just as those original Christmas travelers, Mary and Joseph, were invisible to the innkeepers who had a full house.
 
In this season when we try to sharpen our vision and fortify our bowels, let’s consider assisting some of the literal travelers on the road of life:  Afghan refugees.  Since our country’s withdrawal from Afghanistan, thousands have fled the Taliban and sought refuge here and abroad.  In my home state of little Rhode Island, we are welcoming 250 Afghanis (mostly families), and though there was no “Afghan community” here to speak of before the August crisis, there is now.  That’s thanks to the work of Dorcas International, a nonsectarian outreach group, which has dedicated itself to refugee resettlement, and making a home for the stranger. 

Afghani refugees are grateful.  Former US interpreter for the armed forces Amin Faqiri, arrived in Providence with his family in October, and says with a big smile, “I am starting over, like a newborn baby.”  In many ways, it’s the best time ever to be an immigrant.  Restaurants are desperate for staff.  Manufacturing plants need workers.  Construction sites seek carpenters.  Groups like Dorcas International try to position these legally admitted newcomers for success in their new homeland.  With both a professional staff and LOTS of volunteers, they arrange for apartments, for English language classes, for vocational training in carpentry and the trades, enrollment of children in schools, and family assistance with grocery shopping, as the newcomers get their feet on the ground.  The needs are immense, but the folks from Dorcas and many other non-profit and church groups are there to welcome the “poor, tired, and hungry yearning to breathe free.”

But what about the poor, tired, and hungry who are here on our own shores already?  The everyday Americans, who often, because of bad fortune or drug addiction or alcohol or mental illness or domestic abuse have lost their way and are on the streets?  We cannot walk through our cities without being aware of the homeless:  folks with their carts and their pets, with a pleading sign, and a hand extended.  Nearly half a million of our fellow countrymen are homeless. On the Core Virtues site, we’ve featured the slender middle school novel Stay (by Bobby Pyron), which shines a light on those who live in Emergency Shelters and/or public parks.  And we feature some moving picture books as well.  When addressing the problem of homelessness, there are state and federal initiatives to be sure, but the national tradition of voluntarism and what used to be called “benevolent institutions” is still active and a way to extend a hand.  This is the time of year to support the work of non-profit, non-partisan groups like the National Alliance to End Homelessness and the Salvation Army.  Our personal contributions and turning the attention of our students to those these groups serve is a way to keep the spirit of the holidays.
​
The holidays are a time “when Want is keenly felt and Abundance rejoices,” two bell ringers tell Scrooge.  His “bah-humbug” echoes in our ears.  But the miser became a changed man following that Christmas Eve journey, and it was always said “that he knew how to keep Christmas well.”  May we too know how to keep the spirit of the holidays well even beyond the holidays. 

​Thanksgiving is a uniquely American holiday, and if we didn’t have it because of 1621, Squanto, the Pilgrims, Sarah Buell Hale, and Abraham Lincoln, we’d have to (re)invent it. Because that fourth Thursday in November grounds us in a higher reality and builds bonds of community. Thanksgiving reminds each one of us that we are not uniquely responsible for our own accomplishments and successes.  That we are helped along the way by others.  That we are the humble recipients of many gifts freely given, and that we are connected in a great web of giving to each other.  And all that inspires affection, awe, joy, and thankfulness.  

To see how innately human this desire to express gratitude is, just watch this wondrous clip of a toddler hearing a violin for the first time.    Then watch it again, and again, and again. 

So much in our daily lives turns us in upon ourselves as each undertakes “the pursuit of happiness.” Ours is a seagull society – one in which “me-me-me” is the shrill cry heard from all sides. The iconic American essayists, Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau urged their readers to “insist on yourself; never imitate” and be alert to “a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears.”  Modern gurus encourage contemporary pilgrims to shun ties that bind and “seek your bliss.”  

In rebuke, stands our annual day of Thanksgiving – which recalls both an extraordinary historical event of fellowship four hundred years ago and the deeply human need to give thanks. In that fall of 1621 English settlers and native people celebrated their shared endeavor of the harvest with some ninety Wampanoags and their King Massasoit joining Pilgrim settlers "that we might after a more special manner rejoice together." 

On this four hundredth anniversary of the first Thanksgiving, our primary focus with elementary school children should not be on historical irony that breeds cynicism (“Wampanoags Regret Helping Pilgrims”), but on how each of us is lifted up, bound, and made part of something larger by giving thanks.  

Mary Beth Klee  

For more reflections on the importance of gratitude as an attitude,  read Robert Emmons, the world’s leading expert on gratitude here. 

How did we get here?  That musing, which goes right to the heart of the human search for meaning, became an increasingly literal question last month.  How did we human beings get here – to the American continents? 
 
