Psychology of fear and how it motivates our behavior. Hint: We humans are part of the mammalian chain

This echo essay published in The New Yorker by Elizabeth Kolbert, includes a review of the book "Outraged: Why We Fight About Morality and Politics and How to Find Common Ground", by Kurt Gray.

Rethinking and learning about the human evolution and "moral foundation theory" (MFT). "Millions of years of being hunted have made us preoccupied with danger.  But wihout saber-tooth cats to fear, we fret instead about elections, arguments in group texts and decisions made at PTA meetings," writes Kurt Gray.

Essay published in The New Yorker by Elizabeth Kolbert:
Does One Emotion Rule All Our Ethical Judgments❓
When prehistoric predators abounded, the ability to perceive harm helped our ancestors survive. Some researchers wonder whether it fuels our greatest fights today.

Raymond Arthur Dart (4 February 1893 – 22 November 1988) was an Australian anatomist and anthropologist, best known for his involvement in the 1924, discovery of the first fossil found of Australopithecus africanus, an extinct hominin closely related to humans, at Taung in the North of South Africa.

On November 28, 1924, Raymond A. Dart, a professor at the University of Witwatersrand, in Johannesburg, was getting ready to attend a friend’s wedding when a pair of South African Railways workers staggered up his driveway with two large crates. The crates contained fossils that had been found at a limestone quarry some two hundred miles to the southwest, in the town of Taung. Although the wedding was being held in his own home—and his wife begged him to leave the boxes alone—Dart tore off the stiff collar he was wearing and rushed to find some tools. When he levered off the lid of the second crate, he later recalled, “a thrill of excitement” shot through him. At the top of the pile was a rock that appeared to be a cast of a skull’s interior. Dart, who taught anatomy, guessed that the skull had belonged to a primate, but it seemed too big for a baboon or a chimpanzee. Further rummaging yielded a second chunk of rock that seemed to fit right in front of the first, like a face.

Dart was pulled away from his investigations by the groom, but as soon as the wedding was over he returned to the specimens. Using one of his wife’s knitting needles, he chipped away at the second rock until he had exposed the creature’s chin, jaws, and eye sockets. The teeth, which appeared to have belonged to a child, were decidedly human-looking. More significantly, the opening for the spinal cord was positioned in such a way that it seemed the creature must have walked upright.

In a paper published in Nature just a few months after the wedding, Dart announced that he had discovered an “extinct race of apes.” He called the creature Australopithecus africanus and proposed that Africa must have been the place where our “troglodytic forefathers” evolved. (Definition:  "relating to or characteristic of a cave-dweller, or someone who is reclusive, unsophisticated")

In the nineteen-twenties, the prevailing theory—strongly influenced by racial prejudice—was that humans had evolved in either Europe or Asia. The pro-Europe crowd pointed to a set of remarkably humanlike fossils that had been unearthed in 1912 in Piltdown, a town south of London. Dart’s announcement rubbed the scientific establishment the wrong way. One of his British colleagues labelled it “preposterous.”

In the next few decades, as more Australopithecus fossils were uncovered in Africa—and as the “Piltdown Man” was revealed to be an elaborate fraud—Dart was vindicated. In the meantime, he had moved on. The limestone deposit that had yielded the Taung Child, as the original Australopithecus became known, also contained the remains of all sorts of other creatures, including baboons, turtles, and hyraxes. In another limestone deposit, in Makapansgat, northeast of Pretoria, Australopithecus fossils had been found among a great jumble of animal remains. From these and other bits of evidence, Dart concluded that Australopithecus had been a ferocious hunter who had wielded animal bones as clubs.

“Man’s predecessors differed from living apes in being confirmed killers,” he wrote. They were “carnivorous creatures that seized living quarries by violence, battered them to death, tore apart their broken bodies, dismembered them limb from limb, slaking their ravenous thirst with the hot blood of victims.”

Dart’s account of the “predatory transition from ape to man” was profoundly influential. This time around, though, his theory was wrong. The Taung Child, scientists now believe, lived around three million years ago. It was killed by a bird of prey, as were the animals it was found with. The bones in Makapansgat were left behind by large carnivores, like hyenas and leopards, who were also happy to consume an Australopithecus or two if given the opportunity. 

Instead of being dauntless predators, our ancestors, it seems, were more likely prey. They spent much of their time—and their increasing brain power—trying not to become dinner.

What does all this have to do with life today, when big cats are headed toward extinction and meat comes on Styrofoam trays? According to Kurt Gray, the director of the Deepest Beliefs Lab, at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, the answer is everything. In “Outraged: Why We Fight About Morality and Politics and How to Find Common Ground” (Pantheon), Gray argues that the most pressing problems of contemporary society can be traced to the Taung Child. “It is easy to think that we have transcended our animal nature because we wear performance fabrics and prompt artificial intelligence to help with our ‘knowledge work,’ ” he writes. In fact, “all our thoughts and feelings arise from a mind that evolved eons ago.”

Gray describes himself as a moral psychologist. In contrast to moral philosophers, who search for abstract principles of right and wrong, moral psychologists are interested in the empirical matter of people’s perceptions. Gray writes, “We put aside questions of how we should make moral judgments to examine how people do make more moral judgments.”

For the past couple of decades, moral psychology has been dominated by what’s known as moral-foundations theory, or M.F.T. According to M.F.T., people reach ethical decisions on the basis of mental structures, or “modules,” that evolution has wired into our brains. These modules—there are at least five of them—involve feelings like empathy for the vulnerable, resentment of cheaters, respect for authority, regard for sanctity, and anger at betrayal. The reason people often arrive at different judgments is that their modules have developed differently, either for individual or for cultural reasons. Liberals have come to rely almost exclusively on their fairness and empathy modules, allowing the others to atrophy. Conservatives, by contrast, tend to keep all their modules up and running.

If you find this theory implausible, you’re not alone. It has been criticized on a wide range of grounds, including that it is unsupported by neuroscience. Gray, for his part, wants to sweep aside moral-foundations theory, plural, and replace it with moral-foundation theory, singular. Our ethical judgments, he suggests, are governed not by a complex of modules but by one overriding emotion. Untold generations of cowering have written fear into our genes, rendering us hypersensitive to threats of harm.

“If you want to know what someone sees as wrong, your best bet is to figure out what they see as harmful,” Gray writes at one point. At another point: “All people share a harm-based moral mind.” At still another: “Harm is the master key of morality.”

If people all have the same ethical equipment, why are ethical questions so divisive? Gray’s answer is that different people fear differently. “Moral disagreements can still arise even if we all share a harm-based moral mind, because liberals and conservatives disagree about who is especially vulnerable to victimization,” he writes.

