The World is now Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood

The World is now Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood.

The daily educational program for children debuted on PBS in 1968, after two smaller runs – in 1961 with Misterogers on the CBC, and in 1966 with Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood on the Boston-based Eastern Educational Network, a forerunner to the Public Broadcasting Service. Every day, Fred Rogers would get home from work, put on a cardigan and sneakers, and talk to his neighbours, delivering lessons on friendship, love, kindness, acceptance, and more. Viewers were an important part of the neighborhood, too. Now, the world is a great social laboratory for putting the ideas and values of Fred Rogers into everyday practice in a time of life and death – a time of the continuous present, without past or future.

As the world hits bottom – which may paradoxically be when it hits the peak for COVID-19 cases, which in the United States, now the world epicentre of the coronavirus pandemic, may come in about two weeks time in mid-April – there will be, and already are around the world, early signs of recovery of a better us, and of a better world.

It is still both late days and early days simultaneously, but the 85-year-old argot of personal recovery can be applied now to public recovery, as well, I think: “One day at a time” and “just for today” should no longer be thought of as just private lifesaving advice for recovering alcoholics and addicts, but a public signpost for all for the rebuilding task that will be ahead, one person and one community at a time. The 12-step movement, dates back to June 1935, when Bill Wilson, a failed New York City stockbroker, and Dr. Bob Smith, an Akron, Ohio physician, both recently or newly sober (particularly Dr. Bob, although Bill W. wasn’t that many months ahead of him on the sobriety curve) became friends and Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) was born in Ohio. Both sayings, “one day at a time” and “just for today” are used interchangeably as both verbal slogans and written mottoes, the former coming from AA, and the latter, also a prayer to some, and a poem to others, from Narcotics Anonymous (NA), formed in 1953. They have proved useful as something pithy and easily grasped by the still-suffering in the early days of recovery, grasping for something tangible to hang onto for just one more second, minute, hour or day, grasping for those words every bit as much as a drowning person grasps for the rung on the ladder or life preserver.

Which is probably as good a description as any of the COVID-19 world we live in today, with a March that has birthed a dread spring in a month that seemingly never ends, where waking up every morning in March 2020 has been like having the voice of Capt. Jean-Luc Picard as a personal alarm clock inside my head, uttering such classic Star Trek lines as “damage report’ and “Red alert. All hands stand to battle stations” (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wV30YwXaKJg&feature=share&fbclid=IwAR1c8IoTcgboKQu3u12DNJ_rRNzvH6k0ZNDK3p3b3KLEGBIZLJ4ktx6XBMI).

Fortunately, Gene Roddenberry has been a reminder to me since 1966 that character, courage and goodness are not proprietary virtues of the religious, non-religious, believers or non-believers. We all can and do share in them. And we’re going to need those virtues, and all of us, believers and non-believers, in the days ahead. In this month of unbelievable sounds and images, where the next day’s sounds and images routinely exceeds the horror and scale of the previous day, two stand out for me, one very well known, the other not so much. The first is the image of the floating hospital United States Navy Ship (USNS) Comfort as it entered New York Harbor March 30 during the Biological Armageddon coronavirus pandemic response in New York City. Mike Segar’s photograph for Reuters illustrates why it is often said “a picture is worth a thousand words.”

Ordered to “lean forward,” a military term familiar to those who serve in the United States Navy, meaning the willingness to be aggressive, to take risks, the USNS Comfort (T-AH-20), homeported at Naval Station Norfolk, Virginia, sailed from port up the Atlantic seaboard Saturday. What those sailors, military doctors and nurses, officers, enlisted personnel and civilians aboard the Comfort must have been thinking as they answered the call of duty and sailed north into a Biological Armageddon. The Comfort will provide relief for New York hospitals by taking on non-COVID-19 cases and allowing the hospitals to focus on the most critical patients suffering from the virus.

The second that stands out for me is a brief audio clip I heard on Twitter March 24, the day after the “surge” hit New York City. Tim Mak is National Public Radio (NPR’s) Washington investigative correspondent – and an emergency medical technician (EMT), which is how he got the message. It is the most chilling on the pandemic I have heard to date. I think that’s because of both the subject matter, but also because there is something eerie about that electronically-generated voice on the automated message that went out:

“This an emergency message. This is a priority request for D.C. MRC volunteers (District of Columbia (DC) Medical Reserve Corps (DC MRC)…” (https://twitter.com/i/status/1241471610395267084)

The automated message went out March 21 to health care professionals in Washington, D.C.

