May 26, 2004

Paul Rogat Loeb, On Living With Conviction in a Cynical Time

A BUZZFLASH INTERVIEW

We decided to interview Paul Loeb to offer some perspective on the challenge of not being paralyzed by the dark shadow that the Bush Cartel daily casts on the world. His book, Soul of a Citizen, is an unusual BuzzFlash premium offering.

First of all, it is not about any breaking-news political issue, but it is about politics in the broadest sense. Written by Paul Loeb in 1999 -- and updated several times since then -- Soul of a Citizen is a spiritual call-to-arms for those who may have given up political hope.

Loeb writes about the energizing rewards of working toward the greater good of one's community -- and for the purpose of BuzzFlash, America is our national community.

For those who may become cynical and withdrawn because the obstacles to creating a life-affirming local and national community seem so great, Loeb offers the salve of hope interspersed with inspiring examples of individuals who have found validation and affirmation by working with others on behalf of the common good.

It would be easy to call Loeb a Dr. Phil for worn-out activists and pro-democracy advocates. But that would belittle his fine book and ongoing work. If the Republican party represents a minority trying to impose its values on the majority of this nation -- an "us" vs. "them" strategy -- Loeb makes the case that this great nation should unfold its destiny as an activist community spreading from coast to coast. The spark that will lead to the re-emergence of democracy lies within each of us. Democracy is, indeed, the sum of those sparks.

This book is the antidote for weary, cynical, worn-out and broken-hearted American patriots. Loeb champions the notion that the mere act of activism yields the enriching results of human contact, connection and interaction. And that, in and of itself, is enough to sometimes change the world.

There are no revelatory facts on the Bush Cartel in the Loeb book. No salacious gossip. There's just the empowering revelation that you are half-way toward taking our democracy back, just by engaging in the effort.

Loeb has a new book coming out in the late summer, an anthology entitled, The Impossible Will Take a Little While: A Citizen’s Guide to Hope in a Time of Fear (Basic Books $15.95 www.theimpossible.org).

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BuzzFlash: Normally many books have a relatively short shelf life. You wrote Soul of a Citizen in what year?

Paul Rogat Loeb: It came out in 1999, and my publisher only got 3,000 copies in the bookstores, which is totally pitiful. But then it just kept rolling and taking off by word of mouth. It’s now gone through 10 printings, and there are 85,000 copies in print. That’s amazing. For instance, I just got an e-mail that 1,500 freshmen at the University of Tampa are going to read it. It really has had this kind of underground life -- I don’t think there’s any other way to describe it -- where people find out about it by word of mouth and steadily keep passing it on to friends. It should be more visible in the bookstores, but even without that, it really has taken off, which is a very nice feeling.

BuzzFlash: Reading through Soul of a Citizen, which is subtitled "Living with Conviction in a Cynical Time," it seemed to us you emphasized engagement as an end in itself -- that if one engages in democracy, one is building democracy. And so to withdraw because the obstacles seem so formidable is, in and of itself, to give up on democracy. The act of engagement is democracy in action, and one should never give up on that because then one is giving up on democracy. Is that an accurate statement?

Paul Rogat Loeb: That’s a very accurate summation. When we give up on democracy, we’re giving up on ourselves. We’re giving up on our ability to act and our sense of possibility. Unfortunately, our culture teaches people to hunker down and isolate themselves. Years ago, I read a Kafka story called "The Burrow" about a little creature huddling in a burrow. The image stuck with me -- the idea of people being encouraged to slam our door, double-lock our door, and don’t go outside except in our SUV to go to the mall. Maybe I’m exaggerating a bit, but our culture encourages us to believe that there’s no way we actually can get together with our neighbors and change the ground rules of the world we live in. We’re not even supposed to think that, let alone try it. We’re taught to give up on it before we start, and give away our power. In the process we give away the best part of ourselves -- our ability to act together.

A major theme in Soul of a Citizen -- and in my new book on political hope, The Impossible Will Take a Little While, which will be published mid-August-- is that we’re not told the stories that might most inspire us. I use the example of the Rosa Parks story. I was on a CNN interview with Parks phoning in by telephone, so I didn’t get to meet her, but I was so excited about it. Then they introduced her and said, "One day, Rosa Parks refused to move to the back of the bus. That started the civil rights movement." And I’m thinking: Rosa Parks, at that point, had been an NAACP activist for 12 years. She was the secretary of the local. She’d gone to Highlander Center -- the labor and civil rights center in Tennessee-- for trainings. She had had a whole context, a whole community, that she was part of. This wasn’t an accidental act.