Consider abortion. There are (at least) two parties who could suffer from terminating—or not terminating—a pregnancy. According to Gray, progressives focus on “the harm suffered by women lacking access to medical care,” and therefore come out in favor of abortion rights. Conservatives focus on “the harm suffered by fetuses,” and therefore support abortion restrictions. Arguments over immigration are based on similar differences in what Gray calls “assumptions of vulnerability”: “Progressives focus on the suffering of innocent children fleeing war, while conservatives highlight victims murdered by drug smugglers.” And so on down the list of hot-button issues: “Liberals emphasize how trans women are vulnerable victims, while conservatives emphasize how they could be threatening to other women.” As long as there’s a perception of harm, there’s a potential for outrage, because fear and moral indignation are inextricably linked. Indeed, Gray argues, the safer we’ve become from physical danger, the more hazards we see lurking out there.

“Millions of years of being hunted have made us preoccupied with danger,” he writes. “But without saber-toothed cats to fear, we fret about elections, arguments in group texts, and decisions at PTA meetings.”

Two key figures in “Outraged” are a pair of college-aged siblings known only by their first names, Mark and Julie. One summer, while vacationing together in France, the two decide that it would be fun to have sex with each other. Julie is already on the pill; Mark, to be extra careful, puts on a condom. The sex is indeed enjoyable, but the siblings agree that once is enough. They resolve to keep the experience a secret, and this brings them even closer together.

Julie and Mark are characters dreamed up by Jonathan Haidt, a social psychologist who was one of the original architects of moral-foundations theory. Haidt concocted their dalliance as a test. Would people who read about their incestuous encounter label it morally wrong, even when it was made clear that neither sibling suffered as a result of it? And, if they did condemn the coupling, how would they explain this?

At the time that Haidt invented the siblings, he was teaching at the University of Virginia. He recruited students there to respond to Mark and Julie’s story, along with a macabre tale featuring a vegetarian named Jennifer. One day, Jennifer, who is working in a pathology lab, is asked to incinerate a fresh cadaver. Dismayed to see so much perfectly good flesh going to waste, she cuts a chunk from the body before burning it; then, once she gets home, she cooks the chunk and eats it. Four-fifths of the students surveyed found Mark and Julie’s conduct immoral, while in Jennifer’s case the proportion rose to six-sevenths. As for how they had arrived at their judgments, the students could rarely offer a coherent account.

“I don’t think it’s accepted,” one student said in response to the Mark-and-Julie episode. “That’s pretty much it.” From this, and similarly strong but inarticulate reactions, Haidt concluded that the students had arrived at their judgments impulsively. “Moral reasoning was mostly just a post hoc search,” he wrote.

Haidt’s cheerfully incestuous siblings pose a serious challenge to Gray. If people consistently deem certain actions to be wrong, even when those actions cause no injury, then it would seem that harm can’t be the “master key.”

Gray responds to this challenge with experiments of his own. One involves participants who were instructed to shoot each other with toy guns. In another, participants were quizzed about scenarios of the Mark-and-Julie variety. (Among the scenarios was the case of a man who made love to a grocery-store chicken.) Gray claims that his results confirm the primacy of harm. Haidt may have told the students that no one was hurt by Mark and Julie’s tryst, but, Gray concludes, this assurance didn’t convince them. The same impulse that made them condemn the siblings’ hookup made them certain that harm had been done. Perhaps shame would haunt the pair in the future, or their families would eventually find out and be devastated, or society at large would fall apart because everyone would start sleeping with their siblings.

“People’s intuitive minds simply cannot believe that harmless wrongs are harmless,” Gray writes. “The more harmful something intuitively seems, the more immoral it seems.”

“Outraged” was written at a time of extreme political polarization, and it is coming out just days before the polarizer-in-chief, Donald J. Trump, is set to be inaugurated. The book’s tantalizing promise, as its subtitle announces, is that it will help us “find common ground.” Gray tries to make good on this with a section on the do’s and don’ts of “bridging moral divides.”

He starts with the don’ts. A big one is: Don’t imagine that facts are convincing. Gray cites a study from 2021, in which researchers argued with strangers about gun control. Half the time, the researchers tried to bolster their case with facts. The rest of the time, they offered stories, one of which involved a relative who had been wounded by a stray bullet. (The relative, though made up, was presented as real.) The encounters were taped, so that the conversations could later be analyzed. Strangers who were offered anecdotes were, it turned out, much more willing to engage with the researchers than those offered data were. The group that got stories also treated their interlocutors with more respect.

“Sharing personal experiences instead of facts improved cross partisan perceptions by about 0.7 to 0.9 on a 7-point scale,” Gray writes, trotting out statistics to argue against trotting out statistics. “This may not seem like a giant effect, but it’s actually quite substantial.” Gray’s takeaway from this is that the best way to reach across a moral divide is with a narrative, preferably one that features suffering: “Respect is easiest to build with harm-based storytelling.”

Gray presents this finding as a cause for optimism. The reverse case could easily be made. In outraged America, stories of victimhood are legion. Trump in particular loves to share “harm-based” tales—the less true, the better. A typical example is the fiction the President-elect recounted, in September, about the immigrant community in Springfield, Ohio: “They’re eating the dogs, the people that came in. They’re eating the cats. . . . They’re eating the pets of the people that live there.”

If more harm-based storytelling isn’t the answer, what is? To the extent that the research presented in “Outraged” is persuasive, it suggests that there may not be one. The essential—and most compelling—claim of moral psychology is that people make ethical judgments on the basis of intuition rather than reason. We have, it could be argued, been surprisingly good at muddling through modern times with the impulses we inherited from our “troglodytic forefathers.” But there have been close calls, and some of these occurred before the advent of nuclear weapons, climate change, artificial intelligence, and Truth Social. The great question of our era—and it is a question—is whether the mismatch is finally catching up to us. ♦

Published in the print edition of the January 20, 2025, issue, with the headline “Fear and Loathing.”

American history is all about immigration and our economy is proof about the value of supporting immigrants

A Big Idea to Solve America’s Immigration Messs- An editorial echo published in The New York Times:

The federal government’s ability to regulate immigration, a basic function of any nation, is broken. Over the past four years, some eight million people settled in the United States, and most of them did so unlawfully. Instead of an immigration policy calibrated to the needs of the country, both Americans and immigrants are being let down by a set of outdated laws inconsistently enforced by underfunded agencies. Chaos has been a predictable result.

Donald Trump won a second term as president on the promise that he would turn back the clock, restoring order by returning immigrants whence they came. The president-elect has vowed to deport all immigrants who do not have legal permission to be in the United States, and some who do. He also has described plans to curtail both illegal and legal immigration.

The United States undoubtedly needs to establish control over immigration, and we describe below the necessary changes. 

But, mass deportations, or reductions in future immigration, are not in the national interest.

