patriotism

May 24, 2026

Before My Time: Talking With the Greatest Generation

All of us have heard the old phrase, “before my time.” It captures a simple truth.

Witnessing always makes a difference. Living “before” events happened is not the same as being there. Presence during the history of an epoch is the real thing.

Some participated in that history. The Greatest Generation, women and men, did just that before my time. They fought or aided the fighting force in World War II. We boomers are the ones who read about it and view the movies, coming away in tears, and wondering how they did it.

Perhaps you knew some of them, as I did. I spoke to them because they were my uncles, neighbors, and my friends’ parents in our youth. I talked to them as their counselor, past their battles, beyond my early years.

A few were Chicago Symphony musicians, like Fred Spector, whom I heard perform and interviewed later.

My dad served as a soldier in the conflict, as well.

These men and women of substance didn’t read about it or see it in motion pictures; these people lived the experience before your time and mine.

Sometimes, if they shared them, a handful of their memories lingered with the listener. One of those taught me not just about their life, but about life.

Jerome (Jerry) Katz was a psychiatrist in the Chicago area some years back. Jerry died at 72 after a long career practicing in Chicago’s northern suburbs.

The psychiatrist was a man of size and solidity with a gentle soul, despite his days as a high school football player in the Windy City.

Jerome Katz always appeared to be at ease, with an inviting smile on his face and a soothing voice. The twinkle in his eyes carried mystery, though — as if he understood something that the rest of us hadn’t figured out quite yet.

I didn’t know Jerry very well.

Ours was the kind of relationship that maintained cordiality, saying hello, passing a few words, telling a joke, as Jerry often did, but never much more.

From time to time, Jerry would consult me for my diagnostic opinion about a hospitalized patient. Beyond that, I suspect we never talked for more than five minutes.

Except for one day.

More than 30 years ago, we sat alone in the doctors’ cafeteria at Forest Hospital, then a private psychiatric facility in Des Plaines, IL.

To our surprise, no one else was around, and the room remained undisturbed for the entire period of our lunch.

One might say for that hour, it became the kind of place where one could share intimacies, like a therapist’s office.

The discussion turned to Jerry’s youthful service in World War II, “The Good War.” I don’t remember whether Jerry said that he enlisted while underage, but he didn’t hesitate. To young men of the time, patriotism meant joining up.

It was their duty.

Jerry made his way through basic training to the killing fields of France after D-Day, the Allied Invasion of Europe on June 6, 1944.

He could not have been more than 18 when his perspective on life changed because of a single enemy.

Katz and his unit were “dug in” that day. They’d created a foxhole, perhaps behind some rocks, dead trees, hastily shoveled earthworks, and a shallow pit to sink behind. Not the conventional trench of World War I, but something temporary.

A German force attacked: a bayonet and rifle charge. And Jerry, a strapping young man of perhaps 6’2″, did what he had trained to do. All his comrades did, holding their ground and firing into the oncoming assault.

Soldiers fell at a distance, but a few continued their rush ahead. The gap closed. One in particular kept moving — a towering giant of a warrior — bigger than Katz, built like a mobile fortress, a monster machine, indestructible.

Jerry and the Americans kept shooting, and no amount of speeding metal deterred the attacker. He just kept racing toward them.

Jerry remembered the surreal nature of the event. He and his mates had fired enough bullets to kill 20 men. But somehow they must have missed this soldier. He was now almost on top of their position and on top of Jerry.

Time stretched as the man lunged at Jerry with his bayonet — and collapsed, close enough for Jerry to touch the dead enemy and the blade intended for his flesh. If the giant German possessed only one more second of life, the future psychiatrist would have lost his own.

In a meaningful sense, Katz was touched by this combatant because he thought this soldier would be his executioner. The man who wanted to end Jerry’s life instead transformed it.

“Since that day, everything in my life — every day of my life — has been a ‘lagniappe.'”

“What does that mean?”

“It’s a French expression. It means ‘something extra.’ Like when you go into a bakery, and they give you an extra roll because you bought a dozen. A kind of gift.”

The conversation ended not long after Jerome Katz told me that story.

Like most of us, Jerry had his ups and downs in life. Heart disease was one of his challenges; a loving wife and family were one of his boons.

Dr. Katz helped his fellow women and men by treating his patients, but also by donating his psychiatric expertise to Russian immigrants at the Ark, a charitable organization offering social services.

