Another quiet dinner with friends, new and old. The Italian couple sitting to my left we have met before. She was the little girl I wrote about last year who sat on a cousin’s veranda in 1944 watching part of the German army march up from Italy to try to stop the Allies’ drive across France. She and her husband are now in their eighties, but they still have a youthful fire-in-the-belly that makes them stay intensely connected with what is happening in our world. Also in attendance were three Americans, an Englishwoman, and a Frenchman.
We sifted through the usual topics of dinner parties rather quickly. Then the presidential race in the United States was mentioned, first by the Italians, but soon we were all talking at once. Strong opinions were raised and defended. I don’t think many Americans understand how closely Europeans, and possibly most of the world, follow our political discourse, and its potential impact on other nations.
Clearly, everyone in the room was a progressive of one flavor or another. Europeans have a pretty successful record of taking many of the best ideas about making society more fair and putting them to work. This is not to say that everything works perfectly. After all, the French farmers are notorious for dumping either their crops or loads of pungent animal manure in the streets when they want to protest something important. On occasion, columns of tractors, stretching many miles long, will invade Paris or some regional capital to make their demands heard. Wait… there is something vaguely familiar in all of this. Something that rings of, “I’m mad as hell, and I’m not going to take it anymore” sentiment. Oh yes, of course, whether or not you lean right or left, this is a basic element in the disruptive campaigns of Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders. Maybe the French are not so crazy after all.
Back to the dinner conversation, where the Italians are fervently pleading for America to truly lead the free world again, but not in a simplistic, ‘Make America Great Again’ jingoistic fashion. We need to fix the things we break. We need to demonstrate that we are still the nation built on hardworking immigrants. Our leadership needs to be more than with money and military might. We need to lead by example.