The District of Columbia (DC) Medical Reserve Corps (DC MRC) supports the DC Department of Health (DC Health) in its role as lead for public health and medical emergency preparedness, response and recovery by recruiting, training, and deploying medical and non-medical volunteers to assist with planned events and emergencies.

Roddenberry, a Southern Baptist-turned humanist, held and spoke a truth held and spoken by another Southern Baptist, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., and others before him: the universe unfolds as it indeed should, and the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice. A perfect illustration of this is “Lower Decks,” the 167th episode of the series and the 15th episode of the seventh and final season, which originally aired on Feb. 7, 1994. With remarkable simplicity and brevity, these five sentences from Picard are offered in a ship-wide address from the captain’s ready room off the bridge when Ensign Sito Jaxa, a Bajoran Starfleet officer serving aboard the USS Enterprise, is killed on a covert mission in the line of duty (https://soundingsjohnbarker.wordpress.com/2018/09/24/church-of-star-trek-the-next-generation-and-the-moral-arc-of-the-universe/):

“‘To all Starfleet personnel, this is the Captain. It is my sad duty to inform you that a member of the crew, Ensign Sito Jaxa, has been lost in the line of duty. She was the finest example of a Starfleet officer, and a young woman of remarkable courage and strength of character. Her loss will be deeply felt by all who knew her. Picard out’.” (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=40XUt1HU5H8&feature=share)

Writing a decade after Bobby Kennedy’s assassination in his 1978  book, Robert Kennedy and His Times, the American historian, Arthur M. Schlesinger, commenting in the foreword, said Kennedy “possessed to an exceptional degree what T. S. Eliot called an ‘experiencing nature.’ History changed him, and, had time permitted, he might have changed history. His relationship to his age makes him, I believe, a ‘representative man’ in Emerson’s phrase – one who embodies the consciousness of an epoch, who perceives things in fresh lights and new connections, who exhibits unsuspected possibilities of purpose and action to his contemporaries.”

Such men and women arise from unexpected and unlikely places.

Abraham Lincoln, who in a speech delivered on June 17, 1858, at the close of the Republican state convention at the Illinois State Capitol in Springfield, reaching back to the first century and the words of the Apostle Saint Mark the Evangelist (“And if a house be divided against itself, that house cannot stand”) gave what would become one of the most famous speeches in American history.

Said Lincoln on that late spring day: “A house divided against itself cannot stand. I believe this government cannot endure permanently half slave and half free … It will become all one thing, or all the other.”

Five years later, he gave the most famous speech in American history. Republican President Abraham Lincoln’s 273-word “Gettysburg Address,” lasted less than two minutes, and was delivered at Gettysburg, Pennsylvania on Nov. 19, 1863. Edward Everett, the former senator and secretary of state – and brilliant Massachusetts orator – who, without notes for two hours, preceded President Lincoln in speaking at Gettysburg, gave a brilliant speech that day, as expected, but Lincoln happened to follow with what we now remember as the “Gettysburg Address.” Lincoln’s speech immediately struck a chord and remains the best-known speech in American history more than 150 years after it was given. Everett wrote a letter to Lincoln the day after their speeches, saying, “I should be glad, if I could flatter myself that I came as near to the central idea of the occasion, in two hours, as you did in two minutes.”

Said Lincoln that long-ago November day: “Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

“Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battle-field of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.

“But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate – we can not consecrate – we can not hallow — this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us – that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion – that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain – that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom – and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.” (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U2a-S3rjDBw&feature=share&fbclid=IwAR1LKNwMramCkVoodunLwy1SGqQFCBsejS5cLU9Q0TgVYPPPGs7pFUBxdJw)

I wrote about AIDS in the 1980s. And I remember the climate of fear in 1986 that reporters were not untouched by when we were assigned stories that meant going inside provincial reformatories and federal penitentiaries to interview HIV-positive prisoners in Ontario. The high callings of journalism are to speak truth to power, as well as comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable. But exactly how AIDS was transmitted in terms of morbidity and mortality was not completely understood 35 years ago. So I watched with surprise and unexpected admiration as C. Everett Koop, an evangelical Christian, who served as surgeon general under U.S. Republican president Ronald Reagan from 1982 to 1989, and was well known for wearing his uniform as a vice admiral of the United States Public Health Service Commissioned Corps, had the singular political courage to speak the truth about the science of AIDS as our knowledge increased. According to the Washington Post, “Koop was the only surgeon general to become a household name” (https://soundingsjohnbarker.wordpress.com/2015/01/15/empathy-and-compassion-are-the-gifts-of-our-shared-human-experience/).

