Dear Dad

Dear Daddy,

For twenty-four years I have missed you. I have wished you could be there for my high school graduation, my college graduation, my doctoral graduation. I have wished you could be there for my wedding and for the birth of my first child.

Now, for the first time, I am glad you are not here to see what is happening.

I'm glad you are not here to see the American people elect a cruel, authoritarian demagogue.

I'm glad you are not here to see the unleashing of white supremacist and misogynistic hate groups and tendencies.

I'm glad you are not here to see the proliferation of propaganda, fake news, and vitriolic trolling in our brave new social media world.

I'm glad you are not here to see the weakening of all the values you held dear: free speech, multiculturalism, privacy, due process, truth, and transparency.

I wish I weren't here either.

But I know that if you were here, you would be on the front lines writing and teaching against the onslaught of fascism and misinformation.

And I will rise to the occasion, just as you would have done.

When you died, you were working on a book about moral philosophy. You were going to call it Of Cabbages and Kings.

I don't know exactly what you intended to suggest with that phrase from Lewis Carroll, but I have been thinking about it in recent days. You'll recall, of course, the verse from which you borrowed that phrase:

"The time has come," the Walrus said,
"To talk of many things:
Of shoes--and ships--and sealing-wax--
Of cabbages--and kings--
And why the sea is boiling hot--
And whether pigs have wings."

Many years of considering Victorian children's literature has made me wary of ascribing too much metaphorical weight to the glory of nonsense verse; doing so too often results in laughable overreadings.

And yet, as you did nearly thirty years ago, I see a timely resonance in these words.

It's time to talk about everything.

It's time to talk about basic needs, and trade, and secure communications.

It's time to talk about ordinary people and about powerful people.

It's time to answer questions that are themselves lies, to intervene and reframe them truly.

It's time to ask whether the impossible is happening -- and what we should do if it is.

And it's time to separate the distractions from the threats.

The Walrus and the Carpenter blustered on about cabbages and kings to distract the oysters from the fact that they were about to be consumed.

I pray that my generation is not similarly distracted by our own Walruses and Carpenters who tweet and gloat and blather, all while they are buttering their bread and sharpening their knives.

I will always miss you. But now I know that this is not your time. It is my time, and it is a terrible one. But with your example to guide me, it is a time in which I can face the boiling seas and the winged pigs--and the ravenous villains.

Love,
Catherine