Writing Boots

“Has there ever been a time in recent US history when things were actually good?” a young speechwriter asks on Facebook. “I’m looking back and it seems like whenever there wasn’t a war, there was a recession, and whenever there wasn’t a recession, there was some disaster or another, and when there wasn’t some disaster or another, massive amounts of people were still being denied basic human rights or suffering for one reason or another. It’s incredible to think that today, June 27, 2022 is the best time in history to be an American but… is it???”

As we ease into another Independence Day weekend and ask ourselves we want to celebrate our nation or drink to forget it—seems like a good time to leave here an essay I wrote four years ago, An American Prayer: In Conversation With My Dead Father. It begins:

My father’s been gone almost 10 years.

On the Fourth of July, I cannot decide whether I want to wake him up to tell him all about the national calamity, or let him sleep, and spare him the pain.

I think I’m going to wake him up.

My spirituality is like a lot of people’s, I think: The closest touch we have with God is the memory of our beloved dead, after we have washed them and groomed them and dressed them and arranged their quiet hands. And the closest thing to prayer is the conversations we have with them, still.

And I feel like praying today.

Off next week, back July 11.

The night after I saw the mind-boggling documentary about a group of young women whose guts and guile and selfless, single-minded sacrifice allowed them to perform something like 10,000 relatively safe abortions in Chicago in the years immediately before Roe v. Wade made them legal …

… I spotted this headline in The New York Times: “Companies Scramble to Work Out Policies Related to Employee Abortions.”

Like, how to make it so you don’t need to ask your boss for time and money to have an abortion. How to avoid alienating many customers, who will see your policy as pro-abortion activism. And how to withstand inevitable endless lawsuits from anti-abortion people and politicians.

The Times reporter concluded hopefully that “some executives seemed prepared for it,” quoting Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff, who tweeted last Friday: “I believe CEOs have a responsibility to take care of their employees—no matter what.”

Did no CEO, ever.

Having watched the behavior of CEOs over the last 30 years, guts and guile and selfless, single-minded sacrifice would not be how I would describe it.

I’m glad CEOs are talking this way. But they’re going to need support—probably in the form of tough love, at the end of a whip.

Or as Gloria Steinem put it this week, “I expect to see them do what we make them do.”