Back to Normal

I went to sleep last night with tears in my eyes, thinking about Tim Walz and Kamala Harris. What struck me was something simple yet wonderful. All we have to do is elect them, and we can get back to normal. That, I think, should be the Dems slogan for this campaign: simple, but absolutely necessary.

Harris represents our most important national credo: equality. It was right up front in our Declaration of Independence: “all . . . are created equal.” We’ve never fully implemented it, but we’ve made great progress. We are closer now to making it real than ever before, and everybody senses it.

But there’s another credo that we Americans once held dear and recently have lost sight of. We once were a country of normal people leading extraordinary lives. Our lives were full and gratifying because of the simple virtues. We were strong and brave, yes. But we also calm, smart, decent and kind. Walz represents those virtues like few other pols I’ve ever seen.

I didn’t know who he was until just weeks ago. Then I saw an interview on PBS. (Sorry, I can’t locate the link while traveling; it’s been buried by recent news.)

That interview, before his selection as VP, was a must see, a revelation, a wake-up call. As I watched Walz speak, my blood pressure dropped. Admiration replaced angst. This is what we used to be like, and can again.

Normalcy is not overrated. It’s what every sick, angry, stressed, aggrieved and resentful person most wants. It’s the baseline for a good life. We Americans once had it in our culture, and we can again.

Or we can become more like Russia. I was there, in Moscow, on fellowship, as Russia, too, once strove for normalcy. In 1993, I was the first-ever American law professor to teach at the Moscow State Institute of International Relations (“MGIMO” in the Russian acronym). That’s the feeder school for the Russian foreign service and its feared security services, where Putin had gotten his higher training years before.

Before I arrived, Boris Yeltsin had stood on a tank outside the Russian Parliament Building and faced down a right-wing putsch. The great “Russian Spring” was just starting. MGIMO has just “retired” its teacher of “Socialist Economics” and had started teaching real economics. At a Moscow street market, I bought a Russian-language copy of Paul Samuelson’s two-volume text on economic science and donated it to the MGIMO library.

Yeltsin was unique in Russia’s closed Soviet hierarchy. As a young man, he had literally “ridden the rails” around Russia, like a hobo, discovering his huge nation and its diverse people. He later wrote a book about it, entitled “Sermon on a Given Theme.” That book got him elected president, and he pronounced the goal of making Russia “a normal country.”

Unfortunately, he failed. Today’s Russia, under Putin, is anything but normal. Life is hard there for everyone. All Russians are forced—by the authorities or by circumstances—to live hard lives of deprivation and sacrifice. Russia’s minorities, mostly in the Far East, are being sent, poorly trained and poorly equipped, into battle in Ukraine. There they die in combat. Their bodies are shipped back across the huge Eurasian continent to ever-filling graveyards.

All that hate, fear, harm, and suffering for one’s man’s ego and twisted “vision.”

This is not normal. It’s like our catastrophic misadventure in Vietnam, but on steroids.

If we make the wrong choice in this election, was can be like that again. We can sacrifice our principles, our quiet lives, our progress and our normalcy on the altar of one man’s deranged ego.

Or we can follow our hearts and our principles back to normalcy with Harris and Walz. We can love our children—and our cats—and give them the normal, quiet, lives of constant improvement and hope that we Americans once took for granted. We can be kind, confident, and helpful. We can love our neighbors and our enemies, and raise up the downtrodden, as Jesus once advised, and as our so-called “Evangelical Christians” seem to have forgotten. Back to normal. That should be the Dems’ slogan and our national goal for this election. Let’s leave the hate, revenge, retribution (for what?) and chaos behind.


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