Immigrants are America’s rocket fuel, powering our nation’s unsurpassed economic and cultural achievements. The famous poem inscribed on the Statue of Liberty mischaracterizes those who leave their home countries behind. They are not the tired and the poor; they are people possessed of the determination, skill and resources to seek a better life. Nobel Prizes have been awarded to 142 immigrants to the United States. Nearly half of the companies in the Fortune 500 were founded by immigrants or their children. Blue jeans, Tesla, basketball, “God Bless America” — all the work of immigrants.

There’s a more basic imperative, too. America needs more people. Americans no longer make enough babies to maintain the country’s population. To sustain economic growth, the United States needs an infusion of a few million immigrants every year.

Without immigrants, the population would start to decline immediately, leaving employers short-handed, curtailing the economy’s potential and causing the kinds of strains on public services and society that have plagued Rust Belt cities for decades.

In Japan, where the population has been in decline since 2009, there are no longer enough postal workers to deliver mail on Saturdays. Nine million homes have been abandoned, and a recent report estimated that more than 40 percent of Japanese municipalities might disappear. The challenges prompted Fumio Kishida, then the prime minister, to declare in January 2023 that “Japan is standing on the verge of whether we can continue to function as a society.”

An effective American immigration system requires three big shifts in federal policy, and all three are necessary for any to succeed.

1. The government must make every reasonable effort to prevent people from living and working illegally in the United States. Congress should allocate the resources necessary to secure the nation’s borders and to overhaul the shambolic asylum system so that decisions are made at the border. To further deter people from coming to the United States to seek work — including the significant share of undocumented workers who enter the country legally, on temporary visas, and then remain illegally — the United States also needs to hold employers accountable for the legal status of their workers.

2. Congress should legislate an orderly expansion of legal immigration, including a role for the federal government in directing people to the places that would benefit from population growth and in underwriting the transition costs.

3. The nation also needs to deal humanely with the estimated population of 11 million illegal immigrants who already live here, including the more than three million “Dreamers” brought to this country as children. For too long, large parts of the economy have depended on the labor of immigrants neither paid nor treated as the equals of Americans, a system of exploitation that also undermines American workers and law-abiding employers. 

Most immigrants who have made their lives in this country should be given a path to citizenship.

Versions of this tripartite approach were once embraced by political leaders in both parties. But in recent elections Democrats increasingly cast themselves as full-throated defenders of immigrants, regardless of legal status, while Republicans increasingly portrayed even legal immigration as a negative force in American life. The influx of immigrants into the country, in record numbers in the modern era, has overwhelmed red and blue state approaches. Both parties need a reality check.

Democrats should embrace the need to control who enters the country. High rates of immigration across Europe and North America have not led to more tolerance of newcomers but instead have led to a resurgence of nativist political movements that have shaken liberal democracy. 

Climate change is likely to increase the pressure by propelling more migrants to search for safety and opportunity. 

Frankly, the United States cannot admit everyone who wishes to come into the country, and the choice of who may come should be intentional, not a result of a government’s lack of the will and the capacity to enforce its own laws.

Trump, for his part, is mistaken to portray immigration as a drain on the nation’s resources. Instead, Trump should be condemned for his routinely bigoted portrayal of immigrants, often in defiance of the facts, as a danger to the American people and to the nation’s identity.

Instead, immigration ought to be regarded as an investment in the nation’s future.

The difference between welcoming immigration and trying to suppress it is the difference between Houston and Birmingham, Ala.

Houston began to attract large numbers of immigrants in the mid-1980s. During a downturn in oil prices, large apartment complexes built for oil field workers in neighborhoods such as Gulfton, west of downtown, started advertising for new tenants in Spanish. The basic attractions have remained the same ever since: inexpensive housing, plentiful jobs and the comfort of following in the footsteps of other immigrants.

The Houston area’s population has quadrupled, and nearly a quarter of the 7.5 million residents were born outside the United States, including more than 40 percent of Houston’s doctors, petroleum engineers and scientists, according to the Center for Houston’s Future, a nonprofit research group funded by the local business community.

Ngoc Ho came from Vietnam with her parents in 2014 to join her grandfather, who settled in Houston after the Vietnam War. Ms. Ho, 33, who now runs a day care program, said she loves Houston for its diversity. “It’s like a hot pot,” she said. “You don’t feel different, because everybody has English as a second language.”

The region’s prosperity stands as a rebuttal to Mr. Trump’s insistence that immigration is bad for American workers. Immigrants without specialized skills have pushed Americans out of some types of low-wage work because they are willing to accept worse conditions and lower pay. The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office predicts the current surge in immigration will slow the pace of wage growth for Americans without college degrees over the next few years.

But, as immigrants spend the money they earn, they create more jobs than they fill. To care for roughly three dozen children, most of whose parents are immigrants, Ms. Ho employs eight people. The C.B.O. predicts that by 2034, because of the surge in immigration, the nation’s annual economic output will be 3 percent larger.

Americans have a long history of celebrating past waves of immigration while worrying that the newest arrivals will be different — perhaps less successful or less American. But in a study published in 2017, the economists Ran Abramitzky and Leah Boustan found that the current generation of immigrants was assimilating culturally and prospering economically at essentially the same pace as previous generations.

“The children of immigrants from El Salvador are as likely to be economically successful nowadays as were the children of immigrants from Great Britain 150 years ago,” they wrote in “Streets of Gold,” a 2022, book describing their research.

In contrast to Houston, Alabama, in 2011, passed what was then the most restrictive anti-immigration measure in the country. It prohibited hiring, renting property to or transporting undocumented immigrants. It denied financial aid at state universities to undocumented students. Some parts of the law have since been repealed, but the state’s politicians continue to demonize immigrants, even though Alabama has relatively few.

“Alabama has a terrible reputation, well deserved, for not welcoming immigrants,” said David Sher, a former chairman of the Birmingham Regional Chamber of Commerce.The state’s hostility to immigration helps to explain why Birmingham has lost population in every decade since 1960. It is a city of unfilled spaces — vacant lots, parking lots — and of open jobs. Alabama in August had just 55 available workers for every 100 job openings, among the lowest rates in the country, according to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.

Ashley McMakin, who built a popular chain of four Ashley Mac’s restaurants around the Birmingham area, serving home-style lunches and takeaway dinners, said she struggles to find workers. She offers signing bonuses and the kinds of benefits rarely seen in restaurant work, including health insurance and flexible scheduling.

She has partnered with programs that help ex-felons and people recovering from substance abuse return to the labor force.
But, she still faces chronic staffing difficulties, which forced her to postpone expansion plans. At one point, Ms. McMakin posted a picture of a T-shirt on her Instagram feed that read: “Please Be Patient, There’s Like 3 of Us.” The caption said: “Do you like our new staff shirts?! If we don’t keep laughing, we might start crying.”

