AND THAT IS WHY YOU FAIL

I like how the Washington Post identifies Norman Lear at the beginning of his Op-Ed published yesterday: “Norman Lear is a television writer and producer.” That’s like saying “Willie Mays was a baseball player.” It’s factually accurate: Mr. Lear did write for television and did produce some shows; Willie Mays did play a few baseball games. But it’s not historically accurate. Norman Lear - like Willie Mays - changed the nature of the game by his participation in it. Just as a reminder, the following were created by Norman Lear: “All In the Family.” “Maude;” “The Jeffersons;” “One Day At A Time.” If you go to the Internet Movie Database, you’ll find 65 other credits in both TV and movies, many of them in the past ten years and with two as future projects. Pretty good for a guy who just celebrated his 99th birthday.

But praising Norman Lear for being the force of nature he is (definitely one of the most memorable people a person could be lucky enough to meet, trust me on that) is not what this is about. I want to write about what my response was to reading that Op-Ed. It begins:

“I woke up today at the start of my 100th year as a citizen of this beautiful, bewildering country. I am proud of the progress we’ve made in my first 99 years, and it breaks my heart to see it undermined by politicians more committed to their own power than the principles that should bind us together. Frankly, I am baffled and disturbed that 21st-century Americans must still struggle to protect their right to vote.

“I am a patriot, and I will not surrender that word to those who play to our worst impulses rather than our highest ideals. When the United States entered World War II, I dropped out of college to fight fascism. I flew 52 missions with a crew in a B-17, dropping bombs 35 times. Unlike so many others, I returned from that war safely, to another 70-plus years of life, love, family, failure and triumph.

“After we defeated fascism overseas, it took 20 more years to pass the Voting Rights Act and Civil Rights Act at home. Now, headlines seem drawn from the past: States target Black voters with voter-suppression bills. Federal voting-rights laws blocked in the Senate by a filibuster.

“Racial and religious nationalism, nativism and authoritarianism are seemingly on the rise everywhere. It is deeply discouraging to this member of what has been called ‘the Greatest Generation.’”

Just after reading that, I saw this tweet from Tom Bossert:

“This is not good. FL is now in uncharted territory with 21.7K new cases reported today. 108 new deaths. The wave is now larger than all previous waves. 10,187 hospitalized (83% of its all-time pandemic high). Time to change gears.”

I read that an hour after watching a clip of Governor DeSantis telling everyone that he’s proud to have issued an executive order guaranteeing parents the right to be the final decision-maker on whether or not their children will wear masks when they start school this fall, in classes for which personal attendance by the students is now mandatory - “for their mental health,” he says. The order was issued immediately following a vot by the Broward County School Board - second-largest in the state - to require children to wear masks when the schools reopen in September. DeSantis told a cheering crowd in Cape Coral, “In Florida, there will be no lockdowns. There will be no school closures. There will be no restrictions and no mandates.”

I keep remembering what a friend of mine who works in biological sciences said to me back in January 2020: “A pandemic is evolution’s IQ test. The question is, ‘Are you intelligent enough to take this information and modify your behavior in such a way as to maximize your likelihood of survival?’ It’s pass/fail.”

We are failing.

The other week, I was going through the massive TCinLA library, and once again ran across my copy of “The Limits To Growth.” I’ve had the book since it was required reading in a class on environmental law in grad school back 47 years ago (in addition to my other degrees, I also have a Master of Public Administration degree obtained at night while working in politics, with a specialization in what was then called “Environmental Management”). The book, published by The Club of Rome, was highly controversial at the time, denounced in Congress no less as “Marxist propaganda” for its advocacy of increased government action to prevent further environmental degradation; it was the first book I ever read that mentioned both “global warming” and “climate change” as existential threats to human civilization. 47 years ago. I’ve kept it purposely after discovering it by chance in a box where it had sat for 40-odd years, still managing to hang on through all the life changes contained in that time span. I re-read it then. Unlike the first time I read it, when I came away from it exhilarated that the problems had been defined and action described that could successfully deal with those problems, I came away from reading it 40 years later profoundly depressed. The book laid out the problems, described solutions, and also included scenarios for what might happen 10, 20, and 30 years out, depending on what action was taken. What was depressing was that for each of the problems, the scenario that had proven over time to be a correct forecast was for Nothing Done.

One can continue to be profoundly depressed, just keeping up with the news.

Thirty-two years ago, the Exxon Valdez, an oil tanker owned by Exxon Shipping Company that was bound for Long Beach, California struck Prince William Sound's Bligh Reef 1.5 miles west of Tatitlek, Alaska at 12:04 a.m., spilling10.8 million US gallons of crude oil over the next few days into the pristine waters of Prince William Sound, previously known as one of the major sources of fish in the Pacific. Interestingly, when the Alaska Oil Pipeline was approved 20 years earlier, the decision to route it to the coast where the oil from the North Slope would be loaded aboard tankers, rather than pumped across Canada and the United States overland by pipeline (something we all know now has its own problems), was made despite the warnings of critics that an oil spill was inevitable; the Environmental Impact Statement for the pipeline included a forecast of a likelihood of there being one major oil spill in 20 years. The disaster happened almost 20 years to the day from the publication of that report. Twenty years after the accident, there were reports that the sound had still not recovered from the spill, with oil still found on the bottom, sea life reduced from before the event.

Writing of the event in 2019, 30 years later, Tim Lydon wrote: “As the spill recedes into a more distant past and climate change accelerates, it becomes harder to tease out the disaster’s continuing effects. Less debatable is the lingering damage to the area’s wilderness resource, specifically amid the 8,000 square kilometers of western Prince William Sound that fall within America’s largest congressionally designated wilderness study area. With oil beneath beaches, certain species unrecovered, abandoned structures, and garbage still present, the wilderness remains injured.”

