Dr. John Young                                                                                                          1/27/08

Unitarian Universalist Church of Jacksonville

Ralph Nader’s 17 Traditions

            For most of my adult life, Ralph Nader was one of my heroes. From the late 1960s until the 2000 Presidential campaign I sent his Public Citizen organization a modest annual contribution. I believe that his dead-end Presidential bids in 2000 and 2004 helped G.W. Bush get barely elected President twice, and I do not forgive Ralph Nader for those self-centered diminishments of our political process. Progressive Americans have a suicidal way of defeating themselves politically by deciding that they would rather support a ‘pure candidate’ that is unelectable than highly qualified politicians that understand that negotiation and compromise are at the essence of workable democracies. Democracy like love is full of negotiation and compromise, and I wonder if Ralph Nader fully understands either negotiation or compromise.

            Setting aside his Presidential ambitions, there is no doubt that Ralph Nader has had an amazingly broad and deep positive influence on American democracy. When he was a student at Harvard Law School, he got to studying auto safely, and he soon ended his short-lived Connecticut law practice to become a Washington D.C. based crusader for the rights of consumers and the public. He first made headlines with his 1965 book, Unsafe at Any Speed, which took the auto industry to task for producing unsafe vehicles. Nader became an American folk hero when executives of General Motors hired private detectives to harass him and then publicly apologized before a nationally televised Senate committee hearing.

Nader eventually gathered hundreds of lawyers and full-time, committed activists which became Nader’s Raiders. Together, they produced exposes of industrial hazards, pollution, unsafe products, and governmental neglect of consumer safely laws. Ralph Nader is widely recognized as the founder of the consumers’ rights movement. He played a key role in the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, the Freedom of Information Act, and the Consumer Product Safety Commission. Ralph Nader has been the most renowned and effective crusader for the rights of consumers and the general public in the last half of the 20^th century.

Perhaps Ralph Nader is analogous to the recent spate between Barack and Hillary over Dr. King’s legacy. We would not have gotten the civil rights legislation without Dr. King’s and thousands following him in their unremitting push for justice. As LBJ himself said to Dr. King “keep doing what you are doing because it will make it possible for me to get the legislation passed that needs to be passed.” We need disciplined, unremitting, even self-sacrificial crusaders like Dr. King or Ralph Nader in order to make the changes in public consciousness and legislation that need to be made. We also need political leaders that unify and inspire the public to change their consciousness and to insist that legislators pass the laws and make the policies that are needed. It should be a synergy, not a mutually defeating purity campaign. We know that the real forces for chaos and greed will continue to do what they can to feed our worst human impulses. We need to resist those forces strenuously and persistently.

            Ralph Nader was born in Winsted, Connecticut, to Nathra and Rose Nader, Lebanese immigrants who operated a restaurant and bakery. Ralph, the youngest of four was raised in a home full of noisy, family seminars focused on the duties of citizenship, democracy, and justice. He was a scholarship student at the Gilbert School and then at the Woodrow Wilson School of International Affairs at Princeton University. At Harvard Law School, he became the editor of the Harvard Law Review. He was in the Army for 6 months, traveled widely in the world, and set up a private law practice for a short time in Connecticut. He was helped early in his career in DC by Senator Ribicoff of Connecticut and then Daniel Moynihan who had been at Harvard and became a US Senator from New York.

            Ralph Nader is the author of a bunch of books. His new book, The Seventeen Traditions is completely different. It is, I think, an effort to make up for his lack of a spouse and children of his own, or even perhaps an intimate community of his own. It is officially a celebration of his parents, birth family, and small Connecticut town and what he learned from them. Having also grown up in a small town and a loving, close, and non-conformist family that constantly talked about the big issues of the world, I felt very at home reading Ralph Nader’s 17 Traditions.

            Ralph Nader talks about how “what became a little world to me as an adult was a very large world as a child. Nature has its own power, drawing us into its magical ambience. Today, children are deprived of nature, trained in a corporate world of sensual virtual reality. Today, it is total immersion in virtual reality. Reverie is hard to achieve in a society of instant communication, fast food and commuting, ever faster ways for doing everything. When I was growing up, grown-ups and children spent far more time with each other than today. Wisdom flowed freely between the generations. Neighbors knew each other and visited regularly.

His town of Winsted, Connecticut was known to be a place where argument flourished. His father was a center of those arguments in his restaurant, and it continued regularly in our home. With 10,000 people, you could walk out into the country and all over town, and I did. There was very little that sealed people off from nature or from one another. The ethnic groups and religions mixed, worked together, played together.