In 1965, the Black playwright Douglas Turner Ward premiered a one-act satire that revolved around the premise that all of the Black workers in a Southern town had disappeared. Homes went uncleaned. Babies went unfed. The town’s factories were shuttered. A local businessman complained that “the absence of handymen, porters, sweepers, stock-movers, deliverers and miscellaneous dirty-work doers is disrupting the smooth harmony of marketing!”

Immigrants are now the dirty-work doers. Americans rely on people born in other countries to pick crops, pluck chickens, build homes. Visit a wealthy neighborhood in the middle of the day, and you will find the streets alive with immigrants caring for the children, the dogs and the lawns. It is a bitter irony that even as the United States was ending the legal segregation of African Americans, it was effectively creating a new caste system in which many immigrants were enlisted as workers but excluded from becoming citizens. Roughly 11 million people, one-fourth of the foreign-born population, do not have permission to live here.

There is an inescapable unfairness in offering a path to citizenship to people who are in the United States illegally while so many others wait for years or even decades for their chance for legal entry. After decades of political malpractice and misjudgment, there is also no better alternative.

Mr. Trump will not succeed in making immigrants disappear. During his first term, he deported 325,000 people who were living in the U.S. Even if he deports 10 times as many in his second term, a volume many experts regard as beyond the government’s capacity, millions of immigrants would remain in the country, more vulnerable to exploitation because it will be dangerous for them to seek help.

A saving grace of the current system is that children born in the United States to illegal immigrants are Americans in full; Trump’s avowed intention to end birthright citizenship, which would require a constitutional amendment, would make undocumented status hereditary.

Americans face a choice between perpetuating a society maintained by an underclass of unauthorized workers or moving closer to the democratic ideal of a nation of citizens — a nation in which all are equal before the law. As Chief Justice Earl Warren wrote in 1958, “citizenship is man’s basic right, for it is nothing less than the right to have rights.”

Maintaining an underclass limits not only what its members can achieve but also what they can contribute. Cesar Espinosa’s family entered the United States from Mexico illegally in 1991, when he was 5 years old. Thirteen years later, he was accepted to Yale University, but he could not enroll because, as an illegal immigrant, he could not obtain financial aid. Instead, Mr. Espinosa built a nonprofit, FIEL Houston, that pushes to make higher education available to undocumented immigrants.

“There’s a version of my life where I’m one of those people living in a condo downtown and working in the Energy Corridor,” he said, referring to the glass and steel Houston office towers where some of the nation’s largest companies are headquartered. “I’ve sat up all night sometimes thinking about it.”

Mr. Espinosa’s family was part of the wave of immigrants who entered the country after the last major overhaul of the nation’s immigration laws, in 1986, under President Ronald Reagan, which was intended to greatly reduce illegal immigration.

The fatal flaw was that the government did not impose any real obligations on employers.

It is illegal to knowingly employ illegal immigrants, but the penalties are modest. The government runs a verification system called E-Verify, which is optional for most employers and notoriously easy to game. Verification is based on possession of a valid Social Security number, but illegal immigrants can use someone else’s.

In the mid-2000s, Todd Davis, chief executive of an identity-protection company called LifeLock, published his Social Security number on billboards as a marketing gimmick. A Houston lawyer who works on immigration cases said he found at least 165 instances in which undocumented workers in the Houston area used Mr. Davis’s number.

The government’s longstanding focus on policing immigrants rather than employers is akin to arresting drug users rather than dealers, and it has been roughly as successful.

In 2009, Marek Brothers, a Houston construction company, fired dozens after a government review found the workers had used other people’s Social Security numbers. Stan Marek, the company’s chief executive, said he soon noticed that some of those workers found jobs doing the same work for independent contractors too small to be subjected to scrutiny by federal regulators.

The correctives are straightforward: Limit the classification of workers as independent contractors, so companies are responsible for more of their work forces; legislate an affirmative obligation for companies to verify the immigration status of those workers; create a robust verification system.

Verification would protect workers and law-abiding employers from unfair competition as well as protecting immigrants from exploitation.

Mr. Marek said his business is challenged not just by the low-priced competition but also by the difficulty in finding legal workers even at higher wages. He recruits at high schools and halfway houses, but a vast majority of those he is able to hire are legal immigrants, and there aren’t enough. “Immigrants do the hard work, and we haven’t had a legal way to have them do that since 1986,” he said.

Satish Nannapaneni left India on a student visa in 1997, to earn a master's degree in software engineering at the University of Houston, Clear Lake. After obtaining a green card, he started Flexera Global, a tech services company based in Sugar Land. He is now an American citizen with 140 employees.

He’d like to hire more people, but he can’t find American workers. Those who have the skills are often uninterested in a job that requires regular travel.

Companies can use a special visa, the H-1B, to hire highly educated foreign workers, but the government hasn’t increased the number of visas since 2006. In 2024, Mr. Nannapaneni’s company applied for 47 H-1B visas and received nine.

“People want to come here, they’re talented, and still the politicians keep talking about it instead of fixing the issue,” Mr. Nannapaneni said.

From technology companies in Texas to turf farmers in Alabama, employers insist they can’t find enough domestic workers, and the numbers bear them out. The unemployment rate is low, and as Americans have fewer children, the shortage of workers is projected to increase. The nation must import more than 1.6 million people each year simply to maintain the population.

Proposals to expand legal immigration often focus on identifying immigrants who are most likely to contribute, economically or otherwise, to our national life.

Minimum standards, such as barring criminals, are a matter of common sense. Governments, however, are not always equipped to determine who will make the greatest contributions.

Hugo Ortega had no obvious skills when he arrived in Houston in 1984 at the age of 19.

He decided to leave Mexico City because he was hungry and facing homelessness. He knew that one of his uncles had found work in Texas, sometimes sending home letters that included $20 bills carefully wrapped in aluminum foil.

He was caught at the border five times before he succeeded in crossing on the sixth attempt. In Houston, he took a job as a dishwasher. Four decades later, he is a Houston icon, the chef and a co-owner of a string of celebrated restaurants. “I put my life at risk to come here, and I would do it in a heartbeat again and again and again,” he said.

The amnesty provisions in the 1986 immigration law allowed Mr. Ortega to obtain a green card in 1989 and to become an American citizen in 1996. Along the way he married the restaurant owner, and together they built a culinary empire introducing Houston, long the homeland of Tex-Mex food, to more authentic varieties of Mexican cuisine.

Houston restaurants now serve faithful renditions of a wide range of homeland cuisines, as well as mash-ups that may not be found anywhere else, like beef pho kolaches and brisket tikka masala. 

But, Mr. Ortega knows that immigrant dishwashers in Houston today cannot follow his path. These hard working people have little chance of becoming full members of the society in which they have worked. Indeed, they now face the possibility of being forced to leave.

What would he say to Americans skeptical of immigration?

“Give us an opportunity,” Mr. Ortega said. “You know, just give us an opportunity to cook for you. Give us an opportunity to be part of this wonderful country.”

