The power of the suggestive is much greater than the statement of reality.
C.W. Mundy
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Suggestion’s Subtle Gift
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Tag Archives: psychology
Photo Challenge: In a Land of Playful Awakening
The enzymes that bring Spring to life still lie dormant in Michigan, as we await our annual verdant awakening. But, soon the green shoots will sprout and local swimmers will take to the waters.
“Play is the answer to how anything new comes about.”
– Jean Piaget
Photo Challenge: Awakening
Fleming Creek, Michigan
Washtenaw County, Michigan
Reconciliation Is More Beautiful than Victory
Michigan lake
This date in 1865, the signal act of reconciliation in American history took place, in the dusty hamlet of Appomattox, Virginia. The last embers of the Civil War were dying, as had 625,000 soldiers, blue and gray. The courtly Southerner, Robert E. Lee, came to surrender his threadbare army, and he met the most unlikely of counterparts. Union General Ulysses S. Grant had been a clerk in a leather goods store when the war began. He wore his usual ordinary soldier’s coat, mud-spattered and distinguished only by the three stars in each lapel.
When the papers were signed, Lee thanked Grant for his surprisingly generous terms. Union soldiers watched respectfully as the gray-clad troops filed past; the order had come down from Grant that there was to be no celebration. Most importantly, the terms of surrender ensured that there would be no retribution against Confederate officers. Since General Grant, hero to the public in the North, had signed the document, the radicals and newspaper editorialists could shout for trials and vengeance until they were hoarse, but it would avail them nothing.
The previous month, in his Second Inaugural Address, President Lincoln had anticipated the war’s end with the words, with malice toward none, with charity for all. He pledged to bind up the nation’s wounds and to care for those who had borne the battle, and their widows and orphans. Nowhere did he distinguish between blue and gray soldiers.
The common wisdom might be that the Southerners were the beneficiaries of Grant and Lincoln’s generosity. The better view of reconciliation is found in the words of Shakespeare. The quality of mercy is not strained, the Bard wrote. It is twice blessed, blessing him that receives, but also he that gives. By choosing reconciliation, the victor eschews the darker, revengeful side of human nature. He is then touched, as Lincoln said, by the better angels of our nature. Given the fertile soil of accommodation, the slow process of evolutionary growth can proceed.
Significantly, with the abandonment of post-war Reconstruction, the promise of reconciliation was denied the freedmen, even the 180,000 who had fought valiantly in the Union Army. This retreat from equality remained a stain on the nation’s record for a century.
In recent decades, the simple, but profound message of the meeting between the aristocrat and the former store clerk at Appomattox Court House has been lost in the noxious atmosphere of American politics. Triumph at the polls is now the occasion for contempt, not respect, for the vanquished. The new majority arrogantly rams through its agenda without concern for the minority’s deeply held values. Reconciliation? How quaint. However, as Lincoln, Grant, and Lee knew, victory without reconciliation is a prescription for an endless cycle of rancor and revenge.
“Reconciliation is more beautiful than victory.”
Violeta Barrios de Chamorro, President of Nicaragua, 1990
Beauty, Unexpected
Sometimes the most beautiful thing is precisely the one that comes unexpectedly and unearned.”
Anna Freud
Fleming Creek, Michigan
Somewhere I Read of the Freedom of Speech
In bygone times, when you came across a political commentator you found annoying, the solution was to change the channel. Now, an online mob forms with the fervent intention of silencing the offending voice. To the cyber barricades! Hashtag campaigns, public shaming, boycott the advertisers! And ironically the mobs are often composed of those who label their opponents “authoritarian.” Ah, but the Constitution’s 45 word First Amendment and its resilient spirit of free speech has proven to be the most reliable bulwark against real authoritarians.
Dr. King: Hew out of the Mountain of Despair a Stone of Hope
April 4, 1968, America lost Dr. Martin Luther King to a sniper’s bullet. That evening, ignoring police warnings of violence, Robert Kennedy spoke to the black community of Indianapolis in the most heartfelt speech I have heard He spoke in words of anguish, yet he offered hope for America, thus echoing Dr. King’s call to “hew out of the mountain of despair a stone of hope.” While rage at Dr. King’s murder exploded into riots in scores of American cities, Indianapolis was spared violence. Perhaps because people there believed a leader actually cared? Robert Kennedy’s voice, though silenced 2 months later by an assassin, speaks to us today.
