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Via A Blog Around the Clock:

Learn from the past, set vivid, detailed goals for the future, and live in the only moment of time over which you have any control: now. —Denis Waitley

So, I guess you’re saying my strategy of regretting the past, dreading the future, and being paralyzed in the present isn’t the best option? If only you had told me this in the past!

I was born four score and seven years after Abraham Lincoln died.

That’s a cute little coincidence, but it’s more than that: it tells me that on the day I was born, there were people living in this country who had been born as slaves.

Not many of them, certainly. But there were lots and lots of people who had learned about American slavery directly from parents, grandparents, aunts or uncles who had actually been slaves.

Imagine that.

Abraham Lincoln has always seemed almost mythical to me, like a figure from Mount Olympus. His life, his presidency and his death seem frozen in amber, immutable and inevitable. Yet, on the day I was born, there were probably a handful of people still living who had once, as children, heard him speak.

When Lincoln himself was born, Thomas Jefferson was president. By the time Lincoln was president, Jefferson and his peers had become creatures of myth.

Time turns life into history and history into mythology. We wait for a mythical leader to appear and solve our problems, but life has never worked that way. As Barack Obama said during the 2008 campaign: “We are the people we’ve been waiting for.” If our problems are to be solved, we have to do it ourselves.

From Lincoln’s second annual message to Congress (the State of the Union Message of his time):

Fellow citizens, we cannot escape history. We of this Congress and this administration will be remembered in spite of ourselves. No personal significance or insignificance can spare one or another of us. The fiery trial through which we pass will light us down in honor or dishonor to the last generation.

What we do, or fail to do, matters. That’s no myth.

I’ve been catching up on a backlog of TV programs I’ve recorded but not yet watched. I just watched a film called Money-Driven Medicine that ran last month on Bill Moyer’s Journal. (I thought you could watch it online, but it’s not working for me. Don’t miss seeing it if you get a chance. It’s educational, and moving.)

The narrator introduces a Harvard professor of medical economics named Rashi Fein by quoting him:

We live in a society, not just in an economy.

That’s a good point, I think. It should be obvious, but somehow I think we’ve forgotten that fact in recent decades. It would be good to remember it from now on.

Today would have been John F. Kennedy’s 92nd birthday.

His administration was too short for us to know what kind of president he might have become, but I think he had one quality that’s rare among American politicians: he could recognize when he was playing a game that couldn’t be won, and stop playing it.

We tend to reward politicians who mouth the expected national pieties, and penalize those who “think outside the box.” But when he saw that the old game wasn’t working — couldn’t work — Kennedy tried to change the game. The Cuban Missile Crisis of October 1962 brought the U.S. and the Soviet Union to the brink of a nuclear exchange that might have meant the extinction of the human race. Having gazed into that particular abyss, Kennedy knew that we had to find a different way forward.

On June 10, 1963, at a commencement address at American University, Kennedy spoke about peace in the era of the atom bomb.

I am talking about genuine peace, the kind of peace that makes life on earth worth living, and the kind that enables men and nations to grow, and to hope, and build a better life for their children — not merely peace for Americans but peace for all men and women, not merely peace in our time but peace in all time.

I speak of peace because of the new face of war. Total war makes no sense in an age where great powers can maintain large and relatively invulnerable nuclear forces and refuse to surrender without resort to those forces. It makes no sense in an age where a single nuclear weapon contains almost ten times the explosive force delivered by all the allied air forces in the Second World War. It makes no sense in an age when the deadly poisons produced by a nuclear exchange would be carried by wind and water and soil and seed to the far corners of the globe and to generations yet unborn.

…

Some say that it is useless to speak of peace … until the leaders of the Soviet Union adopt a more enlightened attitude. I hope they do. I believe we can help them do it. But I also believe that we must reexamine our own attitudes, as individuals and as a Nation, for our attitude is as essential as theirs…

First examine our attitude towards peace itself. Too many of us think it is impossible. Too many think it is unreal. But that is a dangerous, defeatist belief. It leads to the conclusion that war is inevitable, that mankind is doomed, that we are gripped by forces we cannot control. We need not accept that view. Our problems are manmade; therefore, they can be solved by man. And man can be as big as he wants. No problem of human destiny is beyond human beings. Man’s reason and spirit have often solved the seemingly unsolvable, and we believe they can do it again…

There is no single, simple key to this peace; no grand or magic formula to be adopted by one or two powers. Genuine peace must be the product of many nations, the sum of many acts. It must be dynamic, not static, changing to meet the challenge of each new generation. For peace is a process — a way of solving problems.

