God bless America

This morning Aidan and I walked Perry to Campbell park, because the pounding surf had taken over the beach at high tide. I threw the ball down the field that was nearly misty from the salt spray off the waves as Aidan climbed the steep hill and slid down on his back, his laughter echoing into the empty morning. We came home, not seeing a single car along the road (but several people walking their dogs) and I found out from the GMU email about the shootings at Virginia Tech this morning. I am more than a world away from that place, and yet just yesterday (or how ever you figure it), I was in the raucous world of the US. What is it about the US that makes it take up so much space in the world? As someone who lives with one foot in that enormous place and one foot in this little one, I’m constantly puzzled by which differences are the most central ones, which differences make for the power distinctions, which ones mean some countries rule the world and others don’t. Once Rome ruled the world, and once England did, a country roughly the same size as this one. And Canada, which is huge, never has. So it’s not all about size. I’ll give you a glimpse of the US I’d never seen before, from my dinner reception Thursday night. Maybe there are clues here.

Mom and I had both been invited to a reception (at different times and for slightly different reasons) for a bunch of fellowship recipients at the Center for Public Leadership at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard. Mom was keen to go, and I was dutiful. And so we met, me in a cab after class day and a dinner out with my teaching team, Mom in her car after a full day. We parked her car on a street packed with limos and crawling with men in dark suits talking into their sleeves. I figured there was more firepower surrounding that house than there were in some Civil War battles. We walked past the various guards, hoping they wouldn’t shoot us, and into a mansion in a part of DC I’d never been to before, and we discovered a place so over-the-top American that I knew I wasn’t in Paekakariki anymore. Here were the power elite—a big-wig admiral, the leaders of industry, a supreme court justice. Screwing up our nerve to enter into the parlor where the power people were talking, Mom and I decided that we would walk in casually and then find a space in the room to talk to one another so that we wouldn’t look like friendless losers. But to get in the door, we had to walk past the smartly-uniformed Admiral, who stuck out his hand and said warmly, “I don’t think I know you ladies.” No, I don’t think he did.

And he was warm and inviting, and so Mom and I found ourselves deep in conversation with the Admiral. When the Fellows joined us (from a meeting they were having in the other room), one came right up to me and said, “Hello professor. You were my teacher at Harvard on Monday,” and then and over the course of the night, we had a lovely talk about Kegan and development and doctors (this guy is a surgeon who will try to revamp the teaching of surgery, in part using adult development techniques). We stayed in the Admiral’s circle, as he talked about his days as a midshipman seconded to the New Zealand Royal Navy and the lovely places he’d seen. He told us about the shame of the NZ people’s decision not to let nuclear weapons into the harbours here, and shook his head in disbelief or sadness about how even once the warheads were removed, still the US couldn’t come because the NZers wouldn’t allow nuclear engines, either. As he talked, others joined the group and he smiled and took their compliments with real pleasure and grace. And when one of the fellows, an Italian woman who might have been just a little tipsy already, asked if I was the Admiral’s wife (the 30 year age difference between us being fairly standard in that room anyway), he smiled, shook his head and continued on with the New Zealand context, about how he was meeting with Helen Clarke a few weeks ago about this very issue. “The New Zealand people are only hurting themselves,” he said sadly, “by not allowing us to protect and partner with them.” I shook my head with some unidentifiable emotion, thinking about all of the dreadfully sad Kiwis who are crushed not to have US sailors walking through their cities, despairing that the US won’t come to their rescue when New Zealand faces its inevitable conflict with, er, one of its many enemies. But I digress.

There were speeches by famous people and by the fellows and several times I came quite close to giggles. I was taken back to years on Harvard admissions committees, where it became mind-numbing to read the applications of people who had not only done brilliantly at school but had spent their summers working to isolate key pieces of the DNA in breast cancer and their weekends making brownies to deliver to homeless people. It isn’t funny, of course, really it’s very impressive and wonderful, but it always makes me ask about whether it is at all possible to be too accomplished. While I was thinking these scandalous thoughts, a tousle-headed handsome man in front of me tried to push his way to the back of the room, but found himself trapped in the front. Finally he turned and whispered for me to switch places with him and afterwards thanked me and said he felt too exposed. My friend Loren (who had invited us), explained that this fellow was a writer for the New Yorker, working for the last 6 months on a biographical story about the man who had funded the fellowship. This impressed me even more than the story of the fellow who had been one of six in history who had won highest honours at West Point for both leadership and also scholarship and then had gone to Iraq and come back before using this fellowship to get two degrees from Harvard. I love the New Yorker—those guys can write!

Then I found myself standing in line next to a beautiful young woman who was laughing that it was way past the time she and her kids usually sit down for mac and cheese for dinner. We began talking about her kids and about how mothering has changed her life. I asked what she was doing here instead of at home reading to her daughters, and she said that she and her husband, George Stephanopoulos come to parties like this sometimes. I said I supposed that would be true.

I sat down next to Mom at a table set up in the library, and found myself wondering who the old man was at the table—knew he must be famous or rich (or both) to be in this crowd surrounded by eager Harvard fellows. There were lawyer jokes and jokes about how distinctive his organization must be with just the 12 of them and all, and I realized that here was the Supreme Court justice (Breyer, as it turned out). He was a lovely man, gracious but without the ease of the Admiral, and offered the fellows helpful pieces of advice like “You never know what’s going to happen next so stop pretending you do,” and “Everyone always looks for his own name and ignores yours, so don’t feel so exposed like you’re the centre of the world.” He talked about buying his grandchildren too many toys and getting in trouble with his daughter. He talked about keeping a moral centre in difficult circumstances, and about how you’re always from where you’re from. And we talked about adult development (because the surgeon who had been in my class Monday wanted to talk about it) and about the law about business and random things. And then we went our separate ways and had—and I kid you not, and this is really saying something—the best brownies I’ve ever eaten in my whole life.

These were the richest, most powerful people I have ever spent time with, and I began to get clear that they actually inhabit a world as different from the US world I used to inhabit as DC is from NZ (only with less travel time). The social rules are different, the whole question of what is possible is different. The scope and scale of everything is different if you can pick up the phone and get an admiral and a supreme court justice to your house for dinner. Zowie.

And somehow this relates to the shootings at Virginia Tech in a way I have not yet begun to understand. There is something about the existence of people and parties like the one I went to on Thursday that is connected to the fact that in the US, people are so frustrated and crazed and powerless that they sometimes walk into schools or post offices or McDonalds and begin to shoot people. I do not understand either extreme. And so I walk on the beach here and think about my life there and the lives in the US I do not understand and how they change me even by their existence. Today those who love students or faculty at Virginia Tech will be terrified and some will be mourning and many will point fingers and talk about how it should have been prevented. And in other places, people will go to McDonalds and go to school and hug their children and work too many hours and live their lives unchanged, but somehow a part of all of these forces. And the tides will come in and the sun will rise and set and the clouds will form, fill, and empty. Today I will bake cookies and pack for a holiday with my family and calm sibling feuds. And I will wonder how I contribute to these systems too, in my presence and in my absence.