Former U.S. president Bill Clinton, a Democrat, also got it right in his first inaugural address Jan. 20, 1993 when he said, ”by the words we speak and the faces we show the world, we force the spring … we recognize a simple but powerful truth – we need each other. And we must care for one another.” He went on to say, we are “tempered by the knowledge that, but for fate, we – the fortunate and the unfortunate – might have been each other.”

Guardian columnist George Monbiot argued yesterday that power has “migrated not just from private money to the state, but from both market and state to another place altogether: the commons. All over the world, communities have mobilized where governments have failed.”

Joanne Rogers is 92 and the widow of Fred Rogers. She has been getting a lot of telephone calls at her apartment in Pittsburgh, says Los Angeles Times staff writer Amy Kaufman in a March 29 story wondering what Mister Rogers, who died in 2005 at the age of 74, would say and do to cope with the COVID-19 coronavirus pandemic?

“When Fred was a boy and scary things would happen to him, his mother used to tell him: ‘Freddy, look for the helpers.’ So he would have talked about the helpers,” Joanne said.

“Helpers,” she explained, are those individuals who – even at the height of global chaos – try to find a way to ease the burden for others; folks such as doctors, nurses, grocery store cashiers, and mail carriers.

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1968: Bobby Kennedy, described by Arthur Schlesinger as one of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s ‘Representative Men’ for his times

On the morning of Wednesday June 5, 1968, I was an 11-year-old nearing the end of Grade 5 at St. Christopher Separate School, as it was known then, a Catholic elementary school on  Annapolis Avenue in Oshawa, Ontario, about 30 miles east of Toronto. My mother and me had a daily ritual of listening to the 7:30 a.m. news together at the kitchen table from CKLB, Oshawa’s AM radio station, as I ate my breakfast getting ready for school.

That morning,  as the news came on, I saw the same look on my mother’s face that I had seen on my father’s just two months earlier on the evening of Thursday, April 4 when the television news bulletin interrupted regular programing: Shock, and something else; fear.

The world was turned upside down.

At 3:50 a.m. EDT on that June 5, 1968, Robert F. Kennedy had been shot in Los Angeles at the Ambassador Hotel. Only two months earlier, Martin Luther King had been was shot dead while standing on a balcony outside his second-floor room at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee.

Although I was only six on Friday, Nov. 22, 1963, I remember well that same look on my teacher’s faces that afternoon at St. Christopher, and again on my parent’s later at home, when Bobby Kennedy’s older brother, John F. Kennedy, 46, riding in the presidential limousine, a modified 1961 Lincoln Continental four-door convertible, turned off Main Street at Dealey Plaza in Dallas around 12:30 p.m. Central Standard Time, and three shots rang out as the motorcade passed the Texas School Book Depository.

If you were born in 1957 or earlier, you have a highly detailed and exceptionally vivid flashbulb memory snapshot of that moment and where you were and what you were doing. While the memories of the Kennedy brothers and King’s assassinations were no doubt shaped by the endless news coverage we subsequently, for those of us, like myself, who were quite young in the 1960s, the flashbulb part of the memories may well be the looks we saw contemporaneous with hearing or seeing our first news coverage of the events on our parent’s or teachers’ faces. I can only speak for myself, but shock and fear were not looks I often saw on my parent’s faces: it registered. I saw similar looks at times during the summer of August 1968 during my first trip outside of Canada on a visit to the United States on both sides of the racial divide as we drove through the South Side of Chicago. “Don’t roll your windows down, don’t stop,” my uncle from Crown Point, Indiana, a long distance truck driver previously from Beamsville, Ontario, warned my dad.

America was metaphorically, if not literally at times, burning. But truth be told, I may have missed the full significance of that history unfolding, as 11-year-old Cathy Ryan, a cute Catholic girl from Crown Point, and most fortuitously, a friend of my cousin Lynne’s, the same age as me, had also caught my eye during that summer visit.

Bobby Kennedy had been the attorney general of the United States in 1963 when his brother was assassinated in Dallas. By 1968, he was a 42-year-old United States senator from New York and the presumptive heir-apparent to the Democratic nomination for the U.S. presidency, as the incumbent President Lyndon Baines Johnson (LBJ), mired deep in the increasingly unpopular Vietnam War, had announced in March he would not seek re-election.

