Epilogue and Epitaph: My Brother’s Keeper

… their glory remains eternal in men’s minds, always there on the right occasion to stir others to speech or to action. For famous men have the whole earth as their memorial…. in people’s hearts their memory abides and grows.

—“Pericles’ funeral oration,” Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War

The telling and retelling of stories is the powerful means by which cultures of families and communities are formed and maintained, national identities are preserved … and moral values are instilled. Stories can inspire, uplift, and transform their listeners, or they can belittle, humiliate, and drive their listeners to despair.

—Lewis Mehl-Madrona, M.D., Coyote Wisdom: The Power of Story in Healing , 2005

We must regain the conviction that we need one another, that we have a shared responsibility for others and the world, and that being good and decent are worth it.

—Pope Francis, Encyclical Letter on Care for Our Common Home , 2015

A long time ago my brothers and I met Mark Hamill—or at least Dave did. My mother bought us tickets to see a 1984 revival of Arthur Miller’s classic play Death of a Salesman starring Dustin Hoffman and John Malkovich on Broadway. I remember nothing about the performances except that I thought they were astonishing.

I do remember thinking that the person sitting in front of us looked very familiar. And I remember he was the first person on his feet applauding when the show ended. As we all stood up and applauded, I leaned over to Dave and whispered, “Isn’t that Luke Skywalker?” When the applause died down, Dave said to him, “Are you—?” Hamill instantly interrupted, asking, “Why don’t you give me some initials?” He clearly did not want his name blurted out in public. But someone did blurt it out, so he started walking toward the aisle.

I remember my brother instantly walking toward the aisle, too, so I followed him. He really wanted to say hello. Or, rather, when he did catch up, he wanted to tell Hamill that he had played the part of Luke Cakewalker in the Shockwave Radio Theater performance of the pun-filled “Food Wars” (“May the Fork be with you”). I think he handed Hamill one of his cards. I have no other memories of the event, although I do know that back then, in my early 20s, I wasn’t the kind of extrovert Dave was, to pull that off, but then he was a fellow performer who played the same role as Hamill. Sort of. That was Dave.

That memory has replayed in my mind again and again—when I saw The Last Jedi with my daughter, when I write about Joseph Campbell or on the rare occasion when Hamill likes a ThinkProgress tweet of one of my articles. The Last Jedi is the final hero’s journey for Luke. In his final deed, he dies heroically for a greater cause. Luke’s mythic journeys have inspired millions.

My brother and his journey have been a life-changing inspiration to me, as I’ve related, especially the stories of how he touched so many different people and how he overcame his animosity toward my father. So I am one of the keepers (and sharers) of my brother’s memories. But the point of these heroic stories and memories is “to stir others to speech or to action” as the great Athenian politician Pericles said in his famous eulogy for those killed in the first year of the Peloponnesian War. That speech was aimed at unifying wartime Athens with a shared story of preserving their unique culture, principles, and democracy—much as Lincoln used his speech remembering those who died at Gettysburg to help unite the Union in a common wartime purpose of preserving our democracy and our core principles that “all men are created equal.”

Now, both our democracy and the world’s climate are in mortal danger—under attack in an information war. We are in an epic struggle between two world views, two narratives, two stories—unity versus disunity. But the forces of disunity seem to have been winning of late, by “commanding the trend,” using all the tools and strategies of virality to win elections, spread disinformation, and destroy our shared founding stories of unity.

There’s no sitting out this struggle because the stakes are too high. You have to pick sides—unity or disunity. Will you tell stories that inspire and uplift listeners or ones that belittle and humiliate, to use the dichotomy of Dr. Lewis Mehl-Madrona from his 2005 book on Native American healing traditions, Coyote Wisdom ? President Trump is certainly a master of the latter kind of stories. Indeed, a major reason I wrote this book was to explain the strategies of the forces of disunity and to help those fighting on the side of unity maximize your impact and become influence ninjas .