For more than a century, scientists have speculated that when massive ice sheets began to melt at the end of the last Ice Age (c. 20,000 years ago) humans crossed a newly exposed land bridge in pursuit of their animal prey.  They migrated from Eurasia to the Americas and eventually peopled the northern and southern continents.  Settlement took time, and humans were not imagined to be in the Americas more than thirteen thousand years ago.  But that date has been under fire.  And last month some hauntingly well-preserved footprints in White Sands, New Mexico and some dogged researchers threw all that into doubt.

The Journal of Science reported that a rich array of human tracks uncovered in the White Sands National Park have now been dated to 21,000-23,000 years ago.  The process of documentation was painstaking and the supporting evidence impressive. Yet glacial ice-sheets would still have covered the North American crossing at that point.  So, were humans already in the Americas before the end of the last Ice Age? It sure looks like it, according to lead geologist Michael Bennett and the fifteen co-authors of the blockbuster study. Two thousand years before.
 
The White Sands findings are stunning because the tracks are so undeniably human, so numerous, and have lent themselves to scrupulous radiocarbon dating protocols.  Their discovery comes on the heels of earlier discoveries that hinted at human settlement long before thirteen thousand years ago in Mexico and as far south as Chile.  So, did humans find little known land routes from Eurasia to America before an ice wall closed off the two continents? Or was the land bridge itself exposed thirty thousand years ago, and might hunter humans have crossed before a wall of ice separated the continents?  Or did early humans come by sea? The new findings open new mysteries.  A paradigm shift is underway. ​

As children return to school this fall – in the time of Covid – teachers once again attempt to cultivate the virtue of respect.  Every year in Core Virtues schools, our September focus is on treating others with high regard -- regardless of their race, creed, ethnicity, age, economic circumstance, physical disability, or anything else.  In past years it seemed easier to model respect as a self-evident human excellence. Most teachers love teaching kids to see beyond genetic attributes or economic circumstances.  We love the stirring picture books that encourage children to focus on the real person, disregarding externals.  The picture books we feature in September -- Strictly No Elephants or Carla’s Sandwich -- make the point, celebrating individual essence and even quirkiness. 
 
But in the time of Covid, respect for others—particularly for their choices, their thoughts, their intentions—is hard to cultivate.   The pandemic has afforded a new gift and challenge.  How do we cultivate respect for those who have different ideas?  What if I believe that your ideas and choices endanger my health?  Or what if you believe that my ideas and choices imperil normal child development and even education?  How do we stave off mutual contempt?  For contempt is the sworn enemy of respect.
 
The challenge is daunting, particularly regarding masks in schools.  This year, in schools where masks are required, teachers will have to interact respectfully with parents (and students) who find the mandate injurious to their children’s education and to civil liberty.  In schools where masks are optional, teachers will have to deal respectfully with parents (and students) who find the choice to unmask irresponsible and a threat to their health.  Teachers will have to model respect for both choices as legitimate, keeping their opinions to themselves. 
 
That’s very hard.  But there has never been a better opportunity to practice what we preach:  respect for dignity of the human person in all our diversity – even (and especially) diversity of thought, point of view. 
 
Perhaps one virtue that will help us model that respect is humility.  We are living in complex (and as we’ve been told repeatedly) unprecedented times.  Our death toll (as a percentage of the population) does not yet rival the bubonic plague.  But we are surpassing 1918 mortality rates, and in new territory with this extended, morphing international disease.  We don’t know what we don’t know.  We’re not sure of the evolution of this disease, and we’re not even sure of the long-term effects of our choices.  There are no “twenty years out” studies.  The only thing we know for sure is that much of what we currently believe will turn out to be incorrect. That has been the case historically for medical practices, pandemics, and public health.
 
So, rather than demonizing the other, let’s practice listening to those with different views. We might learn something.  If not, let's practice saying: “Thank you for helping me understand your thinking on this.  I’m not in the same place, but I'm grateful you shared that point of view."

​The novel, Love in the Time of Cholera, had a cult following.  It’s time for a new novel:   Respect in the Time of Covid.  

​Mary Beth Klee, Ph.D.

Author of the recently published novel, Old Abe, John Cribb (Core Virtues Foundation Trustee) offered the following reflections on America's Independence Day at RealClearPolitics.com on July 4, 2021.

In five years, on July 4, 2026, Americans will observe the 250th anniversary of our nation’s founding, a milestone that carries a somewhat awkward name: the semiquincentennial.

Those old enough to remember our nation’s 200th birthday in 1976 know the bicentennial was a months-long celebration full of parades, fireworks, and tall ships. The country had recently struggled through the Vietnam War, Watergate, recession, and an energy crisis, but Americans came together to pay tribute to the American Revolution.
 