And yet we make it sound that way, as if this lady just acted out of nowhere. I remember Garrison Keillor recently saying on "Prairie Home Companion" that "Rosa Parks wasn’t an activist. She was just a woman whose feet were tired." But of course she’s an activist, and if she isn’t, who is? I like Garrison Keillor and he meant well -- but if you remove her from the category of activists and put her instead in the category of impossibly perfect saints, she actually becomes a less powerful model. She’s too far from our lives, up there on a pedestal. We start thinking that if we want to make an impact we need to come out of nowhere and instantly change history, instead of following her actual model where she worked for 12 years in often frustrating circumstances, where she and others could never be sure about the impact of their actions.

That’s the real model. You try one thing. You try another. It doesn’t always work, so you keep going. And it helps to know that, for Rosa Parks, like all our heroes, the act we’ve all heard of changed history only by being part of a sequence of unheralded actions very far from the national stage. Rosa Parks didn’t know that any of her actions would change history. She just had faith -- as did the others she was working with. You keep trying and keep on until things change.

It wasn’t just Parks. The head of Montgomery’s NAACP chapter was a man named E.D. Nixon, who was a sleeping car porter. He put people’s suitcases on the trains, and he was an activist in the Sleeping Car Porter’s Union organized by the legendary A. Philip Randolph. It was Nixon who got Martin Luther King involved, but we rarely hear his name. But it is largely unknown people who make history. And we’re denied their stories even more than we’re denied the story of people like Rosa Parks. The history all goes down Orwell’s memory hole and just disappears.

Because I travel all over to colleges lecturing, I ask students, "What do you know about any of the great movements that have changed America’s history for the better -- the labor movement, the civil rights movement, the environmental movement, the abolitionist movement, the populist movement, the suffrage movements?" They say: "We really don’t know very much. We know the conclusions. We learned that Lincoln freed the slaves, and women got the vote, and some unions were organized, and somebody signed a civil rights bill. And there was a big march in Washington. King said, ‘I have a dream.’But we don’t get any sense of the process at all -- how it actually happened."

If we don’t know what it was like for these folks, then when we come up against something difficult now, it’s easy to feel it is impossible. There’s a little museum in Rochester, New York, in the house of women’s suffrage leader Susan B. Anthony. Anthony spent her whole life fighting for women’s suffrage. It didn’t happen until about 12 years after she died. Yet obviously her actions mattered, and mattered immensely.

BuzzFlash: We see in the Bush administration, in particular, what appears to be testimonials to the power of democracy. But in essence, it’s an administration that sends out the clear message, if not verbally, then "in their body language," as Bush would say, that the public doesn’t count: "We’re going to make the decisions. We’re going to make them in secret. We’re not going to necessarily tell you the truth. You don’t need to know. We have the judgment to make these decisions. And if you file a lawsuit to try to have us tell you how we made them, we’re going to fight it."

In essence, it’s the opposite of what Bush said in 2000:  "Trust the people." He doesn’t trust the people. He claims he’s carrying out a divine plan, and then Dick Cheney feels that he can keep everything secret. Even though your book was written before the Bush administration, you define democracy and the victory of democracy as people interacting, acting, contacting one another and moving beyond a one-way flow of information from the television set into their brains. Instead, you advocate going out and actively engaging in democracy. And that’s the antidote to a dictatorial regime that rules through the images of television.

Paul Rogat Loeb: Absolutely. I remember I was speaking at a college in Kentucky, and the provost was a former career military officer, a colonel as I recall. He was outraged by the Bush administration. This was four, maybe six months, after 9/11. He said their attitude toward dissent was "shut up and color" -- as if we were 5 year olds. When the administration says, "If you’re not with us, you’re an ally of terrorism," it really does give the message to people: "Don’t participate, except for blind cheerleading." I remember a young woman at Missouri whom I was interviewing. "I’m trying to get people involved," she said, "and they’re telling me, '‘I don’t want to be called an ally of terrorism.'" So part of the challenge is to reclaim patriotism. I’ve been stressing that real patriots ask the hardest questions in the most difficult times. I think that gets through to people.