With such a peace, there will still be quarrels and conflicting interests, as there are within families and nations. World peace, like community peace, does not require that each man love his neighbor, it requires only that they live together in mutual tolerance, submitting their disputes to a just and peaceful settlement. And history teaches us that enmities between nations, as between individuals, do not last forever. However fixed our likes and dislikes may seem, the tide of time and events will often bring surprising changes in the relations between nations and neighbors. So let us persevere. Peace need not be impracticable, and war need not be inevitable…

[Extreme Soviet statements about American intentions offer] a warning to the American people not to fall into the same trap as the Soviets, not to see only a distorted and desperate view of the other side, not to see conflict as inevitable, accommodation as impossible, and communication as nothing more than an exchange of threats.

No government or social system is so evil that its people must be considered as lacking in virtue. As Americans, we find communism profoundly repugnant as a negation of personal freedom and dignity. But we can still hail the Russian people for their many achievements in science and space, in economic and industrial growth, in culture, in acts of courage.

Among the many traits the peoples of our two countries have in common, none is stronger than our mutual abhorrence of war. Almost unique among the major world powers, we have never been at war with each other. And no nation in the history of battle ever suffered more than the Soviet Union in the Second World War. At least 20 million lost their lives. Countless millions of homes and families were burned or sacked. A third of the nation’s territory, including two thirds of its industrial base, was turned into a wasteland — a loss equivalent to the destruction of this country east of Chicago.

…

So let us not be blind to our differences, but let us also direct attention to our common interests and the means by which those differences can be resolved. And if we cannot end now our differences, at least we can help make the world safe for diversity. For in the final analysis, our most basic common link is that we all inhabit this small planet. We all breathe the same air. We all cherish our children’s futures. And we are all mortal.

It’s a Cold War speech. We face different challenges now. But it remains true that we must find a way to live together on this small planet, and we are all mortal.

Video, audio, and the published text of the speech (not an accurate transcript) are available here. A more accurate transcript is here.

From HBO’s Real Time With Bill Maher:

Raw, unencumbered capitalism is a wonderful engine, but how we mistook it for a social framework — for how to build a just society — and interpreted it as that, is just incredible. —David Simon

So it’s not just in science fiction that we turn control of our society over to the machines?

If he had lived, Martin Luther King would turned 80 years old last Thursday.

He might have attended Barack Obama’s inauguration tomorrow in person. As it is, he will be unmistakably present in spirit.

I’ve posted this video before. It seems appropriate now. Martin Luther King in Montgomery, Alabama, on March 25, 1965:

Stanford has the full text of the speech.

The video is from the film King: A Filmed Record… Montgomery to Memphis, which was shown in theaters as a “one-time only” event on March 24, 1970, and was later aired just once on network television. A truncated version of the film was once available on home video, and now the full film is being made available on DVD by A Filmed Record, Inc., a non-profit company. The DVD is pretty expensive, but it’s been awaited for a very long time.

(Most of this eulogy quotes from a 1966 speech by Robert Kennedy to South African students.)

Even in our sleep, pain which cannot forget,
Falls drop by drop upon the heart,
Until, in our own despair, against our will,
Comes wisdom, through the awful grace of God

—Robert F. Kennedy, quoting Aeschylus

When the news bulletin flashed onto the television screen forty years ago tonight, the announcer said that Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. had been shot and killed.

I had never heard Martin Luther King referred to as “Junior” before, and for a few minutes, I thought, “Maybe it’s not him.” But it was him.

If you’re young enough, you might imagine that the whole country joined in mourning the loss of our greatest civil rights leader. But to many Americans, King was nothing but a trouble-maker.

A high school friend asked, “If he was so non-violent, how come there were riots everywhere he went?” The violence was usually started by whites, sometimes by white police and officials, but that was irrelevant — “It’s his fault because he oughtta know that whites aren’t gonna take this sitting down.”

After King’s funeral, I heard a man I knew complain that Robert Kennedy, who was running for the Democratic presidential nomination, should be ashamed of himself for attending the funeral.