Thirty. Years. Later.

My friend David P. McCampbell and his wife are committed sailors who have been sailing their 55-foot ketch around the world for the past eight years (six months of the year in stages, unfortunately blocked the past 18 months). He has reported that they encounter significant garbage in even the most remote parts of the Pacific Ocean they’ve been in. We’ve all heard of the Pacific Gyre north of Hawaii, which covers an estimated surface area of 1.6 million square kilometers, an area twice the size of Texas or three times the size of France. I can remember sailing the Pacific nearly 60 years ago, when the waters were pristine, full of wildlife; the dolphins never tired of escorting us. I remember many good times in Okinawa, snorkeling in what we called Buckner Bay (once again now known by its Japanese name Nakagusuku Bay) and SCUBA diving in the offshore reef. Back then, there might have been a whole ten of us out in the bay. Nowadays, Okinawa’s reefs are a major international tourist attraction, with thousands of tourists visiting every year, And now, all the reefs around the island are reported to have damage.

I was privileged while in the Navy to go on a support mission for a California Academy of Sciences expedition to the Galapagos Islands. Outside of 1,500 people living on Flores Island, the archipelago was unchanged since the day Charles Darwin first set eye on it in 1835. There was even a tortoise on one of the islands with the date “1835" carved in its shell by one of the sailors from that expedition. Literally nobody went there. I got to see the famous Darwin Finches and the rest of the life that had first given Darwin the insight to understand evolution. Today, those islands have a population on three of them totalling 50,000 people, and they are regularly visited by cruise ships with more than 4,000 passengers aboard. Garbage is polluting the ocean and killing the life on the islands.

I could go on, but the point is made. Our politics make it impossible for us to deal with the existential threats we face. And a significant number of our fellow humans - and not just in the United States - are working hard to make things even more impossible of solution.

Are you discouraged reading all that? You should be.

Surviving long odds is possible. I wrote a book about people surviving long odds and slogging through to victory, “I Will Run Wild.” It’s about the period between the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor and the victory at Midway six months later. It’s about people who had few reasons for optimism putting them aside and taking on the tasks before them, regardless of their own beliefs. It came out last fall, and I think that timing has more to do with the good reviews and major sales the book has achieved than mere coincidence.

I have now lived long enough with my birthday 18 days ago to equal my father’s total, with my doctor telling me last week that I am still his “most boring patient,” which gives cause to believe I’m going to continue the tradition of all those ancestors of mine in the old family bible who according to the notes in the back lived 90+ years, and that in the days before modern medicine.

If I look at my present life, I have overcome some pretty long odds to be who and what I am. Someone once guessed that about 50,000 people a year arrive in Los Angeles with a goal of “making it” in the entertainment industry. I don’t know the number who arrive planning to be screenwriters, but since I can throw a stick at any Starbucks and hit ten of them, it’s a good number. When I got into the Writer’s Guild of America after four years of serious effort, there were 180 who joined the other 4,500 that year. I think the odds are longer now (and the opportunities less). The number of people who want to write who make their living doing nothing else is also quite small. According to Publisher’s Weekly, I am in the upper ten percent of writers in America, by income. Let me assure you, I am as far from a rich person as one can get. That tells you how bad things are for most people who write, let alone those who want to.

Awhile back, I was asked if I had any advice for those who want to follow this path. My answer was something an old Navy Chief told me back when I was fairly new out of the family nest: “If you choose to do nothing, you’ll have what is here. If you choose to do something, your chances of achieving it are 50-50.”

One of my favorite sequences in a movie is in “The Empire Strikes Back,” when Luke meets the 800-year old Jedi Master, Yoda. His spaceship now lies on the bottom of a swampy bog. Yoda tells him to “use the force” to raise the ship. Luke says, “Well, okay, I’ll try...” To which Yoda quickly retorts, “No. Do or do not. There is no ‘try.’” Luke puts his mind to it, and lo and behold, up it comes. It’s hovering in the air before him, and he exclaims “I don’t believe it!” At which the ship disappears back into the bog with a PLOP. Yoda looks at him and says, “And that is why you fail.”

I used to go to a writer’s party here once a month when I was setting out. It was good to be around other pilgrims on the journey, to know I wasn’t alone and crazy to be attempting what I was. Interestingly, as various people “made it,” they would stop coming to the party. My own turn came, and that happened to me. And then, when I was in one of those career “troughs,” I went back to it. Many of the people I had known before were still there. And still talking about how hard it was to “make it.” And I had done it; I wrote the script that became my first sale, working in a friend’s garage I was living in because it was that or the streets, and writing a script was the only thing I could think of to do that had the possibility of getting out of the garage; and the option payment did exactly that. After that, I was on my way.

I realized there at that party that the difference between those people who had yet to achieve their dream and me was my willingness to string an electric cord across the back yard from the garage to my friend’s kitchen, plug in the typewriter and go to work. “Do or do not, there is no try.”

Looking around, it’s easy to conclude that regardless of what we do, the chances of achieving the goal is less than the 50-50 odds the old Chief gave me. But whatever they are, any odds for change are better than the 100% guarantee of nothing if we don’t take action.

Not believing we can do it gets us a spaceship at the bottom of a swamp. “And that is why you fail.”

I can only conclude by saying life has shown to me that Norman Lear is right when he says:

“But you will not in the end defeat the democratic spirit, the spirit that animated the Tuskegee airmen to whom I owe my life, the spirit that powers millions of Americans who give of themselves to defend voting rights, protect our environment, preserve peaceful pluralism, defeat discrimination, and expand educational and economic opportunity.”

In closing, you should definitely go read Norman Lear’s op-ed, which you can do here:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/07/27/norman-lear-99th-birthday/

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