Donald Trump intends to violate the constition he said he would protect and absolutley intends to create sedition

Echo opinion published in The New York Times by Thomas Friedman:

Late-night comedians have had a field day with Donald Trump’s musings about his administration possibly seizing Greenland and the Panama Canal. Hahahahahaha! Oh, that Trump — such a funny guy — you never know what will come out of his mouth next.  (NOT❗)

Pay no attention. You know him, he’ll just say something else outrageous tomorrow!

Well, I’ll tell you who I am certain is paying attention: President Xi Jinping of China. If the U.S. president can decide that he wants to seize Greenland and explicitly refuses to rule out the use of force to do so, that is like a giant permission slip for China to seize Taiwan, which has strong emotional, historical, linguistic and national connections to mainland China.

Trump lies continue

It took only a few days after Trump’s remarks for this joke to start circulating among China specialists:

Question: “What does Xi Jinping feel when Trump starts talking about taking Greenland and the Panama Canal?”

Answer: “Hungry” — for Taiwan.

Trump’s remarks are reckless stupidity beyond belief. Imagine what happens when his choice for ambassador to Beijing, David Perdue, takes up his post and, in response to some aggressive act by China toward Taiwan, goes to the Chinese Foreign Ministry to lodge a protest. What will the ministry say?

Presumably something like: “You come in here to protest our actions to reunite with Taiwan when your president is threatening to seize Greenland and the Panama Canal by force? We believe Taiwan is an integral part of China — a belief that while you do not share it, you acknowledged in the 1972 Shanghai Communiqué. What is your connection to Greenland? The fact that Donald Trump Jr. went there on vacation once? Tell your president that China and Russia have as much a claim to Greenland as America does.’’

Vladimir Putin is surely thinking the same thing. How does America get off telling him that by invading Ukraine he has violated international laws and norms by seizing the territory of another nation, while Trump muses about seizing Greenland and forcibly reimposing U.S. sovereignty over the Panama Canal? Ukraine’s territory was once part of Mother Russia, as was Crimea, which Putin has already fully taken back.

No wonder Putin’s press secretary, Dmitry Peskov, told CNBC on Thursday that Russia is “watching the rhetoric on these topics coming out of Washington with great interest.”

Some may think Trump’s remarks on taking Greenland and the Panama Canal are just a joke from an attention-seeking leader with no filter. But, they are not a joke. They are a prescription for chaos. They have already done more damage than people realize. If Trump persists with them, the joke will be entirely on us and on the world order we established after World War II.

Thomas L. Friedman is the foreign affairs Opinion columnist. He joined the paper in 1981, and has won three Pulitzer Prizes.

Anti-immigration extremism never ends with deportations. Eventually history catches up with the evil perpetrators

History’s Lessons on Anti-Immigrant Extremism

Echo essay published in The New Yorker by Michael Luo.

(Maine Writer - Several weeks ago, I also blogged about another time in North American history when mass exportation was used as a way to eliminate an entie population of French settlers in Acadia. Although the great upheaval occured in he middle 19th centure 1755-1777, the consquences of he British cruelty is still experienced among the tens of thousands of descendents today.) Check out this blog at this site here.

The New Yorker:  Even Donald Trump’s recent assertion that he would use executive action to abolish birthright citizenship has a historical link to the Chinese American experience.

Donald Trump has vowed to begin enacting the anti-immigrant agenda at the center of his campaign the moment he takes office: mass deportations, a crackdown on people “pouring up through Mexico and other places,” even the elimination of birthright citizenship. (The fate of high-skill immigration is one area of uncertainty; a dispute over H-1B visas consumed maga world over the holidays.) The scale of what Trump has promised is difficult to fathom and without recent precedent. A century and a half ago, however, a movement to cast out a different group of people began to accelerate in the United States.

In April, 1876, a California state senate committee held a series of hearings in Sacramento and San Francisco on the “social, moral, and political effect” of Chinese immigration. By some estimates, well over a hundred thousand Chinese were living in the state. Government officials, police officers, and civic leaders testified that they represented the dregs of their native land and were rife with a “criminal element”; they lived in crowded, filthy conditions (as one witness put it, “more like hogs than human beings”); they were vectors of disease and licentiousness. Perhaps most important, as a years-long economic depression settled over the country and San Francisco seethed with thousands of unemployed white men, the witnesses argued that Chinese workers drove down wages and took jobs away from Americans. A California pastor proclaimed that white laborers must either “starve to death, or they must fall to the level with the Chinese, or else they must themselves leave the country.”

More than ten thousand people in California and Nevada joined local “camps” of the Order of Caucasians, an organization that aimed to “protect the white man and white civilization.” In July, 1877, a rally in San Francisco erupted into days of rioting as mobs rampaged through the Chinese quarter and vandalized Chinese-owned businesses, mostly laundries, across the city. Several weeks later, the state senators sent an urgent message to Congress, warning that white residents up and down the West Coast were beginning to feel a “profound sense of dissatisfaction with the situation” and there would come a day “when patience may cease.”

A treaty between the U.S. and China guaranteed the free flow of people between the two countries, making politicians in Washington reluctant to impose restrictions. But, then as now, the nation was evenly divided politically, and the Western states were a strategic prize for both Republicans and Democrats. Winning them, it seemed clear, rested on resolving the Chinese question. As a result, in 1882, the U.S.—for the first time in its history—closed its gates to a people because of their race, when Congress passed a bill barring Chinese laborers from entering the country. (The legislation later became known as the Chinese Exclusion Act.) Immigrants still found ways in, though, so Congress passed progressively more onerous laws. Restive residents of dozens of communities across the West also banded together to drive out their Chinese neighbors.

Yet the Chinese were not passive victims: in 1892, after a new law required them to obtain a certificate of residence that established their right to be in the country, leaders of the community organized a campaign of resistance. Anti-Chinese leaders, in turn, vowed mass deportations, only for the effort to founder when it became clear that the measure would be exorbitantly expensive. The Chinese community managed to persist, but it existed in a kind of permanent stress position until 1965, when President Lyndon Johnson signed into law an overhaul of the immigration system.

Today, economic anxieties are again fuelling overtly racist, populist appeals from politicians. A nimbus of outrage among working-class voters has propelled the MAGA movement, much like the rage that drove the anti-Chinese movement. Even Trump’s recent assertion that he would use executive action to abolish birthright citizenship—scholars dispute whether this would be lawful––has a historical link to the Chinese American experience. In 1898, thirty years after the Fourteenth Amendment established the principle as a way of safeguarding the rights of formerly enslaved Black Americans, the Supreme Court upheld it in a landmark case brought by a native-born Chinese American, Wong Kim Ark.