All of that matters, of course, but when I think of Dr. Jerome Katz, I always think of his combat story, his bravery, and the narrow escape.

I recall how every day of his life became “something extra.”

And I remember how the twinkle in his eyes got there.

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The three photos are the superb photographic art of Laura Hedien: Laura Hedien Official Website.

The first is Chile, Patagonia, at Torres del Paine Mountain, April, 2025. The second is a Kenyan Leopard, in the Masai Mara, Kenya, November 2024. Finally, Otter in the Wilds of Kodiak, 2025.

April 3, 2025

Spinning Beyond Our Fear

 

Reverend William Sloane Coffin could put a spin you hadn’t thought of on an idea you believed you knew all about. Imagine him playing with a top, the well-known child’s toy, and flipping it so that it moved in a fashion that defied gravity. He took on grave matters that terrify us, turned them around, and offered hope.

Jaw-dropping and sometimes joy-enhancing.

Here is his definition of patriotism, split into three:

There are three kinds of patriots, two bad, one good. The bad are the uncritical lovers and the loveless critics. Good patriots carry on a lover’s quarrel with their country, a reflection of God’s lover’s quarrel with all the world.

Savoring this will expand its meanings. In Coffin’s words about being good citizens, he speaks of the human tendency toward thoughtless admiration on one side and finding too much fault on the other. Love of country and the lover’s tenacious effort to establish “a more perfect union” were closer to what he believed was “good patriotism.”

Coffin was a fearless advocate and activist in the latter effort, “putting his money where his mouth was.”

As Winston Churchill said to rally the British people in World War II:

“This is the lesson: never give in, never give in, never, never, never, never—in nothing, great or small, large or petty—never give in except to convictions of honour and good sense. Never yield to force; never yield to the apparently overwhelming might of the enemy.” —Harrow School, 29 October 1941.

Here is a successor to those great men, a woman, who has picked up their baton and run with it. If you don’t know who she is, you soon will. She offers a way forward and speaks not least for those who are afraid. The lady in question, Mallory McMorrow, is fearless:

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The top image is called Gyroscope Precision. It is Lucas Vieira’s work, sourced from Wikimedia Commons.

September 9, 2022

On the Need for Privacy

We are much occupied with public words these days. They often involve the need for privacy. Others focus on what is patriotic and nationalistic and whether you and I are one or both.

We think we understand the meaning of all these words, though some people express certainty about the interpretation of the U.S Constitution without having read it.

Not that such reading is time-consuming. I own a small paper-covered booklet of 38 pages containing every word. It is in the back pocket of my blue jeans right now, with room to spare.

I won’t go on at great length here. I am not an attorney, though I know the document just mentioned and studied it a bit with a gifted scholar on the subject.

What I will do instead is to provoke your thought with the brief and wise words of two people more knowledgeable than I am.

The first is Louis Brandeis, who offered an opinion on privacy in a 1928 Supreme Court Case: Olmstead v. United States. Brandeis was an Associate Justice of the Court at the time.

The second comment attempts to distinguish between the motivations of two different groups of people. The thoughts come from Jill Lepore’s short 2019 book, This America: The Case for the Nation. The author is a Professor of History at Harvard.

You can read these excerpted thoughts in a minute or two. I hope you think about them much longer.

1. Louis Brandeis:

The makers of our Constitution undertook to secure conditions favorable to the pursuit of happiness. They recognized the significance of man’s spiritual nature, of his feelings, and of his intellect. They knew that only part of the pain, pleasure and satisfactions of life are to be found in material things. They sought to protect Americans in their beliefs, their thoughts, their emotions and their sensations. They conferred, as against the Government, the right to be let alone — the most comprehensive of rights and the right most valued by civilized men.

2. Jill Lepore:

Patriotism is animated by love, nationalism by hatred. To confuse the one for the other is to pretend that hate is love and fear is courage.

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The first photo is of Louis Brandeis by Harris & Ewing. It was sourced from Wikipedia Commons. The second one is Jill Lepore from Amazon.com/

September 30, 2009

Obama, Racism, and the Implicit Association Test

Are you a closet racist? In 1948, your reaction to the above photo of a white man hugging a black man might have been a measure of that trait.*

Today, however, most people in the USA are better at disguising it, even from themselves. It’s not a charge that can be as easily dismissed as you would think. Your voting record, for example, might not tell you very much. That’s where the Implicit Association Test comes in, as a possible way to know more about your innate tendencies, perhaps even ones about which you are unaware.