AMERICA’S STORY: PAST, PRESENT, AND FUTURE

Unity created out of diversity created this nation and then made it great. E pluribus unum —out of many, one—has been an official motto of the United States since 1782. “We must, indeed, all hang together, or most assuredly we shall all hang separately,” as Ben Franklin said just before signing the Declaration of Independence.

As far back as the book of Genesis, God delivered the message that we do have a responsibility to look after each other. Cain is asked by the Lord, “Where is Abel thy brother?” Cain lies, “I know not: Am I my brother’s keeper?” God replies angrily: “What hast thou done? the voice of thy brother’s blood crieth unto me from the ground.” By putting the line, “Am I my brother’s keeper?” into the mouth of the first murderer, the Bible sends the message that we are our brother’s keepers.

Unity and a shared understanding of the facts are our only hope in the arena I focus on—avoiding catastrophic global warming. We can prevent decades and then centuries of extreme drought, devastating sea level rise, superstorms, and deadly temperature rise leading to mass extinction, but only if the world works together to rapidly embrace clean energy and slash carbon pollution. That’s why all of the major nations of the world, more than 190 in total, came together in Paris in December 2015 with pledges of serious action to restrict carbon pollution in the near term. That’s why those nations unanimously agreed that, to avoid catastrophe, the world must keep ratcheting down emissions of carbon pollution until they are near or even below zero before century’s end.

Disunity driven by disinformation is the guiding principle of those who oppose climate action. That’s why those opponents have engaged in the gravest anti-science disinformation campaign in our history, dating back to the 1960s, funded by fossil fuel companies, and pushed by politicians like President Trump. That’s why Trump, the embodiment of chaos and disunity who is backed by the major polluters, announced in June 2017 that he would withdraw the U.S. from the Paris Climate Accord.

The assault on science and on future generations is an attack on the heart of the Declaration of Independence and America’s founding principles. This assault is a story that must be told and retold.

Jefferson’s masterpiece famously begins, “When, in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people,” to break free of tyranny and “assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them,” they should explain why they are impelled to do so:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

The Declaration is a “scientific paper,” explained historian Gary Wills in his 1978 book Inventing America . “The Declaration’s opening is Newtonian. It lays down the law.” Newton’s landmark 1687 text, Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica famously lays out his three laws of motion, which many at the time called the “laws of nature.”

Jefferson was very familiar with the Principia . Newton’s masterpiece was widely revered among the founding fathers. Jefferson once wrote a letter identifying a tiny mathematical error in it. He was very much a scientist at heart and once said, “Science is my passion, politics is my duty.” For nearly two decades—including the entire time he was vice president and president—he was also president of the nation’s oldest scientific society, The American Philosophical Society, founded by the great American scientist, Ben Franklin.

Jefferson and Franklin grounded the Declaration in the scientific laws of nature. That’s clear from a crucial edit made by Franklin. As Historian Walter Isaacson explained in Benjamin Franklin: An American Life :

The most important of his edits was small but resounding. He crossed out, using the heavy backslashes that he often employed, the last three words of Jefferson’s phrase “We hold these truths to be sacred and undeniable” and changed them to the words now enshrined in history: “We hold these truths to be self-evident.”

The idea of a “self-evident” truth drew from “the scientific determinism espoused by Isaac Newton and the analytic empiricism of Franklin’s close friend David Hume,” Isaacson noted. Hume referred to “truths that are so by virtue of reason and definition” as “self-evident” truths.

Today, it is the laws of nature, studied and enumerated by scientists, that make self-evident we are poised to render those unalienable rights unattainable for billions of humans on our current path of unrestricted carbon pollution. It is the laws of nature that make self-evident Americans can’t achieve sustainable prosperity if the rest of the world doesn’t. We are in this battle together.