One of the tragedies of Chinese exclusion is that the anger toward the immigrants was likely misplaced. Chinese workers were not usually in direct competition with white workers. In an economic study published in 1963, the historian Ping Chiu found that in California the two groups were mostly stratified into different labor pools, with the Chinese concentrated in lower-wage jobs in agriculture and industries such as textile and cigar manufacturing. It was competition from more technologically advanced and efficient factories in the East, along with the broader shift to mass production, that were the biggest factors in the economic travails buffeting white workers in California.

Other scholarship has similarly suggested that excluding Chinese labor failed to lift the fortunes of white workers. This past fall, a group of economists released a working paper on the impact of the Chinese Exclusion Act on Western states. They found that it took a significant toll on the economies of Arizona, California, Idaho, Montana, Nevada, Oregon, Washington, and Wyoming—the states with the largest Chinese populations––until at least 1940. The economists also found “no evidence that the average white worker benefitted from the departure of the Chinese” and concluded that the positive effects of Chinese immigrants in the workforce, including the economies of scale achieved by their presence, outweighed any employment opportunities that emerged from their absence. The findings are hardly surprising. A recent study from the Brookings Institution asserts that a surge in immigration helps to explain the strength of the U.S. economy since 2022, benefitting employers who need workers and contributing to consumer spending.

In the nineteenth century, the Chinese had few public defenders. John C. Weatherred, a bank executive in Tacoma, Washington, wrote in his diary on October 1, 1885, a month before the Chinese were driven out of his town, that there were a “great many fools on the anti-Chinese subject” and that he felt like “taking up for the underdog in the fight.” He praised “the Chinaman” for his “industry, economy & sobriety.” But Weatherred and other sympathizers mostly kept their feelings to themselves. As an emboldened Trump Administration prepares for a new crackdown on immigrants, history offers lessons on the cost of silence. ♦












Published in the print edition of the January 13, 2025, issue, with the headline “Excluded.”

Donald Trump has no intention to govern a democracy. Instead he intends to issue executive orders and cause chronic government chaos.

Delusions of grandeur- Opinion letters published in the Houston Chronicle:

Regarding "Trump, the 'America First' candidate, has a new preoccupation: Imperialism," (Jan. 9): What is happening? Is our soon-to-be POTUS so intoxicated with his own grandeur that he is out to conquer the world? Does he believe, as the monarchies of old did, that the number of territories a country rules is a sign of power?

From:  Pansy Gee in Sugar Land, Texas

Regarding "Trump refuses to rule out use of military force to take control of Greenland and the Panama Canal," (Jan. 7): As someone who did not and could not ever vote for Donald Trump, I have long marveled at the willingness of the American public to disregard what he says and to assume he really means something else. That sort of naivete might be partially liberals' fault: Democrats, at least since the Obama era, seem to have never missed an opportunity to miss an opportunity. Their response was to ridicule Donald Trump, not recognizing that his supporters (a growing number) believed the Democrats were ridiculing them as well.

Trump’s advantage was that he could point to what he said and say he told you what he was going to do, and you didn’t object to it. In fact, you voted for him, perhaps because of it.

Now he's talking about taking control of the Panama Canal and annexing Greenland, which he says are vital to American interests, without ruling out using military force to do it. Add to that the dissolution of many checks and balances that were built into the Constitution, as well as his admiration of and fascination with the world’s dictators. Don’t be surprised at some of the things he comes up with during his administration, including his desire to be president-for-life, like China’s Xi Jinping. I believe we’re going to be on a wild ride of a roller coaster for at least the next four years.

I fervently hope I’m proven wrong. After his first election I had hoped that “the office would make the man,” but now that hope is slim to none. As an independent, I don’t see what Democrats — or anyone — can do to change the new status quo.  By the way, roller coasters make me nauseous.

From Len Kaplan in Houston Texas

As you reported, Trump refuses to rule out military force to seize control of the Panama Canal and Greenland and secure both territories, which he says are vital to American national security. Those were the kind of words Adolf Hitler used as he began what ended up as World War II. The territory was never quite enough, nor was his distaste for certain minorities, much like Trump displays toward many Hispanics. As my father remarked about Hitler when I was a child, "That man is crazy." I say the same about Donald Trump.

From Eritha Yardley in Houston Texas

Book censorship as a cottage industry? How do people have time to create "my opinion only" platforms?

Echo report published in BookRiot:

BookLooks, RatedBooks, and Other Unprofessional Book “Review” Sites to Know: Book Censorship News, January 10, 2025 by
Kelly Jensen 

One of the trends we’ll see in book censorship over 2025, is the increased use of unprofessional, politically-driven book review websites like BookLooks to make decisions in professional library and educational settings. Just days after writing that—including an example from Warren County Public Libraries in New Jersey which happened at the time of writing—another library made headlines nationwide for their decision to begin using BookLooks to make library decisions. This time, it was Anoka County, Minnesota, public schools. Many online shared anger and frustration by this decision, while others talked about how glad they were to be in a safe state with anti-book ban laws. The latter, of course, being an attitude that we’ll see continue to increase in 2025, too, and it’s an uninformed one at that. Minnesota is among the states that have an anti-book ban law in effect.

BookLooks is the most well-known website for unprofessional, biased book reviews. That’s because it is a tool created by a former Moms For Liberty member and continues to be the tool they put their weight, energy, and time behind. I broke that story back in November 2022. Much like anything related to Moms For Liberty, though, BookLooks is not the be-all, end-all when it comes to these kinds of biased “review” websites. It is simply the most well-known because it has had the most ink put behind it; Moms For Liberty, likewise, takes up far more column space when it comes to book censorship than any of the hundreds of other large and small groups nationwide doing the same kind of work. Those groups, some of which are far more dangerous and destructive than Moms, just aren’t as easy or safe to meme online (certainly misogyny plays a nice sized role in this, too—no matter how appalling Moms For Liberty is, they get more play because it is easy even for “nice people on the left” to degrade women and women-adjacent projects).

Getting up to speed on the review sources being used and given legitimacy outside of BookLooks matters because, in order to effect actual change, we have to be aware of the various ways these tools are being used and implemented. 

Certainly, get to know BookLooks. But if your knowledge ends there, you’ve got a lot of catching up to do. Even since the last time I did such a roundup of these biased online book ratings systems in November 2022, more have popped up and become favored by the myriad groups working to ban books in their local community schools and public libraries.

It might not feel good to give these sites any views by clicking the links. But it is vital to see how they’re operating in order to understand why they’re not worthy of being used in professional settings. Compare review sources that are long-running, professional resources by and for library and education professionals such as Kirkus, School Library Journal, and Publishers Weekly, and you’ll see why and how any institutional leadership should be embarrassed and ashamed to even consider their use. Even Common Sense Media, which is also inappropriate for use in making determinations about library and educational acquisitions, does a better job of providing information about books and materials in context than any of these slapdash sites do.