Depending on your political orientation and attitude toward the man in the White House, you might have been accused of being either unpatriotic or a racist within this new century: unpatriotic if you opposed President George W. Bush and a racist if you opposed President Obama.  The voices of protest against the War in Iraq were often charged with giving aid and comfort to the enemy in the scary days after 9-11-2001, when all manner of evidence (later disproven) about the presence of WMDs (Weapons of Mass Destruction) in the hands of Saddam Hussein, the late Iraqi dictator, were alleged by the folks in charge.

More recently, noisy opposition to President Obama’s initiatives have included accusations that he was not born in the USA, is a secret Muslim, is a closet Communist or at least a Socialist, and so forth. When the expression of these ideas is accompanied by posters telling the President to go back to Africa, and pictures of him in “white face,” it gets pretty hard to think well of the protesters.

Now, I don’t know if there is any psychological instrument that can effectively test your patriotism, but I do know one that might tell you something about whether you have any racist tendencies. Or, to be more precise, a tendency to prefer “white” over “black.” It’s called the Implicit Association Test (IAT), a measurement generated by the friendly social scientists at Harvard. It can be found at: Implicit Association Test. Click on the word “Demonstration.”

There are actually a great many measures on the site, but the one I’m talking about is the one labeled Race IAT: Race (‘Black-White’) IAT.

This and other similar tests are described in the following background quotation from the site:

The IAT was originally developed as a device for exploring the unconscious roots of thinking and feeling. This web site has been constructed for a different purpose — to offer the IAT to interested individuals as a tool to gain greater awareness about their own unconscious preferences and beliefs.

Many years ago, Fyodor Dostoyevsky wrote: “Every man has reminiscences which he would not tell to everyone but only his friends. He has other matters in his mind which he would not reveal even to his friends, but only to himself, and that in secret. But there are other things which a man is afraid to tell even to himself, and every decent man has a number of such things stored away in his mind.

These lines from Dostoyevsky capture two concepts that the IAT helps us examine. First, we might not always be willing to share our private attitudes with others. Second, we may not be aware of some of our own attitudes. Your results on the IAT may include both components of control and awareness.

Now, you are likely to ask yourself whether there is a connection between preferring “white” over “black” and acts of discrimination or racism. You will find the answer to that in the FAQ (Frequently Asked Questions) section of the site. In general, the answer is a “not necessarily” and I’m sure that you will want to read more about the behavioral implications of your “preference.” The site and the various tests and explanations are really quite interesting, so I would encourage you to take a look.

The test just might be informative to you about who you “really” are. If you believe that your opposition, for example, to President Obama is entirely motivated by firmly rooted, color-blind principles, you might find the test results unsettling. No less, however, the left-leaning, Obama-supporting, test-takers who pat themselves on the back for their belief that they are “color blind,” might be surprised by their results. A member of either of these groups might be caught up short by what the “black-white” test suggests about them.

Of course, I don’t know how you, dear reader, will score. Are you, to quote Dostoyevsky once more, a hostage to “those things which a man is afraid to tell even to himself?”

Do you have the courage to find out?

Again, here is where you can: Implicit Association Test.

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*The image at the top is a 1948 newspaper photo of Steve Gromek embracing Larry Doby in celebration of a fourth game victory in the World Series. Gromek was the winning pitcher for the Cleveland Indians vs. the Boston Braves. Doby hit the game winning homerun, prompting Gromek’s spontaneous act.

The photo was astonishing for its time. Doby followed Jackie Robinson by less than three months in the 1947 integration of Major League Baseball. The idea of men of two different races cheek-to-cheek offended the most bigoted parts of the white population, some of whom never forgave Gromek. It should also be added that Doby endured the same racism and brutality as Jackie Robinson, but received less credit for it as the second man to integrate baseball while Robinson was the first. The fact that Robinson played for the Brooklyn (New York) Dodgers and therefore received much more media coverage probably also contributed to the reduced attention to Doby’s extraordinary courage and athletic accomplishments. Doby was elected to Baseball’s Hall of Fame in 1998.