As Gerald Ford observed in Philadelphia on Independence Day 1976, it was a time for “both pride and humility, rejoicing and reverence,” a day to reflect that, for our nation’s founders, “when liberty was at stake, they were willing to pay the price.”

If we don’t watch it, we may be headed toward something quite different in 2026. The last few years have brought arguments that the American founding wasn’t so great after all and that the founders were just a bunch of old white men who talked about freedom but instituted slavery and racism.

Some students are being taught that the real founding was not 1776 but 1619, the year the first enslaved Africans arrived in Virginia. A National Archives task force recently cited the Archives’ own rotunda, where the Declaration of Independence, Constitution and other founding documents are displayed, as an example of “structural racism.”
 
If this line of thinking wins the day, 2026 will be a year-long scowling at America’s past. That would be wrong, not only because our country deserves better, but because a nation that learns to loathe itself is in deep trouble.

What to do? Abraham Lincoln offered some excellent guidance in a speech he gave in Chicago in July 1858, just a few weeks before the famous Lincoln-Douglas debates. He used the occasion to give his thoughts on the founding, the Declaration of Independence, and the importance of celebrating July Fourth.

Lincoln never hesitated to address head-on the issue of slavery and the founding. He explained that the founders knew slavery was wrong, but they did not believe they could fight a war against one of the greatest military powers on earth, launch a new nation, hold 13 new states together, and get rid of slavery all at the same time. It was too large a task.

What they could and did do, however, was lay down principles in the Declaration of Independence that spelled the doom of slavery—the ideals that all men are created equal and endowed by their creator with the rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

The declaration of those principles, coming at a time when the vast majority of people on earth lived with little or no freedom, was a magnificent step forward. For the first time in history, a nation was created out of the idea that all should be free and govern themselves.

Those founding principles were a promise. They stood, and still stand, as beacons for the country to move toward.

In one sense, the founding was thus tragically flawed by slavery. In another sense, it was the glorious start of a long journey that has brought hope and freedom to millions.

Lincoln knew the founders were far from perfect, but he also knew they were an extraordinary generation of leaders, perhaps the most extraordinary in history. He called them “iron men” and saw much to admire in them.

He pointed out that few of us are descended by blood from those founders, but we are all their descendants in that we have inherited the ideals they fought for. “That is the electric cord in that Declaration that links the hearts of patriotic and liberty-loving men together,” Lincoln said, “that will link those patriotic hearts as long as the love of freedom exists in the minds of men throughout the world.”

Lincoln knew Fourth of July celebrations are part of the glue that holds us together. They remind us of how difficult it was to establish the principles underlying our democracy and win the liberty we enjoy. They help us, Lincoln said, “feel more attached to one another, and more firmly bound to the country we inhabit.”

In other words, the Fourth of July builds patriotism, love of country.

If they were here today, Abraham Lincoln and Jerry Ford would no doubt both say let’s have a grand semiquincentennial party in 2026. And they would no doubt push back hard against the idea that the American founding was anything but a miracle.

Americans need to do the same in their children’s schools, on college campuses, in town halls and in legislatures. We need to push back hard against the narrative that America’s history is mainly a story of racism and oppression.

Despite its faults and sins—and some of them, like slavery, have been grave—the American record stands tall. It is a brilliant, unparalleled story.

It is still true, as Gerald Ford said on Independence Day 1976, that “the United States today remains the most successful realization of humanity's universal hope.”

Five years from now, let’s come together for a joyful 250th birthday celebration full of patriotism and pride. We can start by lighting a candle this Fourth of July and remembering just how blessed we all are to live here.

John Cribb is the author of “Old Abe: A Novel,” published by Republic Books.

This article was published July 4, 2021 on realclearpolitics.com

Can rocks be a source of wonder, hope, and joy?  Two months ago I’d have said “not really.” But recent experience with national parks, helicopters, and the red planet have made me reconsider. 

Let’s begin with the greatest rock event on earth:  the Grand Canyon.  Two weeks ago my husband and I overflew this natural wonder in a helicopter.  Its majestic scale, eye-popping colors, and repeating symphony of sheer drops leave the viewer slack-jawed.  Consider its size:  fifteen miles wide, a whole mile deep, and two-hundred-seventy-five miles long. That’s bigger than the state of Rhode Island.  Visitors standing on the South Rim with coffee in hand for sunrise or overflying the North Rim while gripping the seats of their helicopter, try to take it all in and fail. Gorgeous gorges of stratified red, copper, ochre, and chalk white rise before them.  ​

And on the canyon floor one mile down, a gigantic volcanic rock lies exposed.  That coal black “Vishnu” rock is nearly two billion years old, and visitors can be forgiven for asking: “how did a Hindu god get into the Grand Canyon?” The answer is: U.S. geologist Clarence Dutton. Awed by the Canyon’s majesty in the 1880s, he felt it belonged to all.  He named its rock formations after deities and kings from around the world.