We’ll begin with a couple of the longer running sites, including BookLooks, and then dive into several other review sites gaining traction. Even if you have just tuned into book censorship, you’ll see that the titles that pop up on these sites are those which are quickest to then begin seeing challenges in public schools and libraries. 

Most of those complaints are simply copy-pasted from any of these resources. Book banners can’t even be bothered not to plagiarize their grievances—a reminder why libraries and schools need to update and strengthen their collection policies in such a way to toss out complaints that do just this. If college students are getting failing grades because of terrible AI detectors falsely identifying their work as AI, then your local right-wing instigator shouldn’t be able to steal the time and money of taxpayers for challenges that they just downloaded from some site on the internet and slapped their own name on.

BookLooks:  BookLooks.org began as BookLook.info and it is the creation of a former Moms For Liberty member. The site, still connected to Moms For Liberty, is regularly updated with reviews by volunteer members of the group. It utilizes a rating system created by the group that is modeled after the MPAA system—this is worth pausing with because the creation of the MPAA system came amid severe criticism. Books are rated on a scale of zero, meaning it’s a book for everyone, to five, with aberrant content for adults only. In its early iterations, any review where the book rated a four or five led to immediate challenges starting in Brevard County, Florida, schools, where Moms For Liberty is headquartered. You’d then see those same books begin to be challenged in other districts across Florida, then the country, where Moms had a local chapter. If you look back at book challenges in 2022, the same books were challenged again and again and the pattern became clear. 

Except as we’ve seen, these reviews are being legitimized by those of a particular political persuasion sitting on school and public library boards. It began in Volusia County, Florida, where the board wanted to “invest” in BookLooks for their district, and it continues with BookLooks being shared as a “resource” in Warren County Public Libraries (New Jersey), the Mauston Public School (WI) administration’s attempts to use it to weed classroom and school library collections, and most recently, the above-mentioned plans to use it to make book-related decisions in St. Francis Schools in Minnesota.

Rated Books:  Owned by several “parental rights” groups, including Utah Parents United, No Left Turn in Education, and the standalone Facebook groups of LaVerna in the Library and her state-level sister pages Mary in the Library, RatedBooks.org is very similar to BookLooks in that it utilizes content ratings on a zero to five scale. It, too, creates handy little guides to sentences deemed inappropriate by volunteer readers, and it offers up far from objective views on whether or not a book should be accessible to minors.

Take Back the Classroom:  The brainchild of Project of The Parental Rights Council and The Kitchen Table Activist (itself affiliated with the Capitol Resource Institute, a public policy institute focused on “parental rights” and “educational freedom”), Take Back the Classroom offers yet another database of books with ratings that they deem inappropriate. Take Back the Classroom essentially takes what BookLooks and RatedBooks does—reviews with cherry picked passages parents can perform at local school and library board meetings—and then offers a look at where those books are in schools across the US. This second part is what Facebook groups like Mary in the Library mentioned above try to do.

Take Back the Classroom is a newer resource and is trying to differentiate itself by providing actual pictures of the books and so-deemed offensive passages while making it even easier for parents to complain to schools. This is paternalism packaged as a helpful guide to local-level activism; we’ll tell you what to do and you’ll be able to do it without having to think at all whether or not it is a thing you want or should be doing!

With zero elaboration, zero context, and zero description to give meaning to this “review” of Speak by Laurie Halse Anderson, users of the website are presented with a highlighted sexual assault scene from the book. A scene where the protagonist makes it clear she is being assaulted and saying no. A scene that is in no way graphic or obscene but scary and a lived reality for too many teens today.

This is what concerned parents are encouraged to take to their schools—perhaps in Bermudian Springs School District or Central York School District in Pennsylvania or Avon Public Schools in Connecticut, where those books are identified as being part of the available materials.

Screen It First:  Why rely on a group like Moms For Liberty or No Left Turn in Education to do your book reviews for you when you can, instead, be part of the crowdsourced project that identifies inappropriate books nationwide? 

Welcome to Screen It First, which purports to help parents identify naughty books. Among the categories that reviews screen for? Foul language, violence, sexual content, and LGBTQ+ content.

Screen It First reviews anonymously (❗❓ 💥😕), and it compiles those anonymous passages of inappropriate content for users to access. What a wealth of information for book banners to have access to—screenshot upon screenshot of material that is pulled out of context and shared with anonymity.

The “it’s not about gay people!” nonsense spouted is pretty hard to turn from when LGBTQ+ content is one of the review categories.

It’s nice that they take a step back from any connection to book banning or censorship, despite the fact they are building a database that makes it easy for anyone to engage in just those activities. 

If it were about “informed choices” and “age appropriateness,” then there would be no call out category of LGBTQIA+ in the reviewing process, as any content in that category would be age-appropriate in books written for its respective age group.

Books don’t just appear on shelves but go through several rounds of review, screening, editing, and more before they get there.

No need to read cover-to-cover, folks. Just share anything you find so that we can create a list of LGBTQIA+ books for folks to complain about as quickly and easily as possible. It’s too hard for them to do the work themselves. 

“Uncle was gay and dressed up in drag.”

We The People/Bruce Friedman:  Proud serial book banner Bruce Friedman from Clay County, Florida, maintains one of the longest book target lists in the country. It’s longer and more robust than either the group he’s affiliated with—No Left Turn—and the one that captures the most coverage, BookLooks.

We The People’s “inappropriate books” list is, as of writing January 2025, over 7,000 😡😠 books long. You can access a copy of that list here, but it is frequently updated.

Bruce is the top book banner in Florida, which is impressive given the competition from Escambia County’s Vicki Baggett. His document includes his concerns about the books, and for titles he has challenged and/or successfully had banned in Clay County, he simply uploads his documents so that other people can copy-paste in their own districts.

Bruce was not successful in trying to get (Don’t) Call Me Crazy banned last year, and I’ll be here waiting to see what happens with Here We Are: Feminism for the Real World. He’ll have to wait a bit to challenge that one, given that he’s been limited to the number of books he can bring complaints about to the board.

(If it weren’t retaliation, then the link to my first story about Bruce’s hobby of going to Clay County School Board meetings to complain about books wouldn’t have led to all three of my books *suddenly* showing up on this list, nor would he have needed to include a link to said piece).

Additional Lists & List Compilations:  Several lists developed more locally include home-grown reviews and ratings, as well as pull from bigger review databases like BookLooks and RatedBooks. Here are a few more for your reference:

FEC United’s List of Inappropriate Books (especially notable for Michigan)
Texans Wake Up: Inappropriate Books
Pavement Education Project’s Inappropriate Books (especially notable for North Carolina)
Books That Indoctrinate Young Children (especially notable for Canadian, UK, and Australian folks)

In putting this list together, I stumbled upon another interesting resource. While it is not being used to ban books yet, the capacity is there, and more, there are plenty of copyright-related issues that arise. That site is Sift Books, which will edit audiobooks to allow listeners to skip anything they might deem “inappropriate.” There is little information about the individuals behind the site, though they do note that it can take up to a month for a requested title to be redacted appropriately. 

