It was a common parental refrain from the 1950s and 1960s: “Eat your vegetables; there are millions of starving kids in Africa”. My sisters and I heard it repeatedly from our mother as she challenged us to do more than just stare at cauliflower, beans, or broccoli. It usually worked, although I drew the line at beets. Her directive, along with “clean your plate”, was repeated all across the country as vegetables were increasingly promoted as essential for growth and health, with the underlying message that since other children didn’t have enough food, we shouldn’t waste ours.
It could be said that the unofficial and widespread campaign was an attempt to broaden the self-interest of kids, to get them to look beyond what was in front of them and see the challenges of the larger world. That there was a link between personal diet and international humanitarian issues. That we were related to one another – even across vast differences of geography, race, circumstance, and culture. All this was lost on my sisters and me. To us, dinnertime often turned into a stand-off between the four of us who were looking at vegetables we didn’t want to eat and our mother who insisted that we do. Self-interest was confined to resisting what was on our plate.
Over the centuries there have been religious and humanitarian efforts to get people to claim self-interest as a value beyond what is immediately before them. Ubuntu (I am because we are), “love your neighbor as yourself” (Matthew 22:39), compassion and kindness being fundamental values in Islam, Tikkun Olam (“repairing the world” in Hebrew) are expressions and sentiments that encourage, if not insist, that we include the care of others as part of our self-interest. That our health and growth is directly connected to the health and growth of others
This is getting harder to come by as polarization continues to shrink our world down to a plate of people who think, vote, worship and live the same way. Adding to this growing scourge is a President who increasingly reduces self-interest to the self. Himself. His ego. His plate. His uninformed and uncontrolled instincts. From adding his name to the Kennedy Center and at least one airport, his image on a yet to be produced $250 Bill, his insistence that Giorgia Meloni, the Prime Minister, begged him to have her picture taken with him, his sitting down at the G7 Summit with the words, “I’m the boss”, along with a growing litany of self-absorbed statements and actions, we are witnessing the frightening and dangerous transition from a Commander in Chief to a Spoiled Child in Chief.
The resistance to his cruel sniveling is growing, which is a good thing. His words and actions need to be called out, and that is happening from more and more quarters of the country – be they political, cultural, theological and moral. Yet in all this resistance there is a temptation most of us find it hard to keep at bay, which is the temptation to engage in an ongoing exercise of deriding and denouncing Mr. Trump. We can end up feeling righteous in our self- righteousness, but there is a danger that lamenting and lampooning Trump can reduce oure;v to a vegetable on Trump’s plate that he not only won’t eat but will viciously denounce. His solipsism and narcissism are contagious viruses that threaten to reduce us to his level.
Trump’s self-interest is all about him. That is tragic and dangerous. The challenge for us is not to confine our self-interest to what is immediately before us on our plate, but to expand our world view. There are indeed starving children in Africa, India, Gaza, and southern Lebanon. There are victims of war in Ukraine, Iran, Sudan and elsewhere; as well as victims of Ebola in the Congo and soon to be elsewhere. There are people who are struggling all over the world, around the block – and often at our own dinner table. Our own well-being is inextricably connected to the well-being of others. An expanded world view makes us healthier, as it opens up our hearts and expands our minds. And often, often, it makes a difference – in healing ourselves and healing some of the pain of the world. We don’t have to take all that pain on, but some bite-sized piece of connection and care, which does at least two things: it helps prevent us from falling into Trump’s puerile pit, and it offers doses of hope to a wounded world.