I wish we emphasized this more in our culture. John Kerry should honor that moment when he and the other soldiers came back and asked those hard questions. They called their campaign "winter soldier" from the phrase of Tom Paine about contrasting the sunshine soldiers and the summer patriots with the winter soldiers who rallied to their country’s need when it was most difficult, not when everyone was praising them. In fact, it’s the very opposite of patriotism when people use its cloak to mask the narrowest, greed-driven impulses toward consolidating raw power.

During World War II, Roosevelt put out a message that in a difficult, critical time, we were going to need shared sacrifices. Contrast that to the Bush administration saying, "This is a crisis. We’re going to be at war the rest of our lives. But the most important thing you can do is go down to the mall and shop, so don’t change your lifestyle one little bit."

BuzzFlash: You deal a lot with the issue of community. One issue that doesn’t get discussed much in the media -- and the Democrats and Republicans don’t seem to bring it up explicitly, although it’s the subtext of much of the political debate -- is, are we, as a nation, a diverse secular community? Or are we a narrow community of so-called Christian Evangelical values that are infused, according to Antonin Scalia, in the Constitution? Or, according to Bush, that God chose him and that God is now guiding him -- a stronger voice than his own father, he told Bob Woodward -- although he may just be confusing Cheney with God.

Paul Rogat Loeb: Maybe with God and his father both.

BuzzFlash: Bush has a very limited sense of community. His community is a Christian, God-driven community where God speaks to him and directs him, and that’s his view of the world. There was a recent book written by people from the Hoover Institute, a right-wing think tank, so it was a book sympathetic to Bush. But they quoted an unidentified Bush family member who said that Bush believes he is leading a crusade of Christianity against the Islamic world.

Most BuzzFlash readers, and most of the people presented in Soul of a Citizen -- you provide these wonderful anecdotes of community involvement, engagement -- believe in a secular, diverse community and believe that democracy encompasses diversity and allows for individual thought and opinion. A clash between two different concepts of community is basically at the heart of the difference between progressive Democrats and independents versus right-wing Republicans. And yet it is not generally articulated in that way.

Paul Rogat Loeb: That’s an interesting question, because there are a lot of people whose religious faith impels them to speak out for justice. Just look at some of the Christian witness groups challenging our involvement in Iraq. But running a society by the rules of a particular theology can get very dangerous.

I actually came up against some related issues in what you could call my first political involvement when I was 11. I’m Jewish, and I was attending a largely Jewish elementary school that had an annual Christmas pageant where we sang these Christian songs. They were pretty innocuous songs like "Little Drummer Boy" (somehow I still remember the names). But I said, "I don’t want to sing these songs. It’s fine if other people sing them, but these aren’t my songs. They’re Christian songs and I’m Jewish." I was in sixth grade, and the teacher said, "You have to." When I refused, the principal called in my parents, and my parents told me "don’t make trouble."

But there was something in me that was really stubborn. It just felt like a violation of who I was to sing a song that expressed a belief that I didn’t believe in. So they said, "OK, you can sit in a room by yourself and not have fun when everybody else is having fun." I said, "Fine. I will."

So I’m very aware the risk of assuming a particular theological definition, applying it to everybody and saying this is what you must believe -- that can be absolutely deadly. It also is true that when people believe that they have a direct line to God, and they absolutely understand God’s message, that very dangerous things can happen, ranging from 9/11 to everything that the Bush people like Ashcroft are doing.

Again, some of the people I most respect are theologically conservative Christians and Jews who fight for peace and justice, like the people who publish Sojourners magazine. But in their theology and their approach to the world, there’s an element of reflectiveness. There’s an element of doubt in the best sense, that counters self-righteousness. Instead their faith -- which they take very seriously -- impels them to question self-serving power structures and also to continually reflect on their own actions. That’s the strength of what I call the prophetic tradition, and it’s powerful. It’s an approach to the world I really admire.

The most dangerous aspect of the Bush folks isn’t that they draw different conclusions than I do on how to approach particular issues. It’s their belief in their own absolute certainty. It’s their assumption that if people don’t share their theology, like those in the Islamic world, it’s because God doesn’t listen to them; they’re fundamentally heathens who will burn in Hell. They don’t quite say it. It’s not politic to say it. But it underscores their ethic of contempt towards people who don’t share their worldview.