That word there, redacted, is what’s happening here and it’s one of the four Rs of book censorship. Even if the book isn’t outright banned, it can still be censored in ways like this.

Sift Books might seem innocuous in its infancy. But how long until this site becomes where people turn to make decisions about what should or shouldn’t be banned and/or to seek subscriptions for items already within a collection to redact materials for library users?

Book Censorship News: January 10, 2025

• Let’s Talk About It: The Teen’s Guide to Sex, Relationships, and Being a Human was banned from Mobile Public Library (AL).
• Cache County Schools (Utah) will not be removing I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings nor The Handmaid’s Tale from the district. Recall that in Utah, every district’s decision on banned books is even more vital than in most other places—if three districts remove a book, every single district in the state must follow suit.
• Two trustees at Eagle Library (ID) were removed from their positions last fall and it turns out that’s because they were pushing for book bans beyond their power. This included using—surprise!—BookLooks as some sort of authority on whether or not books should be in the public library they were part of governing.
• New Hampshire legislators are pursing a “parental rights” bill that would let folks more easily ban books they don’t like.
• This story out of Salem, Oregon, is a must-read, and there’s the bit, too, about how the district has no certified librarians after laying them all off in 2011. Not censorship news per se, but it is about the ways library workers are treated as secondary.

Saying a hearffelt goodby to President Jimmy Carter

President Joe Biden hails President Jimmy Carter’s ‘strength of character’ in eulogy for 39th president. ‘Throughout his life, he showed us what it means to be a practitioner of good works and a good and faithful servant of God and of the people,’ President Biden said at a National Cathedral service attended by all living U.S. presidents.

Transcript published by the Associated Press:

President Joe Biden:  Leaders of the clergy, distinguished guests and most importantly family of President Jimmy Carter.

In April 2021, Jill and I visited Jimmy and Rosalynn on a warm spring day down in Plains, Georgia. We wanted to see them.

Rosalynn met us at the front door with her signature smile. Together, we entered a home that they had shared for almost 77 years of marriage, an unassuming red brick ranch home. They flexed their modesty more than any trappings of power.

We walked into the living room where Jimmy greeted us like family. That day, just the four of us sat in the living room and shared memories that spanned almost six decades, a deep friendship that started in 1974.

I was a 31-year-old senator. And I was the first senator outside of Georgia, maybe the first senator, to endorse his candidacy for president.

It was an endorsement based on what I believe is Jimmy Carter’s enduring attribute: Character. Character. Character.

Because of that, character, I believe, is destiny. Destiny in our lives and quite frankly, destiny in the life of the nation.

It is an accumulation of a million things built on character that leads to a good life in a decent country. A life of purpose, a life of meaning. Now, how do we find that good life? What does it look like? What does it take to build character? Do the ends justify the means?

Jimmy Carter’s friendship taught me, and through his life taught me, that strength of character is more than title or the power we hold. It’s the strength to understand that everyone should be treated with dignity, respect. That everyone, and I mean everyone, deserves an even shot. Not a guarantee, but just a shot.

Now, it’s not about being perfect, because none of us are perfect. We’re all fallible. But it’s about asking ourselves: "Are we striving to do things, the right things? What values? What are the values that animate our spirit? To operate from fear or hope, ego or generosity? Do we show grace? Do we keep the faith when it’s most tested?"

For keeping the faith with the best of humankind and the best of America is the story, in my view, from my perspective, of Jimmy Carter’s life.

The story of a man, to state the obvious – you’ve heard today some great, great eulogies -- who came from a house without running water or electricity and rose to the pinnacle of power.

The story of a man who was at once driven and devoted to making real the words of his savior and the ideals of this nation. The story of a man who never let the tides of politics divert him from his mission to serve and shape the world.

The man had character. President Jimmy Carter had character.

Jimmy held a deep Christian faith in God. And that his candidacy spoke and wrote about faith as a substance of things hoped for, and evidence of the things not seen. Faith founded on commandments of scripture. Love the Lord thy God with all thy heart and all thy mind and all thy soul. And love thy neighbor as thyself.

You know, we have an obligation to give hate no safe harbor. And to stand up to what my dad used to say is the greatest sin of all: the abuse of power.

Easy to say, but very, very difficult to do. In his life, in this life, any walk of faith can be difficult. It can be lonely. But it requires action to be the doers of the world.

But, in that commandment lies the essence, in my view, found in the gospel, found in many faith traditions, and found in the very idea of America. Because the very journey of our nation is a walk of sheer faith. To do the work, to be the country we say we are, to be the country we say we want to be. A nation where all are created equal in the image of God and deserve to be treated equally throughout our lives.

We’ve never fully lived up to that idea of America. We’ve never walked away from it either, because of patriots like Jimmy Carter. Throughout his life, he showed us what it means to be a practitioner of good works and a good and faithful servant of God and of the people.

And today, many think he was from a bygone era. But in reality, he saw well into the future.

A white Southern Baptist who led on civil rights. A decorated Navy veteran who brokered peace. A brilliant nuclear engineer who led on nuclear nonproliferation. A hard-working farmer who championed conservation and clean energy.

And a president who redefined the relationship with a vice president.

Jimmy and I often talked about our dear friend Walter Mondale, whom we all miss very much. Together they formed a model partnership of collaboration and trust, because both were men of character.

And as we all know, Jimmy Carter also established a model post-presidency by making a powerful difference as a private citizen in America. And I might add, as you all know around the world, through it all he showed us how character and faith start with ourselves and then flow to others.

At our best, we share the better parts of ourselves: joy, solidarity, love, commitment. Not for reward, but in reverence for the incredible gift of life we’ve all been granted. To make every minute of our time here on Earth count.

That’s the definition of a good life, a life Jimmy Carter lived during his 100 years.

To young people, to anyone in search of meaning and purpose, study the power of Jimmy Carter’s example.

I miss him, but I take solace in knowing that he and his beloved Rosalynn are reunited again. To the entire Carter family, thank you, and I mean this sincerely, for sharing them both with America and the world. We love you all.

Jill and I will cherish our visits with them, including that last one in their home. We saw Jimmy as he always was, at peace with a life fully lived. A good life of purpose and meaning, of character driven by destiny and filled with the power of faith, hope and love.

Say it again: Faith, hope and love.

As he returns to Plains, Georgia, for his final resting place, we can say goodbye. In the words of the prophet Micah, who Jimmy so admired until his final breath, Jimmy Carter did justly, loved mercy, walked humbly.

May God bless a great American, my dear friend and a good man. 

May he rise up, be raised up on eagle’s wings, bear you on the breath of dawn, and make you to shine like the sun, and hold you in the palm of His hand.

God bless you, Jimmy Carter.