I was lucky enough to meet Douglas Tuman, who is a running for Congress from the Town of Hempstead. Doug is currently commissioner of engineering for the Town of Hempstead and has both a degree in civil engineering from Stevens and a law degree from Hofstra. In other words he’s bright.
He had come across my writing on the COVID pandemic and the recent rioting across America and was interested enough to reach out and ask me more. Let’s see the last time I received a phone call from a politician running for office was — how about never.
Douglas reminded me of another home-grown politician, Sen. Michael Balboni, in that they both have charm, warmth, sincerity and a wide breadth of knowledge.
Our conversation lasted an hour and focused on the rocky road we have all been on since the pandemic began in earnest in mid-March. I shared my views about the real power of our immune system, how as humans we have a knack for adaptation, how the television media seemed to politicize the pandemic and how the film industry had accurately predicted the course of this global outbreak with the 2011 movie “Contagion” starring Matt Damon, Kate Winslet and Jude Law.
As we discussed the protest marches we are witnessing, he asked for my thoughts on ways to bridge our obvious sense of divisiveness and unrest. He pointed out that Nassau County is extremely diverse and if it is guided properly, it could serve as a model county that could inspire other places throughout the nation.
I told him that the current explosiveness seen during these marches stems from a multitude of factors. The killing of George Floyd was like a match that ignited our frustrations about the lockdown, the sudden removal of sports, art and entertainment, the loss of gainful employment, anxiety about money and 40 years of growing income disparity without an end in sight. All this produces anger, paranoia and despair.
And on an even deeper level, I see that our growing divisiveness in politics is an effort to simplify an overly and increasingly complicated world. And into this maelstrom of tension, confusion and anger comes the politician. I send my sympathies to Donald Trump, Andrew Cuomo, Bill de Blasio and Douglas Tuman because there will be no simple solutions to any of these racial, economic and social conflicts.
Marching in the streets is a sign that people are unhappy and frustrated, but it’s also a sign that people have not given up hope. And there are many solutions to this social unrest.
Here are three right off the bat:
1) What I have learned by working with many world-class athletes is that whatever you want to do or gain or achieve in life will take lots of hard work. Golfers are finally returning to the PGA tour this week and every athlete I have worked with over this time has been working seven days a week in this so-called 90-day-off season. Whatever your dream may be, you must be ready to work for it.
2) What I told Doug Tuman is that humans tend to like each other when they meet. When they are alone, shut off from others and just watching television, they tend to become distrustful and even paranoid. When we lose face-to-face contact with our neighbors, we begin to lose trust and our fear grows. I told him that if I see someone walking toward me on the street, I feel tension but the moment we make eye contact and say hi we connect as humans and feel good about each other. In keeping with James Kunstler’s landmark book “The Geography of Nowhere,” we need to have more walkable towns so that we get to know each other.
3) Of course, another solution to societal problems is to be blessed with charismatic and brave leaders with high moral values and tremendous courage. One of the last century’s greatest and most powerful leaders was the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. His essay “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” which was written while he was in jail, is considered by many to be one of the greatest American essays of the 20th century. He had total command of philosophy, politics and theology and was able to write and to speak as a great poet. His letter was addressed to some of the church leaders of the day and he quoted easily from Aristotle, Saint Augustine, Saint Thomas Aquinas, Martin Buber and Paul Tillich. He wrote of carving “a tunnel of hope through the dark mountain of disappointment” and said he was “appalled by the silence of good people.”
Well, I am not sure if those answers are of any help to Douglas Tuman in his runup to the election, but I sincerely hope that they are. Tuman seems to me to be young enough, smart enough, brave enough, honest enough and moral enough to build a pathway out of these troubled waters we currently find ourselves in. And perhaps his degree in engineering makes him uniquely suited for this kind of bridge building.