I recently saw an art exhibit in Vancouver, British Columbia, of Frida Kahlo, Georgia O’Keefe and the Canadian artist Emily Carr. You could say all of them, in some sense, are nature artists. But the natural world they portrayed was far from placid and it wasn’t always benign. It had howling monkeys, wild trees, and the presence of death. You had a sense of a raw power that you better not mess with because it’s far larger than you. I remember walking out of that exhibit thinking: "What’s really scary about Bush is he’s got absolutely no sense of awe, no sense, for all his proclaimed piety, of the majesty of the world, barely a recognition that there’s a larger world out there, let alone that if you approach it in a destructive fashion, it’s going to bite you back"

All he has is his certainty that humans, like nature, are there to be bought and sold, conquered and manipulated, treated like they have no souls. It’s the worst of fundamentalist and conservative Christianity because he believes he has a direct line to God. But it’s also joined with the worst of corporate greed in a devil’s deal that’s extremely dangerous for the world.

BuzzFlash: The United States was founded on the rule of law, in that we had a constitutional structure and the primacy of the individual over the government. It used to be that the Republican party championed that. But in the Bush administration, we have the primacy of the government over the individual. We have Ashcroft pursuing people who use marijuana medicinally; trampling on states’rights in Oregon over the suicide issue; the FCC censoring television and so-called vulgar language;. and we have Bush supporting Constitutional amendments limiting privacy rights of the individual and reproductive choice and so forth.

It seems things have been turned upside down, that we again have a limited community -- one community within thousands of communities in the United States -- trying to impose its community philosophy and religion on the rest of the country. Then you have the rest of the country going back to the foundation of our democracy, which is acceptance of diversity, which says you have an individual right to be in that community as long as you don’t assert on me. And I have a right to my community.

The Bush administration makes flowery speeches about democracy, but as Mark Crispin Miller said, Goebbels was the one who said that the essence of achieving a propaganda success for a government is to hide uniformity within the mask of diversity. The Bush administration’s uniformity is this Christian Evangelical morality that it tries to assert on the entire nation. In Soul of a Citizen, you talk about the diversity of community and diversity of engagement. Is it a victory for democracy every time a person does engage in the act of democracy through interconnection with other groups and working toward the common good?

Paul Rogat Loeb: I think it is. Situations in which you’re working with people who don’t necessarily share all the same assumptions and the same experiences are particularly valuable. They strengthen us and enrich our world view. There’s a wonderful campaign finance reform approach that has passed in Arizona, Vermont and Massachusetts: If you get enough $5 contributions, you can actually get matching public money to run for office. It’s absolutely boosted the number of people running and the diversity of people running, because it’s not just all rich and well-connected folks.

In Soul of a Citizen I write about a woman named Alison Smith, who worked with the League of Women Voters to help pass Maine’s electoral initiative. Alison was also involved in an earlier task force on marine environmental issues, including oil dumping. All the different stakeholders took part, including environmental groups and marine boating interests and people who ran the docks. Even the oil companies participated. The group had to sit down together over a series of meetings and hammer out a draft law for Maine. Alison felt at first "that the person from the oil company was just a total pain in the butt -- but by the end they made some real contributions. And when we worked everything out, they actually signed off on the proposed bill and said they could stand behind it."

It’s a good thing when people get together, but the question is who is at the table? At some point, the Supreme Court will decide whether we’ll ever find out who was actually in the room when Bush and Cheney drafted their energy policy. But the people that we know were not in the room, even in a token way, were Sierra Club, Audubon, the Wilderness Society, or any of the environmental groups. They weren’t even consulted.

Maybe even having a pretense of listening is worse. But this administration didn’t even make the pretense. They just didn’t want to hear from the environmental community, which is interesting, even though something like 85 percent of Americans believe we need to do more for the environment, including Republicans and many very conservative religious folks. Even though the environmental groups don’t have all those folks as members, they represent a majority belief in America. Yet from the administration’s point of view, they don’t need to be at the table.

I recently saw a cartoon that showed Bush praying by his bed and hearing a voice that tells him to invade Iraq. Bush then leaves and Cheney crawls out from under the bed, the voice he’s been listening to. I don’t know whether that’s the actual process that occurred, but the circle of people who this administration listens to is so small. The isolation of this presidency is so great. I don’t believe that we’re going to redeem Bush. I hope to God we get him out. If we don’t, we’re going to have to build a truly massive movement to stop his continuous stream of destructive actions.