My parents taught me that it was common for people to accept conventional ideas, and that I needed to challenge my own and others’ preconceptions. We needed to always reject conformity and coercion. When we spoke unfairly of or to another person, my mother would admonish us by saying, “I think it is you that is the problem. You have always liked that girl, you have grown up with her, but now you and your friends are calling her a pig because she is a little overweight. I think it is not her problem but rather your problem.”

So, what are Ralph Nader’s 17 traditions? They are the traditions of: listening, the family table, health, history, scarcity, sibling equality, education and argument, discipline, simple enjoyments, reciprocity, independent thinking, charity, work, business, patriotism, solitude, and civics. For Nader, the tradition of listening is summed up by his mother’s admonition to ‘listen more than you speak, and think before you speak. The ear sharpens the memory.’ His father taught Ralph skeptical observation and Socratic questioning. Ralph learned as a youthful hitchhiker to see every driver as an expert on some subject, to ask leading questions and make verbal nudges in order to tease out what you were really interested in learning. His mother said, “The more you listen, the more sensible will be what you say.”

Ralph’s birth family table was a central place of learning for Ralph as it was for me. His parents, like mine, talked about everything with their children. They talked as adults with their children, and their children learned early to converse as adults. The family table was a place to collect the stories and wisdom of the generations and to learn how to be articulate, logical, and able to respond to tough questions and high standards of discourse. You were expected to eat what was served, and you were expected to join in the conversation. His mother taught him about health when he was sick, not rushing her children to the doctor but eating well, getting enough rest and exercise, and not doing foolish things that would ruin your health. His father was, Ralph said, a model of moderation.

His parents taught him to learn from the past because it was often crucial for understanding the present and shaping the future. When Ralph was three years old and his siblings were eleven, nine, and seven, his mother took them, just before WWII, for a year-long trip to Lebanon, to visit family and to understand their heritage. Back in Connecticut, they learned local history. Ralph was a newspaper delivery boy and learned a lot about his town by reading the newspaper and exploring the town. His father taught him that history was written and revised by those whose interest it was served. His older brother Shafeek read to Ralph about Hawaiian history and explained that the Doles’ invasion was colonial imperialism secured by US Marines. As Ralph concluded, “by the time I arrived in college and law school, my critical facilities had been honed by years of such exchanges with my family.”

His family despite their comfortable middle class income practiced intentional scarcity: thrift, frugality, economy, searching for bargains, sharing clothes, doing for themselves. We learned, Ralph said, not to own things that would eventually own us. We learned to value our creative imagination and productive actions more than an avalanche of things. Ralph felt that all of the four children were treated equally, never measured against each other. He was expected to learn from his two older sisters and his older brother. He felt that he and his siblings grew up with little envy or egocentricity to come between us. Our parents had taught us to respect one another. Ralph celebrates his siblings, his brother, Shaf, who works in community economic development and is a champion of community colleges. His sister, Claire who got her Ph.D. in public law and wrote an early book on science and technology in the third world and helped the health services back in Winsted. Sister Laura, who got her Ph.D. in anthropology, became a professor at the University of Chicago at Berkeley, and an activist in energy policies.

His parents put a premium on education. The family revered books and everyone read constantly. We could share our new-found knowledge and our difficulties with authors or teachers with our parents. Ralph’s father liked to remind him that ‘your best teacher is your last mistake.’ At school, we learned facts, but at home, Ralph said, we learned character, that was a continuing homework. The Nader parents’ discipline was often simply a look and then an escalating set of shut your mouth, to being sent to stand in the corner or to do a chore that drove the point of the infraction home to the child in question. We could always argue our case. We knew our parents sometimes disagreed, but they did not argue in front of us, feeling it would diminish our respect for them. I disagree with this choice of Ralph’s parents. Simple enjoyments by oneself or with family members or friends were the foundation of Ralph Nader’s tradition of simple enjoyments. They only went to movies about twice a year, and their only electronic interruption was periodically listening to the radio, usually as a reward or a family activity, as opposed to a daily routine. As Ralph said, “we were interacting with other human beings, not with machines.”

