Comments
ACCORDING TO LIZ - Everyone knows who he is, and few can deny that his life has been both brave and humble. And that respect for him has only grown over the years. Tomorrow he celebrates his 100th birthday: we know him best as Jimmy Carter, the 39th President of these United States.
At last month’s Democratic National Convention, Jason Carter praised his grandfather as a man who loved his neighbors – here and around the world – as much as he loved himself, who amassed a legacy burnished by all the lives he touched, all the good he has done, and a desire to hang on to vote for Kamala Harris.
Jimmy Carter was a man ahead of his time, who pledged to conduct the “moral equivalent of war” against the energy crisis, symbolically putting solar panels on the White House roof in 1979.
“A generation from now, this solar heater can either be a curiosity, a museum piece, an example of a road not taken, or it can be a small part of one of the greatest and most exciting adventures ever undertaken by the American people.”
In 1977, over 45 years ago, he attempted to address the country’s energy gluttony as a moral war on excess. Just think if he had won or even cracked open the path to environmental sustainability back then, how different our lives would be today.
He addressed problems head on despite their political danger:
“We must not be selfish or timid if we hope to have a decent world for our children and our grandchildren. We simply must balance our demand for energy with our rapidly shrinking resources. By acting now, we can control our future instead of letting the future control us.”
His prescience on environmental concerns also included pushing through Superfund legislation to clean up locations abandoned due to toxic waste.
He set aside some 100 million acres in Alaska to protect it from development.
He irritated the Washington cartel of perennial politicians and their entourages by refusing to participate in their horse-trading games of give-and-take partisan persuasion.
He ran a peanut farm.
He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Peace in 2002.
His colorful brother Billy may have embarrassed the staid Washingtonian elites with his beer-drinking good ol’ boy image and poor taste in who he chose to conduct business with, but he was always family.
His love for his wife Rosalynn exemplified all that is good with the American people.
He epitomized family values, before the wingnuts gave the term an ugly spin and used it to set moralizing but immoral religiosity above intrinsic human worth.
He was thwarted by a consortium of small-minded and selfish men – Kissinger and other power abusers, the demon barons of Wall Street, and a Congress that too often put personal advancement (and donations from the oil industry and just about anyone else) above the needs of the country and the people they were supposed to represent.
He took the fall for the Iran hostage crisis which resulted from decades [of] meddling by the CIA and American business interests in a foreign country’s affairs, including the continued propping up of their puppet Shah.
He unconditionally pardoned hundreds of thousands of draft dodgers.
He signed away the perpetual lease on the Panama Canal. But the anger against that was fueled by American obliviousness to the historical truth: years of an abusive colonial-style administration cemented into power by the U.S. backing of a pro-profit elite following the 1903 Panamanian war of independence.
He ordered the American boycott of the 1980 Moscow Olympics when Russia invaded Afghanistan. Joined by 64 other countries, the action gave the Soviets the black eye they deserved without the militarization too common to less nuanced Presidents. Presidents who were perceived as bullies on the world stage and consigned too many young Americans to death and disabilities.
He had integrity. He eschewed the underhanded tactics of his enemies.
He was a principled and moral man and lost the highest office due to the machinations of the military-industrial complex under Kissinger and the CIA connections of Ronald Reagan’s handlers.
He accepted loss gracefully.
He acknowledged his failings. And soldiered on. A man of vision and courage.
Instead of just running a foundation with money collected from political cronies, he was often seen swinging a hammer building Habitat for Humanity homes.
He founded the Carter Center to wage peace, fight disease and build hope.
He embraced his faith but never put others down for not sharing it. It formed the cornerstone of his personal morality and his omnipresent commitment to human rights.
He may have alienated the hawks but his policies conditioning economic support on ethical improvements by foreign regimes was a far more effective force for democracy than today’s forever wars.
His unswerving and personal involvement in the Israeli-Egyptian peace process gave the world stability in the Middle East for a generation.
He was the first President to actively pursue the inclusion of women and minorities in his cabinet.
After leaving office, Carter served as an unappointed minister without portfolio in the reconciliation of various internal conflicts around the world including helping negotiate the end of nuclear weapons development in North Korea.
Among the honors Carter has received on a list far too long to catalogue here are the:
· Presidential Medal of Freedom
· Nobel Peace Prize
· Martin Luther King Jr. Nonviolent Peace Prize
· Conservationist of the Year Award
· Albert Schweitzer Prize for Humanitarianism
· United Nations Human Rights Award
· Mahatma Gandhi Global Nonviolence Award
He was a writer, a Pulitzer Prize finalist, and has maintained a passion for music all his life.
He was nominated nine times for the Grammy Award for Best Spoken Word Album for audio recordings of his books and won three times.
While his so-called “malaise speech” may have been turned against him when many American business and political leaders were still wallowing in the fantasy of manifest destiny and endless expansion, his words were chillingly prophetic:
“It is a crisis that strikes at the very heart and soul and spirit of our national will. We can see this crisis in the growing doubt about the meaning of our own lives and in the loss of a unity of purpose for our nation.
“We’ve always had a faith that the days of our children would be better than our own... our people are losing that faith… In a nation that was once proud of hard work, strong families, close-knit communities, and our faith in God, too many of us now tend to worship self-indulgence and consumption.”
He was a very white man from the deep south but with him it was the white hat of goodwill and purity of purpose.
President Carter is the epitome of service to humanity, dedicating his life to a transcendent ideal of helping others. Throughout his career and throughout a lifetime lived in love, he has manifested the best of what the Bible and other holy texts have to offer, and espoused peace.
Happy birthday, Jimmy!
(Liz Amsden is a contributor to CityWatch and an activist from Northeast Los Angeles with opinions on much of what goes on in our lives. She has written extensively on the City's budget and services as well as her many other interests and passions. In her real life she works on budgets for film and television where fiction can rarely be as strange as the truth of living in today's world.)
