To Affect the Quality of the Day
Our Democracy and fellow citizens deserve the same reverence as we give our lives
I consider amongst the best wisdom personally and for the American republic what my dear high school English teacher, John Faggi, argued was the most important line in Henry David Thoreau’s Walden:
“To affect the quality of the day, that is the highest of arts.”
Henry David Thoreau
Similarly, Austrian scientist, Viktor Frankl, while enduring Nazi concentration camps, realized that no matter what his tormentors inflicted on him, they could not control his thoughts. He alone decided how he would feel and what he would believe. His sense of self and of freedom in the midst of horror, helped others realize that no matter our circumstances we control how we perceive our lives.
Whether your life is easy and enjoyable or filled with fear and suffering or is somewhere in-between, we all make choices about how we perceive our life. And we all have the capacity to choose to better it. Turning this wisdom into action requires daily practice. If I were to write a self-help book, I’d title it: “Give Love to Your Life.” I’d detail what each person should do every day to train themselves to enjoy life’s moments and to give love to the people who matter.[1] This means deliberately focusing on cultivating the best of each day. Plucking the day.
When the Roman poet Quintus Horatius Flaccus wrote “Carpe Diem” he used that phrase not to mean seize the day. Which it does not. It means pluck the day. Because the day, like a flower, is ephemeral.
Quintus Horatius Flaccus (aka Horace)
Every day wars, murders, fleeing refugees, riots, and arrests fill newspapers and screens and conversations. People fear losing their country to missiles both explosive and cultural.
Last week’s military parade in DC and anti-Trump protests around America made manifest these fears. These gatherings both reflected real emotions and were organized to score political points with groups of Americans who each don’t want to listen to each other.
But the event whose anniversary this military parade marked tells us much about how we can lead ourselves and affect the quality of our day for our country.
On June 14th, 1775, the Continental Congress, then still a year away from declaring American independence, ordered the formation of military units from across the colonies in order to support the Massachusetts militias fighting alone against the British army. Britain stripped Massachusetts of the right to local legislatures in 1774, and the British army had arrived to enforce the subservience of the colonists.
It's critical to observe that the June 14th resolution to create an American army came two months after the Revolutionary War had already begun. Unbowed by British power, not interested in waiting for the Congress to solve their problems, local minutemen in Massachusetts took up arms against British power at the battles of Lexington and Concord.
This spirit of individual agency lives on today and is reason to celebrate Americans’ fierce love of freedom and justice that drives them to shout their opinions online and in megaphones, to seek to strengthen their communities against foreign aliens or by protecting foreign aliens. These Americans channel the minutemen’s unyielding spirit. We are lucky we live in a country of people who are not easily cowed. In fact, we seem to be barely cowed—ever.
But courage alone does not a nation make. Especially when that courage is channeled towards division. Republican and Democratic leaders trade recriminations, playing against each other to demonize fellow citizens. President Trump denigrates fellow Americans. Governor Newsom and Senator Padilla and other 2028 hopefuls present themselves as heroes standing up to evil tyrants.
Such partisan bravery is the stuff of revolution not of citizenship. The French revolutionaries were brave, too. They took down their king and their clergy. They also marched as a mob and massacred their democratic leaders. Then they massacred another set of democratic leaders. They murdered so many people that one Parisian quarry owner asked the courts for help because his quarry was inoperable: it was filled with dumped corpses. Because the Frenchmen knew nothing about how to live in peace with each other, they soon resigned themselves to a dictator.
It’s well-known and long-observed that where people demonize another group, violence follows. Political assassinations follow. Like last week’s in Minnesota and last year’s against Trump and other assassination attempts we know about and don’t know about that law enforcement thwarts. In Iran, a Persian friend born in Tehran told me, public buses at every stop would announce the street followed by, “Death to America. Death to Israel.” As in: “Next stop: Eyavanak Boulevard. Death to America. Death to Israel.” At every stop. Daily inculcation of hatred turns real: the Iranian government invested billions of dollars in proxies who murdered thousands of Israelis and Americans.
During World War II, New York mayor Fiorello La Guardia, feared civil discord and race riots: “How many times have I said in the last two years that I fear panic more than enemy bombs.” Even in one of America’s finest hours of unity, Americans brawled with, killed, and persecuted each other.
We in America create demons out of each other.
But it’s the opposite that made America successful and what still makes it successful. Citizens from different backgrounds bind themselves together. Liberty and Union. Now and Forever. One and Inseparable. On June 14, 1775, Congress created regiments from Virginia and Maryland and Pennsylvania so that Massachusetts would not have to fight for its freedom alone.
They looked after each other.
The 19th century English anthropologist and Darwinism advocate Thomas Henry Huxley wrote that:
“Each man who enters into the enjoyment of the advantages of a polity shall be mindful of his debt to those who have laboriously constructed it; and shall take heed that no act of his weakens the fabric in which he has been permitted to live.”
We know today that our closest primate relatives, too, practice an appreciation of one another. Chimpanzees make their societies stable by making sure everyone is included in eating and other rituals. We, too, strengthen our society’s “fabric” when we treat kindly the strong and the weak, the old and the juvenile, the nurse and the farmer.[2]
Thomas Henry Huxley
Our righteous moral zeal matters to the success of our polity far less than our realizing that our fellow citizens’ feel their own moral zeal—and for the same values we hold dear. Those other citizens draw the opposite conclusion about what is wise. That does not make them wrong.
For just as the gift of life is a quickly passing miracle, so too is a free society. It is a bequest we hand down not only from generation to generation but also from day to day. Every fleeting day and minute, we can affect the quality of the day by either cherishing it or not. To pluck the day, we must open our eyes, see the flower, and suck the nectar. Before the flower fades. Before the pottery shatters. Before the breeze fails.
To affect the quality of the day is the highest of arts. For ourselves. For our country. For each other.
[1] An abundance of self-help books already exist, many of which I think are excellent – Walden, How to Win Friends & Influence People, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People.
[2] In chimpanzees, our nearest genetic relative, the alpha males act like a leader more than a ruler. They make sure everyone gets fed. They enforce respect of the weak by the strong. By contrast, in macaques, the alpha male is a dictator: hoarding resources for himself and never helping others. Chimps of all ranks are generally well-treated because every member of the group acts as if they all need each other. See: de Waal, Frans. Good Natured, (1996).