The challenge is to really get ordinary folks to recognize that what is being done is not in their interest. I’ll talk about the taxes, and I’ll say this administration is transferring about $130 billion a year to the wealthiest 1 or 2 percent in the country. And my kid’s high school laid off 11 teachers. Is that related? Yes, it’s related. The money moves from one group to the other. And when you actually have those conversations, I think people get that. I’ve gone into very conservative environments, and they see the cuts happening at the local level. When you point it out, they even see some of the links and recognize that the administration is handing so much to a tiny group of the wealthy. They may be anti-abortion, which may pull them toward the Republicans. They believe that if you’re hit, you've got to hammer back, which may incline them to support the war.

But then you start questioning and ask, "Who hit us?" If we’re not hammering back on the people who actually hit us, if we’re hammering back on some thug that we’ve propped up and Cheney and Rumsfeld helped put in office, there’s a window, I think, for people to be able to say, "Maybe what I’m being told about the world isn’t quite so accurate. Maybe there’s some missing pieces. Maybe I better find out what’s actually going on."

BuzzFlash: As we have noted, some BuzzFlash readers are demoralized in feeling that the forces of darkness have such a stranglehold over the American government that nothing can be done, and that these forces fight with such mob-like tactics that the Democrats don’t have the will or the desire to engage in street fighting to overcome them.

What do you recommend to someone who is a strong believer in democracy, in the Constitution, and in the secular society, to overcome feelings of disillusionment and frustration to the point that they feel they can no longer have an impact on democracy?

Paul Rogat Loeb: We’re certainly up against some absolutely ruthless people. They studied at the Don Corleone school of politics. That’s the tradition they follow. At the same time, when I go and talk to ordinary citizens -- and I travel all over the country -- people’s belief systems never quite fit into neat little boxes. As recent polls have suggested, they may still believe Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda were in bed together, that the experts did think there were weapons of mass destruction, and that the world is behind us. It’s disturbing that they believe those kinds of lies.

But then you have a conversation with them, and you find out that they’re worried about health care and think maybe there ought to be universal coverage. They think the tax system should be more fair. They feel queasy about the war, even if they’re sort of torn about whether it’s their duty to go along with it. So, if the poll says, "Are you going to vote Republican or Democrat?" and they say they’re going to vote Republican, it’s tempting to write them off as irredeemable, but it’s a mistake.

Some of them may be so locked into a mindset of fear that there’s no way we’ll break through it. But a lot of times it gets more complicated. I tell the story of my best friend, a commercial fisherman and environmental activist named Pete Knutson, who has gotten the fishermen very involved in environmental accountability, like testifying at Endangered Species Act hearings. As a result, some of the huge industrial interests whose actions were being limited by environmental laws that the fishermen helped pass, decided to try and knock them out, which they actually did in Florida and Texas. They put on the ballot a kind of green-washing initiative that supposedly prevented the destruction of seabirds by nets. The first thing my friend did was bring in the Sierra Club, Audubon, Friends of the Earth, and all the other environmental groups he’d been working with, to say the initiative was actually an anti-environmental sham, sponsored by big industrial interests.

Those kind of coalitions are expected, though fishermen aren’t usually part of them. But my friend Pete did something else that broke the mold. Some of the fishermen were members of churches like Assemblies of God, which are about as fundamentalist as you can get.

And he got them involved and had an Assemblies of God preacher giving an invocation against corporate greed on the steps of my state capitol and sending out a letter to all his fellow ministers in the state saying that the initiative was wrong. One of the fisherman who was part of the minister’s church went on a Christian fundamentalist TV show and said, "Don’t you know Jesus was a fisherman? You’re trying to put fishermen out of business. When Jesus comes back, He’s going to rip your head off." You don’t normally see these things in progressive politics, but if we saw them more often, we’d be more powerful.

The other amazing thing is that the fishermen won the statewide vote. They beat the huge industrial interests.

Pete grew up the son of a Lutheran preacher, so maybe he’s particularly attuned to these possibilities, but I like what he says: "If you can get to these Evangelicals on fundamental economic issues and on taking care of the earth, you can break them off from the right-wing coalitions. But you’ve got to get them to enter into the conversation." I’m not suggesting that our first and prime allies are going to be these fundamentalist groups, but we shouldn’t completely write off their ordinary members.

When I was putting together Soul of a Citizen, I’d remembered that a Pew poll said that a majority of born-again Christians, which is one of their categories, favored national health care. I couldn’t find the survey, so I called up the center. The nice young liberal woman who answered said, "Oh, I’m sure that’s not true. They’re just a bunch of bigots." I said, "Well, gee, I do think their kids get sick just like my kid gets sick." She called back like an hour or two later, really kind of embarrassed, and said, "Oh, I guess you’re right."

