JANUARY 16, 2021 – To compensate for the cold water—er, beer—I poured on readers yesterday, this post provides warm cocoa.
On Thursday, I received a call from Carol, a second cousin on my mother’s side. Our great-grandfather was George B. Holman, mover and shaker of his day—founder of a thriving moving and storage business.
Carol and I met when as a young kid, I was visiting my New Jersey grandparents. I believe our mothers and grandmothers had arranged one or two small get-togethers between us Minnesotan “foreigners” (my grandmother’s view of anyone living west of Philadelphia) and Carol and her siblings, who lived not far from my grandparents.
Unfortunately, family relationships soured as business disagreements devolved into litigation between her father and grandfather, on the one side, and my grandfather and uncle, on the other. My mother, loyal to her immediate family but always the diplomat, tried to restore relations. She was motivated in part, I suspect, from the deep loss she’d felt when Carol’s uncle—the family’s shining light and mother’s favorite cousin—was killed aboard a B-17 in WW II.
On one of my trips to New Jersey in more recent times, I tried to look up Carol’s side of the family. With Carol’s older siblings, I was minimally successful. They’d taken over the business, done well for themselves, and long ago “moved on,” as it were, from their estranged, “foreign” cousins.
Carol, however, responded enthusiastically. She and her husband had lived for many years in New Hampshire (with its motto, “Live Free or Die”) and moved to the very red, rattlesnake-infested state of Arizona. In email and phone conversations, we exchanged reminiscences about ancestral properties and personalities. On Thursday’s call, we picked right up where we’d left off many months ago. I think of our conversations as honoring the memory of George and his sons and grandsons, despite their differences, and a renewal of the reconciliation that my mother had fostered.
Carol and I share common world views as well as ancestors. On Thursday’s call we exchanged mutual outrage over the recent assault on the Capitol. (She is among those voters who’s turning Arizona blue.) The conversation soon turned thoughtful—a reflection of Carol’s hallmark trait—as she boiled matters down succinctly. “With rights come responsibility,” she said. What she finds lacking in Americans’ obsession with “rights” is a coordinate emphasis on responsibility. “If I violate someone else’s right to expect me to observe a stop sign,” she said, “I must accept responsibility when my car collides with his.”
You can take the patriot out of New England, I thought, but you can’t take New England out of the patriot.
Carol’s insight reveals the crux of our national political crisis. She understands that “rights” without responsibility turn chaotic; that without a counterweight, the Revolutionary War battle cry (and “Gadsden flag”—a strike-ready rattlesnake above the words, “Don’t Tread on Me”) is anti-social. If without rights we have no liberty, then without responsibility, America dies by rattlesnake bite.
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© 2021 by Eric Nilsson