Reciprocity for Ralph Nader centered on the help and comfort his birth family offered to one another. His father got Ralph put ahead in school, and Ralph was determined ‘not to let my father down.’ In turn, Ralph said that his immigrant parents willingly learned from their children about America and American ways. In my work in tutoring programs through the years, I have seen this repeated often among the most successful immigrant families. Parents help their children to get ahead in America, and the children, in turn, help their parents to become integrated Americans. It early puts the children in the role of teaching their parents. His parents took great interest in their children’s friends, encouraged us to bring them home and asked them lots of questions once they got there. They taught us to respect ourselves and to not hesitate to be different. They realized that peer groups were their competition in rearing their children, and that “the wrong group of ‘friends’ could dash years’ worth of attentive child rearing and proper behavior.” The Nader family spoke Arabic at home, and his parents had accents and the family was darker than most of the locals and occasionally we were called camel-drivers or worse, but our parents dealt with ethnic prejudice against them by opposing all prejudice. As Ralph allowed, it didn’t hurt that my father owned the biggest restaurant in town, and that it served American rather than ethnic food. Although ancestrally the family was Eastern Orthodox Christians, they were welcomed into the local Methodist Church, and Ralph felt his ethnic heritage simply gave him a distinctive foundation rather than being a barrier or difficulty.

His parents were involved in charitable causes, both locally and for their native areas in Lebanon. His father paid for a sewer system for his native village and helped with a new wing at the local Connecticut hospital. He took young Ralph on a tour of the charitable institutions of his town and explained how the original charitable gifts from local business men had gotten them established, and pointed out that there were a hundred such people in town who could have made such contributions but that it was only actually done by a few. Ralph ends the chapter by quoting the founder of the European Union, Jean Monnet, who said, “Without people, nothing is possible. Without institutions, nothing is lasting.” Ralph concludes that we have become too reliant on government and that the expectation that wealthy people will extend their wealth to enrich more peoples’ lives needs to be renewed.

The Nader children never received an allowance, were always expected to help out at home, and as teenagers to help out in the restaurant. Ralph also had a paper route, and the children were all taught to put aside much of what they earned in outside jobs into a savings account. They were taught that all work was worthy, that without millions of ordinary workers, the world would come to a stop and that while everyone should be respected, we did not need to stand in awe of anyone. Watching his father run his restaurant, Ralph developed great respect for the small business owner whose word was his bond, who had many long-term contracts and employees. His father’s restaurant, along with most other local downtown businesses, was flooded out three times from 1925 until he closed the restaurant in 1969.

His father did his best to nurture his restaurant as a place where people would get informed about civic issues and stirred up about injustice. His mother admonished Ralph when he was eight to love his country enough to work hard to make it more lovable. This is Ralph’s definition for patriotism. A country, like an individual, should be judged by deeds not by words. Freedom is participation in power, not the worship of power. Ralph Nader believes strongly in solitude. His parents often left the children to their own devices. They went outside, read, used their imaginations, and interacted with friends and family. Ralph is very concerned that contemporary children are increasingly living lives controlled by what he calls electronic child-seducers: TV, video games, and the Internet, and I would add, cell phones and I-pods. He concludes the chapter: “Children today suffer from shortened attention spans and reduced person-to-person interactions, and the results are wreaking havoc with their ability to think, converse, conduct themselves in family life, and educate themselves. Solitude has remained my engine of renewal, the steward of my self-reliance, and the clarifier of my thoughts.” [135]

Nader celebrates the New England town meeting and his parent’s civic golden rule that neighbors should treat neighbors as they themselves would like to be treated. Ralph reminds us that the ancient Greek word for idiot referred to civic apathy. Ralph saw his father educating thousands of people in his restaurant about the issues of the day. His mother was an activist with the Red Cross, created an international club, and after yet another flood made it clear that the town needed a dam by getting hold of Connecticut’s US Senator Prescott Bush’s [GW’s grandfather’s] hand at a local gathering and refusing to let go until he promised to help the town get the dam built. It got built! His parents loved their civic involvements, and taught their children to stay involved. “From my parents, I learned the essential qualities that define the civic personality—a blend of constant curiosity, inventive thinking, resilience in the face of obstacles, and a willingness to share credit with deserving colleagues. Nader celebrates these millions of civic activists as the backbone of democracy.

He concludes that “children develop their notions of fairness at a very early age. My parents propelled me to try to reach as many people as I could and to try to show them that most of our problems had solutions, if only people would give themselves enough time to stand up and be counted, and if only some of us would stand tall and lead. He quotes with approval an ancient Chinese proverb: “To know and not to do is not to know.” His father who told Ralph: “Never say you did your best because then you’ll never try to do better.” He is afraid that child-rearing too is becoming a business in America and crowding out the healthy families and their essential traditions. Our families must nurture Jefferson’s ‘aristocracy of virtue and talent’ if democracy is going to continue to flourish in the 21^st century. [150]