There are people like the head of Enron or Halliburton -- the Lays and the Skillings, not to mention men like Dick Cheney -- who aren’t going to change their stripes. They’re in it for greed. They’re unlikely to repent. All we can do is create enough organized citizen power to prevent them from doing their destructive kinds of activities. But the sort of individual person who may be sucked into buying a myth -- say, about the Iraq war -- they’re much more reachable. A core part of our challenge is to figure out a way to get conversations going with people like that. You have to say, "Look, our own inspectors said that Saddam Hussein’s weapons got destroyed after the first Gulf War. We didn’t find any because there weren’t any."

And the Bush administration lied about this the way they’ve lied about all these other things. I know we’d like to believe our leaders are telling the truth, but here are all these examples -- and then we list them -- of ways that this particular group seems to have contempt for both truth and democracy.

So it’s important to distinguish the highly destructive men who are running this country from their often well-meaning passive supporters. It's important to approach the latter as best we can, assuming they’re acting in good faith, which I don’t think is true of the Bush gang. A website like BuzzFlash is an important resource to give people enough information to approach those folks who seem to be on the other side, but who in fact may be receptive. We may have more in common with them than we think.

BuzzFlash: Let me close by asking you a sweeping question that encompasses what you have in this very enriching book. How do you tell people who are disillusioned and feel like they just want to give up, that the abuses of democracy have become so brazen that they just want to withdraw -- how do they live with conviction in a cynical time?

Paul Rogat Loeb: A couple of ways. We’ll have another conversation soon on my new book, The Impossible Will Take a Little While. It’s totally focused on that theme. But I think there are a few key elements. One is community. The disillusioned will say they are the only person who feels this way; nobody else has those problems. Any of us who’ve acted have come up against this famous phrase. And we have to answer, "Well, excuse me, many people have this problem. Many people don’t like these policies. Many people think we need a different direction." But the opposition will try and make you feel like you’re the lone idiot. When you have other people, when you have a community, you recognize that you’re not alone.

We also need a sense of longevity over time -- because we really don’t know when history is going to turn. That’s why I like citing that Rosa Parks story, because if you looked at her journey three years or five years along, or even nine years along, you might have made a rational conclusion that what she was doing was futile.

Parks’commitment to advocacy started when she went to her first civil rights meetings about lynchings -- a pretty horrible chapter of American history that we like to ignore. It wasn’t easy. She was working on hard issues and not necessarily finding clear traction. She did this for 12 years, from her first NAACP meeting to her stand on the bus. She and many other people all across the country did this, and often change looked very elusive, even like things were rolling back. And even when Montgomery lit the spark it took another decade for the Civil Rights Act to pass. So we need to remember that progress is rarely instant, on these issues we’re still wrestling with, or any others.

In an essay for my new book, The Impossible Will Take a Little While, Howard Zinn talks of what he calls "The Optimism of Uncertainty." You don’t know, he says. You never really know what is going to change and when, because you can’t look over the horizon of history. A friend of mine, Dick Flacks, was traveling around for SDS in the early ‘60s. He was a young University of Chicago professor and he visited Berkeley, where everybody was telling him,"This is the deadest campus on earth. Nothing is going to happen here. We try and we try, and it’s so frustrating." Then, four months later, the Free Speech Movement breaks out and Berkeley becomes the activist Berkeley of legend. So you just never know. And I think that that’s part of what we have to remember to keep us going.

Another theme, which I’ll touch on more when we talk about the new book, is that we act not just to do good in the world, but for ourselves. Activists keep telling me, "We want to be able to look at ourselves in the mirror. We want to know we’ve done our best." Looking in the mirror is not about adjusting your hairdo. It’s about saying,"Okay, I stood up as a human being and I did what was right." To use a somewhat theological word, it’s about knowing, in the words from the civil rights movement, that our souls are rested, that we’ve done what is right. That’s important because, when all we’re doing is watching the bad news and not doing anything about it --just taking it all in -- it’s easy to get bitter and frustrated.

We could just turn away from everything, pay no attention to the bad news. But we know where that leads, to letting it all get worse. Or we can do something, and remember that we never know the ripples that are going to come out from what we do.

BuzzFlash: Paul, thank you very much.

Paul Rogat Loeb: My pleasure.

A BUZZFLASH INTERVIEW

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