Moreover, founding fathers such as Jefferson firmly believed we had an equal duty to future generations. Jefferson’s September 1789 letter to James Madison, is “the most succinct, systematic treatment of intergenerational principles left to us by the founders,” as The Constitutional Law Foundation explains in its discussion of “Intergenerational Justice in the United States Constitution, The Stewardship Doctrine.”

In this letter, Jefferson answers a crucial question: Must later generations “consider the preceding generation as having had a right to eat up the whole soil of their country, in the course of a life?” Soil was an obvious focal point for examining the issue of intergenerational equity for a Virginia planter like Jefferson.

The answer, to Jefferson, was another self-evident truth: “Every one will say no; that the soil is the gift of God to the living, as much as it had been to the deceased generation .”

One generation destroying the next generation’s vital soil or its livable climate is immoral. Hence it is horrifically immoral to flood their coastal soil and turn much of the rest into a permanent dust bowl. Yet that is what Trump’s policies would put us on track to do according to the Congressionally mandated National Climate Assessment released in November 2017 after White House review and clearance.

“The catastrophic predictions now can no longer be looked on with contempt and irony,” as Pope Francis said in his 195-page climate Encyclical Letter. “We can leave to future generations too many ruins, deserts and squalor.” But “too many ruins, deserts, and squalor” is not an acceptable choice for a sane and moral society, as the Pope explained. We are not just our brothers’ keepers but our children’s.

THE HERO WITH A MILLION FACES

Before Joseph Campbell died in 1987, the journalist Bill Moyers interviewed him about The Hero with a Thousand Faces, which had become famous as a major inspiration for the original Star Wars trilogy. The resulting 1988 series, The Power of Myth , was one of the most popular ever to air on PBS.

“Why the hero with a thousand faces?” Moyers asks in the first episode. “Well, because there is a certain typical hero sequence of actions, which can be detected in stories from all over the world, and from many, many periods of history,” explains Campbell. “And I think it’s essentially, you might say, the one deed done by many, many different people.” Moyers naturally asks, “What is the deed?” Campbell answers:

Well, there are two types of deed. One is the physical deed; the hero who has performed a war act or a physical act of heroism—saving a life, that’s a hero act. Giving himself, sacrificing himself to another. And the other kind is the spiritual hero, who has learned or found a mode of experiencing the supernormal range of human spiritual life, and then come back and communicated it. It’s a cycle, it’s a going and a return, that the hero cycle represents.

In earlier chapters, I talked about my brother’s journey, the going and return that he made, back to where my father was born, and, ultimately, to a place where he could let go of his anger. To my brother Danny and I, Dave’s most heroic deed was establishing the Al Romm Interdisciplinary Journalism Scholarship Fund despite their often-bitter relationship. But the scholarship fund wasn’t just a way to remember my father. It was a response to the election.

Here’s what Dave wrote about the Fund, to which I will donate a quarter of the sales of this book:

Qualifications include a) have to speak at least one language besides English fluently, 2) Must have gotten a B or better in an advanced math class and 3) worked on the HS newspaper or equivalent .

Established in the name of my father, A.N “Al” Romm, who was editor of the Middletown (NY) Times Herald-Record , it’s for HS students in Orange County, NY.

My father often said he would rather hire a Political Science or History Major and teach them Journalism than hire a Journalism Major and teach them critical thinking.

This is partly in response to the last election. I’m laying groundwork for the future. I don’t know what the US will look like in ten or fifteen years, but I’m hoping to help some kids gain some crucial skills.

If someone could write their own epitaph (from the Greek for “at” or “over” a “tomb”), then perhaps that should be his. In praising the heroes of Athens, Pericles said they had “the most splendid of sepulchers,” a metaphorical tomb “where their glory remains eternal in men’s minds, always there on the right occasion to stir others to speech or to action.”

I wrote this book so that those who are stirred to speech and to action can also gain some crucial skills, reach millions, have the most impact, complete your hero’s journey—and help others complete theirs.