Time deceives us. It smooths over the ragged edges; it erases the sweat and struggle; it papers over the hatred; it replaces bravery with mythology. We forget that, throughout history, every advance of liberty and human dignity has had to be won against fierce, fiery and often violent opposition. It was true forty years ago, and it’s true today.

On the night Dr. King was murdered, Robert Kennedy was scheduled to speak to a mostly black audience at a campaign rally in Indianapolis. This is what he said:

The great British actor Paul Scofield has died. Here’s a short scene from A Man for All Seasons, in which Scofield played Sir Thomas More.

Roper: So, now you give the Devil benefit of law!

More: Yes! What would you do? Cut a great road through the law to get after the Devil?

Roper: Yes, I’d cut down every law in England to do that!

More: Oh? And when the last law was down, and the Devil turned ’round on you, where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat?

This country is planted thick with laws, from coast to coast — man’s laws, not God’s — and if you cut them down (and you’re just the man to do it!), do you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then?

Yes, I’d give the Devil benefit of law, for my own safety’s sake!

Only part of this speech is famous. It’s worth hearing the whole thing.

A short clip from my favorite Martin Luther King speech is here.

Quotes from a variety of sources:

“Boredom is the feeling that everything is a waste of time; serenity, that nothing is.” — Thomas S. Szasz

“Moral indignation is jealousy with a halo.” — H. G. Wells

“If passion drives you, let reason hold the reins.” — Benjamin Franklin

“If you find yourself in a hole, the first thing to do is stop digging.” — Will Rogers

“We are all born ignorant, but one must work hard to remain stupid.” — Benjamin Franklin

Now you know why George W. Bush keeps furrowing his brow and saying, “It’s hard! It’s hard work!”

(Lots of good quotes about time at ScienceBlogs.)

You can never get enough of what you don’t really need. — Harold Ramis, quoting “a very wise person” in an interview on the newly-released DVD of the 1967 movie, Bedazzled, with Peter Cook and Dudley Moore.

I’m reading a programming book called Perl Best Practices. There’s some good stuff in it, though most of it is fairly technical. My favorite things are the short quotes that begin each chapter. Most of them are pretty nerdy, but a few of them speak to all of us:

On two occasions I have been asked [by members of Parliament], “Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?” I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question. –Charles Babbage

This is why everyone should learn at least a little bit of computer programming. There is no magic inside the computer, but it can certainly seem like magic until you get in and poke around a bit for yourself.

Advice is what we ask for when we already know the answer but wish we didn’t. –Erica Jong, How to Save Your Own Life

Advice is what you ignore when you already know the answer and think it might magically change.

Any fool can make things bigger, more complex, and more violent. It takes a touch of genius — and a lot of courage — to move in the opposite direction. –Albert Einstein

Haven’t you heard? That emboldens the other fools.

From an email message today:

Evil (ignorance) is like a shadow — it has no real substance of its own, it is simply a lack of light. You cannot cause a shadow to disappear by trying to fight it, stamp on it, by railing against it, or any other form of emotional or physical resistance. In order to cause a shadow to disappear, you must shine light on it. — Shakti Gawain

Martin Luther King in Montgomery, Alabama, on March 25, 1965:

I know you are asking today, “How long will it take?” Somebody’s asking, “How long will prejudice blind the visions of men…”

I come to say to you this afternoon, however difficult the moment, however frustrating the hour, it will not be long, because “truth crushed to earth will rise again.”

How long? Not long, because “no lie can live forever.”

How long? Not long, because “you shall reap what you sow.”

How long? Not long:

Truth forever on the scaffold,
Wrong forever on the throne,
Yet that scaffold sways the future,
And, behind the dim unknown,
Standeth God within the shadow,
Keeping watch above his own.

How long? Not long, because “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.”

How long? Not long, because:

Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord;
He is trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored;
He has loosed the fateful lightning of his terrible swift sword;
His truth is marching on.
He has sounded forth the trumpet that shall never call retreat;
He is sifting out the hearts of men before His judgment seat.
O, be swift, my soul, to answer Him! Be jubilant my feet!
Our God is marching on.
Glory, hallelujah! Glory, hallelujah!
Glory, hallelujah! Glory, hallelujah!
His truth is marching on.

The video is from the documentary “King: Montgomery to Memphis.”