Johnson, who served as JFK’s vice-president, was also in Dallas on Nov. 22, 1963, and just  two hours and eight minutes after Kennedy was shot, Johnson, who was riding in a car behind the president, with his wife, Lady Bird Johnson, and Texas Senator Ralph Yarborough, was sworn in as president of the United States aboard Air Force One at Love Field, as the presidential plane’s four jet engines were being powered up, by Judge Sarah Tilghman Hughes, a federal judge for the United States District Court for the Northern District of Texas, the only woman in U.S. history to have sworn in a United States president, a task usually executed by the chief justice of the United States, using a Roman Catholic missal taken from a side table in Kennedy’s airplane cabin, which Larry O’Brien, a member of JFK’s inner circle as  special assistant to the president for congressional relations and personnel, is said to have mistakenly taken to be a Bible, as it was bound in calfskin and embossed with a crucifix.

A year later in 1964, as the Vietnam War was just starting to heat up, Johnson, basking in the still fresh memory of Camelot, had easily defeated Republican nominee Barry Goldwater, to be elected president.

Senator Robert Kennedy was shot at 12:50 a.m. in the kitchen pantry of the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles after winning the California presidential primary. Immediately after he announced to his cheering supporters that the country was ready to end its fractious divisions, Kennedy was shot several times by  22-year-old Sirhan Sirhan, a Jordanian national, born a Christian in Jerusalem under the British Mandate for Palestine, who angered by Kennedy’s support for Israel during the Six-Day War, which had begun exactly a year earlier on June 5, 1967, stepped forward with a rolled up campaign poster, hiding his .22  Iver-Johnson Cadet revolver. He was only a foot away when he fired eight rounds at Kennedy. Five bystanders were also wounded. Kennedy, mortally wounded, died almost 26 hours later the following day.

Sirhan, now 71, was convicted at trial and sentenced in April 1969 to die in California’s gas chamber for Kennedy’s assassination, but the sentence was commuted to life imprisonment in 1972 after the Supreme Court of California’s decision in The People of the State of California v. Robert Page Anderson, which  held the death penalty violated the California state constitution’s prohibition against cruel or unusual punishment, and further declared its decision was retroactive, thereby invalidating all prior death sentences in effect that had been imposed in California. The death penalty was later restored in California.

Sirhan is currently serving his sentence at the Richard J. Donovan Correctional Facility, a medium-maximum state prison in San Diego County, California. He has been denied parole 14 times. Sirhan’s next parole hearing is scheduled for March 2, 2016 when he will have served 47 years of his life sentence.

By June 1968 Bobby Kennedy was perceived by many to be the only person in American politics capable of uniting the country with his integrity and devotion to the civil rights cause. After winning California’s primary, Kennedy was in position win the Democratic presidential nomination and face Richard Nixon, who won the Republican presidential nomination in Miami in August, in the November 1968 general election.

Writing a decade after Kennedy’s assassination in 1978 in his book, Robert Kennedy and His Times, the American historian, Arthur M. Schlesinger, commenting in the foreword, said Kennedy “possessed to an exceptional degree what T. S. Eliot called an ‘experiencing nature.’ History changed him, and, had time permitted, he might have changed history. His relationship to his age makes him, I believe, a ‘representative man’ in Emerson’s phrase – one who embodies the consciousness of an epoch, who perceives things in fresh lights and new connections, who exhibits unsuspected possibilities of purpose and action to his contemporaries.”

What if Bobby Kennedy had lived and been elected president in 1968 and Richard Nixon had remained a historical footnote?

Would the Vietnam War have ended years earlier?

Would RFK have advanced the cause of civil rights and the promise of America in a way that would have meant the 1970s would not now be remembered as the “Me Decade” after the 1960s, as novelist Tom Wolfe coined the term in his essay “The ‘Me’ Decade and the Third Great Awakening”, published by New York magazine in August 1976 referring to the 1970s and the atomized individualism that followed the communitarianism of the 1960s?

These many years later, I still can’t see a news clip of Bobby Kennedy speaking and not experience heartache at some level for the lost possibilities of what might have been. But historian David Hackett Fischer, in his 1970 book, Historians’ Fallacies: Toward a Logic of Historical Thought, quite rightly warned us of the dangers of counterfactual historiography, which extrapolates a timeline in which a key historical event did not happen or had an outcome which was different from that which did in fact occur.

We just don’t know.

Especially when it comes to 1968, which has been described by many as the year that rocked the world. Apart from the Kennedy and King assassinations in the United States, there was popular rebellion in the air across societies and cultures over disparate issues around the world in 1968, including Czechoslovakia, Cuba, France (“May 68” and the student strikes in Paris, led by Daniel Marc Cohn-Bendit, a.k.a. Dany le Rouge) West Germany, Mexico and Nigeria and the civil war surrounding its oil-rich southeastern state of then secessionist Biafra, just to name a few.

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