Vishnu evokes the Hindu god charged with preserving and protecting the earth. Isis, Osiris, Horus, Zoroaster, Solomon, Brahma, Apollo, Jupiter, and Diana are other temple-like mounts in the park, recalling ancient Egypt, Persia, Greece, Rome, and Biblical heroes.  China’s Confucius and India’s Buddha preside over their own temple buttes. The Viking world is represented on the “Valhalla Plateau” with Odin enthroned nearby.  “King Arthur’s Castle,” and “Holy Grail Temple” in the Canyon bring medieval imagination to life.

“I volunteer…” Many of us, who love our communities, work on committees, and seek a better world, know the power and burden of those two words.  “I do this task freely and without compensation. I front-burner an activity from which I derive no personal benefit, but helps my neighbor.”

Americans do a LOT of volunteering.  AmeriCorps (a federal agency) tracks the stats and found that nearly a third of the nation, a record 77 million citizens donated their time and talent to civic, charitable, and community initiatives in 2019.  Those efforts translated into 6.9 billion hours of work, and an estimated 167 billion dollars in economic value.  And that was just hands-on physical service.  It turns out that more than half of all Americans volunteer their money to charities. In other words, they donate.

Still, who knew that volunteers had a national month?  Recognized by the US Congress in 1990, April is National Volunteer Month.  The month has been set aside to honor those who give back and fortify the republic through their service.  Almost eighty million strong, the nation’s volunteers are now working as firefighters in many rural communities, staffing food pantries and soup kitchens, working in women’s shelters, spearheading litter clean-ups, delivering meals-on-wheels, transporting seniors, assisting veterans, tutoring children in schools, steering non-profit organizations, welcoming newborns, and literally giving of their own blood at Red Cross blood drives. 

As early as the 1830s, Alexis de Tocqueville flagged the spirit of “voluntarism” as a unique byproduct of the America's democratic society.  A democratic republic, he explained, a polity in which the people rule, is undergirded by the understanding that its citizens, as equals, shared a common enterprise.  “We’re all in this together.  It’s on us.” in  contemporary parlance.  Historically, American volunteers organized elections, built hospitals, prisons, schools, churches, libraries and much more. 
​
In contemporary life the tradition continues.  Municipal, state, and federal governments support much infrastructure, but organized volunteer community service and philanthropic giving thrives.  Today the number of non-profit organizations registered in the United States exceeds the number of citizens in Trinidad and Tobago. (The number is 1.6 million.) The themes of “getting involved” and “giving back” resound nationwide. 

Women’s History Month in March (so designated in 1987) comes on the heels of Black History Month in February (so designated in 1976).  These initiatives were intended to spotlight the contributions of huge swaths of the American population often ignored or marginalized in history books and in the classroom.  Since the 1970s, enormous strides have been made in correcting these oversights. Women’s Studies and African American Studies have become full-fledged disciplines in many universities and claimed a place in national history or social studies curricula. And in children’s literature, we are awash in glorious picture and chapter books celebrating exemplars of excellence from diverse backgrounds.  
 
Some worry that recent tendencies in American education to front-burner diversity are divisive.  “E pluribus unum” or “Out of many, one” our currency proclaims.  To the extent that we celebrate women’s lives and accomplishments, or black lives and accomplishments, or Hispanic lives and accomplishments, or Native American, are we diminishing our shared identity as Americans?  Are we encouraging a hyphenated society in which each group cherishes victimhood and prizes mainly its own contributions and wellbeing? Are we moving toward: “Out of one, many”? 

That’s a good question to ask in March when we showcase compassion as our core virtue.  Compassion is a virtue that unites.  The essence of that particular human excellence is, as the Latin root implies suffering with:  “com” meaning “with” and ‘pati” to suffer.  Compassion moves us to feel the pain of others and act to end their distress.  That virtue goes against strong drives in human nature toward self-interest (“me, me, ME”).  To the extent that each of us is able to enter into the experience of the other – with his or her own unique hurdles, gifts, and initiative – we can share their struggle, broaden our own understanding, grow in respect for others, and cultivate a sense of shared humanity.

Literature has been a historic vehicle for broadening hearts and opening eyes in this way.  One thinks of the astonishing impact of Uncle Tom’s Cabin in galvanizing public sentiment against slavery.  In the Core Virtues program our entire premise is that quality literature helps children get beyond themselves and fall in love with the good.  We are in the business of broadening minds and hearts by introducing children to the struggles and triumphs of their fellow citizens and human beings.